Category: Radio

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Thneaking Up on "Thubway Tham"

Thubway Tham, as he appeared in Detective Story magazine, 25 Jan. 1934

The other day I called detective Ellery Queen to the rescue when I found myself in need of some pop-cultural assistance while dealing with a certain case of bigotry in the blogosphere. Searching for a visual aid to prop up my improbable prose, I dug up my copy of Ellery Queen’s Rogues’ Gallery, a 1945 anthology of crime fiction containing radio scripts by Dannay/Lee and John Dickson Carr.

It occurred to me that, aside from those two scripts, I hadn’t read any of the other pieces in said volume. So, leafing through, I happened upon a story about a small-time crook with a big-time speech impediment, a lisp so thick that it earned him the nickname “Thubway Tham.”

Now, Tham never hit it big in radio or the talkies (with that voice, he had about as much of a chance to make it there as silent-screen siren Dolores Costello). That said, he was a rather popular pulp hero in his day, which is reason enough for me to make his acquaintance.

Thubway Tham was the brainchild of Johnston McCulley, creator of the recently if not altogether successfully resuscitated Zorro. According to McCulley (as retold by Mssrs. Ellery Queen), Tham first sprang into action during his author’s visit to New York City in 1919. Observing the crowds being “spewed out of the subway,” McCulley realized that those Big Apple commuters were a veritable herd of cash cows for a clever pickpocket.

In need of a saleable story, McCulley came up with “Subway Sam”; but, somewhat intoxicated at the time, the writer found that his mouth would not cooperate in pronouncing the name and settled for “Thubway Tham” instead.

An artful little dodger who forever thumbed his nose at the luckless Detective Craddock, his arch-enemy, Tham kept appearing and disappearing in story after story (some 182 by 1945, according to his prolific father); yet the times were changing, and what might have been amusing in the prosperous 1920s or reassuring in the lean 1930s was no longer appropriate during the war years, when paper was too precious for the spreading of questionable romances of self-serving criminals and the glorification of devious individualism.

Even less-than upright characters, such as the Saint, were being recruited for the war effort. And unless Tham was satisfied to go underground for the duration, disappearing from public view along with other misfits like honorable, but propagandistically irredeemable Mr. Moto, he was expected to take his hand out of other people’s pockets long enough to lend it to Uncle Sam.

Here is how McCulley’s aging lawbreaker, anno 1944, saw his dilemma:

Thubway Tham found his favorite bench unoccupied, and sat upon it.  He was thinking of the war.  Many of his younger friends had enlisted or been drafted.  Familiar faces were missing.  Even certain of the gentry habitually under the eyes of the police had accepted honest toil in shipyards and factories turning out munitions and war supplies.

Tham was sad.  A few days before he had tried to enlist and get into a uniform.  But there were several things wrong with him physically, the army surgeons found.  Tham had started the physical examination feeling rather fit, but by the time they got through with him he was wondering which hospital l would be the best when he unexpectedly collapsed on the street.

He was contemplating now seeking work in some defense plant.  But, frankly, that did not appeal to him.  Tham was a creature of habit, and a part of that habit was to ignore manual labor.  Moreover, work in a war plant would keep him away from his beloved subway.

So, McCulley confronted poor Tham with “the lowest of the low,” with con artists whose prey were “hicks from the sticks,” the “real men” about to fight for their country. Tham could continue stealing, but, punishing those more selfish than he and redistributing his loot, morphed into some simulated Saint, a decidedly less daring and debonair Robin Hood of Modern Crimes.

However valuable such sentimental propaganda might have been, the wartime heroics of turnabout Tham, as recorded in “Thubway Tham, Thivilian,” made for a rather dull and disingenuous Oliver! twist.

What might Thubway Tham be doing these days? Is he still trying his shaky hand at subway robbery? Or has he turned to that superhighway in the sky, where latter-day tricksters, unhampered by physical defects, find ample opportunity to keep their fingers busy and their pockets full?

Don’t let me catch you again, Tham.  Disguised as a conscientious “thivilian,” you pretty much wore out your welcome.

