Category: Radio

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"Everybody talks too much": Dylan Thomas and the Long-Lost "Art of Conversation"

“To begin at the beginning.” Thus opens what is undoubtedly the most famous of all plays written for radio: Under Milk Wood, by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. BBC radio first produced the play in January 1954, with fellow Welshman Richard Burton in the role of the narrator. It had been previously performed in New York, shortly before Thomas’s death in November 1953 (which is the subject of a new book, Fatal Neglect by David N. Thomas, whose previous biography was the source for the motion picture The Edge of Love. Thomas’s poetry is still widely read today; but little is known generally about his other works for the wireless, about which there is generally little talk these days.

Thomas’s most popular story, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (published posthumously in 1955) was originally written for radio, as may be deduced from the attention Thomas’s pays to descriptions of sounds and voices, from the “most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow” to that “small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time,” a “small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole.”

Indeed, as I learned from Douglas Cleverdon’s introduction to the Folio edition of Under Milk Wood, Thomas had been on the air, whether as poet, critic, or actor, since 1939. Among his broadcast features is “Return Journey” (1947), a precursor to “Mad Town” (as Under Milk Wood was initially titled); it has been published in the anthology Wales on the Wireless (1988). Earlier this year, another play for voices by Dylan Thomas has been discovered and is now being given its first production on the air. Titled “The Art of Conversation,” it is available online until 9 December.

The title is somewhat misleading, since the play is really about shutting up. It is a Second World War propaganda piece, commissioned as part of a “Loose Lips Sink Ships” campaign, the sort of cautionary talk on the virtue of silence exemplified in the US by mystery writer Mignon Eberhart’s “The Enemy Is Listening” (Cavalcade of America, 7 June 1943). In it, a sinister voice (Everett Sloane’s) replies to remark that no “real American intends to give information to the enemy,” that

sometimes, sometimes someone forgets.  A word overheard and repeated. A small fact passed on to someone else may mean little to you.  It may mean nothing to the person to whom you repeat it.  But the third or the fourth person or the tenth or the twentieth may be your enemy. Your enemy.

Thomas’s “The Art of Conversation” is a rather more subtle performance. It permits us to indulge in the excesses of talk by Britain’s most celebrated conversationalists, only to remind us that there are times when—and subjects about which—the word should be “mum.” “I don’t think you’ll find Mr. Hitler with a little notebook under our table, do you?” one careless talker quips; but, just to be on the safe side, the idle talk that ensures is being censored.

Like Eberhart, Thomas weaves a web of compromising voices; yet he dispenses with melodrama and, indeed, as is typical of his compositions, with plot altogether. Instead, he opts for an informal lecture (replete with audience) punctuated by “the lantern slides of sound”: a multitude of voices, some distinct, others choric. All are preliminaries and subject to shushing:

Hundreds of odds and ends of hundreds of hearsays and rumours may, and can, be brought together into such a pattern that a whole Allied enterprise is thwarted or destroyed. A wagging tongue may sink a ship; a stray word over a mild-and-bitter may help to murder children.

However chatty and playful, “The Art of Conversation” eventually gets down to business and brings its message across; at least, it might have done, had it not disappeared for decades—apparently before it was ever broadcast. According to the current issue of the Radio Times, there is no evidence that the play was intended for radio; but you need only to listen to know that it could have hardly been written with any other medium in mind.

Alison Hindell’s belated production slightly condenses the original script (available here in its entirety), but otherwise takes few liberties with Thomas’s prose and directions; a 1920s “nigger” is turned into “negro,” a concession to our politically corrected sensibilities. Few US radio dramatists were treated with such respect.

The single exception is the rather pointless addition of an opening line that is not part of Thomas’s “Art,” but the famous introduction to Under Milk Wood, quoted above. No doubt, the presenters intended to draw the famous poet into his forgotten “Conversation,” so as to validate this lesser performance; but, instead of indulging in such self-conscious reverberations, they should have left themselves out of it, especially since there is enough of Thomas in it to make the lecture worth our while.

If only a discovery like this could get us talking again about radio . . .

