Category: Radio

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Old-time Radio Primer: I Stands for Imagine

This is one of those lazybones, slow coach, watch-your-toe-nails-grow afternoons. A moment of ease and drowsy repose, a moment so slight as to be of no matter, so carefree as to be of no consequence. A now to outweigh any later, to balance any yesterdays on a scale of time perfectly still. It is an instant fit for nothing—which is just what I intend to do. Am I doing nothing? Are not my senses responsive to the rays of the sun, my skin receptive to the cooling breeze, and my ears alive to the slightest of sounds—sounds so soothing as to render highly unlikely the chance of this missive being shared before evening?

I might not get anything done at present; but, as hard as it has been for me to put to sleep the guilt a Calvinism cut down to a strict work ethics and a suspicion of non-manual labor taught me to suffer, doing naught and doing not as some think one ought is a naughtiness that can produce a host of something—a host ready to accommodate a multitude of guests in the open inn of my imagination.

“Imagine”! It’s another word for my old-time radio primer (begun here)—and certainly one made for the airwaves, the medium that minds beyond matter. What does it mean, to imagine? According to Aristotle, it is the mental reproduction of sensory impressions. Does it follow that the imagined is inferior to the real, a mere copy of an original? Not a fruitful train of thought, perhaps, this levelling of mental streams with the concrete of matter-of-factness. Besides, you won’t get far with the concept of originality in , which borrowed so freely that I might as well have let “I” stand for “influence.”

The notion that imagination is reproduction has caused artists of centuries past to prefer the word “fancy” as denoting invention, rather than imitation. Listening to the radio, however, imagination seems the more appropriate term, as much as 1930s theorist Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) insisted on freeing sound from the business of substituting for the other senses not engaged during the act of lending an ear.

Listeners of radio plays do not so much invent worlds as image them forth with the sonic inventory ordered by the writer and supplied by the producer. The furnished rooms, unlike those shown in pictures, on screens large and small, may differ greatly, according to the vocabulary, experience, and preferences of the audience.

Of course, associations can be more profound than the image of door being produced by oil-starved hinges. That sound may also produce thoughts of approaching danger, of impending entrapment, of what’s behind and what might lie ahead.

On this day, 1 July, in 1954, for instance, Escape invited listeners to conceive of a “Dark Wall” and a closed door behind which was concealed a “beautiful woman whom you must find before she meets her death.” The rooms, after all, are not just set up to be furnished in accordance with a more or less clearly defined blueprint, to be inhabited by a set of characters. Within these dark walls, there also flourished doubts and wonderment, sorrow and fear.

To get behind that dark wall and sneak through the door takes about as much effort as closing ones eyelids, which makes listening to a play for radio the ideal activity for an idle moment like this—as long as the mind’s eye is ready to adjust to the luminescence of the imagined. Pardon me, while I wander off . . .

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On This Day in 1932: The Home Folks Are Moving In

Well, sir, it’s a few minutes or so past six o’clock in the evening as our scene opens now, and here in the garden of the small house halfway up in the Welsh hills we discover Dr. Harry Heuser setting the table for a barbecue dinner. Sorting the flatware, he still keeps an eye on Montague, his Jack Russell terrier. Meanwhile, the side dishes are being prepared in the kitchen and the telephone is ringing. Listen.

That is how my evening dinner preparations might have sounded if they had been fictionalized by Paul Rhymer, creator of radio’s Vic and Sade, a series of sketches (previously mentioned here) that had its debut on this day, 29 June, in 1932. Some sixty years before Seinfeld renovated the television sitcom, Rhymer constructed a fictive world whose four main characters could truly go on about nothing like nobody else—without as much as a situation. Like this, for instance:

UNCLE FLETCHER. [. . .] Don’t s’pose you ever knew Arnie Gupples, Vic? 

VIC. Name’s not familiar. 

UNCLE FLETCHER. Sadie? 

SADE. Uh-uh. 

UNCLE FLETCHER. Arnie Gupples worked in a shoe store there in Belvidere years ago. I’ve bought shoes off’n Arnie. Far as that goes, I could name you off a dozen parties that bought shoes off’n Arnie. Hey, Sadie, your cousin Albert Feeber bought shoes off’n Arnie Gupples. 

SADE. Really? 

UNCLE FLETCHER. (Stoutly) Your cousin Albert Feeber bought shoes off’n Arnie Gupples. 