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Up to My Eyes in Dog-eared Books

This is one of those rare, lugubrious days of landscape-swallowing fogginess on which you might as well retreat, brandy in hand, into the confines of your small but reassuringly familiar study. My thought being as opaque as the wintry sky, my mind as obnubilated as the mist-shrouded hills, I have put aside all semi-intellectual or quasi-artistic endeavors for the moment. Instead, I busy myself cataloguing the books in my radio drama library, another four dusty volumes of forgotten plays having arrived by mail yesterday. During my years of researching so-called old-time radio in New York City, I had access to several excellent public and academic libraries, however deficient my own.

While a vast number of recordings have been preserved, there are some plays you can only find on paper, among them rare pieces by noted American authors like Sherwood Anderson, who died on this day, 8 March, in 1941. Writing my dissertation, I was determined not to discuss at length any play I had never set my ears upon. The page seemed to be a poor substitute for a performance. Who, I ask you, would claim to know a movie having only read the screenplay? I thought. And yet, once your eye is becoming accustomed to the language of radio, you can almost hear the plays as they might have been produced.

Distrustful of my less than reliable memory, I used to photocopy much of what I read and carefully filed away each text for ready reference. After I had earned my doctorate and decided, propelled by romance, to move to the United Kingdom, I took those thousands of sheets out of their assigned ring binders, boxed them up, and posted them, along with most of my belongings, to be shipped overseas.

Upon my arrival in Blighty, I was not only confronted with stacks of paper (relieved to find them there), but with the problem of making a new and orderly home for them. Little did I know when I decided to be economic by dumping the old binders that the paper sizes in the UK differ from those in the US, that British sheet protectors are too narrow for American paper, and that such incompatibilities would spell many a tedious hour punching holes or cropping paper. Eventually, I resigned in frustration from such labors and resolved to ditch some of the copies in exchange for the originals, however obscure.

Tossing another photocopied script into the bin this morning, I noticed that the play thus preserved was broadcast on the first anniversary of Anderson’s death on this day in 1941. The piece in question is “The Test” by radio dramatist Joseph Ruscoll, and I have not yet come across a recording of it.

Produced by the Columbia Workshop, it concerns adolescent lovers Janet and Joseph who, thirty years after parting, are nothing but joyful memories and pangs of regret to one another. They separated as the result of a dare—the eponymous “test”—that was to prove Joseph’s love for Janet: would he give up his harmonica for their harmonious union? No, he would not stoop to accepting the challenge—and the two were twained no more. Through the miracle of the pre-cellular phone wireless, a radio commentator interviewing both brings about a reunion of sorts. After all, radio was, as Gerald Nachman put it, “yesterday’s internet”:

Narrator: And you never spoke to him again, Janet?

Janet.  Never.  (Sorrowfully)

Narrator: Or you to her, Mr. Pike? 

Joseph: I had my pride.  (Lowly)

Narrator (sighs): And that was thirty years ago?

Janet (flaring up): Pride! If he had really loved me, he wouldn’t have had any pride!

Joseph (flaring up in turn): And if she really loved me, she—what about her foolish pride?

Janet (indignantly): Foolish?

Joseph (crying out): Foolish! Foolish!

Janet: What do you think, Mr. Narrator?

Narrator (sadly): I think you were both very, very foolish.

Perhaps, we’d better put our keyboard to some special use tonight by searching for old friends or else put it aside altogether, seeking instead the company of neglected loved ones rather than dwelling in the sheltering obscurity of our inconsequentiality or sweltering in the ersatz heat of emboldening internet anonymity. I write for myself and strangers—but I live for a hug and a smile.

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On This Day in 1943: Gracie Allen Decides to Replace Jack Benny with "Thirty Minutes of Refinement"

Last night, I finally got to see the so-called highlights of the Academy Awards, an assortment of leftovers that UK channel Sky One tosses to those subscribers who refuse to have juicy bits of trivia over-nighted for a premium. While mercifully abridged, the ceremony was chopped off at all the wrong spots, with more attention being paid to red carpet parading than to the presentation proper, let alone the politics behind the trophy distribution.

I had been looking forward to a few choice moments described by television critic Brent McKee in his online journal, but never got to judge for myself what exactly was the matter with Lauren Bacall, whom I had already presumed dead a few weeks ago. The commercials-riddled presentation made gossip-fest Entertainment Tonight look like an uncompromising piece of investigative journalism. Being accosted by the inane and utterly superfluous commentary provided by a couple of British MC stand-ins, I hardly even got as much as a glimpse of Jon Stewart, whose hosting of the high-profile, low-rated affair received rather mixed reviews.

