Category: Radio

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The Immaculate Misconception of George W. Bush, Ex-President

Well, this is a day to remember the fallen. Perhaps that includes those fallen from grace; and according to M*A*S*H creator Larry Gelbart, the fallen one to be recalled this Memorial Day is none other than George W. Bush, Ex-President. I am referring to Gelbart’s radio play Abrogate, which aired on BBC Radio 4 on Friday, 26 May. Memorial Day roughly coincides with Ascension, which the British insist on celebrating as “Spring Bank Holiday.” I rather resent this government-imposed erasure of traditions, as if the “holi” of this “holiday” were the culture of saving and spending, and the miracle to behold and recall were the power of Mammon.

The holiday-by-any-other-name broadcast of Gelbart’s play is well-timed, considering that the futuristic satire Abrogate not only serves as a memorial to the Bush and Cheney years—which it imagines to have given way to a Hillary Clinton administration—but also serves up a miracle, revealing, in an act of levi(tationali)ty, that Baby W. was the product of Barbara Bush’s immaculate conception, his rise to office being decreed from above. Ascension meets condescension in what is itself a high-spirited, irreverent, but less than immaculate confection.

Abrogate is conceived as a broadcast by the fictional AGN (the All Gates Network), “devoted to the endless scandals and excesses which White House after White House also seem so endlessly devoted to.” Carrying on the tradition of truth-finding lowered to the level of scandalmongering, AGN presents

highlights of the recent hearings held by the Special Senate Committee that was charged by the present administration with the investigation of the extent to which the former administration was engaged in a campaign of secrecy and deception, as well as a thorough disdain for the law, the result of which was tantamount to a virtual second American Revolution that threatened to undo the first, a nullification no less of over two hundred years of this nation’s civil and social progress, as well as the alarming arbitrary banishment of recognizable order or, as it has come to be known throughout and within the media, Abrogate.

Or, as the Committee Chair puts it “at the onslaught” of the hearing, to answer the “sixty- four trillion dollar question”: “Did the powers that then were, the previous Bush administration, pursue with both malice and perhaps some aforethought certain actions which served to violate the letters and spirit of the laws of this land in a way never here before thought possible? And do the sum of these reactionary actions equal a total that smacks of a conspiracy [. . .]?” In other words, “What did the President know, aside from what the Vice President told him he already did?”

From Senator Fulsome (played by Vincent Spano), for instance, you will learn about the Secretive Service, the Center for Shame and Public Apology, and Bush’s POOP (Photo-op Operations Program). “[I]t has become more and less common knowledge that anyone who was everyone was a spy in those days,” Fulsome declares, excusing the administration’s errors in judgment by arguing that “Terrible times create terrible thinking.” Among those called to the microphone during the hearing are Condoleezza Rice (played by Theresa Randle), Lynn Cheney (Joanne Baron), and Barbara Bush (Pat Carroll), whose motherly defense of her heavenly-fathered child provides the outrageous climax of Abrogate.

It all may have sounded rather more radiogenic as it turned out: a series of voices denouncing and defending the present-turned-former president and his actions, criminal or otherwise. As a radio production, Abrogate does not quite come off, however. It is too verbose, for one, squandering many of its inspired oneliners (while drowning out some less than subtle puns). My prose, for instance, barely suited to a blog, would have no chance on the air. On the air, lines need to be snappy, delivered slowly and forcefully enough in well-timed intervals to be absorbed in a single sitting.

Nor does Abrogate succeed in sounding verisimilitudinous, in coming across like a real newscast, an actual Senate committee hearing, which is the setting of this satire. What exactly is being sent up here, other than the heavens-bound Ms. Bush? Is Abrogate deriding the former President, his family and staff; the subsequent (and presumably Democrat White House) that indulges in this fault-finding mission; or the media, for leaping at every opportunity to undermine the authority of a much-maligned administration? And while it is true that the speakers implicated themselves in their ineptitude, the dizzy spin of Gelbart’s fictive broadcast seems to be taking too many turns, ridiculing the medium of which it avails itself and thereby negating the valid (op)positions to which it gives voice.

Such shortcomings notwithstanding, Abrogate is worth a listen, especially since attempts at contemporary radio drama, let alone timely politically relevant plays, are so rare these days. For inconsequential folly, you can always tune in to my podcast, a new feature of broadcastellan about which I will have more to say in the near future.