SADE. Um.

Don’t expect the other shoe to drop any time soon. This is as much a rumination about birthday presents as it is an occasion for one of Uncle Fletcher’s stories, yarns that became tangled as soon as he set out to spin them. For all their lazy folksiness, Rhymer’s wireless tappings of the small house have been likened to the Theater of the Absurd. In the estimation of noted storyteller Ray Bradbury, these “conversations” are “more brilliant in their pointlessness, circling around nothing, than anything written since by Pinter or Beckett.” Radio raconteur Jean Shepherd followed up this assessment by calling Rhymer’s series an “authentic picture of American life” while arguing them to be “far closer to Ionesco in spirit than [. . .] to Thornton Wilder.”

That Rhymer inspires such name dropping is due in part to his radiogenic use of the unseen and non-speaking character—the “phantom” of Mrs. Harris. In Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, Mrs. Gamp appeared to be in “constant communication” with a woman whose existence remained a “fearful mystery” and stirred “conflicting rumours,” since none had “ever seen her.”

Giving voices to only four of his creations, Rhymer managed to introduce hundreds of such talked-about “phantoms” into the small house—an imaginary dwelling fit for anyone dwelling on and dwelling in imaginings. Its architecture never changed, despite undergoing countless extensions. Like our memories, it became cluttered and crowded, familiar and bewildering, age-worn yet ever new. Here, conjured up again for our amusement, is the aforementioned Arnie Gupples.

UNCLE FLETCHER. Arnie Gupples give Gwendolyn Yowtch this fancy shoe scraper for her birthday. They were engaged to be married at the time. Well, sir, first shot outa the box Gwendolyn went to scrape some mud off her shoes with that shoe scraper, twisted her ankle, had to have the doctor, got mad, an’ give Arnie the mitten. Two months afterwards she married Art Hungle an’ moved to North Dakota. Arnie felt so bad he quit is job at the shoe store. I heard afterwards he finally married a rich woman that made him learn to play on the cornet. 

VIC, SADE, and RUSH. Uh. 

UNCLE FLETCHER (thoughtfully) Way the world goes, I guess. 

VIC, SADE, and RUSH. Um.

Which concludes another missive from the small house halfway up in the Welsh hills.

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Amelia Earhart Is Late

I could tell things wouldn’t go my way today. The evidence was right there on the carpet, and next to it, with a wet cloth, was I, trying to ameliorate the situation. Jack Russell terrier Montague, who has been our companion for a week now, has finally made his mark. I guess I should be thankful that it was only exhibit number one, not number two. Then was the computer giving me grief by making it impossible for me to access my own homepage. Now, I am no fastidious Phileas Fogg; but such vagaries are the antithesis of an orderly, well-structured existence.

In old-time radio, there was little tolerance for anything amounting to chaos, be it disorder or nothingness. The broadcast schedule was tight, and any deviance from it meant to alienate both the listening public and the corporate sponsors who footed the bills. On this day, 28 June, in 1937, millions of Americans expected to meet on the air the leading lady in it. The famed aviatrix (pictured above, right, next to screen stars Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis) was scheduled to appear on the Lux Radio Theatre; not as an actress in a play, but as an added attraction, a latter-day Phileas Fogg whose life in flight was the very stuff of melodrama.

Announcer Melville Ruick was forced to offer tuners-in the following apology: “We had hoped at this time to bring you Ms. Amelia Earhart. However, she has not yet completed her sensational around-the-world flight; so, will be heard instead next Monday evening from the Lux Radio Theatre, will she have arrived by that time.”

Ms. Earhart, who was on her way to New Guinea, would not appear in the following broadcast. In fact, a few days after her delay was announced, she would disappear altogether when her plane was lost somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, more than 6000 miles from her destination. During the subsequent Lux broadcast, the last of the season, host Cecil B. DeMille read the following statement:

Somewhere in a distant corner of the South Pacific is Ms. Amelia Earhart, who had planned at this moment to be on the stage of the Lux Radio Theatre. I know everyone hearing me now joins in our hope that the rescuers of Ms. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, will reach them swiftly and find them safe. I’ve just spoken with George Palmer Putnam, husband of Ms. Earhart at Oakland. Considerably more encouraged than he was yesterday, Mr. Putnam says that after a careful check of all reports, he believes the fliers are on land believes. He adds that they have adequate supplies, which will last Ms. Earhart and Captain Noonan until the arrival of rescue ships or planes.

