Category: Radio Plays

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Cherchez Lom

Well, I don’t always manage it. Keeping my everyday contained in a single journal devoted to popular culture; or working my life around its keeping. Not that I am being secretive about what else is going on. I am merely trying to stay within the boundaries I defined for broadcastellan; and sometimes the connections between old-time radio and my present can only be got at with considerable stretching. I wonder whether Walter Pater had this problem turning his life into a work of art, which no doubt is the most graceful and fulfilling way of controlling ones existence.

Today, for instance, I am leaving for Prague without much more than this radio program to keep me on track. It is a 1930s travelogue from the obscure series Ports of Call. Then, there is Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘N’ Roll, a radio dramatization of which aired on BBC Radio 3 earlier this summer. The play is currently on stage in Prague; but I doubt that I am up to watching Stoppard in translation (in a language, no less, that is entirely foreign to me).

According to the Internet Database, my departure for the country I still cannot spell without consulting a pocket dictionary coincides with the 90th birthday of the only major Czech-born actor with a career in English language film I know: Herbert Lom, born (if the Database is to be believed) in Prague on this day, 11 September, in 1917. Lom (looking rather like a Czech Charles Boyer in his pre-Pink Panther period) fled his native country after my fascist forebear invaded and began acting in England in the early 1940s; he was last seen in Marple, the latest television series to dramatize the mysteries of Agatha Christie (last encountered here on her birthday during my trip to Istanbul).

The last time I spotted Mr. Lom in one of his big-screen outings, he was a bad guy after the titular figurine in Brass Monkey (1948), a genre-defying comedy-musical-thriller co-starring The Smiths cover girl Avril Angers set . . . in the world of radio broadcasting. As I said, quite a stretch; I need not have struggled quite this much, considering that, during World War II, Lom was an announcer for the BBC’s Foreign Service.

Now I have got to stretch out a bit before our journey. I hope to be reporting back while on location—with thoughts of Kafka, perhaps, or the Golem—as abject a failure as I am at these on-the-spot updates . . .

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Drifting on the Airwaves; or, Getting Carried Away by The Pacific Story

There was no getting through it today, neither for the sun, nor for my eyes. A shroud of mist enveloped our cottage, obscuring the views of the hills and valleys beyond the hedge. With nothing in sight—and certainly no end—I just closed my eyes and drifted off again, sleeping the morning (though not the mist) away. On a murky day like this, when you just “want to get away from it all,” the Internet Archive can be relied upon to “offer you … escape,” if you pardon the belabored radio reference. True, with a trip to Prague in the offing, and the sounds and sights of Budapest and New York still readily retrievable from the ever deepening recesses of my mind, I am not exactly desperate for a virtual getaway; nor is it escapism I am after. It is the thrill of discovering and taking in something new that keeps me turning and returning to that amazing resource, filled as the Archive is with rare recordings waiting to be explored.

One such recent discovery is The Pacific Story, a series of broadcasts that was part of NBC’s Inter-American University of the Air. According to On the Air, John Dunning’s still indispensable encyclopedia of old-time radio, was heard over NBC stations from 1943 to 1947. The program introduced US American listeners at home to the theaters of war and to peoples of faraway countries and continents, from Luzon to Japan, from China to Australia.

Among the authorities on the Far East featured in the series was the aforementioned Pearl S. Buck. Unfortunately, Buck’s remarks on the life of Sun Yat-Sen, heard on the 3 Mary 1944 broadcast, have not been preserved; but I am working myself through the recordings in hopes of coming across other such notable literary commentators.

On this day, 5 September, in 1943, The Pacific Story attempted to put India in a nutshell, wrapping up its history “from Clive to Ghandi.” The dramatic portion of the program, followed by an academic essay on the state and future of India, opens in medias res: a duel between Clive and a subaltern, fought over losses at a card game.

Clive, those attending the duel remind each other, had tried to commit suicide more than once, but had proved a poor shot, as his pistol misfired. Once again, his gun goes off; once again, Clive misfires, missing his opponent. “This,” the narrator sums up, “was Robert Clive, the English clerk, destined to become Lord Robert Clive, founder of the British Indian Empire.”