Just how difficult it is to find a suitable master (or mistress) of ceremonies was played up in this year’s introductory Oscar sketches, in which former presentational misfires like Whoopi Goldberg and David Letterman refused to front once more what amounted to a chorus of disapproval.

What is required of an Academy Awards host is not simply a modicum of charm and wit, as well as a stature that bears a vague semblance to Hollywood star power, but also a persona firm enough not to crack when faced with the shocks and punctures it is likely to sustain during a never entirely predictable live broadcast. Censors and advertisers balk at volatile comics (an energetic personality Robin Williams once used to personify), as much as a large percentage of the statistical presence known as the general public might enjoy their ad-libbing antics.

True, the exposure of certain parts of the human anatomy aside, American broadcasters are no longer quite as squeamish as they once were in their furtive approach to the lexicon of the commoners (even though rap lyrics can still be awarded a prize without being deemed fit to air in their original form). Still, notwithstanding the fact that everyday language seems to have just about shrivelled to the utterance of monosyllabics, the broadcasters’ dictionary of permissible phrases sure used to be much smaller a few decades ago.

On this day, 7 March, in 1960, for instance, Jack Paar returned to host the Tonight Show after an absence of one month, during which he protested NBC’s rejection of a tame bit of toilet humor (some quip about a “water closet”). Today, of course, it is chiefly political correctness that concerns those who suck up the open air of which they are merely lessees while sucking up to the advertisers and corporate entities that condition it.

Sometimes I wonder whether the host is as overrated a figure as the actor who portrays the spectacle that is a James Bond movie. How irreplaceable are the ostensible headliners of any show, even if their names are as closely associated with it as, say, Jack Benny’s was with the Jack Benny Program? Benny learned the hard way on this day in 1943. The perennial 39-year old—who would later give a young Paar his break when discovering the newcomer while entertaining the troops)—was forced to sit out his own broadcast due to a cold, only a funeral having kept him away during the previous season.

Asked to substitute for him were fellow radio comedians George Burns and Gracie Allen. Yet while George was perfectly willing to pinch-hit for bedridden Benny, his batty wife simply refused to go on the air to take care of the impending vacuum.

Gracie had decided to become an intellectual, and filling in for the lead of an old comedy act just would no longer do. She was scheduled instead to give a piano concert, undaunted by her apparent lack of keyboards-tested talent. None of George’s coaxing would convince her to change her absent mind; besides, she already owned the expensive articles of clothing that George promised to bestow upon her in the event of her much-needed cooperation.

Eventually, Gracie condescended to do the show after all, having discovered a kindred soul in sensitive Dennis Day. Sure, he liked Little Women; but he liked books even better. And when he demonstrated his love for poetry by reciting Rudyard Kipling’s “If” in a pitch that screamed “cultured”—no ifs and buts about it—Gracie could not but seize Benny’s temporarily vacant timeslot, determined to present her “Thirty Minutes of Refinement.”

Now “refinement” was a concept to which violinist Benny himself aspired, but which those in charge of shaping popular radio entertainment mainly derided for profit as some harebrained, longhair attempts at bothering the blissfully ignorant with unnecessary uplift.

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An Eye for an Ear: An Oscar "Triumph" for Radio Drama

Well, you’d expect me to go on about it, wouldn’t you? About the Academy Award for the documentary short “A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin,” I mean. Now, I haven’t actually seen the ceremony, shown live in the UK on one of those premium channels that test your willingness to pay yet a little extra for something that used to be free; on the night prior to the Oscars, I enjoyed instead “An Audience with Norman Corwin” (a recording of which is available on the BBC homepage until 10 March). The program features clips of several of the plays I wrote about in my study, including “We Hold These Truth,” “The Odyssey of Runyon Jones,” and experts from the World War II propaganda series An American in England.