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Old-time Radio Primer: D Stands for Drama

Most of us can do without it. In our everyday lives, at least, where it strikes us as exasperating, discomfiting and generally inopportune. “Drama,” I mean, which follows “Crooner” in this, my Norman Corwin inspired “Radio Primer.” If encountered outside the theater and within the bounds we think of as our reality—a dichotomy well worth questioning—drama may be defined as any of those interludes during which other people insist on making a scene and drawing us into the action. We’d much rather leave those moments of emotional turmoil to the professionals, who get paid and applauded for enacting them.

There is plenty of drama going on elsewhere, I am pleased to report. After Wednesday night’s great evening of spectacle, taking in Gormenghast, I am looking forward now to Athol Fugard’s The Island, which is being staged at the same local venue next Tuesday. And only yesterday we got our hands on tickets to see Kevin Spacey at London’s Old Vic in A Moon for the Misbegotten by Eugene O’Neill (whose Ah, Wilderness! I discussed only a few days ago). Now, that Moon won’t rise until the fall. For more immediate drama, for private screenings and stages set under my direction, I’ve got the radio. So, what can those listening to old-time radio drama expect? Let me put it to you in the obligatory “Primer” rhyme:

Epics in a digest,
And jokes for the New Deal,
Thrills to fill the war chest,
And ample time for spiel. 

Interludes commercial,
And bowdlerized O’Neill,
And nothing controversial,
Since that makes sponsors reel. 

Broadway for the homebound,
And hoaxes sounding real,
And living rooms turned fairground—
That’s radio’s appeal.

This, at least, is why old-time radio appeals to me. Of course, radio drama is still being produced; and however marginalized in the US, it enjoys ongoing popularity in the UK and elsewhere. For those who can’t be bothered to plan ahead for a trip to the Moon, for those who want their future here and now, radio continues to offer cheap flights of fancy. At this moment—or whenever it is convenient for you to listen in—BBC Radio 4 presents M*A*S*H creator Larry Gelbart’s Abrogate, a radio play that imagines a post-Bush era in which Hillary Clinton takes over as US President and a Congressional committee is set up to investigate just what went wrong during the previous administration (a recording of which is available online for about a week).

Now, I don’t suppose anyone tuning in would confuse Abrogate with anything resembling reality, even though I have had my own War of the Worlds experience not too long ago, taking fiction for fact. As I was reminded last night, watching Barbara Stanwyck in Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (1931)—the story of a media-savvy evangelist avenging her father’s death by duping the public—radio was a medium to challenge these boundaries. It could make listeners believe by creating an alternate reality that, rather than being set aside for public display, seeped right into the ear canal and had the verisimilitude of daydreams and night terrors.

Having to leave our private sphere to see a performance, on stage or screen, assists in keeping drama separate from so-called real life, as does the opening and shutting of a book, which turns what we experience in fiction into a world apart. Beginning in the 1920s, the airwaves did away with the being away or setting apart; from the first live broadcast of a stage play (The Wolf, heard on 3 August 1922), the radio brought drama home; and throughout the 1930s and ’40s it did so daily, serially, and at times all too convincingly.

There were debates about the psychological effect of radio melodrama on women and children, the adult male apparently being deemed too levelheaded (or thick-headed, perhaps) to be thus influenced. Thrillers in particular—those “bloodcurdling broadcasts” that daily “gurgle[d] through the loudspeaker”—came under attack for threatening to “breed a race of neurotic impressionables” by virtue of radio’s “power to play on the ear with horror effects,” while so-called “washboard weepers”—or soap operas—had the youngsters’ elders in fits of pity and despair.

The creators of radio theater sure knew how to make a scene, the mind being a ready supplier of props and probabilities. Will such dramatics convince me tonight that Hillary Clinton got (or might get) into the White House? We shall hear . . .

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Gormenghast (Dis)played; or, How to Mount a Frame of Mind

The beleaguered sun appeared to have triumphed at last in a narrow victory over the long-reigning clouds, and I, a much deprived heliolater, ventured out with laptop and deckchair to luxuriate in the vernal cool of a brightly colored afternoon, absorbed in thoughts of . . . death, dread, and desolation. It was not the long shadows cast upon the weeds-corrupted lawn, nor the shrieking of the crows nesting in our chimney that evoked such gloomy visions; nor was it the realization that the skies were darkening once more as another curtain of mist was lowering itself upon the formerly glorious outdoors.

No, my mood was not brought on by any one thing I happened to be perceiving at that moment; it was something instead that I took away with me last night as the crowds poured out of the theater on the hill, sending them into the inky, rain-swept night with images of Gormenghast.

