Category: Radio

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Kaboom! Kerplunk! Ka-ching!

Well, being that I am off to Cardiff on Thursday to see the touring Young Vic production of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, I thought I’d make this serial and comic strip week here on broadcastellan. “Blistering barnacles” and “Cushion footed quadrupeds”! I am smack in the middle of the “Funny Book War” as staged by Michael Chabon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; and even though my comic treats were generally of not of the superheroic kind (to which this recent portrait attests), comics are very much on my mind.

It so happens that the aforementioned (and by now controversial) boy reporter and his creator are also the subject of the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Tintin’s Guide to Journalism” (available online here until 23 November). In this broadcast, which also features the voice of Tintin creator Hergé, journalist Mark Lawson investigates cases of real-life reporters who were inspired to enter their profession by books like King Ottokar’s Sceptre. In my case, comics simply inspired imitation.

The Germans are said to have papered the way to the comics with the picture books of Wilhelm Busch (Max und Moritz), which is where I started out as well. After graduating from the Katzenjammer Kids inspiring Max und Moritz, I became an avid comic collector, spending virtually all of my Taschengeld (distributed as it was back then in Deutsch Marks) on weeklies like Fix und Foxi.

Sigh! My family could not afford to have me shod there; but I still sneaked into the Salamander shoe stores to browse just long enough to grab my copy of Lurchi, another treat being the stories of Mecki the hedgehog I clipped from the pages of the German radio and television magazine Hörzu. More inclined toward the buzz of Maya the Bee than to the “THWIP!” of Spiderman, my comic book phase ended as I entered my teenage years. Make that my “comic reading phase,” since I kept drawing them. My own creations often mocked those among my pubescent schoolmates who kept up with the exploits of guys like Superman or The Phantom.

It was only after I graduated from the comics that I discovered a connection between cartoon bubbles and comic speech, the kind of connection to which the Americans owe the serial adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy, the kind of affinity that made it possible for New York City Mayor La Guardia to read Little Orphan Annie on the air during the 1945 newspaper strike.

Even though I had very little exposure to radio drama, being the walking TV Guide in my family, I created in the character of Inspektor Bullauge (Inspector Bull’s Eye) a comic for the ear. I made up the story as I played the parts, more interested in the sound effects I could use and record to bring my cardboard creation to life.

Zowie! Despite dedicating an estimated 300,000 words of this journal to popular culture (and radio dramatics in particular), I have never explored here the relationship between onomatopoeia and the equally imaginative world of sound effects . . .

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Dark Echoes

Well, perhaps I am a medium. Perhaps, broadcastellan is more than a mere series of ever so slight and seemingly inconsequential messages. Or, perhaps, this is simply another one of those alleged coincidences I have been pondering, on occasion, with the author of those Relative and to me altogether relevant Esoterica. Two days ago, I shared a make-up chart from the celebrated House of Westmore. Apart from being a fascinating artefact, remotely related to my topic of the day, I thought it was neither here nor there—that realm in which I often find myself while exploring the out-of-date everyday. This evening, though, I learned that another branch of that fruitbearing family tree, Monty Westmore, has died off at the age of 84. Westmore, who was Joan Crawford’s personal makeup artist during the latter part of her career, was still active in the 1990s, working on blockbusters like Jurassic Park.

Last night, I watched what I believed to be the altogether inconsequential College Swing (1938) starring Bob Hope, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, along with a handsome and ever so handy handbag serving as a radio receiver, and that celebrated comedy team of Burns and Allen (aforementioned), who enjoyed such popularity that they were called upon to sell the Paramount feature in the film’s trailer. Today, I learned that Ronnie Burns, the adopted son of Burns and Allen—who frequently featured on his parents’ 1950s television series—passed away on 14 November 2007 at the age of 72; he was three years old when College Swing was shot.

“In the midst of life we are in death,” I thought, without the slightest ambition of being original. It seems there really is no such a mode as escapism; there is no signing off, as long as we acknowledge that the signs and signposts of old lead us straight into the present day. To the receptive mind, any old vehicle has the power to drive us home; everything connects, if only you let it, and even the remotest piece of formerly popular culture will insist on rendering itself significant . . .