To borrow the title of one of Corwin’s own commemorative pieces celebrating the triumph of the medium, “Seems Radio Is Here to Stay” after all. It is a rare occasion indeed when the visual arts are called upon to serve as a promotional vehicle for the theater of the mind, a theater that stood on shaky ground on the soil of American culture. Too often, old-time radio drama was reduced to the billboarding of motion pictures, to sly efforts of teasing home audiences out of their seats and into the theaters or the arms of the retailers.

So unless you choose to align yourself with the three unsympathetic passers-by who answered my poll question by stating that they simply “don’t care,” this Oscar win is an occasion for cheer and cautious optimism. I say “cautious” because I also don’t hold with those who argue my statement about the sorry state of and wanting respect for radio drama in the USA to be somewhat exaggerated, let alone patently false.

I assume those aficionados of the wireless are too much among their kind to notice how little the public knows about writers like Corwin, how little evidence there is of their works on the shelves of our stores and libraries. Even Corwin added a tentative “Seems” to his title. Not that he had doubts about its potential excellence, having so often provided evidence of it himself.

What’s so great about keeping one’s eyes closed? Is it an irresponsible drowning out of reality, or a hapless fishing in the shrinking pool of our imaginings? Or is radio just a plaything for those who missed the boat when it comes to modern technology? While I would not recommend it for viewers of American Idol, who’d realize that much of what we think we appreciate in sound is augmented by visuals, a time-out for our over-worked oculars may be a stimulating and downright exciting if perhaps disorienting workout for one of our often underestimated senses.

As Corwin put it in his salute to those already tuning in,

. . . it is good to take a nip of fancy every now and then,
A swig or two of wonderment
To jag the mind.
It’s good to send your thoughts excursioning
Beyond the paved and well-worn alleys of your life
If only as a form of exercise
Especially in wanton days like these.

The “days,” of course, are always “like these,” which makes this a time as good as any to go take that excursion on the airwaves. And should you decide to go sailing, surfing, or simply dipping your toes into that vast sea, come back again, if only long enough to tell me about your adventures. In the meantime, I am going to embark upon my own experiments in radio dramatics, the issue of which, if seaworthy, I might be sharing with you before long.

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A Case for Ellery Who?: Detecting Prejudice and Paranoia in the Blogosphere

Well, only a few short hours ago I was writing about the constitutional freedoms that US citizens enjoy and the appeal American writers like Pulitzer Prize winner Marc Connelly made to 1940s radio listeners of the The Free Company (and “The Mole on Lincoln’s Cheek” in particular) to cherish and defend such liberties. I suppose that includes the freedom to sever one’s connections to anyone we realize to be incompatible or determine to be objectionable, regardless of any interests or passions we might otherwise share. Now, I don’t wish to make a Brokeback Mountain out of a molehill; but I have to confess that I am rather dismayed at the length one of my former readers went to in order to disassociate himself from my ramblings, sentiments he previously appreciated and endorsed. Allow me to expound.

I am always eager to read about and hear from others who, like me, are interested in early-to-mid 20th-century American popular culture; they need not be like me in other respects or feel themselves to be other, like me. Now that I am outside the academy and live somewhat remotely, I am thrilled to communicate with those who are drawn to the neglected yet fertile fields of silent movies, pre-code Hollywood, and old-time radio.

As may have become clear to the few who visit this site with some regularity, I am neither nostalgic nor flippant (or camp) in my approach to such marginalized topics. Nor am I an historian. The chief reason for keeping this journal is to share what I think matters to a few, regardless of how immaterial it may be to the many. Just who are these few, I sometimes wonder. And sometimes I get an answer that is disheartening if not, upon reflection, entirely uncommon.

Yesterday, I decided to add another online journal to my short list of links (see right). On said blog, I had left a comment about the sorry state of many old-time radio recordings, a remark that was kindly and publicly acknowledged, and received one in return regarding the career of actress Lurene Tuttle.

Pleased to have come across another old-time radiophile (I dislike lazy acronyms and refuse to stoop to letter combinations like OTR), I sent a message to the Tuttle expert, inviting him to be linked on my page. The response so startled me that I decided to drop today’s feature—much to my regret of disappointing an admirer of screen legend Kay Francis —and write instead about this sad case of blogophobia, the fear of being linked to and associated with someone as repulsive as myself.