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Yola (Not Quite Lola); or, The Blonde Who Bombed

Germany. 1932. Another young screen actress is lured from the thriving UFA studios to the motion picture colony in California. Her name was Anna Sten. She was born one hundred years ago (3 December 1908) in what was then Russia. According to Deems Taylor’s Pictorial History of the Movies, Sten was thought of as “another Banky [aforementioned], Garbo, or Dietrich.” Highly, in short. The man who did the thinking was Samuel Goldwyn; and soon after, he must have thought, “What was I thinking!”

European beauties were all the rage in the early 1930s Hollywood. It was a peculiarly anachronistic fad, considering that the talkies called for clear diction, however exotic the looks of the actress from whose mouth the sounds poured into the still imperfect microphones. Beauty, Taylor’s 1948 update of his compendium to motion pictures conceded, Anna Sten “undeniably” possessed; but her “all-too-Russian” accent was better suited to comedy than to tragedy.” Surely, a Russian accent need not be no impediment to melodrama; rather, this non sequitur signals that, by the mid-1940s, Russians were deemed too dangerous or dubious to be romantic leads in Hollywood and were more safely marketable as so many eccentric cousins of Mischa Auer.

When Sten’s first three movies misfired, Goldwyn sensed that the eggs this Kiev chick laid were not golden. By 1935, her leading lady period was effectively over. Still, two years after her last Hollywood flop, the notoriously diction-challenged Sten was given another shot at stardom . . . by stepping behind the microphone of the most popular dramatic show on the air: the Lux Radio Theater. The show’s nominal producer, Cecil B. DeMille, was called upon to remind an audience of millions (most of whom potential moviegoers) why Sten was still a star; no Banky, but bankable:

I first saw Anna Sten in one of the most effective scenes ever filmed.  It was in a foreign production with Emil Jannings [Robert Siodmak’s Stürme der Leidenschaft (1932)].  Determined to place her under contract, I started negotiations for the service of this very young girl who had starved with her parents in the Ukraine to become one of Europe’s most glamorous stars.  Then, one day, Samuel Goldwyn invited me to his office to ask my opinion of an actress he just signed.  The actress was Anna Sten.  I was greatly disappointed to lose her, but tonight have the privilege of presenting her in a DeMille production.

The “production” was an unusual one for Lux, a program best known for its microphonic telescoping of Hollywood pictures. Sten was cast in yet another variation on George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustark, that popular, sequel-spawning romance of the early days of the last century. Sten had not appeared in the screen version; indeed, the property was never revisited after the end of the silent era, when last it served as a vehicle for comedienne Marion Davies. By 1937, Graustark was pretty much grave stench. Was Sten being condemned to suffocate in it?

Not quite. The Lux version (8 February 1937) made no attempt at fidelity to the original. Like many romances written or rewritten in the wake It Happened one Night, Graustark was given a screwball spin. Clearly, this radio production was designed to test how Sten’s comic appeal. For this, the air waves were an economically safer testing ground than the sound stage. Besides, it forced the foreigner to prove her command of the English language, albeit in a role demanding an eastern European accent. Sten is delightful (and altogether intelligible) in the role of Princess Yetive; but the broadcast did nothing for her career.

Commemorating Sten’s 100th birthday (she died in 1993), I am turning to her final pre-Hollywood effort, the musical comedy Bomben auf Monte Carlo (1931), from which all the images here are taken. As the bored Princess Yola, a not-so-distant cousin of Yetive, Sten plays opposite German screen idol Hans Albers, the sea captain whom she employs and pursues, using the manual How to Seduce Men as a guide. It is the kind of screwball material that would have served her well overseas. Also in the cast are Heinz Rühmann (last seen here) and Peter Lorre, whose voice remained an asset in Hollywood, and the lively tunes of the Comedian Harmonists (who also appear on screen). This one bombed in name only, however monstrous the title in light of German air attacks on Spain in 1937 . . . shortly after Sten’s first and final Lux broadcast.

It was not so much Sten’s diction that caused her fall as it was the rise of a stentorian dictator. The Old World that Sten had been called upon to represent was fast disappearing; and whatever was distant and foreign soon ceased to be exotic, glamorous, or desirable.

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Even Reindeer Get the Flu

Four weeks and a day! As the exclamation mark suggests, being that I use it so sparingly, I am not counting down the days to New Year’s Eve here or marvel at the seemingly accelerated passing of time. It is the time my cold has been taking thus far to run its collision course and me crazy into the not so welcome bargain. It could be, though, that today’s headache has been exacerbated by Mickey Rooney.