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All About Tallulah! (Never Mind “Wardrobe, make-up, or hair”)

Well, Tallulah Hallelujah! How could I pass up the chance to pass on this anniversary double treat? On this day, 16 November, in 1950, Tallulah Bankhead grabbed the microphone to entertain the multitude, first in a recreation of her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Two year later, she was heard in the part that might have gone to Claudette Colbert (had she not given her all to make sure that Three Came Home) but is now almost exclusively thought of as belonging to Bette Davis: All About Eve (previously discussed here in its pre-filmic radio version). When I featured clips from these performances in first adventure in podcasting, I was unaware that both “Lifeboat” and “All About Eve” were broadcast on the same day, two years apart.

Now, la Bankhead is more often thought of as a legend than an actress; that is, she is foremost a star, and only secondarily a performer. We generally do not have access to the stage appearances of Hollywood stars of the studio era, a couple of stills and reviews aside. Radio theatricals, however, can give us an inkling of those ephemeral performances. So, once again, I am conjuring up the Tallulah spirit, as I did when last I placed her image on my Quija board.

Bankhead’s performance in the Screen Directors Playhouse production of “Lifeboat,” broadcast on this day, 16 November, in 1950, serves to remind us how good an actress an icon can be. As an uncommonly humble Alfred Hitchcock tells the audience in the introduction to the play,

. . . I think you should know that Lifeboat is not what we call a director’s picture.  There are no trick sets, no camera tricks, in fact, no tricks at all.  When the director approaches such a picture, he offers up a little prayer and delivers himself wholly into the hands of his actors.  Since they are very good actors, the result is just as you should hear it now.

Indeed, the production is very fine, with Bankhead serving as narratrix of her character’s experience aboard that ill-fated vessel. That time around, there were no calls for “Wardrobe, make-up, or hair,” no matter how many times the eccentric star uncrossed her legs.

The Theater Guild adaptation of “All About Eve” was more in keeping with the Bankhead persona in those Big Show days. “Thank you, Mr. Brokenshire,” Bankhead seizes the microphone from her announcer,

and good evening, darlings.  The play we are performing for you this evening on Theater Guild on the Air is called—and I never could understand why— All About Eve.  All About Eve.  True, there is an Eve in it, and what a part that is.  There is also a glamorous and brilliant leading lady of the theatre whose true identity has been kept a secret too long.  Tonight, darlings, tonight baby intends to do something about that.

What a bumpy night it turned out to be. Those two years sure made a difference. You might say, that the campy “Eve” is an extension of or promotional vehicle for the Big Show and the Tallulah image in general. Character had given way for caricature.

How odd it is that such camp is so personal to me; and yet, when I think of Bankhead, I am inevitably reminded of my years in New York City. Sitting in my favorite local park by the East River while preparing for my dissertation on radio drama by listening to a few programs (oh, the hardship a doctoral candidate has to endure), I got to talk to a fellow sun worshipper who, learning about my uncommon soundtrack, asked whether I had come across the name of Florence Robinson, who was an old friend of his. No, I could not say I had; but I soon discovered that Robinson had been Tallulah’s co-star in “All About Eve.”

Just about that time, in those early days of the 21st century, I got to see the Tallulah Hallelujah! starring Tovah Feldshuh in the title role (no, not Hallelujah). A few years later I became friends with the “producing associate” of the show. So, listening to Bankhead, however outré or larger than life she might sound, triggers many a personal memory.

Then again, listening is always personal, as sounds pass the threshold of my ears, entering my body in a way images never could, and keep reverberating in my mind. While no longer surprised, I am still disappointed when I flick through biographies like the one by Joel Lobenthal I am clutching above, accounts of an actor’s life that make so little of their roles on radio and the role radio played during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

Sure, the The Big Show was not being ignored (even though George Baxt, who novelized Bankhead’s broadcasting experience in the volume shown here, barely gets a mention). Beyond that, though, Bankhead’s “many radio appearances” are summed up as involving “acting in sketches or trading patter with Hildegarde, Fred Allen, Kate Smith, and others.”

Given that recordings are now so readily available, the general disregard for the medium, expressing itself in a line like “[r]adio was Tallulah’s only medium for the next six months,” becomes an intolerable distortion of American popular culture. I wish more attention was being paid to the cultural force of the old wireless, a wish that, aside from all the nonsense and dross you might expect here, is the raison d’être of broadcastellan.