I assure you, this is not a case of a bruised ego. I always assumed the most repellent aspect of broadcastellan to be its syntax and diction, its subject being merely inconsequential to most. It turns out, however, that the invitation was rejected as a direct response to . . . my blogroll.

According to the e-missive sent to me, one of the sites listed on the right is so offensive that said Tuttle-tale decided not only to refuse the link, but to erase the two comments I had left on his blog, even if doing so meant having to delete the posts to which they were attached—one of which journal entries having welcomed my “intelligent” remarks (about Vic and Sade) and greeting me as the first reader to leave a response. However obliging, I won’t go so far as to delete my essay about Ms. Tuttle in order to assist in this erasure, an obliterating not only of the former association but of the prejudice behind its severance.

What has this to do with Ellery Queen, apart from the double entendre intended? Well, even during the McCarthy era, in which small-mindedness reached its peak in the US, programs like The Adventures of Ellery Queen encouraged listeners to be open and embracing of those whose constitutionally protected beliefs, creeds, and pursuits of happiness differed from their own. Here, for instance, is the message attached to “One Diamond,” first heard on the Ellery Queen program on 6 May 1948:

This is Ellery Queen, saying goodnight ’till next week, and enlisting all Americans every night and every day in the fight against bad citizenship, bigotry, and discrimination—the crimes which are weakening America.

Should you find this message offensive and the people I chose to include in my blogroll abhorrent, I ask you—kindly but resolutely—to turn away and divest yourself of any associations with broadcastellan you might have sought or tolerated until now.

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Presidential Approval Ratings, Patriotism, and "The Mole on Lincoln’s Cheek"

Perhaps I shouldn’t be whistling “Consider Yourself” quite so cheerfully today, considering that it was just announced that Jack Wild, Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of Dickens’s Artful Dodger in the 1968 musical Oliver! has passed away at the age of 53 (the generally reliable Internet Movie Database had yet to catch up when last I checked this afternoon). Now, I haven’t been able to get those Oliver! tunes out of my head ever since I saw a production of it last summer, when I was impressed by Peter Karrie’s stirring rendition of “Reviewing the Situation.” Someone else who ought to be reviewing the situation—someone quite possibly sighing “Where Is Love?” along with future James Bond, Daniel Craig, whose birthday is being celebrated today by remarkably few fans of the series—is the current US President, whose waning popularity might as well be measured in disapproval ratings.

Whatever one’s view of the man or his performance, one has to wonder how future generations will look upon his administration and its handling of the so-called war on terror, the US economy, disaster relief and matters environmental. On this day, 2 March, in 1940, a play was broadcast on CBS radio that encouraged Americans to ask question like these and to resist the kind of hero-worship that is the result of blind faith and blatant revisionism.

The play was Marc Connelly’s “The Mole on Lincoln’s Cheek” (previously mentioned in connection to Cindy Sheehan). Starring Claire Trevor, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Bickford, and Margaret Hamilton, it was part of a series of original radio dramas produced by the The Free Company, a “group of prominent writers, actors, and radio workers” who “organized to give expression to their faith in American democracy,” as it was put with some confidence in the introduction of each play (recordings of which you’ll find here). Connelly’s play deals with the freedom of speech in education, of which the depiction of Lincoln’s prominent mole is a metaphor. A heated dispute over the use of textbooks that portray America’s leaders in an at times less than flattering manner is dramatized to urge listeners to “resist any temptation to suppress truth or distort it.”

In the words of one of Connelly’s characters—a teacher accused of un-American activities for using a history book whose author points out that John Hancock was a smuggler and that “Andrew Jackson was rough and uncultured, couldn’t even spell—those who try to clean up history are “as reactionary as Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. Put an unexpected truth in front of them and they’ll always kick over the lamp.”

One of the offending line in the textbooks under attack is the assertion that “[i]n many instances the devotion of the leaders in the fight for independence in 1776 was caused less by patriotism than by the opportunity for what today we would call graft.” The teacher who ordered and approves of the textbook, dismisses accusations of anti-Americanism by expressing his belief that “a patriot is someone who exerts himself to promote the well-being of his country.”