You might say that Ms. Earhart was done in by radio; radio navigation, that is, which let her down in the clouds. To find her turned out to be the most costly mission yet undertaken by the US government. It was an effort to no avail. Her body vanished into the thin air that had failed to carry her, the air that did not transport her into millions of homes as publicized. The rest, speculation about her reappearance or her being killed by the Japanese, is legend. Within days after her final scheduled appearance on the radio, such speculations would be all over the front pages of the world’s newspapers.

The Front Page—that was the name of the play heard on the Lux Radio Theatre on the night she was originally slated to speak. At hand to lend realism to the role of unscrupulous newshound Hildy Johnson was one of America’s most celebrated and controversial news columnists, Walter Winchell. He was meant to have met his match not only in Hildy but in the living news story invited to relate her own tale. While he performed admirably in the Hecht/MacArthur comedy-drama staple (previously discussed here), the real scoop was beyond his reach.

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Somebody, Please, Stop the Music!; or, There’s a Fly in My Diegesis

Well, I am feeling rather languid. I rarely take naps in the afternoon—but today I’m as supine as Montague, our terrier, who arose this morning with a pronounced limp. A limp, that is, pronouncing his exhaustion. Sunday’s outing on Cardigan Bay has taken its belated toll. Monty has been with us for less than a week now and I am not sure just how much exercise he can handle (or would that be pawdle?). Apparently, rock climbing and sea diving are new disciplines for the less than limber chap. Perhaps, I should not grumble at his temporary torpor. It has been a while since last I worked on my little play. My play for radio, I mean.

Watching the video clips of Montague frolicking on those rocks (clips I am editing for a potential webjournal of Missives from Montague) made me ask a question I had not considered before: the question of music. Pardon my synesthesia, but some of those images sounded as if they had been scored by Bernard Herrmann, the radio composer who went on to make it big in pictures. There was an abandon in the seascape, a pathos in the scene of small dog staring into the foamy waters from the doubtful perch of a slippery rock as a decidedly more daring dog plunged into the surf to leap for a small rubber ball as if his life depended upon it. From Montague’s point of view (or from my perspective imposed upon his), it was exhilaration tempered with anguish, a longing and lingering in a tempest of impulses.

No doubt, I will hear these pictures differently if I look at them again; perhaps they will be altogether soundless. Right now, this muteness would spell indifference. If I don’t hear anything while looking at them I fear that I might have lost the sense of replaying a personal memory, however excessive my indulging in sentiment may seem at presence. Is music theatrical—or, as the name implies, melo-dramatic—while natural sound and stillness are matter of fact? Are silent images any more objective than musically underscored ones? Am I not being manipulated by the picture, an image that seems to supply its own score?

I have been wondering about the soundscape of my play. Supposedly, there is something called extradiegetic sound. That is, music superimposed on a diegesis, the story as experienced by its characters. Now, if my play included a scene in which the old lady (one of the two main characters) played a musical instrument, that strain would be considered diegetic. Everything else—music not heard by the characters, but by the audience only—is understood to be beyond their senses. Sounds clear. But might not the distinction be rather too neat and exclusive?

Now, the old lady won’t be playing any instrument; she might know how to play the organ—and she would most certainly enjoy the harp. Old enough, she might even remember the Merry Macs (pictured above), tune trillers featured on Fred Allen’s radio program. Right now—that is, for the duration of the play as soundstaged—she is too busy playing with that young man, the stranger she has lured into her dark house or, rather, the darkness of her mind. How about the music playing in that mind, unsound but not necessarily unsounded? Might she be scoring the melodrama in which she has cast that strange man? Might the young man, gradually turning suspicious, begin to hear John Carpenter’s theme from Halloween (or some such Psycho score with which he is familiar), just as I mentally soundtracked my pictures of Montague?

Should I play around with such potentialities? Or should I tell myself to stop the music, despite the fact that its effective use has enriched scores of radiogenic performances, including the “glitter” of harps and strings heard on Norman Corwin’s “Odyssey of Runyon Jones”—a fantasy in which a harp, playing a harpy, “holds a conversation” with a boy in search of his late dog?