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The Second Hand Sense

Well, I don’t think there is such a thing as a second-hand experience. I mean, either you are experiencing or you are not. That said, much of popular culture consists of hand-me-downs, the most retail-generative of which are being continually retailored to suit new media and markets. Pop is what keeps popping up, what pops in and out of the media we very nearly reserve for popping corn. It is the culture that is second-hand, though, not our appreciation of it. Earlier today, we booked tickets for the Young Vic’s touring production of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, based on the comic book Tintin in Tibet, first serialized back in 1958-59. I sure am looking forward to my reencounter with the aforementioned Tintin (or with Tim und Struppi, as I got to know the boy reporter and his dog many years ago in my native Germany). Without requiring any reanimation, the adventure will come to life on the stage of the magnificent Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. I shall take it all in, with whatever senses are being engaged, no matter how many layers of text and context separate me from the original strip.

Sometimes, an approximation is all we get to experience. Take Charles Laughton, for instance, who was heard on this day, 15 November, in 1936 in a radio-readied scene from the biopic Rembrandt, in which Mr. Elsa Lanchester played the title role. The radio version (of a scene from the motion picture) was broadcast from London over NBC in the United States. I know, the movie is still extant; it is this original broadcast that seems hard to get.

Laughton (seen here through the eyes of make-up artist Ern Westmore in a chart published in the 24 December 1938 issue of the British Picture Post, previously raided for a shot of Claudette Colbert’s gams and this portrait of Laughton’s Jamaica Inn co-star) is heard extolling the virtues of women, probably not a romantic subject in which the actor had much of a first-hand knowledge.

Considering that the original recording does not appear to be in circulation, I was glad to catch an earful of Laughton’s performance on this 6 March 1957 broadcast of NBC’s self-celebratory second handbasket Recollections, which was being stuffed with this Rembrandt copy more than twenty years after the initial live broadcast. Other goodies shared out on that occasion were Dinah Shore’s “big break” on the Eddie Cantor Show (2 October 1940), a tribute to Wynn Murray, and a 1937 performance by Ray Heatherton (whose photograph you may find on my homepage).

NBC’s broadcasts of Recollections are a first-rate introduction to American radio entertainment of the 1930s and, indeed, to the everyday of US citizens during that period. However much broadcasters depended on stage and screen plays for their material, teasing listeners with their if-only-you-could-see-us-now approach to on-air promotion, tuning had lost little of its excitement during those early days of network broadcasting. I, for one, have never treated listening as a second hand sense, no matter how second-rate the material.

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Dumb? Wait!: Pinter & a Pair of Chekhov’s Shorts

Well, I’ve been struggling to keep up, which makes me feel and appear rather dumber than usual. I have gotten into the habit of editing my journal entries online, of dumping scraps here in hopes of making something of them, eventually. “We must beat the iron while it is hot, but we may polish it at leisure,” Dryden famously said. As a poet, composing in solitude, he probably never thought of doing the polishing in public. At any rate, given the relative obscurity of broadcastellan, I often assume that my composing here is very nearly done in private; but the realization that one looker-on had landed here after scouring the web for references to “Dr. Harry Heuser,” no doubt with the intention of checking my credentials, rather put me off the idea of performance editing. And yet, as dumb as it might be not to wait until such time as the half-cooked turns into a dish fit for tossing into this dumb waiter of a vehicle, I am not easily reformed. It is quite literally too late for that now.

I just got back from an evening of theater. There is always time for that; and the offerings here in the small seaside town of Aberystwyth, just outside of which I reside, is gratifyingly varied. Once again, I can’t wait to share my thoughts, however dumber they will be expressed in the shoddy prose of the moment. Before my memories go stale or my mind blank, I have got to share my thoughts on the Compass Theatre Company‘s production of Pinter’s “Dumb Waiter,” with a “Pair of Chekhov’s Shorts” thrown in.

The shorts suited us just fine. “The Evils of Tobacco” and “The Proposal” (translated by Neil Sissons), are comedy sketches Chekhov wrote for the vaudeville stage early in his career, “Evils” being a monologue and “The Proposal” a one-acter for three characters. Both pieces deal with what is generally thought of as the end of comedy, marriage, by inviting us to see the end of marriage as comedy.