“No one can deny that we are living in a changing world. Its social and economic orders are vanishing in front of our eyes. The chief purpose of teaching history is not to glorify the past but to insure the future.” Reviewing the situation, it seems to me that this lesson has been suppressed a few years ago and that much of what is troubling Americans today is the direct result of a momentary overcrowding of the passive, no-matter-what school of patriotism Connelly warned against, a dismissal or downright vilifying of critical thinking that led first to silence and now that the school is being torn down provokes equally immature fits of told-you-so hilarity.

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Oscar Nods, Corwin Winks, and Red Carpet Wrinkles

Unless they missed the 28 February 2006 deadline, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have cast their votes for this year’s nominees in the various categories. The long list of winners and losers will be read aloud in one of those excruciatingly drawn-out and rather tiresome displays of self-aggrandizing common among the tinseltownies.

Apparently, most of those celebrating celebrities are still unaware of the increasing likelihood that their nip/tucked tuchuses and streamlined features, boxoted-out-of-all expressiveness, will soon be replaced by the real thing in perennial flawlessness: tantrum-free CGI stand-ins who have that airbrushed and anorexic look to which so many of these cartoonish red-carpet crawlers aspire. Once again, it is left to the British to put a few creases back into Logan’s runway; but Dame Judy Dench stands as much of a chance to take home a trophy as quasi-live audiences have staying awake long enough to find out.

At least, one of the documentaries nominated this year pays tribute to the world of radio—that refuge of the bald and wrinkled, that last frontier and Lost Horizon for those among us who leap at the opportunity of supplying in our minds all that is wanting on the screen, warts ‘n all. The subject of that documentary, of course, is poet, playwright, and journalist Norman Corwin, age 95.

This Friday, BBC 4 radio will feature an hourlong “Audience with Norman Corwin,” which listeners worldwide can pick up here. An Oscar nominee himself (in the category of best adapted screenplay for Lust for Life in 1957), Corwin enjoyed lambasting the pomp and frippery of Hollywood’s long-gone studio era. Some of what he had to say, however, still rings true.

“Let nothing interfere with your enjoyment, / We’ll waltz away through war and unemployment.” This is how Corwin’s 1944 “Movie Primer” sends up the “Ostrich studio” approach to filmmaking, as expressed in the studio theme song, the “Graustark national anthem”:

Have you got those ‘need-a-vacation-from-a-world situation’ blues?
Oh, those blues.
Then cheer up, neighbor, fear no capital or labor.
Keep smiling, sweety, why fret about a treaty?
Chin up, fella, we give you Cinderella,
And you’ll never have, you’ll never have those headline blues . . . 

Let nothing interfere with entertainment,
The screen was not for sadness or for painment.
We’ll cuddle you and kiss you, and guard your free issue.
We manufacture syrup to cheer up your blues. 

Have you got those ‘need-a-vacation-from-a-serious-consideration’ blues?
Oh, those blues.
Keep grinning, oh you kiddoes, buck up, you widows.
You must never sink as low as to have to think.
So, chin up, fella, we give you Cinderella,
And you’ll never have, you’ll never have those headline blues.

Granted, many of the old production codes have long been cracked, and, from what I’ve read, this year’s nominated pictures are a little less frivolous than of old. Epics, fantasies, and new-fangled musical are taking a backseat and the tired boy-meets-girl formula has received some gender adjustments. That said, playing it safe in order to generate potential blockbusters is still common practice, and Hollywood producers either continue to drag storylines out of the same moldy vault or abandon intelligible storytelling altogether in favor of special effects and noisy action.

All right, the stories have some new wrinkles; it’s the faces that seem to be getting more insipid each year.

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The Passing Parade: A Fat Tuesday Hangover

Perhaps I should not have been quite so surprised; nor pleased, for that matter. For twenty-four hours or so, broadcastellan ceased to be practically invisible—and it was all due to my tribute to video star Don Knotts. In an effort to be timely, for once, I dispatched the previous post before sunrise on Monday morning while those across the big pond still clung to what was left of their weekend. When next I checked for signs of life on this blog, I noticed a dramatic increase in the number of visitors, nearly three times as many as on an average day. Most of them found their way here through a topics exchange rather than the common traffic generators on which many e-diarists rely. Now, I won’t stoop to pinning my hopes of boosting my low voltage scribblings on the passing of aged celebrities with more or less marginal careers in old-time radio. Still, waking up to a Fat Tuesday hangover after this intoxicating surge in circulation, I decided that I’d rather give up cocktails than topicality for Lent.