“Stop the Music”? That, of course, was the name of a popular quiz program often being blamed, and not unjustly, for the slow but certain death of radio playfulness. “Radio is the Marshall Plan with music,” quipped the aforementioned Allen, who, on this day, 27 June, in 1948, tried to stand up against the giveaway shows that prompted millions of his listeners to twist the dial in hopes of getting rewarded for waiting by the telephone: “The slogan of the quiz program is, ‘If you can’t entertain people, give them something.'”

To Allen, and anyone with a keen, uncommon sense for the aural medium, this was a dead giveaway that radio artistry was being slaughtered for commerce, that those in charge of broadcasting were ready to renounce the sounds of the imagination for the common sense of the “ka-ching.”

Considering today’s economy of radio dramatics, which advises against what is conveniently dismissed as old-fashioned or corny in storytelling, I will rely on the music playing in the mind’s ear of the audience. Perhaps, characters and setting will succeed in suggesting the soundtrack I had in mind—theirs and mine.

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On This Day in 1949: At Quip’s End, Wireless Wit Calls It Quits

Well, I’ll probably laugh about it—eventually. Not a day in my life passes without mishaps, some major, some trivial, all vexing. Sure, I could blame it now on Montague, our new canine companion. After all, dogs are expected to be inept, to be indifferent to our technological comforts and headaches; but a few remaining bristles on that scouring brush called conscience go against the grain of my indolence and continue to tickle until I make a clean breast of it. The “it,” this time around, is a cordless phone plunged into the watery grave of a bathtub. The rest, as they say (in Hamlet) is silence.

I won’t be silent about the quietus of one of the great American radio comedians whose program left the air on this day, 26 June, in 1949. The comedian in question is Fred Allen, a mediocre juggler who discovered that playing with words attracted a larger audience. That is, until the quiz and giveaway craze of the late 1940s revealed the greed and idiocy of a public that was eager to leave radio behind for the promises of a few bucks, some gifts, and a little flickering picture in a box of tubes and wires.

Fred Allen was a satirist. Whereas Jack Benny relied on situational humor, Allen relished in timely wit. Benny got people to laugh by making a fool of himself on our behalf. His age, his musical shortcomings, his vanity and tightfistedness—they were as hilarious as they were endearing. Rival Allen, on the other hand, made fun of all and sundry. He was the court jester in the living room, sending up what got listeners down: New Deal bureaucracy, wartime rationing, postwar housing shortage—anything fit for banter in Allen’s Alley.

That Alley was Allen’s finest piece of airwaves architecture. It was just the airway to vent anger and open up debate. How unfortunate that, in his final months on the air, Allen stooped to driving around that lane—a broader and less angular Alley called Main Street—in a Ford vehicle, in keeping with the demands of his new sponsor and the greed rampant after years of sacrifice. It wasn’t television that ended Allen’s career, even though, as critics insisted, he had no face for it. That he had no voice for radio did not prevent him from excelling in that medium. It was commerce, plain and simple.

The sponsors kept giving him a tough time, demanding cuts or cutting him off. The giveaway programs cut him to the quick; he was smarting from the audience’s lack of loyalty. It was just a phase; but Allen, plagued by poor health, did not wait for it to end. On the final program, Portland Hoffa started things off “with a laugh” by telling a few intentionally corny jokes and supplying the laughter herself. “If I can keep up this pace, I’ll end up with my own program,” Hoffa declared. “The way radio is going, that is quite possible,” her husband retorted. It was Allen having the last laugh at the age of canned cheer. It was the gallows humor of a man at wit’s end.

There were jokes, too, about Milton Berle, the epitome of television humor, comedy that translated sharp lines into slips and gaffes, allusions into grimaces, and travesty into cross dressing. True, television could deliver verbal jokes—but it had to justify the image, however grainy or ghostly at first. An old vaudevillian who learned to tell jokes when his juggling hands failed to do the trick, Allen was not a lad of Berlesque. He made some attempts, as Alan Havig noted, but none succeeded, just as his film career had flopped while Benny and Hope stayed afloat.

On his last program, Allen confronted wit and humor by pairing fellow satirist Henry Morgan with humor triumphant—none other than Benny, the fall guy who would be back in the fall. Having overspent by buying into the installment plan scheme, Morgan, “flatter than something that has been stepped on,” is forced to go to a pawnshop. There, he is greeted by Benny, the broker, proudly showing off his cool, green vault and counting whatever money was coming his way. As it turns out, Benny was also the shyster whose loan got Morgan still deeper into his financial fix.