My attempt to book tickets to his latest show, that is. I tried to get in touch with a sales representative to make sure that the tickets I ordered online won’t be sent to our home, as requested, given that, as it dawned on me only after I had finalized the booking, we are elsewhere during the latter part of December.

The apparently unstoppable octogenarian, Judy Garland’s co-star in a series of musical-comedies, is going to be in one of those pantomimes so popular in Britain during the holiday season; this time, some eighty-two years after his acting debut in motion pictures, he appears at the Hippodrome in Bristol, England, where we had planned to spend the final forty-eight hours of 2008.

The busy Mr. Rooney, slated to appear in four films in the upcoming months, stars opposite British stage and television actress Michelle Collins, whom last we saw backstage at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London (and whose autograph I displayed here). Anyway, I eventually sorted out the mailing situation and can only hope that the constitution of the man formerly known as Andy Hardy will prove sturdier than mine.

I am in the mood for a seasonal tale, tall or otherwise, but would much rather close my eyes than read Christmas Stories with its selection of fiction by Conan Doyle, Damon Runyon, Evelyn Waugh, and, a personal favorite, Anthony Trollope. So, once again, I rely on the radio, or recordings of plays once produced for the medium. On this day, 2 December, in 1945, The Philco Radio Hall of Fame presented a new story, which it predicted to “become a Christmas classic.”

Never mind that this prediction did not quite come true. After all, the woman who made it was not chiefly known as a clairvoyant, even though she had a voice that could induce millions to spend millions on war bonds and forge stars in the smithy of her own radio shows. Announcer Glenn Riggs somewhat needlessly reminded the public that, “as commentator, singer, forceful personality and discoverer of stars,” she had “no equal on the air.” Yes, it was Kate Smith who ventured that guess, no doubt boosting the sales of the volume. When Smith sings, you can count on sales as well as volume.

On the Hall of Fame, Smith not only belts out a number of tunes, including “If I Loved You” from the latest Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel and her celebrated rendition of “God Bless America”; as story lady, Smith narrates a dramatized version of Roger Duvoisin’s “The Christmas Whale,” a whimsical paean to ingenuity involving the breakout of a flu epidemic at Santa’s toyshop and the reindeer that flew not because they all came down with it. Perhaps, such susceptibility explains why this year’s advent calendar featuring Olive, the Other Reindeer, arrived a day late in the mail.

The title of Duvoisin’s story leaves no doubt as to the creature lending a helping fin. Perhaps, the sudden substitution was a metaphor for the death of FDR just at the time when things were beginning to look up and the theaters of war were closing, not merely for the duration of the holidays. There is no mention of Harry Truman; but, when asked what Christmas gift she would make General Eisenhower, Smith remarks: “Well, I’d give him a future as great as his past.” Perhaps, she was prophetic after all . . .

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Picking up The Magic Key

When I was growing up, looking forward to Christmas meant opening the Türchen (little doors) of an advent calendar (last shown here). Every morning, for twenty-four days, colorful pictures marked the countdown to Heiligabend, as Christmas Eve is known and celebrated in my native Germany. In an update of this seeming oxymoron—the surprise-filled ritual—I am trying to turn this journal into such a calendar, discovering something new to think, wonder, and write about. There won’t be twenty-four doors, mind you, since I am going to make an exit to London on the 17th, from which day forward there will be many a silent night here at broadcastellan; but, during the next few weeks, I shall open as many Türchen as time and internet access permit.

Perhaps, this isn’t so very different from what I do with this journal throughout the year; but I shall endeavor to make what’s behind the door a revelation, or a surprise, at least, to myself—stories, voices, and personalities I have not yet mentioned on these virtual pages. Rather than being a reflex, the surprise is a reaction for which I shall have to strive. What I find behind those closed doors, I should add, may not always befit the spirit of the season.

I shall open the first door by picking up The Magic Key, a popular US radio variety program of the mid to late 1930s; sponsored by RCA, it was designed to promote the wonders of radio, no expenses spared. On this day, 1 December, in 1935, the hourlong program offered “varied entertainment, from Buenos Aires, Ottawa, Canada, Chicago and New York City, presented for the families of the nation by the members of the family of RCA.”