Appearing before me, on the stage of my mind, are scenes of last night’s production of Mervyn Peake’s Titus trilogy, a dark evocation of a world more forbidding, more rotten and miasmic than Hamlet’s Elsinore—a world of stifling traditions, soul-crushing dread, and futile ambitions. To say that John Constable’s adaptation of this world was a recreation in sound and images would be an injustice to this thoroughly engrossing spectacle—a theatrical event that struck me at times as a staging of Jacobean revenge tragedies by Cirque du Soleil.

Matthew Bourne, who whipped Edward Scissorhands into such a frothy confection of over-hyped ballet-hoo should take note; as should anyone endeavouring to bring a fantasy like Tolkien’s alive in the “wooden O” of the theater. Under the direction of David Glass, Gormenghast is conceived as an imaginatively choreographed piece of melodramatic shadowcasting, a labyrinthine dreamscape whose grotesque denizens scurry about like frustrated rodents.

As Quentin Crisp suggests in an essay on Peake as author and artist, visualizations often fail in the attempt to capture the imagined. When illustrating or showing, when portraying and rendering concrete the world an imaginative storyteller creates in words, “a certain ludicrous quality is always liable to creep in; the eye begins to vomit sooner than the ear—far sooner than the mind.”

So, the prospect of ghastly gormandizing, on seeing novelistic food for fancy being processed into rancid eye candy was not something I looked forward to without serious misgivings. I had not expected anything quite as bold as this inspired translation, which relied neither on the spoken word nor elaborate props to assist the audience in seeing the castle of Gormenghast rise not so much before their eyes as before their mind’s eye.

There was silent screen horror in the movement of Phillip Pellew (above, as Flay) and in the long corridors suggested by panels and shafts of light; in fact, the production seemed to owe more to silent movies than to western stage melodrama; this Grand Guignol was at times Kafkaesque, at others reminiscent of Brecht’s epic theater, as meek and inconsequential Steerpike (played by Adam Sunderland) attempts to lift himself from squalor to political prominence—a ruthless revolutionary in a stagnant, corroding society insisting on “no change.”

David Glass’s Gormenghast is too bleak to be called brilliant; but it certainly is a memorable achievement in translation, which is the realization that being faithful is not being literal, the radical art of doing away with “no change.”

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On This Day in 1944: Montgomery Clift Gets Lost in Radio’s “Wilderness”

Before heading out on this appropriately wild and gloomy evening to see a touring production of Gormenghast at our local theater, I am going to listen to one the lesser known drama programs of American old-time radio: Arthur Hopkins Presents (1944-45), which took its name from the noted Broadway producer-director who hosted the series. On this day, 24 May, in 1944, Mr. Hopkins presented an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s popular comedy Ah, Wilderness! starring Broadway legend Dudley Digges and featuring a young if experienced stage actor who would become one of the most sought-after actors of 1950s Hollywood—Montgomery Clift.

In the spring of 1944, Arthur Hopkins took to the airwaves in hopes of introducing to radio a “people’s theatre and a repertory theatre.” Hopkins held that radio offered a temporary “solution to the unavoidable extravagance of the commercial theater in shelving a play when the immediate audience has been served,” and to the “economic encumbrances” that made repertory “impractical” in a Broadway venue. By reprocessing recent stage successes, Hopkins sought to “create adult theatre audiences for them and eventually for Broadway.”

The series premiered promisingly that April with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, whose use of a narrator makes it one of the most radiogenic of stage dramas. Subsequent plays were not nearly as ideally suited to the airwaves; at least, they were not suited to the demands of the one-dimensional (that is, sound only) medium. Hopkins was vehemently opposed to making changes to the original scripts. He insisted that the “two pillars on which dramatic productions stand are identical in theater and radio. They are text and cast.”

Rejecting the addition of a narrator and keeping both music and sound effects to a minimum, Hopkins deemed the challenge of adaptation to be no more than a matter of sagacious cutting. As a result of such ill-advised fidelity, “Ah, Wilderness!” begins in medias res and ends in somewhat of a muddle. 

The mind receiving no assistance in setting the scene—help provided by a guiding narrator like the one installed in Arthur Arent’s Theater Guild version of the same play—what is left of O’Neill’s nostalgic recreation of small town Connecticut in the year 1906 is a Babel of voices, a sonic jungle that at times suggests a forest of microphones behind which performers, whose scripts you can hear rustling, rush to and fro in a frantic attempt to recite as much of the original text as possible within the allotted fifty-five minutes.