It paid to adjust, this final sketch suggested; and pinning your hopes on a medium that was being abandoned, as Allen put it in Treadmill to Oblivion, like the “bones at a barbecue” was no picnic. It’s no good to be good at something if it’s something the many no longer cares about. It’s the death sentence under the law of supply and demand. I know. I’ve been staring at that noose for years.

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Old-time Radio Primer: H Stands for Hiatus

Well, how are you feeling today? According to one British study, 23 June is the happiest day of the year. Montague and I were perfectly content, playing and dozing in the garden and going for walks along the lane. Perhaps, the folks down in the nearby town of Aberystwyth were even happier last Tuesday, when they had several thousand pounds thrown at them on the street by a stranger who just wanted to “spread a little sunshine.”  Apparently, this local story had already travelled around the world (both my sister and my best friend in Germany had heard of it) before it came to my ears, which, no doubt, were too busy picking up the sounds of .

As grateful as I am for ready access and instant replay, recording technology can render our present-day listening quite unlike the experience of tuning in back then. It is difficult to get a sense of a weekly broadcasting schedule, of certain parts of the day being associated with particular programs, of the anticipation of their airing and the space such periodically scheduled events occupied in the minds of the audience in the interim.

To be sure, the middle of June would have been meant a rather prolonged wait for the next tune-in opportunity. It was during this month (rather than May, as on US television nowadays) that most of the crowd-pleasing drama series and comedy-variety shows went on their summer hiatus. Hiatus, from the Latin hiare, meaning “to yawn.”

As I suggested a while ago, the off-season in radio had initially been a response to technical difficulties of broadcasting during the long, bright days of the year. Now, a hiatus can be a precarious wait, which is why I’d never attempt one for broadcastellan. The question is: will the audience greet the news of your return with excitement, or a resounding yawn? That is, will your show go on even in its absence, circulating in the minds of the multitude? Not, perhaps, if your season finale is as disastrous as the second one of Desperate Housewives.

To be sure, broadcasters did not shut down the microphones and close the studios for the duration. Before resorting to reruns, which became customary in the 1950s, they scheduled replacement programs, some of which, like the Forecast series, were designed to test the potential of untried fare. It wasn’t all filler during those summer months. The Mercury Theater, for instance, was first heard in July 1938. Besides, a prestigious timeslot, one occupied by the Lux Radio Theatre demanded high-profile or at least adequate replacements. One of the most highly regarded programs to have its premiere during the summer was the thriller anthology Escape.

On this day, 23 June, in 1950, Escape offered the western melodrama “Sundown,” the “story of a boy who never owned anything . . . but a gun.” The cast was headed by Barton Yarborough, best remembered today for his portrayal of Texan daredevil Doc Long in Carlton E. Morse’s I Love a Mystery serial. Doc and his pals did not break for the summer; they kept audiences suspended, from one cliffhanger to the next. On the very day Yarborough was heard in “Sundown,” another Doc Long (played by Jim Boles) set out for a new adventure in “The Snake with the Diamond Eyes.”

There was time as well for summer schooling. On this day in 1957, Edward R. Murrow introduced the listeners of the CBS Radio Workshop to a word far more ominous than “hiatus,” precisely because it denotes a lingering presence:

A new word has been added to our ever increasing vocabulary.  It’s a small word, dressed in fear.  To pronounce, not very difficult.  To envision, staggering.  This scientific word may well become the most important in all languages and to all peoples. It is pronounced “fallout.” “Fallout.”  Rather a simple word to describe so much.  “Fallout.”  Radiation withheld by quantities of atmosphere that may eventually descend to pillage, burn, kill not only you and me, but the scores of generations unborn.  Quite a word, “fallout.”

Countering the politics of terror, Murrow suggested that this lexical novelty could also denote the harvest of knowledge, as “words, thoughts, ideas,” withheld in an “atmosphere of ignorance,” eventually descend on future generations. Perhaps, this intellectual fallout is rather too gradual and the radiation too slight. With atomic energy once again on the political agenda in Britain, and threats of nuclear warfare not quite a thing of the past, little seems to have been learned from past horrors.

I wish political leaders could be forced to go on hiatus to make room for summer replacements—especially since some of them seem as perverse as that ill-treated teenager in Escape, seeking retribution beyond reason in an atmosphere of fear and its inevitable fallout. To the restless mind, “hiatus” can mean “pause for thought.”