The henpecked husband ostensibly lecturing about the “Evils” of smoking is really more keen on, and indeed desperate to, share his thoughts about his miserable existence as dictated by his controlling spouse. The monologue was delivered with humor and pathos by Michael Onslowe, who was seen in all three pieces. “Evils” would work well on radio, I thought. It is one of my hard-to-kick habits always to think of what I see in the light (or darkness, as it were) of its radiodramatic potentialities.

Nor does “The Proposal” pose any great challenges to the adaptor for radio, even though Sisson deftly exploits the physical aspects of comedy in the slapstick treatment of the suitor’s nervous disposition. As the title suggests, “The Proposal” tells of an intended match, the advancement of which goes awry. However old and slight these two plays, the laughter was not derived from our perception of their datedness; nor did they greatly rely for their effect on the audience’s nostalgia for this kind of entertainment. They simply still work as comic banter.

Pinter’s “Dumb Waiter” is rather more dependent on what is unexpressed, even though Gus, one of the two hapless hitmen waiting for their next job, seemed to have echoed our attitude toward this final play on the bill when he exclaimed: “It’s worse than the last one.” Commenting on the dump of a hotel in which he and his partner Ben are waiting to carry out their next assignment, he adds: “At least there was a wireless there.” Is “Dumb Waiter” radiogenic? Surely not in the way that Pinter’s “A Slight Ache” plays with your mind.

Still, the titular contraption prominently mounted in the center of the stage, and the speaking tube attached to it, made me think of the wireless that Gus was missing. Indeed, it very nearly made me go “Yoo-hoo! Is anybody?” as I thought of Molly Goldberg’s old apartment and the role her dumb waiter played in her everyday communications with the unheard Mrs. Bloom. I guess, a day without radio to me amounts to something like an existential void. It is certainly more than “A Slight Ache.”

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“Isn’t she nice?”: Laraine Day (1913-2007) on the Air

Well, the first thing I thought of when I heard about the passing of screen actress Laraine Day on 10 November 2007 was this remark by Alfred Hitchcock, who directed her in Foreign Correspondent (1940): “I would have liked to have a bigger star.” He could not have been faced with a brighter one. Best known in the 1940s for her recurring role of nurse Mary Lamont in a series of Dr. Kildare movies, Day (seen left in a picture taken from my copy of the 3-9 January 1942 issue of Movie-Radio Guide) was as bright as her name suggested. There seemed to be no edge from which to push to her into more ambitious performances. She was just so darn nice . . . at least until she was forced to give back that pretty Locket.

In The Locket (1946), Day’s cheerful personality is being cleverly exploited to make audiences wonder whether her character, Nancy, is really as charming and uncomplicated as she seems. “She is nice,” a woman attending Nancy’s wedding observes. “She’s lucky,” another guest replies. “If you’re nice, you have to be lucky,” the first one counters, only to be dealt with the riposte that “[i]f you’re lucky, you can afford to be nice.”

Nancy can afford to be nice, however little happiness being a good girl managed to get her as a child; but is she just Mrs. Lucky to have landed such a well-to-do husband, or has her not being quite so nice something to do with it? The Locket, in which Day stars opposite Robert Mitchum, Brian Aherne, and Gene Raymond, is Hitchcock’s Marnie without the sex angle. It is a dark, labyrinthine thriller that casts welcome shadows on the brightness of Ms. Day.

Before making her frequent US television appearances, hosting her own program, Daydreaming with Laraine (1951), and starring in a number of Lux Video Theater productions, Day was heard on the Lux Radio Theater in recreations of her screen roles in Mr. Lucky (1943) and Bride by Mistake (1944). She was also cast in a number of original radio plays produced by the Cavalcade of America (such as in “The Camels Are Coming,” opposite her Foreign Correspondent co-star Joel McCrea).

On Biography in Sound, Day let listeners in on the home life of her husband, Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, with whom she also appeared on Tallulah Bankhead’s Big Show (4 February 1951), in which Day’s clean image was contrasted with that of her irascible husband:

Bankhead: Well, I must say, Laraine, that being the wife of a stormy baseball manager doesn’t seem to have changed you very much.  You still have that fresh, lovely, scrubbed look.

Day: Why shouldn’t I look scrubbed? Every time we have an argument, Leo sends me to the showers.