For all their shortcomings, such transcribed theatricals are living records of a tradition we can otherwise only glimpse at in a couple of still photographs. Digges (as Nat Miller) and Clift (as his young son Dick) turn in fine performances, Clift being most convincing in the scene at the notorious Pleasant Beach House, where he is easy prey for one of the “swift” dames who prefer cash over matrimony.

The young man, we readily believe, doesn’t understand what is going on; nor is he corrupted by it. His father is pleased to forgive a son who has been naïve rather than wayward. “I don’t believe in kissing between fathers and sons after a certain age,” Nat remarks, having just received such a token of filial love; “seems mushy and silly—but that meant something.” To Nat, it meant that his son was “safe—from himself.” In Cliff’s case, it might have meant something else altogether.

Surprisingly, the man responsible for this Arthur Hopkins adaptation was none other than Wyllis Cooper (pictured above), whose thriller programs were the finest and most literary ever to be soundstaged for American radio. Now, there was a man who’d done well bringing a Gothic nightmare like Gormenghast to the public’s ear. I wonder how the visualization of Mervyn Peake’s 1950 novel will succeed tonight. But more about that tomorrow . . .

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On This Day in 1944: A Travelogue Introduces Americans to Tel Aviv

Well, it seems that the power lines are beginning to rot. The electric lights went out just after the sun had set, a sun, mind you, that had been hidden for days behind a wind-blown, tattered curtain of clouds. I was rather relieved to find my none-too-successful experimentations in podcasting cut short by this momentary outage, lit a large candle, and began to read a few pages of Mervyn Peake’s epic Gormenghast. In doing so, I was readying myself for a dramatization of this dreadful story—a study in dread—that I am going to attend tomorrow evening.

My reading aloud soon sent my audience (of one) to sleep, just as I have often dozed off listening to recordings of old-time radio programs—a sonically induced somnolence largely responsible for the delay in the completion of my doctoral study. In the image empire of the west, closing one’s eyes is generally associated with rest, rather than heightened attention.

Most of us are too visually trained, weaned on and preoccupied by the ocular, to become fully audile—that is, capable of learning through hearing. It was a challenge that radio producers had to meet when education—or indoctrination—by radio became an essential aspect of mobilizing the masses during the Second World War.

There are a number of radiodramatic techniques that assist listeners in taking in whatever needs to be conveyed; but rather than sharing information—factual specifics or intricate data—radio drama was most successful at creating impressions, stirring sensations, and instilling beliefs. One such belief, slow to take root, was that Americans were not fighting by themselves or for themselves alone, that it was not simply a war against an identifiable enemy, but a struggle for democratic ideals and their realization elsewhere.

In 1943, journalist, poet, and radio dramatist Norman Corwin was asked to create a series that would tell Americans at the home front something about their nation’s gobal allies. Passport for Adams was a sonic travelogue relating the impressions of a small-town newspaper editor assigned to report on the impact of the war on the world’s civilian population; weekly broadcasts transported listeners to Moscow and Marrakesh, to Monrovia and Belem.

As Corwin explains it in his notes on the play “Tel Aviv”—a second production of which was soundstaged by Columbia Presents Corwin on this day, 23 May, in 1944—the “idea was to pull for unity and victory.” The “omission of ugly details was quite beside the point. To have dwelt upon them would have been to play exactly the same tune as Goebbels, who was constantly reminding the world that the British, in their time, were dreadful imperialists.”

To counter the ignorance of his fellow citizens, Corwin created a comic sidekick more naïve than they—a culturally insensitive if good-natured news photographer who greets with wisecracks his colleague’s advice that he prepare for his assignment by “striking up an acquaintance” with Hebrew: “I know plennya Hebrew: aleph, baze, vaze, gimbel, dullard, kibitz, schlemiel, guniff, kosher, gefilte fish, Yehudi Menuhin. . . .”

Poet-journalist Corwin, who, pressed for time, gleaned most of his facts about life in Tel Aviv from a single interview with a former correspondent in Palestine—approached his subject linguistically by making a foreign tongue sound friendly and familiar—a language expressing the ideals known to and embraced by all who fought fascism.

During their tour of the city, Adams and his colleague gather information like pieces of vocabulary, from the shouts of a newsboy (“Davar Iton Erev”) to street signs such as “Rechow Umot Hameuchadot” (Street of the United Nations). Along the way, the ignorant photographer—a man dealing in images rather than words—is set right about the Hora, which he thought of as some “kind of a Jewish jitterbug dance,” while Adams talks to the people of Tel Aviv, among them a construction worker who, once a lawyer in Germany, is proud of having helped laying the bricks of the “Bet-Haam” (House of the People).