The afternoon’s entertainers included silent screen idol Richard Barthelmess who, opposite Warner Brothers’ star Jean Muir, made “one of his rare microphone appearances” in a scene from Maxwell Anderson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Saturday’s Children, along with Eddy Duchin and his orchestra, Eduardo Donato and his tango ensemble, members of the cast of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and, if that weren’t varied entertainment enough, John B. Kennedy touring the Chicago stockyards and a report from Canada’s Minister of Agriculture. All live, of course, both from the studio and via hook-ups.

The Magic Key was a marvel in this respect, and it wasn’t bashful about being marvelous: “Within the memory of men now living, the speediest communication between New York and Buenos Aires consumed twenty-seven days. Today, we’ll make the journey in so many seconds [. . .].”

The highlight, for me, are the scenes from Saturday’s Children; but it is difficult to enjoy the performance, knowing what actress Jean Muir had to endure throughout the 1950s, when the doors to sound stages and broadcast studios were closed to her as a direct result of anti-Communist hysteria. In 1950, Muir’s name appeared in Red Channels, effectively barring her from starring in the television version of The Aldrich Family. As Rita Morley Harvey tells it in Those Wonderful, Terrible Years, Muir sought “solace” in alcohol, suffering “poor health” and “personal sorrow.”

Muir’s is a notorious case of witch-hunting; and, considering that few recordings of her radio performances are extant today, it is a thrill to hear her on this Magic Key program, well before radio, anxious to avoid scandal and diminished returns, decided to lock her out. “The proverb says,” Richard Barthelmess remarked in an overly complicated setting of the scene, “that Saturday’s children must work for a living”; but a regular job as only radio and motion pictures could offer an actor back then was a luxury denied the talented Ms. Muir.

As if to comment on things to come, the scenes from Anderson’s play involve a peculiar gift: a bolt, a hammer, and a screwdriver, given to Muir’s character, “a free agent” lately separated from her husband, by her boss, an admirer who wanted to guard against an inquisitive landlady. “Anytime you want a bolt on your door,” her still-loving husband implores her, “I wish you’d ask me.” Unlike Muir, her character got to choose whether to bolt the door or bolt.

The broadcast closes with the obligatory holiday shopping reminder, announcer Milton Cross insisting that the “members of the family of RCA [were] eager to help make your Christmas holidays happy ones. Will there be an RCA Victor in your home this Christmas?” I wish there were occasion for such a purchase these days; but, about half a century ago, the makers and sponsors of radio entertainment decided to throw away those magic keys to the kingdom of make-believe . . .

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Radio Was . . . “Stud’s Place”

“The importance of the ‘word’ was lost when television took over the living rooms of America. Sure, there were plenty of trivial programs on radio at the time, but there were also brilliance and creativity that have never been equaled by television.” This is how Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian Studs Terkel (1912-2008) summed up the decline in our regard for and funding of the medium in which he, as an interviewer, excelled. “The arrival of television was a horrendous thing for the medium of radio,” Terkel told Michael C. Keith, editor of Talking Radio (2000). “It was devastating for the radio artists as well as the public. Television was a very poor replacement.”

In the late 1940s, when radio had not yet been superseded by television in all but talk and music, Terkel was frequently heard on Destination Freedom, a history program dramatizing the stories of America’s negro people, including notable Americans like Joe Louis, Richard Wright, and Jackie Robinson.

Tonight, BBC Radio 4’s Archive Hour (in a broadcast available online until 5 December 2008) brings back the life of the legendary voice of the Bronx-born and Chicago-bred journalist. “Studs Terkel: Back in the Wax Museum” delves into the late historian’s personal collection of some seven thousand hours of recordings that he donated to the sound archive of the Chicago Historical Society; these interviews represent nearly half a century of broadcasting. As documentarian Alan Dein puts it, Terkel is the “undisputed hero and the modern pioneer of what we now know as oral history, the art of exploring living memory.”

To Terkel, America was deficient in memory, as well as the respect for its inconstancy; so, whether he interviewed and recorded noted figures of his day or the “so-called ordinary people”—workers, civilians, survivors of war—who could not count on a public platform elsewhere, Terkel did much to prevent listeners from forgetting.