Hardly the portrait of a hero, “India: From Clive to Ghandi” places the British in a long line of invaders, from Alexander the Great and the Muslims to the establishment of the Mughal Empire. The increasing power of the British over all of India, the story continues, led to the formation of the Indian Nationalist Movement in which Ghandi emerged as a leader.

“Today,” narrator Gayne Whitman reminded the listeners, “both Ghandi and Nehru are in jail because of their call for passive rebellion against Britain.” And yet, the broadcast concluded, only an independent, emancipated India, defending itself, could effectively combat the Japanese. This argument against British imperialism is quite remarkable, considering that the US was closely allied with Britain in the war against Japan, with the designs and dangers of which The Pacific Story was then chiefly concerned.

All the while, as I made my tortuous passage to India in this overloaded vehicle of a public service broadcast, I kept returning to Wales, to a spot I had revisited earlier this year. There, in the former billiard room of Powis Castle (pictured above), the horded riches of Lord Clive—Indian treasures that brought on suspicion, public inquiry and, perhaps, the ultimate suicide of this man—have been on public display since 1987.

Getting your mind to drift on the airwaves sure can take you places. Far from letting you escape, it can also take you straight back into your own backyard by circuitous routes that make it difficult at times to get through a single broadcast.

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It Might As Well Be Maytime

Well, I neither know nor care whether it is still considered a gaffe in some circles, but this was the kind of post-Labor Day that makes me want to wear white, or less. Mind you, I was just lounging in our garden, a rare enough treat this year. I am not among those who look toward fall as a fresh and colorful season, marked and marred by decay as it is. In New York City, my former home, September and October come as a relief from the stifling heat, a cooling down for which there is generally no need here in temperate and meteorologically temperamental Wales. Pop culturally speaking, to be sure, autumn is a time of renewal. In the US, at least, there is the fall lineup to look forward to as the end of an arid stretch in which fillers and (starting in the late 1940s) repeats convinced folks of the pleasures to be had outdoors.

No doubt, the producers of the Peabody Award-winning Lux Radio Theater were trying to stress this sense of a vernal rebirth when it opened its tenth season on this day, 4 September, back in 1944. Here is how host Cecil B. DeMille welcomed back the audience to what then was, statistically speaking, the greatest dramatic show on radio:

Greetings from Hollywood, ladies and gentlemen. At every opening night in the theater, for a thousand years, there’s been a breathless feeling of expectancy, a sense of new adventure. And tonight, as the light to on again in our Lux Radio Theater, there’s the added thrill of knowing that the lights are going on all over the world. With the liberation of France, the torch of Freedom burns again in Europe, and tonight we have a play that expresses something of the bond between song-loving America and music-loving Paris. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s screen hit Maytime, with Sigmund Romberg’s unforgettable music, and for our stars, those all-American favorites, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.

Leave it to the spokesperson of Lever Brothers (last spotted here with the Lord of toilet soaps) and the continuity writers in their employ, to link historical events of such magnitude as D-Day, the establishment of a French provisional government and its relocation from Algiers to Paris a few days prior to the broadcast with an escapist trifle like Maytime (1937), which, as Connie Billips and Arthur Pierce pointed out in Lux Presents Hollywood, bears little musical resemblance to Romberg’s original operetta, begot in the dark days of the Europe of 1917, before the US entered the first World War.

Commercial interests were anxious to reclaim the airwaves, after a period of restraint that we living in the 21st century have not witnessed since the attack on the World Trade Center back in September 2001. During his curtain call with co-star MacDonald (whose 1930 effort The Lottery Bride was released on DVD today), the aforementioned Mr. Eddy was further making “light” of the situation in the European war theater by plugging his new radio program. By expressing that “the lights were going on again all over the world,” Nelson remarked as he dutifully read from his script, DeMille had put him “on the spot.” After all, his sponsors were “160 leading electric light and power companies.” Houselights, please!