The broadcast ends with the word “shalom,” which Adams hopes will gain in a “future not too distant” a “new meaning and a more lasting one than we have ever known.” While “shalom”—or “peace”—is a dream that has yet to be translated into a global reality, radio, as a disseminator of sentiments, kept alive an ideal that kept home front Americans from abandoning the war as a means of achieving it.

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Old-time Radio Primer: C Stands for Crooner

Well, I am mad about music this weekend, or something remotely resembling it. After fifteen years of going without while living in the Eurotrash-resisting US, I finally got another hit of it last spring. The Eurovision Song Contest, I mean, the spectacle (or cultural war) in whose battles have fought the likes of Celine Dion, Olivia Newton-John, Abba, Lulu, Cliff Richards, Katrina and the Waves, and whoever it was first to belt out “Volare.” Thursday night’s semi-finals in Athens were predictably vulgar—short on fabric and long on fanfare, feuds and fanaticism.

Gone are the days in which a song could be sold without a dance, in which lyrics could catch the ear while the eye got a rest, on in which a chart-topper could have legs without the exposure of gams (assets that rarely hurt but failed Kate Ryan in her attempt to step up for Belgium).

So, my Norman Corwin-inspired Old-time Radio Primer, a lexical expedition of yesterday’s airwaves that got underway with definitions of “audience” and “broadcastellan“ will pay tribute today to a craze that is as closely associated with radio as the set itself; to the vocal chords that, if Marion Davies’s experience in Going Hollywood is to be believed, ensnared a generation, made youngsters rebel and schoolmarm’s swoon; in short, the crooners and their tunes.

The crooners seized the advantage of the sonic close-up, the proximity to the microphone that can lend force to a whisper, a subtlety and intimacy hard to achieve in a crowded auditorium. They performed for an unprecedented multitude, but, coming home into parlor or boudoir, could always create the illusion of reaching everyone separately, singly, and, if imagined so by the listener, secretly as well.

Having no voice to match the tones of Rudy Vallée or Bing Crosby—whose “Temptation” still sends me—I will salute the much-mocked crooner with some slight but only slightly irreverent verse I penned for the occasion:

Well-oiled enough to wrestle
And steady enough to grind
It finds a niche to nestle
In the ever so obstinate mind.

Well-groomed enough for cocktails
And flashy enough to blind
It sticks when other crock fails
In the ever so obstinate mind. 

Well-heeled enough to dally
Obliging enough to bind:
The crooner and his sally
On the ever so obstinate mind. 

The crooner and his bally-
hoo,
of the
ever so obstinate
no-chance-you-will-forget
cure’s-not-discovered-yet
match-that-your-mind-has met
(more? how about a bet?) kind.

With the notable exception of Mr. Vallée, crooners quickly came to resent the term, insisting, like Crosby, to be billed or labeled otherwise (a simple “baritone” would do). After all, as much as they were adored by the radio listeners of the 1930s, who fantasized about American idols like Vallée, their “Vagabond Lover,” the crooners were widely dismissed or ridiculed by the press, whose writers might have felt threatened by these newly emerging voices, vocal Valentinos whose low, lavender tones seemed to have so much more erotic sway than can be generated by the most aggressive and boisterous Winchellean journalese.

To the chauvinists of the tabloids, radio had opened a Pandora’s voice box, and what poured out into the air to impregnate the imagination of millions was a provokingly and intimidatingly potent seed, strongly suggesting that such sounds could be mightier than the pen.

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What Those Who Remembered Forgot: Cy Feuer (1911-2006) on the Air

Well, the marquee lights of New York City’s playhouses will be dimmed tonight at 8 PM (EST) in commemoration of Tony Award-winning theatrical producer and composer Cy Feuer, who passed away this week at the age of 95. Active for well over half a century on Broadway and in Hollywood, Feuer produced shows like Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, wrote original scores for a great number of popular movies (including the much loved Adventures of Captain Marvel [1941], and served as musical director for numerous other motion picture projects.

I first heard the name Cy Feuer, who published his memoir in 2003, while listening to recordings of a late-1940s series of radio thrillers titled Escape. So, as I have done before in tributes to Shelley Winters and Don Knotts, I will provide a footnote to the obituaries you might find elsewhere.