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The Anarchy of Silence: Being Absent/Absent Being

Well, what does it suggest? My silence, I mean. Is it a sign of indifference or an exercise in difference? Does it bespeak failure or betoken activity elsewhere? Does it spell death, metaphoric or otherwise? Mind you, I have merely extended my customary weekend retreat from the blogosphere for a single day; and, such is the nature or curse of keeping a public journal—of being nobody to anyone—it may have gone virtually unnoticed. My absence, after all, is no more eloquent than your silence. It requires your presence to come into being.

The house is quiet once more. It resounds with absence. After a weekend of entertaining and sight-seeing, of silent film (with our house guest, Neil Brand, accompanying Buster Keaton’s Cops and The General at the local university’s Arts Center) and talks about radio drama in the still of a summer garden halfway up in the Welsh hills, I alone remained behind.

It is quiet, but never quite silent. There is the storm, rain lashing against the pane of the window, winds strong enough to make the walls of my room shiver. There were the shouts of “goal” on the television earlier today, as even I could not keep myself from having a peek at the World Cup goings-on. There were a few phone calls. There was a moment of reflection on the career of director Vincent The Damned Don’t Cry Sherman, who died last Sunday at the age of 99. And then there was my own voice, reading aloud the lines I have been writing. Yes, I have been writing.

As announced, I have begun anew to write a play. I decided upon a ghost story, a story of absence and presence—the very presence of absence. After looking at various scraps, jotted down ideas for radio plays, I kept in mind what I hinted at in my recent remarks about sound effects. I have used a problem in sound as the starting point for aural play. I won’t relate here and now just what the play is about, lest it should not come about after all if thus prematurely released. It will have to suffice that it features a disembodied voice, imagined sounds, and an improbable architecture. Echoes of that tower I mentioned previously.

In all this, the play is hardly experimental. It is a rather plain story; but one that insist on being told on the air, rather than any other medium. It aims at conveying a mood, at casting suspicion on the speakers, a shadow of doubt cast by the sounds and silence they make. Yes, they “make silence.” Too often we think of silence as being nothing, even though we insist on it being golden by virtue of its rarity. It is glorified as much as it is dreaded. It is a malevolent deity that renders us speechless by holding its tongue.

Now, in old-time radio, silence was anathema. It was not deemed golden enough to fill time on the air, time set aside to fill the coffers of the sponsors. It was dreaded, all right; but tunes and talk and sound effects trickery were let loose upon it to assure its sound defeat.

As Charles Addams suggests in the above visualization of the shrieks, shots, and thuds—the sound and the fury—of 1940s radio thrillers, silence was rarely called upon to make that difference, to speak of promises or signal impending doom. It was talked to death and yet survived in my favorite chapter of Carlton E. Morse’s “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” a noisy serial thriller that confronted a soldier of fortune with a silent and invisible adversary (which I discussed here at length)). If a speaker confronts an uncertain someone without getting a response, does the silence mean the certain absence of the addressee? Or is it a mark of the listener’s defiance? The anarchy of the unseen unheard!

I am hoping to create such uncertainties in my play—a mystery that depends to some degree on the listener’s picking up of a prominently dangled clew. If it goes unnoticed, the revelation might yield a moment of surprise; if it is perceived by the audience before the character in the play catches on, there may come into being a prolonged thrill of suspense. Radio is the very medium for such turns of the screw.

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Old-time Radio Primer: G Stands for Gravel Box and Glass Crasher

Well, where to begin? Picture this, if you will. You decided to write a play that will never be seen; a play that will be imagined rather than staged; a play that will be taken in as sound alone. In short, something—some immaterial thing—that used to be called radio drama. Audio drama will suffice as a name for it, even though other, more grandiose terms have been suggested. Having studied the history of such performances for years, I might as well try my hands, my ears, and my mind at them. The question remains; where to begin?

This is what I am pondering as I sit here in the relative still of our garden, where life plays itself out in a display of colors, a cool breeze and the rays of the sun stroking my bare skin, and (to borrow from Tennyson) the air stirring to the “murmur of innumerable bees.” Now, audio plays can conjure any number of concrete images and intimate sensations; they may trigger memories of feelings—or desires for them—and thus bring them about. Audio drama. It is certainly not all sound.