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In My Library: Radio Drama and How to Write It (1926)

The man behind the counter looked none too pleased when I handed over my money. This one, he said, had escaped him. The item in question is a rare little volume on radio drama, written way back in 1929, at a time when wireless theatricals were largely regarded, if at all, as little more than a novelty. In his foreword, Productions Director for the BBC, R. E. Jeffries, expressed the not unfounded belief that its author, one Gordon Lea, had the “distinction of being the first to publish a work in volume form upon the subject.”

Nothing to get excited about, you might say. I know, it is not exactly a prize pony, this old hobbyhorse of mine. Few who come across it today care to hop on, let alone put any money on it, particularly now that it has been put out to the pasture known as the internet, the playing field where culture is beaten to death. So, should not any bookseller be pleased to part with Mr. Lea’s reflection on echoes? Not, perhaps, when the money exchanged amounts to no more than a single pound coin. History often comes cheaply; it is the price for ignoring it that is high.

I had been on the lookout for Radio Drama and How to Write It while researching for Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on old-time radio in the United States. After no volume could be unearthed in the legendary and much-relied on vaults of the New York Public Library, let alone anywhere else, I gave up the search, comforted by the thought that Mr. Lea was, after all, a British hobbyhorse fancier, far removed from the commercial network circus in which I had chosen to study that ill-treated bastard of the performing arts.

It helps to take the blinders off. After all, I spotted the obscure volume last weekend, on another trip to Hay-on-Wye, the Welsh bordertown known the world over (by serious collectors, at least) as the “town of books.” Now, I am always anxious to put my loot on display. And so, rather to let it sit on my bookshelf, I shall let Mr. Lea’s pioneering effort speak for itself:

It is asserted that no play is complete until it has an audience. This is untrue. One might as well say that a tragedy of emotion between man and wife, enacted in the privacy of their own drawing room, is not a tragedy, because the general public are not invited to watch it. A play is complete when once it is conceived by its author. But, inasmuch as this fallacy is still popular, playwrights still construct their plays with an audience in mind.[. . .].

Thus, Lea reasons, the stage play

must be such as can appeal to a crowd, as distinct from the individual. This is a difficult thing to do, but such is the power of crowd-psychology, that if the play appeals to a section of the crowd, the disparate elements can be conquered and absorbed into the general atmosphere. An audience may, at the beginning of the play, be a company of individuals, but before long hey are by the devices of stage-production welded into one mass with one mind and one emotion. If the play is incapable of this alchemy, it fails to please and becomes a thing for the solitary patron. 

There, then, are the conditions which govern the production of the stage-play, and [ . . .] within the limitations of the theatre are wonderfully efficacious. 

But, is it necessary to accept these limitations? Is there no other medium more flexible?

In stage drama there is “always the problem of the fourth wall,” the solving (or dissolving) of which lead to intriguing if unsatisfactory compromises. In a production of The Passing of the Third Floor Back, for instance, the footlights were turned into an imaginary fireplace. “[V]ery ingenious,” the author quips,

but the effect is that, when the players sit before the fire, you have the spectacle of people staring straight at you, and, unless you imagine yourself to be a lump of coal or a salamander, you don’t get the right angle.

I was reminded of my experience seeing What Every Woman Knows at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, which thrust me into a similar hot spot I did not relish.

Sure, sound-only drama can readily break the barriers of convention. Yet when Lea dreams of the new medium and its potentialities, he has technology, not commerce or politics, in mind. Whether state-run or commercially sponsored, radio was never quite as free and free as the air. The audience, its size and sensibilities, always mattered more than the voice of the single speaker.

Nor am I convinced that a play is a play without playing itself out before or within an audience, whatever its number. A thought must be communicated to mean, and indeed to be. It is for this reason that I air out my library from time to time, to dust off those forgotten books and share what I find there in this, the most flexible medium of all . . .