Escape presented adaptations of adventure yarns, fantastic tales, and horror stories by noted authors like Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Among the stories rendered more exciting or eerie to the ear by Feuer, who composed the music as well as conducted the orchestra, were Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” John Collier’s “Evening Primrose,” and—the stand-out of the series—Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen Versus the Ants.”

The musical accompaniment for such high melodrama was generally less noticeable or noteworthy than the sound effects, and more often incidental rather than integral; unlike the terrifying animal sounds conceived and created by the Escape sound artists, music was employed mainly to set scenes or enhance atmosphere. It is only when you pay attention to those bridges and screens of sound that you appreciate them as being of some consequence.

Feuer—whose work was also featured on the Ford Theater program, the episodic thriller Case, Crime Photographer, and the short-lived adventure serial Shorty Bell, starring Mickey Rooney—was not given much of a chance to turn musical sounds into characters; like fellow Escape alumni Ivan Ditmars, Leith Stevens, and Wilbur Hatch, he had largely to content himself with producing the odd note to prop up or propel the plot, however odd or ordinary.

In order to fulfill their weekly assignments, radio composers commonly recycled stock music (like the musical crutches handed to The Lone Ranger when he came to television, for the supply of which Feuer is now being credited). Perhaps this is what compelled former radio composer Bernard Herrmann to emerge from the airwaves by making his music speak for and draw attention to itself, refusing to let film scores—such as the intense ones he created for Vertigo and Obsession—go under by pounding them into the viewer’s consciousness so as to let them take center stage in their minds.

On at least one occasion, however, Feuer was involved in something a trifle more ambitious, when, on 25 August 1946, he was called upon to conduct the orchestra assembled for the Columbia Workshop. Billed as “radio’s foremost laboratory of writing and production techniques,” the Workshop produced the experimental play “The Path and the Door” by newcomer Les Crutchfield (previously mentioned here), which boasted a score by modernist composer George Antheil, who had never before worked in or for broadcasting.

To intrigue audiences, radio producers were more likely to invite artists new or altogether alien to the medium, rather than permitting the reliable Girls and Guys Friday of the business to make a name for themselves. Making his escape from the radio (and B-movie thriller) mill, Cy Feuer eventually earned such distinction on the Great White Way, which will appear somewhat less dazzling during tonight’s 60-second salute to a man who managed to “Succeed in Business” these past six decades.

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On This Day in 1938: Americans Are Invited to "Stump the Experts"

Well, it was time to close the sixth broadcastellan poll, if only to devise another in which you are herewith invited to participate. So, what, in my view, has been radio’s chief contribution to American life in the pre-TV era? There is some validity to all of the proposed replies (which I would not have bothered to list otherwise); and even though the statement that the medium “promoted clear diction and elocution” was endorsed by none, it was not meant to be facetious. Depending so much on the spoken word, radio producers certainly had more respect for it than today’s entertainers, artists whose mumblings are the Brad Pitt-falls of visual storytelling. And “Something else”? It might very well be broadcasting’s influence on the nation’s musical tastes, radio having served not only as an “everyman’s theater and public library,” but as a virtual concert hall.

Polls are nearly as fascinating to me as they are frustrating. I, for one, prefer not to give straight answers; I much rather respond or challenge, preferably after some reflection. The kind of question that can be answered decisively—the kind that requires one particular, supposedly right reply—is either unnecessary or suspect.

Nor can I rely upon my memory as a fail-safe system for the ready retrieval of data, pieces of trivia with which I’d rather not clutter up my mind. So, it is with some trepidation that I note a significant anniversary in American broadcasting: the quiz program Information, Please!, which had its radio premiere on this day, 17 May, in 1938 (and not, as the History Channel website will have you know, back in 1930).

Information, Please! was billed as a celebrity quiz program on which everyday citizens asked the questions that experts from the fields of literature, science, motion pictures or politics were called upon to answer. Noted guest panelists to appear on the show during its first two seasons (along with regulars like the aforementioned Oscar Levant) include movie director Alfred Hitchcock, playwright Moss Hart, as well as authors Ben Hecht, Rex Stout, Louis Bromfield, and Christopher Morley.

Here are some of the questions raised during the first program:

“Correct the following line and name its author. And the line is: ‘In the spring a young man’s fancy always turns to thoughts of love.'”

“In what well-known symphony did the composer include a chord in order to awaken a sleeping audience?”

“How is immigration to the United States from the following nations restricted: England, Brazil, China?”