Yet sound is the non-matter with which to do the conjuring. And to me, audio play has to be about sound and of sound, rather than a verbal exchange place, sequences of lines uttered and interrupted or augmented by non-verbal noise and moments of silence. I don’t hold with those critics who think of radio drama primarily as an oral medium. It is, more inclusively, aural.

Too often sounds have been relegated to the business of supporting a drama unfolding as dialogue or narration—of setting scenes, creating backdrops, or, at best, enhancing its atmosphere. The sounds of opening or closing doors, for instance, create the space in which characters are heard to move, as do those steps on rocks-strewn earth produced by sound(wo)man playing in the “gravel box.”

A gravel box, you see, is a container filled with pebbles, a box which used to simulate the ground on which the dramatis personae of the air were heard to tread. Are bodies immaterial without such sandbox sounds? Or does it suffice, after all, to rely on the voice box alone.

Then there are in radio dramatics those stirring noises of shots and sirens, crashing waves or smashed windows. There is the glass crasher, for example, which, as the name suggests, is a device used for creating the sound of breaking glass. G, in this entry in my old-time radio primer, does not stand for gadget or gimmick.

Sounds have a life beyond live support, beyond adding color or concrete markers of space, which merely enhance what is often already expressed in words: “Don’t you just love the ocean?” (biz: sound of waves); “Isn’t it romantic out here in under the stars?” (cue the crickets); “What are you pointing that gun at me for, you thug?” (insert shots here).

To appropriate another line of poetry (from Pope, this time), must sound seem an “echo to the sense”? Must it make sense? Must it be echoing something else? Does it always suggest a body, some certain corporeal entity responsible for such noise? Must sound be a relationship, a communicating passageway between one hearing and one sounding, traceable to an originating source which gives it meaning, as footsteps getting louder might mean “danger” if tracked down to the body of an approaching adversary or “the promise of pleasure” if traced to the form of a lover?

In other word, is sound an echo of the reverberating body producing it? The question, to be sure, is older than the wireless; it is as ancient as the atmosphere and the dark of night begetting such thoughts. Consider this exchange from Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818), which investigates the relationship between (re)sonance and reception, between sounding and sounding out:

“Nonsense, sir,” interrupted Mr. Glowry. “That is not at all like the sound I heard.” 

“But, sir,” said Scythrop, “a key-hole may be so constructed as to act like an acoustic tube, and an acoustic tube, sir, will modify sound in a very remarkable manner. Consider the construction of the ear, and the nature and causes of sound. The external part of the ear is a cartilaginous funnel.” 

“It wo’n’t do, Scythrop. There is a girl concealed in this tower, and find her I will.”

Should I lead the ear to that concealed someone? Or will my play be all architecture, tower and bells, without a body in sight? We shall hear . . .

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More Milestone Reflections; or, Quo Vadis, broadcastellan?

Well, I have been away taking pictures. Taking pictures away, to be precise. It was an entirely manual engagement with the arts, involving nothing more than hauling some large canvasses—paintings by the late British artist David Tinker—for an upcoming exhibition. The things we do for a meal and a daytrip to a place where sheep are outnumbered by people (in this case, Cardiff). It so happens that the artist’s widow is Tracy Spottiswoode, who writes for television and radio. She is currently working on a radio play for the BBC, based on a story related to her by her father. It is an incident in the life of Hollywood actor Robert Vaughn, who found himself caught up in the turmoil of the Prague Spring while filming on location in Czechoslovakia, anno 1968. Considering that another successful radio writer, silent film music composer Neil Brand (last seen on UK television in Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns series, which concludes today with a portrait of Harold Lloyd) is coming to visit this weekend, I decided to give writing for the medium another try and return to my own audiodramatic tinkerings (first and last hinted at here).

I have written much about radio, but never for it. And since this 200th entry into my journal marks another milestone (the last one having been contemplated here) it is a convenient moment to reflect on my writings, their uses and purposes. “Quo Vadis” is meant here as a way of mapping out a way, of asking myself what to do next with and within this forum, another opportunity of looking back, listening ahead, and saying thanks to all those who have been reading and commenting over the past five months. Writing in such a marginalized field—and writing in such a marginalizing style about it—can be a rather lonely pursuit.