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“. . . said the spider to the fly”

Just about anyone can walk into your parlor, give it the onceover and imagine you out of the way. That is something you have to put up with when you put your home up for sale, as we have done a few weeks ago.

Last Friday, we were supposed to have moved into town, but the deal fell through earlier this month after our buyer pulled out; and now we are trying to attract others without having any place else to go at present. I do not thrill to the prospect of having to be ready at a moment’s notice, or even a day’s, to make way for a parade of strangers traipsing in, to get cobwebs out of corners and the lawn neatly cropped only to vacate the premises to facilitate the inspections.

Yesterday, a rather po-faced lady from England stopped by for a viewing of our Welsh cottage, gliding across the threshold like a dark cloud. Her parting words, the remark that we should not have any trouble selling the place, only underscored what her dour expression could not cover up. She hadn’t found what she was after. Her crystal, she later told the estate agent, just did not swing the right way.

As it turns out, she was after something very particular, indeed: the very place she once called home. Now, last summer, we’ve had someone stopping by all the way from Pittsburgh, showing up unannounced and claiming that her ancestors had once dwelled under our roof. She had no intention to buy the house; but we gladly bought her story, until we eventually proved that she had been mistaken. The dame with the crystal, on the other hand, was not simply catching up with her past. She was on a mission to find the house she had inhabited . . . in a past life. Who sent her? Shirley MacLaine?

As I said, you have got to be prepared for all sorts. In view of such strange visitations and the negotiations that may ensue, I began to wonder whether I am to be the spider or the fly, the one that catches or the one getting caught. I was a latchkey child, so yarns spun from such material have always made a great impression on me. Grimm’s “The Wolf and the Seven Kids” was an early favorite. I, of course, cast myself in the role of the littlest kid, hiding inside the grandfather clock while my older sister was being devoured by a predatory trespasser whose entrance did not so much depend on brute force but on the slyness (and the piece of chalk) with which he altered his voice to impersonate a trusted caregiver.

The soft-spoken, smooth-talking outsider who draws you in or cajoles his way inside is a figure cut out for radio drama. Yes, radio drama. If that cooky cat can dangle her crystal, let me romance a whole set. The long-running Suspense program, for instance, offered its listeners some memorable updates of the lupine intruder sneaking in and the arachnoid charmer sneaking up on its prey.

“To Find Help” comes to mind. In it, homeowner Agnes Moorehead is being harrassed by young Frank Sinatra (18 January 1945) and Ethel Barrymore struggles to fend off Gene Kelly (6 January 1949). It is an edge-of-your-contested-porch melodrama commenting on and deriving its poignancy from the post-war demobilization and the subsequent housing crisis (a contemporary edge removed from Beware, My Lovely [1952], the inferior screen adaptation starring Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan).

On this day, 30 August, in 1945, it was Peter Lorre’s turn to come a-knocking. Co-written by Academy Award nominated Herbert Clyde Lewis, “Nobody Loves Me,” is a slight yet ideal vehicle for the aforementioned Mr. Lorre, who inhabits the role of an armed man forcing himself inside a police station to relieve himself of a burdensome tale many of the folks he encountered did not live to tell. Leave it to Lorre to make the wolf sound like a poor kid, to give the spider the qualities of a hapless fly.

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"A-spinning goes our weekly wheel of fortune . . ."

Well, here we go again. As the aforementioned “Major” Bowes used to say, “Around and around and around she goes,” referring to the spinning wheel on the Original Amateur Hour. A few years after Bowes took his final bow, Ted Mack (pictured) took over as host of the show, which, when revived in 1948, was both heard on the radio and seen on television. The concept has been going around and around as well, there being more amateurs than ever on television to root for or laugh at. Another season of The X Factor is currently underway in Britain, with Simon Cowell once again heading the panel of judges, rolling his eyes, and uttering his standard “if I’m being perfectly honest” until the winner is being declared by audience vote just in time for the release of the Christmas single.