“Kyosti Kallio is a Greek Island, a dictator of Peru, President of Finland, or the name of a Japanese political party?”

Unlike the quiz and giveaway programs of late 1940s—which had an even more devastating effect on the production of dramatic entertainment than the reality show format has on today’s television storytelling—Information, Please did not depend for its success on shrewdly engendered greed and promises of instant gratification, whether experienced by the participant or felt by the listener. This does not mean, however, that the instincts worked upon by the comparatively sophisticated Information, Please were any less basic.

“Now, folks,” moderator Clifton Fadiman greeted the audience, “any education that you and I may pick up for the next half hour or so is all to the good; but beyond that we’re out simply to play this as a game and have some fun at it.” And the “fun” of Information, Please! was not so much the thrill of getting it right, but of witnessing others of supposedly “towering intellect” (as Fadiman put it, mockingly) struggle and fail to meet the public’s challenge. To “stump the expert” was the objective, which was nothing less than an exercise in ridiculing the artist and the intellectual in a joyous vindication of mediocrity.

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“Boom Bang a Bang”: Mae West, Eurovision, and the Re-education of Charlie McCarthy

Well, it’s one of those drab and dispiriting whatever-happened-to-summer kind of days on which even morale-boosting Carmen Miranda might have thrown in the technicolored towel. Yesterday, the house was shrouded in mist; and now, as if to mock the recently announced drought warning and water restrictions, the slow-moving clouds across the Welsh hills have assumed a washed-out shade of gray that looks about as cheerful as the fur of a middle-aged rat trying to waddle off with your last piece of cheese. Not that there was any more merriment to be had last night when I lowered the blind to screen the less-than-classic Mae West vehicle The Heat’s On (1943).

Watching West’s caricature of back-alley “come hither” cut the rug with dithering Victor Moore, whose hairpiece had just fallen off while hers remained as conspicuous as a comb-over, had all the gayety of a fancy dress party at a retirement home in a northern suburb of Minsk.

To be sure, West was already past her prime in the mid-1930s, an obsolescence determined not so much by biology than by the enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code, the same code that made similarly cartoonish Betty Boop lower her skirts. Such strictures notwithstanding, West continued to keep censors busy by causing the greatest sex scandal on US radio, when, in 1937, she impersonated the original lady Eve in a Garden of Eden sketch presented on the Chase and Sanborn Hour (as previously mentioned here). West’s delivery was so suggestive that she was subsequently deemed too hot for radio.

Now, the star of the Chase and Sanborn Hour, ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy, got away with considerably more verbal tease and naughtiness than anyone else on the air. Saved by his image—the picture of a wooden chap on Bergen’s knee, that is—Charlie didn’t have to worry much about his reputation. Without such widely circulated likenesses, Charlie would undoubtedly have come across as a rather more adult toy—a stunted youth Peter-Pandering to the randy fantasies of the frustrated heterosexual middle-aged male.

While The Heat’s On made a farce out of censorship in the theaters, Charlie was amusing himself with many a leading lady of the silver screen—and a few misleading ones. On this day, 16 May, in 1943, for instance, Charlie’s heart went a-racing at the sight of Claudette Colbert, who invited the lucky log to spend his summer on her island farm. (At this point, I usually refer readers to my collection of Colbert memorabilia; but one of the finest sets of Claudette images are now on display at the glamour sanctuary known as Trouble in Paradise, a treat not to be missed.)

Charlie was soon disillusioned, however, when it became clear that Ms. Colbert had something other than romance in mind. He was to get busy on the farm, rather than enjoying the fruits without labor. There was a war on, and the Pinocchio among Romeos had to learn to be a little less selfish and irresponsible. As a piece of carved wood, he was certainly expendable—unless his antics could both delight and teach. After all, even old Victor Moore was seen promoting Victory Gardens in The Heat’s On, while Hazel Scott—the only performer to get The Heat up to temperature—tickled the ivories in an attempt to appease disenfranchised African-Americans, racial harmony being essential to the war effort.

On the same evening Charlie learned that flirting with Colbert was futile, Jack Benny’s valet Rochester took center stage singing a number from Cabin in the Sky on his boss’s program; meanwhile, Benny’s rival Fred Allen tried to sell a pan-American ditty to singing sensation Frank Sinatra. Like pleasure-seeking Charlie McCarthy, America’s musical entertainers had all become recruits in the fight against the Axis.