Considering that Day’s projected identity resembles an ad for toilet soap, it is not surprising that she made several return visits to the Lux Radio Theater. Introduced as “ever lovely” by Mr. DeMille, Day enjoyed a rather more interesting vehicle than her own comedies in the mystery “The Unguarded Hour” (4 December 1944).

In that adaptation for radio (of a movie based on a stage drama that itself was an adaptation), Day plays a valiant wife who tries to protect her husband from a scandal of which he is unaware. His words, uttered by co-star Robert Montgomery, capture what is the Laraine Day persona:

How do you think I came to worship you? Because you’re so pretty? Because you win large silver cups jumping horses or play good bridge? No, darling.  You have what’s called quality.  It’s kindness, it’s generosity, that makes all the rest of us feel just a little shoddy.

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Passport to Ridicule

Well, who needs fun house mirrors? When it comes to deriving amusement from staring at distorted reflections of yourself, there is nothing like the jack-in-the-box of old photographs. However familiar, they still manage to surprise. Sometimes, those snapshots of your past take on lives of their own as, in the eyes of others, they begin to resemble the faces of strangers. It becomes rather trying when you begin to think of your former self as a latter-day Frankenstein who, attempting to create life in his image, unwittingly gave birth to something monstrous beyond his control.

Owing to a current television program, I am the subject of much joshing here at Ty Newydd, our home (“ty” being Welsh for house). Once again, we are tuning in to The X Factor, one of those illegitimate, hyperactive offspring of the aforementioned Major Bowes so eagerly adopted these days and brought into the homes of an adoring public. And until such time as the show’s televoting devotees decide they have had their fill and be rid of him, I must expect to be mocked each Saturday evening for allegedly resembling the decidedly odd Rhydian Roberts, one of the two Welsh contestants in this year’s competition.

Each week, Rhydian is making a spectacle of himself as he appears before a panel of judges (the cocky Simon Cowell, the confidently second-rate Dannii Minogue, the feisty Sharon Osborne, and the amiable Irishman Louis Walsh) to take on a duet from The Phantom of the Opera or take the stage like an ice-sculptured Liberace in sequins and faux furs, belting like Welsh pop icon Shirley Bassey to the bewilderment of the British people who never beheld anyone quite like him.

Remote and humorless, Rhydian seems to come to life only on the stage. Thus far, he has remained an impenetrable mystery. Too straight for camp, he has a discipline and drive more chilling than the ambitions of Eve Harrington. He is a regular storm-trouper. It is no less disconcerting to be likened to him. Fortunately, the theatrical one can carry a tune, which is where any comparisons between us two, unwarrantable as they are to begin with, must most assuredly come to an end. In the words of frustrated blues singer Eve Peabody, “mine is strictly a bathtub voice.”

No, I don’t mind making a display of myself (as I have done here on numerous occasions). In fact, before I made up my mind that one journal was quite enough of me, I briefly contemplated dedicating one to the history of my hair, an autobiographical venture I intended to call The Shoulderpadded Atlas (for which this picture might have qualified). It would have been another argument for the non-visual arts, no doubt, which is better put forward here on broadcastellan. That said, it is just as well that I share my life here, given that the past preserved on my old computer seems to have been lost in yesterday’s crash.

Since then, I have had as much reason to cheer as I have sense not to burst into song. It was determined this morning that I shall have to dig up my passport again. Another trip to the old haunts of Gotham is in the offing. Considering that the above picture has changed more accurately to reflect my present exterior, I shall probably get through immigrations without suffering much ridicule (let alone comparisons to a man as yet unknown stateside). Of course, that also means I am going to miss the season finale of X Factor. Not a void a bottle of Aqua Net can’t fill.

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". . . to hear this entertaining piece": By the Fire with Belloc’s "Matilda"

Well, I’m continuing my week before the wireless, taking in the BBC’s varied fare. It is just the thing to do on a gloomy day like this, especially when there are so many other things to be done. Though I am not literally sitting before an old bakelit set, but by the fireside instead, with the BBC’s digital “Listen Again” page for a dial, I am feeling a certain kinship to the channel hoppers of yore who went in search of sounds to sound off about.