Perhaps I am craving a larger audience than I am enjoying here; but writing an audio play (for the first time since high school) is merely another creative response to my ongoing engagement with radio. And, if the lacking response to Larry Gelbart’s recent radio satire “Abrogate” (as discussed here) is any indication, there may not be a large audience—or a large vocal one—for such writing either.

That said, there will be less of me, here, in the next few weeks, weeks that will involve gathering new impressions elsewhere, in London and New York City. As you may recall, when last I was in New York, I very nearly went out of my mind going in search of a wireless network to post my writings—not the kind of part in the theater of the mind I had in mine.

The recent acquisitions you will find on my bookshelf (including Arch Oboler’s Fourteen Radio Plays, Abbot’s Handbook of Broadcasting, and Wylie’s 1938/39 and 1939/40 Best Broadcasts, all pictured above) provide models and instructions for the wireless tyro. Today’s writers can learn a lot from the old practitioners, restraint as they were by commercial ties. Radio plays can be talky and tiresome, so intellectual as to become insipid. A healthy dose of melodrama and a helping of sound effects sure liven things up. At least, I hope they will in my efforts at soundstaging. I might exhibit some of my experiments in radio writing on my podcast site.

So, if you enjoy plays for the ear—or derive pleasure hearing about someone struggling to give prospective listeners an earful—you might find my forthcoming discussions about aural storytelling and sound effects of some interest. Please stay tuned . . .

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Leaving His Ears Behind, E. M. Forster Steps Inside a Distant Echo Chamber of the Marabar Caves

Well, I wonder whether they will get here tonight. The troupe of the Johannesburg Market Theatre, I mean. Two weeks ago, they were supposed to take me to The Island; instead, they seemed to have gotten stranded somewhere else. I am all set to go, notwithstanding a lingering headache, brought on by alcohol and technology. As sobering as the experience might have been, I succeeded at last in putting my third podcast online. It conjures up the voices of a number of silent screen actresses; among them Mary Pickford, whose Little Annie Rooney was flickering on our screen this weekend, along with a 1924 production of Peter Pan, featuring the aforementioned Anna May Wong as Tiger Lily.

Both of these films are adaptations; but, whether you are familiar with the original or not, they are engrossingly cinematic so as to draw you in rather than draw your attention to their second-handedness. To me, an adaptation succeeds if it manages to make me forget its lineage, at least upon first inspection. I prefer to take in first and take on thereafter, to give a re-production a chance to stand on its own without forcing it to stand up against a text from which it more or less freely borrows.

Now, so-called old-time radio drama depended even more heavily on borrowed material than the movies. With schedules to be filled for weeks on end, there was great demand for stories, but a relatively short supply. Storytellers were, by and large, not paid enough to be original; given the governing principle of commercial sponsorship and the broadcasters’ insistence on groping for the largest audience possible, radio writers were discouraged from attempting anything new. In fact, they were even conservative in their approach to adaptation.

On this day, 12 June, in 1949, the NBC University Theater presented its version of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Intent on proving its literary fidelity, a little passage was cut right through this play. And out walked none other than E. M. Forster himself. The dramatization, as one critic remarked, bore so little resemblance to the novel as to have “missed the boat completely”; as such, it was as much in need of an endorsement as it was unworthy of it. Yet, the listener might feel tempted to conclude, if Forster did not mind lending his ear and commenting on the play, it surely could not be quite as “cumulatively degrading to all concerned—author, producer, and audience” as the captious critic made it out to be.

In fact, however, Forster did not comment on the adaptation at all; he did not even mention it. Instead, he gave a brief lecture on his novel and its significance—a lecture that was taped and inserted into a performance he had not himself auditioned. Remarking on the partition and independence of India and Pakistan, Forster expressed himself “thankful” that his novel was “out of date.” Listeners to the University Theater might not have noticed at all, considering that there was so little left of the debate with which Forster’s novel is concerned.

Entirely squandered in this uninspired adaptation are the aural potentialities of the Marabar Caves. Unlike film, radio drama is not obliged to impose concrete images on a writer’s vision. Like the novel, it allows its audience to co-create those images or to resist them in order to realize the metaphorical potentialities of language.

The caves are such a metaphor; they are an echo chamber for a clash of cultures, the site of cultural blindness where the false shelter of ignorance caves in on itself. Without resorting to much sound effects trickery, the radio adaptation could have suggested the horrors of Marabar—the reverberation of one’s own voice drowning out all others in a choric recital of an ode to blindness.