A decidedly more frivolous war will be waged all over Europe this weekend, when the Eurovision Song Contest, responsible for tunes like “Volare,” “Waterloo” and the abovementioned “Boom Bang a Bang” (also the title of a Eurovision documentary to air on UK television tonight) gets underway for the fifty-first time. Assault weapons include rap from the UK, Country from Germany, and Death Metal from Finland. It’s the showdown of the year on European television; and the US, slow to catch on for once, is planning to copy the concept.

And why not? As Shakespeare might have put it (had he not said otherwise): “If music be the [fuel of war], play on; / Give [us] excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.”

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Many Happy Reruns: Joseph Cotten, Radio Actor

Well, I am finally done with Cousin Henry, the novel I was reading, soaking, drying and pressing, however intermittently, these past few weeks. I tend to read in the bathtub, you see, and my books get a fair dousing now and then. Cousin Henry is one of the shorter novels of prolific 19th-century author Anthony Trollope; and even though Trollopeans—those singing a Trollopaean to the less sentimental or melodramatic works of Victorian fiction—generally agree that Trollope’s shorter works are not nearly as satisfying as his enormous three-deckers, I thought Cousin Henry to be an engrossing portrait of a man riddled by guilt—a man too weak to enjoy the fruits of his own wickedness and too wicked to surrender them. Now that I have done with Cousin Henry, I might as well pay tribute to the man who played Uncle Charlie. Joseph Cotten, that is, who was born on this day, 15 May, in 1905.

Sure, I can relate most anything or anyone to radio; but in the case of Cotten, there is no need to stretch. Not that it would be difficult to highlight the wireless connections of some of the other notable film and theater personalities born on this day, a list including actress Constance Cummings, who was heard in a radio adaptation of Alice Duer Miller’s narrative poem The White Cliffs on the anthology drama series Romance (22 May 1945); Clifton Fadiman, editor and book critic, best known to American radio 1940s listeners as the moderator of the literary quiz program Information, Please; and playwright-novelist Max Frisch, whose Biedermann und die Brandstifter (Firebugs) was originally written for radio back in 1952.

Joseph Cotten was a radio actor, first if perhaps not foremost. He started out in radio drama in the mid-1930s, acting in a play produced by the American School of the Air, during the production of which he met and befriended Orson Welles, who subsequently gave Cotten his big screen break by casting him in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. On the air, Cotten was heard on programs like the aforementioned Romance, on the thriller anthology Suspense, the patriotic Cavalcade of America, and the Lux Radio Theater (taking Cary Grant’s part in Penny Serenade, for instance), as well as being featured on Welles’s own showcases, the Mercury Theatre on the Air and its commercial re-establishment, the Campbell Playhouse.

Radio listeners had several opportunities to hear Cotten on his birthday, namely in the 15 May 1949 production of “Breakdown,” as soundstaged by the Prudential Family Hour of Stars and a “Salute to Eugene O’Neill,” broadcast on 15 May 1954. Undoubtedly the least of these occasions was “Halfway to Reno,” a romantic trifle that aired on 15 May 1947 as part of the Radio Reader’s Digest. The play was an adaptation of one of the stories from the pages of Reader’s Digest magazine; it involves a husband and father who falls in love with another woman and seeks a divorce—until he is reminded of the wonders of parenthood, of playing ball with and reading to his son. It is a thoroughly undramatic play, a glossy treatment of marital discord, prefixed by the reminder that, in 1946, one out of three marriages ended in divorce.

Interviewed (that is, reading the script prepared for him) during the introduction to the pay, Cotten assured radio listeners that he was happily married. As I learned today, flicking through an edition of Hollywood Album, he claimed to owe his acting career to one Lenore Kipp, his first wife, who played the piano Cotten was pounding during a local theatre production of “Paris Bound” as far away from Broadway as Florida. When Ms. Kipp said “goodbye” go to New York, Cotten followed and eventually married her.

Most Victorian novels, of course, are concerned with matrimony. Comedies are said to end in marriage, while tragedy begin with it. Trollope, at least, had little interest in the conventional happy ending when he penned his Cousin Henry—a story about a secreted will and its ultimate detection—which concludes refreshingly unsentimental: “As any little interest which this tale may possess has come rather from the heroine’s material interests than from her love,—as it has not been, so to say, a love story,—the reader need not follow the happy pair absolutely to the altar.”

Cotten’s voice had a rough edge, an edge wasted on romances going smoothly. Right now, I am picturing him as the frustrated and disillusioned husband in Niagara, a spouse “Halfway to Reno” making a detour to those deadly falls.