Here is how casting director Marie Correll (wife of Amos ‘n’ Andy co-creator Charles Correll) described the auditions for the televised Amateur Hour to the readers of the Radio and Television Mirror back in the summer of 1949:

“The wonderful part is that auditions are open to everyone,” she tells you. “We get hundreds of letters a week and every letter is answered, although it may take from two to three weeks. Our staff sorts the mail geographically. We set dates and enclose application blanks for those close enough to New York to audition here. We tell the others about our out-of-town audition staff and give dates when it will be in their vicinity. But every affiliated station helps as a clearing house for local talent.” 

Application forms are numbered when they go out. Applicants are auditioned in numerical order on the day they appear. No favorites are played. Everybody gets the same chance. Even second and third chances. 

“It’s amazing how much performers can improve even in a matter of months sometimes,” Mrs. Correll says. “We’ve had talent audition, be rejected, write in later for another appointment and make the grade. We never discourage anyone. We try to get a little background on them, find out what they’re aiming for. If they are singers we sometimes make suggestions about numbers that may suit their voices better, though I must say that nine times out of ten they stick to the same numbers. And you’d be surprised how many come to the first audition with only one number prepared, staking everything on a single effort.” 

Space being at a premium even in New York’s huge Radio City, the room where hopefuls wait their turn is really a long corridor, flanked on both sides with chairs that leave only a narrow passageway between. Every chair is filled. Standees lean on their instrument cases, huddled in little groups. 

Youth and hope predominate here, with a sprinkling of the middle-aged and a few elders [. . .]. 

Tonight’s auditions are fairly typical. There are about half a dozen young boys, whose occupations were listed on their applications as shipping clerk, parcel post clerk, plasterer, salesman, and the like—all eager to break away from the routine of their jobs and get into the glamorous show business world. They sing the same numbers in about the same way. 

“It isn’t that they’re bad—they’re just not good enough,” Marie explains. 

There is a harmony team of five Negro boys, a choral group with an earnest leader, and two schoolboys who have written their own material. (Under “type of talent” on their application forms they had put, “Comedy—we hope!”).

Yes, our “weekly wheel of fortune” goes a-spinning, even though talent has long become secondary to hitting the no longer quite so elusive jackpot. Discontented, determined or delusional, they are lining up by the thousands for a chance to enter that allegedly “glamorous” realm of show business, to be enfranchised and marketed, which is why decent plasterers are harder to find these days than celebrities behind bars and disgruntled clerks prepare for their seconds of fame by slipping plastered behind the wheel . . .

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Taking Them by Storm

Well, how is this for an odd piece of cross-promotion: Linda Darnell selling face powder and a Hurricane picture. Did they really release Slattery’s Hurricane at the height of the season known for the weather phenomenon from which the film takes its title (no, not Slattery, silly)? According to the Internet Movie Database, the movie starring radio actor turned big screen tough guy Richard Widmark was indeed blowing into theaters during the month of August, back in 1949. Perhaps, these days that would be considered bad timing, a move to bring on a storm of protest for its lack of sensitivity. Besides, you try keeping your powder dry during a torrential downpour.

The pictured advertisement, featuring the alluring Ms. Darnell (who had earlier starred in Summer Storm), can be found in the August 1949 issue of Radio and Television Weekly, through the tattered pages of which I am currently leafing. Now, I have not seen the motion picture, which was radio-readied for Lux (rather than Woodbury) on 6 March 1950, with Maureen O’Hara in the Darnell part. Never mind that now. More interesting to me is that Slattery’s Hurricane was written by none other than Herman Wouk, the aforementioned radio writer whose first novel, Aurora Dawn (1946), was a satire of the advertising game and commercial broadcasting in America:

Aurora Dawn! 

[. . .] was the name of a soap; a pink, pleasant-smelling article distributed throughout the land and modestly advertised as the “fastest-selling” soap in America. Whether this meant that sales were transacted more rapidly with Aurora Dawn soap than with any other, the customer snatching it out of the druggist’s hand with impolite haste, flinging down a coin and dashing from the store, or whether the slogan was trying to say that its sales were increasing more quickly than the sales of any other cleansing bar; this is not known. Advertising has restored an Elizabethan elasticity to our drying English prose, often sacrificing explicitness for rich color. 