I am reminded, in particular, of a reviewer for the American Mercury who kept his post for seventeen hours straight on a wintry Thursday afternoon in early 1932. “O my country, my country, the pains are so great you must be growing up at last!” that worn out tuner-in concluded:

A radio playlet, a love scene in which a young man and a young woman tip over a canoe. “I love you so much, I hate you . . . you, you darling!” . . . Some jokes. “When he sat at the piano somebody had pulled the stool away”. . . Dialogues between a grumpy, nasal Sherlock Holmes and a foreign villainess. “That seals your fate, Madam” . . . A young business-like voice invites those who want to make money in their spare time to “meet with me personally” at 500 Fifth Avenue, room 525, tomorrow morning. . . The Lucky Strike Hour, perhaps the best of all air jazz orchestras, with interpolations by the confidential gutter voice of Walter Winchell. . . .

Indiscriminate listening is likely to trigger similar responses today, even if those dialing or downloading the BBC’s offerings are at least spared the sales talk with which we are being accosted elsewhere. Equipped with a copy of the Radio Times, I listen selectively. As a result, my date with the wireless was like a retreat into a well-stocked library, except that it was a lot noisier.

Tuning in BBC 7, I found myself on the Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, retraced in a four-part dramatization of Smollet’s 1771 novel. Over at BBC 4, I fished for Books at Bedtime, the catch of the day being Augustus Carp, Esq. by Henry Howarth Bashford (1924). Then, catching up with last Sunday’s Adventures in Poetry, I bid farewell to “Matilda—Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death,” and whose epitaph is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Hilaire Belloc’s poem was read by children’s author Michael Morpurgo and commented upon by two pint-sized Matildas whose observations were far more engaging than the choice remarks of their scholarly elders. The girls understood that their namesake was getting burned for trying not to be bored:

For once, towards the close of day,
Matilda, growing tired of play
And finding she was left alone,
Went tiptoe to the telephone
And summoned the immediate aid
Of London’s noble Fire-Brigade.

Now, let’s examine Matilda’s situation from a listener’s perspective. Quite clearly, the girl was sick of listening, probably because she never got to ride the airwaves, where listening is an activity quite distinct from obedience, provided the ear is connected to an open mind. Instead, she insisted on making herself heard. Calling the fire department, she did not simply order the home entertainment that was wanting—she created it. Long before Orson Welles and his team staged “The War of the Worlds” to such startling effect, there was Matilda, getting a show on the road.

Not that her ingenuity was appreciated by her aunt, who was obliged “to pay / To get the men to go away!” Rather more thrilling than picking up theatricals on the electrophone (aforementioned), the dial-a-drama incident resulted in a further curtailing of Matilda’s amusements:

It happened that a few weeks later
Her aunt was off to the Theatre
To see that interesting play
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.
She had refused to take her niece
To hear this entertaining piece:
A deprivation just and wise
To punish her for telling lies.

I’m not sure whether Matilda would have found hearing Mrs. Tanqueray nearly as “entertaining” as the issue of her lupine effusions. She was never to experience that middle-class chestnut, which would be warmed up or roasted often enough on US radio, well into the 1930s; but melodrama came home after all, even without access to the wireless:

That night a fire did break out—
You should have heard Matilda shout!
You should have heard her scream and bawl,
And throw the window up and call
To people passing in the street—
(The rapidly increasing heat
Encouraging her to obtain
Their confidence)—but all in vain!
For every time she shouted “Fire!”
They only answered “Little Liar!”
And therefore when her aunt returned,
Matilda, and the house, were burned.

Matilda just wasn’t cut out to be a newscaster, I guess, even though she had that Hearstian knack for bringing events into being by proclaiming them. Still, if she had been as good a liar as Mr. Belloc made her out or up to be, why did she ever grow “tired of play” in the first place?

What I have gathered from listening to this cautionary tale, however spurious, is this: If you don’t want to get burned and end up paying too dearly for your amusements, give listening another try . . .

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Going His Way: The Bing Crosby Trail

Well, I’m on his way. Instead of Going Hollywood, where the WGA strike is beginning to make itself felt, I am listening all this week to the BBC, taking in drama, music, and talk. Late to catch up, I started on The Bing Crosby Trail, a six week tour whose first installment took me on a road to California, New York City, and Spokane, where listeners get to meet the daughter, the widow, and many of the contemporaries of the man known as Bing.