Among the voices heard on the program, aside form Stud’s own, are those of beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Canadian-American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, film star Joan Crawford, fan dancer Sally Rand, Algonquin Round Table wit Dorothy Parker, Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, feminist Simone de Beauvoir, philosopher Bertrand Russell (interviewed at his home in Wales), Irish street singer Margaret Barry, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., African-American journalist Vernon Jarrett, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson venting her frustrations without song. “I haven’t the vaguest idea” how to operate a tape recorder, Terkel once confessed. “Yet, it is my right arm,” he marveled.

According to Terkel, who was discharged from military due to a perforated eardrum, the advent of television was “forcing radio to reinvent itself into something not quite as good”; but, the loss of radio dramatics notwithstanding, the audio documentary was surely the very best way in which to reinvigorate the airwaves. “Stud’s Place” was Terkel’s foray into television back in 1949 (cut short due to anti-Communist hysteria); but it was radio that remained his true domain.

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Let’s Pretend . . . We’ve All Grown Up

Just how up have we grown since, say, the 1950s? You know, those innocent days of atomic terror, Cold War fears and anti-Communist witch-hunting. We who presume to have grown up tend to make small of what lies behind us, whether we ridicule or romanticize it. We not only know, we know better. We believe ourselves so much more educated, sophisticated or complicated than folks back in the day, whatever that day might be. It rarely occurs to us that we may have lost something other than simplicity, that we have forgotten much that was worth remembering. All those fables and fairy tales, for instance, those legends and myths that once were known to children and adults alike, the archetypal yarns that bound us, tied us to distant yet related cultures, to past generations, and to antiquity by reminding us that we are one with the earth and the universe. We have not so much grown up, it seems to me, as we are growing apart.

Imagine a children’s program these days dramatizing the by now little known story of “Ceres and Prosperina,” which was heard on this day, 28 November, in 1953 by anyone tuning in to the popular and long-running radio series Let’s Pretend. Obviously, this was well before those Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles graced the plastic lunch boxes of a myth-starved generation.

Let’s Pretend rarely resorted to such faux myths and ersatz folk tales; instead, it kept many of the traditional ones alive, from “Bluebeard” to “Hiawatha,” from “Jason and the Golden Fleece” to “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Under what Norman Corwin in his Foreword to cast member Arthur Anderson’s chronicle of the program called the “benign dictatorship” of Nila Mack, Let’s Pretend “enjoyed a run of 24 years, during which it scooped up almost half a hundred national awards, and also during which the adapter-director-producer smoked two and a half packs of cigarettes daily.”

For the “Ceres and Proserpina” episode, the producers of the series (Ms. Mack, pictured above, had died earlier that year of a heart attack) did not feel obliged to explain just who these characters were, other than pointing out that this Roman myth was a perfect story for Thanksgiving, which had been celebrated two days prior to the Saturday broadcast. As the host of the series, Uncle Bill Adams, put it:

Thanksgiving is America’s own holiday; but ever since the beginning of time people have been celebrating the harvest season one way or another. The Greeks and Romans, two thousand years ago, had a wonderful harvest story. And today we’re doing it for the first time on Let’s Pretend.

All that needed to be clarified to make “Ceres and Proserpina” (as streamlined and sanitized for radio by Johanna Johnston) come alive to the target audience of tots was the meaning of the word “pomegranate.” As Sybil Trent defined it, “it’s round and red, and a little bigger than an apple, Pretenders, but the inside is full of red seeds like big currants, full of juice and very delicious.”

I suspect that, these days, the producers of a kids’ program would have to spend more time explaining or justifying their choice of presenting a myth like “Ceres and Proserpina” than they would the shape or taste of the fruit that plays such a pivotal role in it. Thanksgiving aside, the story was readily made relevant to its listeners, who were reminded of the people who, even eight years after the end of the Second World War, were living in abject poverty overseas. As announcer Jim Campbell explained:

Yes, Pretenders, now that the Thanksgiving season is almost over and everybody is beginning to think about Christmas, here’s a reminder for you to pass on to your families. Many children, and grown-ups, too, in lands that were devastated by the war, face a very miserable Christmas indeed, unless some good Americans play Santa Claus for them.