[The hero’s] purpose was [ . . .] to make the fastest-selling soap sell even faster. [He, one Andrew Reale,] was [. . .] employed [. . .] by the Republic Broadcasting Company, a vast free enterprise rivaled only by the United States Broadcasting System, another private property. These two huge corporations monopolized the radio facilities of the land in a state of healthy competition with each other, and drew their lifeblood from rich advertising fees which assured the public an uninterrupted flow of entertainment by the highest priced comedians, jazz singers, musicians, news analysts, and vaudeville novelties in the land—a gratifying contrast to the dreary round of classical music and educational programs which gave government-owned radio chains such a dowdy reputation in other countries.

Meanwhile, no cross-promotion could save Arctic Manhunt (1949) from obscurity. Announced in the same issue of Radio and Television Mirror, it was meant to convince both the “man-hunting brunette” and the “girl whose man needs—a little encouragement” that lipstick was indispensable to the survival of the species. As yet, no five people of either sex could be found who saw and care to cast their vote for Arctic Manhunt on the Internet Movie Database. Whether or not the advertised product “lasts—and LASTS and L-A-S-T-S,” especially under the conditions endured in the forecast melodrama, I am in no position to say; but memories of those promised “pulse-quickening” scenes certainly faded fast. It takes more than corporate windbags to take them by storm.

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Sorry, Long Rumba

Well, this isn’t exactly the stuff of Hollywood melodrama; but being cut off from the web for weeks—and hairs—on end is likely to have anyone channelling the none too blithe spirit of Mrs. Elbert Stevenson, the telecommunications-challenged anti-heroine of Lucille Fletcher’s “Sorry, Wrong Number.” I realize that “Sorry, No Broadband,” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it; nor does it sound right to be giving you the whole song and dance about it all whenever I do get a chance to vent publicly (that is, while not at home).

Still, the thought of getting one’s dial-uppance after years of making out like a broadbandit is just about as comforting as having the aforementioned First Lady of Suspense shriek bloody murder in your ears. These days, to be sure, Mrs. Stevenson would meet her well-timed end trying to make herself understood at some call center in India. Otherwise, this outcry from the play seems to fit our latest phone bill:

“[. . .] it’s positively driving me crazy. I’ve never seen such inefficient, miserable service.”

Pardon me for turning broadcastellan into an agony column. You see, we were given to understand that repairs of our phone line, apparently requiring the digging up of precious tarmac, would be put on hold so as not to disrupt local traffic . . . until September. I never guessed that my wanting to stay home at the computer would be deemed bad for tourism. To our relief, the phone started ringing again a few days ago; but the world wide web was still being spun without us.

So, I did not get to tell you about the production of West Side Story now playing at the local Arts Centre; or the complaints launched anonymously by a squeamish audience member voicing concerns about a simulated rape scene; or how the scene was subsequently changed so as not to offend, let alone harm the impressionables who should never be left with the impression that any show could go on without them in mind.

Apparently, West Side Story, written by former radio dramatist Arthur Laurents, is now a musical about infantile delinquents. Ours are not Happy Days for social realism. As in the age of the great radio theatricals, censorship is often nothing more than the arrogance of the few speaking up to silence what is quietly appreciated by the many. The world, it seems, is full of meddlesome Mrs. (and Mr.) Stevensons, in the spirit of providing vicarious relief through an imaginary throttling of whom on behalf of us, their long-suffering contemporaries, the revenge fantasy of “Sorry, Wrong Number” was conceived.

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Little Town Blues; or, Melting Away

Well, “it won’t be like that in town.” That is a remark you would have heard frequently, had you been eavesdropping in on us talking about our anticipated move out of the country later this month. As it turns out, we will have to wait far longer to prove or confute our hypotheses about the differences between urban and rural dwelling. Our plans to relocate to Aberystwyth, the Welsh seaside town romanticized in the quirky murder mysteries of Malcolm Pryce, have been thwarted. The potential buyer of our present abode has nixed the deal, making it impossible for us to buy the house currently owned by the person desirous to take possession of our buyer’s home. There’s a neat little triangle gone Bermuda.