With The Bing Crosby Trail, producer and host Michael Freedland, a prolific biographer (whose audio portrait “Danny Kaye: UNICEF’s Jester” is available online until 12 November), attempts a departure from the traditional approach to telling a life story: “This is not just another biographical series,” Freedland insists in his introduction. “You could say it is more in the way of geography than history.” He also issues a “warning” to those about to follow him: “No obvious star names on the roster here. No sycophantic interviews with actors or other singers who, in Bing’s lifetime, called him great to his face and whispered other things behind his back.”

Instead, Freedland has been traveling around the US, “talking to people whose life Bing touched.” Not that those he interviews are nobodies: Buddy Bregman (“Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings”), veteran Paramount producer A.C. Lyles, and historian Ken Barnes (who produced the CD box set “Swingin’ With Bing”) have all gone on Freedland’s record.

“My life is like an open book,” Bing is heard singing (lines from his “That’s What Life Is All About”); and the man with the microphone who is out to capture that life is taking Bing by his word. Not content to “glance back through the pages” of printed volumes, he tries to pick up bits and pieces that perhaps never made it into any biography. Sounds good to me.

And yet, the cross-country Crosby Trail gets lost on a Road to Utopia, an ambition that must remain a dream. Freedland has gone out of his way to come away with comparatively little. The tour is not off to a promising start. We are take on a “winding mountain road above Malibu” to hear Mary Crosby sharing the insight that her father enjoyed playing golf and liked to whistle a lot. Does one really have to travel way out west for such a soundbite?

A subsequent inspection of Bing’s statue at Gonzaga University in Spokane and a tour of the Student Center housing the Crosby Museum are altogether misguided in their visual-mindedness. I’d rather be listening to Bing whistle than being given this runaround, blindfolded. At times so glossy as to make me cross, the Crosby Trail is a gross betrayal of the medium.

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Napoleon Solo Dynamite: Robert Vaughn “Behind the Iron Curtain”

Well, it wasn’t exactly the Summer of Love, back in 1968, when American film and television actor Robert Vaughn, then known to millions of Americans as “Napoleon Solo” came to Czechoslovakia to play a Nazi officer in The Bridge at Remagen. Four decades later, Vaughn got the opportunity to share his experience in Tracy Spottiswoode’s radio play “Solo Behind the Curtain.” The play aired last Monday on BBC Radio 4.

Now, Spottiswoode told me about “Solo” some 18 months ago when we sat in the kitchen of her Cardiff home (as mentioned here, in passing); by now, I had almost given up on ever getting to hear it, especially since I have visited Prague in the meantime and dined at the Cafe Europa on Wenceslas Square, where Vaughn enjoys a cool drink and the warmth of late spring as the play opens.

In a nod to Vaughn’s most famous role, “Solo” comes on like a 1960s spy thriller, with suave Vaughn feeling “pretty sure” that he was “being followed. In those days, there was nothing surprising in that. An American in an Iron Curtain country, during the Cold War. It would have been unusual not to be followed. What was surprising, though, was just how pretty she was.”

Her name is Pepsi (wonderfully portrayed by Serbian actress Vesna Stanojevic), and she is used to being called “bubbly.” Perhaps it is her blood (Pepsi’s father was American communist who, in a moment of nostalgia, named his daughter after the soft drink he could no longer enjoy in his wife’s homeland of Czechoslovakia). The smart if malapropism prone young woman, who serves as the crew’s interpreter, is proud of her country’s relative freedom, but eager to leave with the Americans as those freedoms are being crushed.

Vaughn is an excellent narrator, as his father Walter had been, back in the mid-1940s, when he narrated wartime propaganda plays like “Assignment USA” for the series Words at War, aside from appearing on thriller programs like Murder at Midnight and Gangbusters.

Unlike his father, Vaughn was busy exposing propaganda, rather than delivering it. During the time of the filming, he was at work on his doctoral dissertation, which was later published as Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. As you will hear, it very nearly got lost as a peaceful spring gave way to a bloody summer.

His is not the voice of a 35-year-old, to be sure; but Vaughn draws you into his story all the same as he recreates his experience shooting in Czechoslovakia . . . until the shooting began in the streets. In August 1968, a short period of reformed communism under Alexander Dubček, known as the Prague Spring, came to an end as Soviet tanks rolled into the city. Not that Vaughn was ready to say U.N.C.L.E. and get stranded in a country hostile to the west in general and a film crew in particular, engaged as it was in firing explosives and blowing up things to restage a war for maximum box office impact.