This year, a “miserable” or, at any rate, less splendid holiday season is being forecast for many families, including “some good Americans”; but no one seems to advocate Ovid’s Metamorphoses as an alternative to the computerized fantasy games that are less likely this season to fly off the shelves of the electronic stores not yet closed down for good. Along with cost-effective radio dramatics, mythology is the kind of nutritious snack that has long disappeared from the menu of children’s entertainment. The change of seasons, fancifully explained by “Ceres and Proserpine,” is now defined by commerce, by what is and what is not on display in the shop windows. It is the modern myth of perpetual growth and prosperity that may well prove the less relevant and enduring one. By all means, have that pomegranate, but brace yourself for a prolonged visit with Pluto.

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Blind Justice; or, ‘1000 for Verdicts’

“It does not matter whether your verdict is ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty.’ If your reasons for it are good enough you will share in the prizes.” With this peculiar invitation, millions of US Americans were lured to their radios, tuned in to WJZ, for a trial in which they, the listening public, were called upon to act as jurors. As previously mentioned here, it all began on this day, 25 November, in 1930.

The judge in the case was none other than New York Senator Robert F. Wagner, lending gravitas to a spectacle that was, in more sense than one, a trial broadcast. Would listeners find fictional society beauty Vivienne Ware guilty of the murder of millionaire architect Damon Fenwicke, a crime for which she could be sentenced to the electric chair? And would they leap out of their armchairs to boost not only their own circulation but that of their local paper by rereading what they just heard on the air?

“It is no part of your duty to decide whether or not she shall die,” Senator Wagner insisted. That, he told the listeners,

is the function of the Court and the Law.  But you must remember that in endeavoring to secure a conviction of this young and beautiful defendant the District Attorney is but pursuing the business to which you, the people of this State, have set him.  You will consider carefully all the evidence as it is presented for you from the witness stand.

Whether or not their voices could kill, those tuning in nevertheless derived their thrills from the importance of the interactive role granted to them. Tune in, have your say, all for a chance to win a substantial amount of dough—what’s not to love!

Leave it to a Hearst paper to conceive of a reality show like The Trial of Vivienne Ware—a trial that sold papers and bought the jury. Those who caught up with the daily broadcasts from the courtroom and read transcripts and analyses in their daily Hearst paper were rewarded for being informed enough to arrive at the verdict they were invited to mail in. No attendance, no deliberations with fellow jurors required. All that was needed, aside from a radio set and a few cents for daily tabloids, was curiosity, rhetoric, and greed.

You might say it was just fiction, this fictitious call for justice; but the Hearst press, known to have started a war with mere words, was doing its utmost to make the trial seem as real as the joined media of radio and the press could make it, all with the aim of a very real boost in sales through a cleverly manipulative marketing campaign.

More than a radio serial, The Trial of Vivienne Ware is one of the most elaborate and dubious media events ever staged. All that remains of it now are a number of newspaper articles and a book touted as “an innovation in both the radio and publishing worlds”—the “first radio novel.”

To be sure, Kenneth M. Ellis’s “novel”—a combination of faux news reportage and courtroom dialogue—has none of the thrills of the original experience. Its failure to excite and convince convincingly argues the power of the media to create a sense of reality through the realities we glean from sensation.

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Once More Round the Horne

I just got back from Brighton, England, the popular seaside resort that is pretty much the gayest town in all of Britain. So, to speak in the cheek-lodged tongue of Polari, I was bound to have a “fantabulosa” time. And how “fantabulosa” was it for an old “omi-palone” like me to have Round the Horne playing just round the corner at Brighton’s Theatre Royal. Considering that Round the Horne is a British radio series whose last original episode aired back in 1968, I could hardly believe my “ogles” when I read that it was on while I was visiting. I was thrilled to get my “lills” on a pair of tickets to “aunt nell” some of the wittiest comedy act never seen by millions.

Round the Horne: Unseen and Uncut is an ingeniously—if deceptively—simple production. It merely presents two of the sixty-six 45-minute broadcasts from this much-loved and well-remembered BBC program (1965-68), separated by an intermission that only the most humorless of stick-in-the-muds would take as an opportunity to make a hasty retreat. The scripts are taken directly from the original series. You would not want to tinker with lines composed by Barry Took (Laugh In) and his writing partner Marty Feldman. You certainly would not have to.