Though it should not take an actor’s death to make others alive to a neglected dramatic medium, a revival of interest cannot take place if the world is dead to the subject you go on about. So, in effort to adhere to my own dictum, I must keep on trying to relate the presumably out-of-date to our present everyday. Not enough of this is being done elsewhere. As a result, radio drama is mostly appreciated as a font of nostalgia or camp.

In my current poll I ask, not for the first time, just why old-time radio drama does not enjoy the status granted to old movies. Even as video stores are slowly being replaced by online libraries, the shelves of the major DVD retailers are still stacked with copies of classic Hollywood films and, increasingly, not-so classy television fare. Saunter over to the CD section and try to find the radio plays of Norman Corwin. You might as well be browsing for recorded mating calls of the dodo, despite the fact that Corwin’s seminal works are the subject of one of the documentary shorts nominated for an Academy Award this year.

Sure, there is less demand for non-musical, non-visual dramatics; apparently, people would rather gawk at a giant squid on display than pay a few quid to take in a well-directed audio play; but, as we all know, demand is being created and kept alive through advertising, and old-time radio, with its uncertain copyrights and complicated commercial ties, has little chance at being thus promoted. Or is it just that much of radio ain’t any good?

As I am trying to push my own study on radio—and to push it forward—I am at times as disillusioned as the anti-hero of Frederic Wakeman’s best-selling novel The Hucksters (1946). “There’s no need to caricature radio,” he opined. “All you have to do is listen to it. Or if you were writing about it, you’d simply report with fidelity what goes on behind the scenes. It’d make a perfect farce.” I am going to refrain from scoffing, however; encouraged by the ongoing podcasting revolution, I defiantly if cautiously concur instead with Mr. Corwin, who, some sixty years ago, observed: “Seems Radio Is Here to Stay.”

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What Those Who Remembered Forgot: Don Knotts (1924-2006) on the Air

Last night, I was pleased to make the acquaintance of Dr. Jack (1922), the chief passenger in an early but well-oiled Harold Lloyd vehicle, a sentimental comedy speeding up to some nimble last-reel slapstick. Within a few years of this outing, Lloyd reached the height of his silent screen career with classics like Safety Last (1923) and Girl Shy (1924), my favorite among his many fine films. Watching the genial and ingenious Dr. Jack as he rescued a girl’s doll from a well or cured a schoolboy of his feigned illness, I had a vision of this good physician attending to the aches and growing pains of Don Knotts, the late comedian who was born just about the time Girl Shy first flickered on American movie screens.

I cannot claim to have followed Knotts’s career on television and in motion pictures closely over the years. I never as much as sat through a single episode of The Andy Griffith Show, even though I enjoy whistling its catchy theme. Nor have I ever laid eyes on I Love a Mystery, the television adaptation of Carlton E. Morse’s previously discussed serial thriller “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” And I sure didn’t rush to hear him in Chicken Little, either. Such well-nigh disqualifying deficiencies notwithstanding, I can contribute here an “on the air” footnote to his otherwise well-documented career. In fact, researching Knotts’s early years on radio, I came across a rather remarkable echo.

As a radio performer, Knotts is undoubtedly best known as sidekick Windy Wales—teller of tall tales—in the revival of the Bobby Benson adventures, which had begun in the early 1930s as the kind of juvenile radio serial Irwin Shaw mocks in his short story “Main Currents of American Thought.” Such quasi-folk antics aside, Knotts was given an opportunity to play the brother of a true American storyteller: Samuel Clemens, the writer still better known by his pseudonym, Mark Twain.

Heard on the Cavalcade of America program, the play was an adaptation of Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and starred Raymond Massey as the grown-up author recalling his life story. As Twain’s brother Henry, Knotts was heard in a brief but pivotal scene dramatizing an incident that changed the life of the reluctant author.