Meanwhile, our cottage is once again cut off from the world, due to an ongoing problem with the telephone lines. I am in town now to file this report, sitting, in fact, not far from the Edwardian house (pictured) we were hoping to occupy. After the welcome interlude set aside for this lament, I am once again singing the blues where no one can hear me sigh . . .

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Not Growing Up With The Simpsons

Well, I am not one to multitask. I can only manage one thing at a time, which, if desirous to veil my ineptitude, I would turn into a virtue by declaring myself to be merely anxious to give everything my all. In fact, undivided attention is not easily achieved when keeping on track means struggling not to drown in the crosscurrents of concurrency. I find it hard to read in public places, cannot tie my laces without keeping my eyes on them, and have trouble talking on the phone while being in a state of motion. I may very well be incapable of growing what is commonly referred to as “up.” Going about life with such deliberation, it would take me too long to take all the requisite steps.

It also explains the latest gap in my online journal, as unnoticed as it or its bridging might have gone. Simply put, either I live or I write, the experience being well in advance of its expression. The past few days were spent experiencing: sipping tea (or Margaritas) with visiting novelist Lynda Waterhouse and spouse, taking Montague to the beach on an afternoon almost passing for summer, and attending the opening of Hervé and the Wolf: Saints and Their Beasts, an exciting series of new paintings by our friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins. To avoid becoming rather too refined in my tastes—cultural elitism being as outmoded as modernism, the movement that gave it birth by issuing a privately printed death warrant to the popular—I agreed to take in last weekend’s international box office chart-topper, The Simpsons Movie.

Now, I haven’t watched The Simpsons with any regularity since they got their own show after graduating from the Tracy Ullman Show back in the late 1980s, when Bart and his mischief were still the focal point of this dysfunctional family portrait. Turning the pages of old diaries and photo albums, I did not come across any reference to the show and the impression it made on me (pictured above, in still earlier days, gleefully ignorant of the cultural indoctrination then deemed suitable for children).

Revisiting Springfield after taking scarcely a peek at it in fifteen years, I had little difficulty catching up. The Simpsons do not seem to change. Theirs is a constancy impossible in non-animated TV fare (its inanimate sameness notwithstanding), but common for radio characters of the pre-TV age, whose “Perennial Adolescence” caused one contemporary listener to warn that

only a miracle can save America from debacle. Such people [as those of radio’s Aldrich Family] are unequipped to create or manage an effective nation, as unable to do that as they are to run their individual lives and face the challenges of home and neighborhood [. . .]. 

They will help to explain why it was that, back in the middle nineteen-hundreds, the most powerful nation on earth was also the most fumbling and ineffective. They will make compassionate the understanding that Americans of our time had lived so long in adolescent terms that when they were called upon for leadership in a world of crisis which demanded mature and wise decisions, they proved incompetent to make those decisions.

The Simpsons differ from the juvenile characters of old radio comedies, which largely avoided socio-political commentary. Marge, Homer, and their perennially prepubescent offspring are outwardly ageless; yet their daily lives reflect the concerns of our times. Without losing their vigor or changing their looks, a sameness at once satisfying and comforting to us mortals, The Simpsons continue to be relevant because they exploit what is most talked of so as to remain talked about. As survival artists who escape time itself, they are permitted to get away with much, especially when it comes to expressing what we dare not face because it requires us to change.

Perhaps, this feature-length episode is rather too literally topical in that it tries hard not to get under our skin. Too careful not to offend too many too much, The Simpsons Movie takes no side in the current international debate from which it culls its material as from so many recycle bins. It sanitizes the fears about which we cannot quite come clean. The “Irritating Truth” is that we are more apt to laugh at than question ourselves, to accept our failures rather than to change our ways.