The second act (or half, rather) builds on the first, allowing viewers to pick up the rhythm of the show, pick up on the slight but clever variations, and pick their favorite among the recurring characters in a line-up including Fiona and Charles, an aging pair of actors who reprise their preposterously Cowardesque silver screen dialogues (“I know you know I know”) in that posh and most unnatural anti-vernacular of BBC English; folk singer Rambling Syd Rumpo with yet another rendition of his Jabberwockian tunes; and, of course, Julian and his friend Sandy in all their Polari-riddled glory that was enjoyed by millions but understood and shared by only a few whose nature made them appreciate the subversiveness and desperation of such artifice. After all, homosexuality was still illegal at the time.

Of course, the production is not at all simple. The performers are called upon to impersonate well-known radio (and television) personalities, including Kenneth Horne (played by Jonathan Rigby), Kenneth Williams (Robin Sebastian), and Betty Marsden (Sally Grace). Standing behind a row of microphones, without any other props of scenery to speak of, the six cast members (not including the singers and orchestra members) have to sound the part and deliver their borrowed lines with an enthusiasm that is thoroughly rehearsed without sounding disingenuous. Along with the harmonizing quartet known as Not the Fraser Hayes Four, the seen voices of this stage show are fully deserving of a hearty cheer of “fantabulosa!”

However convincingly the experience of attending a live radio broadcast (or a recording session thereof) in a studio is being recreated, though, one aspect of such productions has been overlooked or obscured. Hidden from view were the indispensable sound effects artists whose presence would have completed the picture. I would have settled for an extra pressing a number of buttons while seated among the musicians who were in full view at all times. Instead, the recorded yet well-timed effects (from footsteps to horses hoofs) came from a loudspeaker, its makers or purveyors unseen and, a mention in the playbill aside, unacknowledged.

The production might also have benefited from a few glances behind the scene, with actors walking on, preparing for their roles or having a chat before each broadcast. No dirt, just an element of realism. Since Took’s widow serves as “script consultant” for this touring show, some insightful biographical notes might have been worked into this simulation. Kenneth Williams’s life, in particular, is worth exploring in a stage drama. According to the playbill, the “action takes place” at the “BBC Paris Recording Studios in Lower Regent Street, London”; but what there is of action hardly speaks as loudly as the words. This is “theater of the mind”; and once it is taken out of the wooden O of your cranium, you begin to wonder whether what you see is really what you get as you make an effort to wipe your “oglefakes.”

That said, I was glad for this chance to catch up with Round the Horne—and at such an opportune moment to boot. It so happens that, this Friday, 28 November, BBC Radio 7 is rebroadcasting the 7 March 1965 debut of the program, with subsequent episodes to follow sequentially in the weeks and months to come. My “aunt nells” are ready for it . . .

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Bright Eyes and Black

Well-behaved children, however rare an over-protected species nowadays, are about as fascinating as so many slices of white bread. It isn’t until you have got something on them that they become even remotely interesting. What jam is to Wonder Bread is dirt to supposedly wonderful well-breads. If they’re simply wonderful, they are plain dull. You’re better off tossing sardines to a trained seal. Animals that do as they are told are invariably more engaging than docile offspring. I suspect that our enthusiastic response to the tricks performed by fair Lassie is really owing to our culture of laissez-faire; it is gratifying that we still can get pets to do what we dare not demand from our young. Obviously, I don’t have any kids to brag about, deserving or otherwise—which is why I get such a kick out of wicked children. Their mischief is one of those pleasures I refuse to feel guilty about.

Last night, I watched Shirley Temple in Bright Eyes (1934). Shirley is cute ‘n all, but it is Jane Withers who steals the show demanding a machine gun for Christmas, decapitating a doll, or playing train wreck, all the while manipulating her parents into doing exactly what she wants. Now, there’s a future executive.

These days, it takes nerves to get a Shirley Temple DVD past the checkout of your local supermarket. You are liable to incur the suspicion of fellow customers who might feel compelled to warn their parenting friends and neighbors about you. I buried my copies of Bright Eyes, Baby Take a Bow, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm under a few bottles of Chardonnay; better to be thought of as an alcoholic!

Whether we are facing another depression or not, Miss Temple would not have a career today; at least, she would not be surrounded by a bunch of aviators singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop” while rubbing her tummy and licking all sorts of oversized candy. Jane Withers, too, would have a tough time with her “Bad Seed” routine. The Children of the Damned are very nearly outlawed, what with all the gun-toting prepubescents we come across in the news. It is no longer acceptable to fantasize about wayward kids (or fantasize about kids, period); our culture has become altogether too infantile, permissive, and litigious for that kind of amusement.