Sam and Henry (the Clemens brothers, not Gosden and Correll’s Amos ‘n’ Andy precursors) worked together on the Pennsylvania, a Mississippi riverboat on which Sam was being trained as a cub pilot. The captain instructed Henry to tell the pilot to stop at a certain landing; but the hateful, irascible man denied having been informed. Sam defends his brother, engages in a fight with the pilot and knocks him down; but even though he is being congratulated rather than punished for his assault on the man, Sam thinks himself unfit to be his replacement. Leaving the boat, he bids farewell to Henry, who stays aboard. Before they part, Henry once more urges Sam not to squander his talent as storyteller.

Shortly thereafter, Henry, along with some 150 others, loses his life after an explosion aboard the Pennsylvania. Yet his voice remains alive in Twain’s mind, and Henry’s hopes for his brother are being realized at last. “Life on the Mississippi” was broadcast on 24 February 1953—exactly fifty-three years prior to Knotts’s own death last Friday.

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Another “Wrong Number,” a False Start for Marilyn, and the Right Answer at Last

For the past three weeks I have been commemorating the dames, gals, and ladies of the airwaves; but now, the correct answer to the question posed in first broadcastellan quiz can finally be revealed. Thanks to all those who guessed or knew or couldn’t care less—and told me so. Tallulah Bankhead, Doris Day, Mary Pickford, Helen Hayes, Marlene Dietrich, Agnes Moorehead, and Dorothy Lamour—they were all radio regulars at some point in their careers, whereas others, including Ginger Rogers, the lady in question (as guessed by three readers), limited their air time to occasional guest appearances on dramatic programs like the Lux Radio Theatre. And others still, Marilyn Monroe among them, started out in commercials.

On this day, 24 February, in 1947, more than five years before she became a major star, a noticeably nervous Monroe, having waited months for her first movie role while already under contract at Fox, was pushed before the microphone to appear in a commercial break for the Lux production of “Kitty.” Within the few seconds allotted for her radio debut, Monroe was faced with the task of initiating her career (by mentioning her first Technicolor screen test), plugging Betty Grable’s The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (whose costume she got to wear during the test shoot), and peddling Lux “flakes” (which ostensibly kept those costumes fresh and colourful). However alluring her timbre, Monroe fumbled. She could not even get the name of the announcer straight; her voice was rarely broadcast thereafter, even as her film roles remained scarce and undistinguished.

A pleasant voice, while an asset, was not a radio requisite. As I mentioned previously, Louella Parsons did quite well without one, notwithstanding her consternation when being told she had to do without the larynx of Ms. Rogers, who allegedly insisted on getting paid to be interviewed. The giggles and high-pitched screechings of comedy actresses aside, the most celebrated woman’s voice on American radio was the less than pleasing one emanating from Agnes Moorehead. Her virago vocals, by which Joseph Cotton’s character in Since You Went Away claims to have been haunted across the Atlantic, was ideally suited to the role of irate Mrs. Stevenson in that most famous of original old-time radio plays, Lucille Fletcher’s “Sorry, Wrong Number.”

On this day in 1944, Moorehead, shown left during a performance of “Sorry,” once again starred in the role she had originated on the radio thriller anthology Suspense in May 1943. The part was subsequently translated for motion picture audiences and television viewers (by Barbara Stanwyck, Mildred Natwick, Ida Lupino, and Shelley Winters); but, however bitter Moorehead might have been losing the role to Stanwyck on the big screen, no actress would snatch the original from the “First Lady of Suspense.”

It was not until long after Moorehead’s death that Claire Bloom (recently seen on UK television in the last of the second season of Marple), made an attempt at superseding the “First Lady,” not only by recreating the role for radio in 1999, but by starring in a sequel of sorts.

While she had nothing to do with that sequel, radio dramatist Lucille Fletcher was responsible for the 1948 film adaptation. Her involvement did not, however, assure the aesthetic success of the latter, which, for all its high melodrama, has little of the tension generated by the original play. With its numerous flashbacks, the film destroys the intensity of a drama unfolding in real time. Like Allan Ullman’s novelization of Fletcher’s screenplay, it fails to approximate, let alone recreate, the excitement of eavesdropping on someone in mortal danger, someone whose life, like the live broadcast during which it plays out—runs on a decidedly tight schedule beyond our control and influence.

“I wanted to write a show that was ‘pure medium,'” Fletcher remarked about “Sorry, Wrong Number.” She succeeded so well that any adaptation would amount to nothing short of mediocre impurity.