On this day, 19 November, in 1948, syndicated radio and television critic John Crosby already wondered “Whatever Happened to the Bad Boy?” He argued Henry Aldrich to be a poor substitute for Huck Finn or Penrod, the latter now being all but forgotten. Crosby might have responded more favorably to Bart Simpson; but even Bart has long been overshadowed by his childlike father. We don’t have a problem laughing at the juvenile, provided the little rascals come to us in the shape of a Will Ferrell. To that kind of let’s pretend our youth-obsessed society can readily relate.

What Crosby rejected was the kind of naughty child that was too dumb to know any better. For juveniles like Henry Aldrich he could

see no hope whatsoever of future brilliance. Week after week, they get into one jam after another, always by accident, never by design. The trouble they see is a censored, respectable, passive trouble. They’re the victims. In Huck’s day somebody else was the victim.

Never mind the kind of pampered brats we see today and dread. Show me a black-eyed smart aleck who sets out to shatter our sentiments of childhood as a period of innocence, sweetness, and pastel-colored light. Just make it fiction.

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Soaps to Dial For: My Nights with That Noble Woman

I’ve been having sleepless nights recently, what with this cold and all the rest I am getting throughout the day. It is a testament to my restraint that you still don’t know the half of it. Since I’m not one to crochet or get crotchety, I generally substitute sound sleep for a generous if gentle dose of sound. There’s nothing like canned melodrama to fill the dark hours with images just mute enough not to clash with your pajamas. No thrillers like Inner Sanctum or Suspense, if you please. Too jarring by far! No Fred Allen or Vic and Sade to induce chuckles when it’s snores I’m after. No plays I’d be itching to follow, no tunes I’d be eager to hum. So, I kept my ears peeled for some pop-cultural flotsam that could send me adrift, and presto. The other sleepless night, I finally turned to the kind of fare I rarely try, particularly not when I am in fine fettle. My fettle being decidedly not fit to be in, I contrived to make a late night date with Mary Noble, Backstage Wife.

Backstage Wife belongs to that genre known as “soap opera,” defined by James Thurber as a

kind of sandwich, whose recipe is simple enough, although it took years to compound. Between thick slices of advertising, spread twelve minutes of dialogue, add predicament, villainy, and female suffering in equal measure, throw in a dash of nobility, sprinkle with tears, season with organ music, cover with a rich announcer sauce, and serve five times a week.

If you serve that platter past midnight, rather than at lunchtime, the sandwich appears to become more spicy than soggy. After all, what Thurber left out of that list of ingredients is the listener’s imagination, which tends to get saucier once you hit the sheets.

Fodder for radio satirists Bob and Ray’s “Mary Backstage, Noble Wife,” the “story of Mary Noble and what it means to be the wife of a famous star” was on the air for a quarter of a century. A small but sizeable helping of that run is readily available online, namely a storyline involving the scheming Claudia Vincent, a woman who fires shots at man to gain the confidence of another. That the other man is Mary Noble’s husband, Larry, makes Claudia Vincent’s obvious maneuverings all the more delicious.

Not that my taste buds can be trusted in times likes these, but the last thing I wanted was my mouth to start watering. Now my nights are spent wondering about Mary, Larry, Claudia and Rupert, knowing that I shall never hear the end of it, for want of extant chapters. Of course, serial dramas are not about endings. They, like all melodramas, are about the protracted middle, the main courses and the side dishes, about the precariousness of the status quo and all our attempts to stay as we are or get what is presumably owed us. For all its sensational scenes and rhetorical bombast, melodrama is truest to life, far more real, to be sure, than tragedy and comedy. In those aged and unadulterated models of drama, all endings are final; in melodrama, there is plenty of room for doubt, for turns and returns, for the “what ifs” that, I should have known, are keeping me asking for seconds and up for hours.

The current season of Desperate Housewives being so listless you cannot even claim it to have mustered energy enough to jump the shark, I am only too grateful for a bit of cheddar and ham as only those horrid Hummerts could slice it. Now pardon me while I dim the lights. It’s time for my sandwich.