Category: Radio Plays

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On This Day in 1993: Exit of Vincent Price Delayed by Diary Entry

Like Gwendolen Fairfax, I am wont to consult my diary. After all, “one should always have something sensational to read.” I will no doubt hear this line again very soon, when the Ridiculusmus production of The Importance of Being Earnest comes to town on 7 November. But I digress. Aside from being compelled by a desire to revel in the “sensational,” I stuck my nose into one of my old journals today to find out whether I had taken any notice of the passing of Vincent Price back on 25 October 1993. Though not particularly impressed by his acting in 1950s or ’60s horror films, I have always had an eager ear for the tone of his sophisticated, suave, and slightly sardonic voice.

Now, according to the notoriously selective and inaccurate accounts of the world’s goings-on and departures I scribbled into a series of black volumes over a decade prior to this my first public and somewhat more thoroughly fact-checked journal, Price gave up the ghost on 26 October 1993. My delayed response (or flawed chronicling) led me to remark upon the “uncannily” timed television broadcast of a Price biography on that day, a documentary that was part of the regular schedule, rather than one of those hastily squeezed in tributes. It was as if the obituary had been anticipated by some clairvoyant programming executive in the broadcasting house on haunted hill. Accuracy can be so soberingly unromantic.

Not so an exposure to Mr. Price’s voice. To this day, the mannered speech of the man who laughed to the beat of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” rings in my ears whenever I am in the mood for another adventure of The Saint; and, as this item in the broadcastellan archive attests, I am not infrequently drawn that way. The father of the Saint, Leslie Charteris, may have thought little of Price’s interpretation of Simon Templar (alias the “Robin Hood of modern crime”) and, aside from collecting royalties, had no involvement in the radio series when Price took over the role. It is still Price (rather than, say, Roger Moore) whom I identify most with the part.

These days, UK television viewers may take a gander at George Sanders in the Saint movies of the late 1930s (The Saint Strikes Back, for instance, was shown only last Sunday); but I keep missing them. No matter. In case you have checked out (or, thank you very much, participated in) the first broadcastellan poll and wondered who would rather give up the ocular than the olfactory sense—one of those benighted creatures was yours truly.

So, now that I have the calendric confusions cleared up and my senses prioritized, I shall recall Price to life tonight by listening to another one of his many radio performances. Say, which voice has been haunting you lately?

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Loving Mysteries: Between the Martin Mansion and Bleak House

Well, I am still hoping other internet tourists will join me in rediscovering I Love a Mystery beginning this Halloween (see previous post for details). I know, it might seem sacrilegious to ignore the anniversary of that most famous of all Halloween pranks, “The War of the Worlds,” in favor of Carlton E. Morse’s serial thriller. Actually, “The War” was waged on the night before Halloween (30 October 1938), which means that I can listen forward without remorse to reviewing the first installment of “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” a neo-gothic mystery starring Mercedes McCambridge (as the tortured Charity Martin) and Tony Randall (as Reggie Yorke, one of the three intrepid investigators, pictured above, who are called upon to examine the Martin’s rotten family tree). So, consider tuning in and coming along for the ride.

In the meantime, I am also looking forward to the new adaptation of Bleak House starring Charles Dance (as Mr. Tulkinghorn) and Gillian Anderson (as Lady Dedlock). It has been nearly ten years since last I read the novel, my favorite among Dickens’s works; so perhaps I won’t notice the liberties taken with the original. Beginning this Thursday on BBC One, the complex melodrama will be played out in fifteen parts, just like Morse’s “Thing.”

Not that the comparisons end there. There are deadly secrets, the proverbial skeletons in the closet, and a curse on both of those decidedly bleak houses, the Martin mansion and Dickens’s eponymous edifice. The overused label “soap opera” has been attached to the BBC production, along with other disclaimers, such as the introduction of new characters; whatever the terminology, serialization and bowdlerization are quite in keeping with Victorian practices.

I might put aside my copy of Don Quixote for the duration and reread Bleak House, now that the days are getting shorter and the winds are a-wuthering, if only to re-encounter the carefree Harold Skimpole and the careworn Richard Carstone, two characters of whom I once fancied myself some kind of composite.

Perhaps I’m someone else among the dramatis personae now; that’s one of the pleasures of rereading. As long as I won’t turn into Mr. Turveydrop. . . . Say, what kind of Dickensian character are you?

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An Invitation to Murder by Installments!

Last night I was in on Charlie Chan’s Secret (1936). If somewhat deficient in atmosphere, this old whodunit has many of the key elements of early twentieth-century mystery melodramas like Seven Keys to Baldpate and The Cat and the Canary. Let’s see: there’s a large family fortune and plenty of heirs who’d like to lay claim to it; bogus visitations from the realm the dead; murders ingeniously plotted but thwarted; and a wealthy elderly matriarch in a neo-gothic mansion who is in desperate need of a detective to sort out the family closet.

Come to think of it, that sounds rather a lot like “The Thing That Cries in the Night,” one of the sequences of Carlton E. Morse’s radio thriller I Love a Mystery. Now, there’s a serial I wouldn’t mind reviewing . . . again.As I said previously, I don’t have anything against radio serials, if only they did not insist on such a commitment on my part to be intelligible, let alone enjoyable. Of course, I Love a Mystery is not one of those open-ended daytime serials that go anywhere, and nowhere fast. By the way, I did follow up what happened to Mrs. Goldberg and her chicken venture, but still couldn’t make much sense of the not-going-ons over at Molly’s house.

Morse’s storytelling is byzantine, to be sure, but it is not interminable; each cliffhanger takes you closer to a solution, even though the inevitable conclusion is never as satisfying as our journey and gradual advancement toward it.

On 31 October 1949, the East Coast revival of I Love a Mystery began its investigation of “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” For fifteen nights, listeners were invited to follow the bizarre adventures of three soldiers of fortune—Jack, Doc and Reggie—in an old house whose closets were filled with the proverbial family skeletons. Even though I devoted a lengthy chapter to it in my dissertation, I have never enjoyed this serial as it was offered to the radio audience—as a mystery whose solution is purchased on an installment plan.

So, inspired by the shared viewings going on over at the Charlie Chan Family Home, I am proposing a shared listening experience of “The Thing That Cries in the Night.” It would require little more than ten minutes each day to listen to each of the fifteen episodes (available online here) and a few minutes more to exchange ideas about it on this blog. If you miss an episode, you can always catch up with the convoluted plot here. I will even continue my reviews while away for a visit to my former home, the Big Apple.

Anyway, let me know whether you accept my invitation to go in search of the mysterious “Thing,” starting this Halloween . . .

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On This Day in 1930: Old Sleuth Re-emerges in New Medium

Well, before taking a moment to give my page a bit of a makeover and getting all gimmicky by setting up a poll to encourage reader participation (despite my own difficulties with such surveys), I tuned in again to BBC 4 last night and watched another fine British thriller: Edward Dmytryk’s Obsession (1949). Sufficiently motivated by the experience, I promptly cast my vote at IMDb, which is something I am just getting into the habit of doing.

Obsession is told mainly from the perspective of the criminal, a jealous husband determined to do away with his wife’s lover; eventually, Scotland Yard is on his case, and the storytelling loses some of its focus as the inspector keeps calling and occasionally takes the camera along with him. Still, with its emphasis on the execution and prevention rather than the detection of a crime, Obsession is a psychological thriller as opposed to a whodunit, the genre revolutionized in the 1880s by Conan Doyle and his famed Sherlock Holmes stories.

I have always enjoyed a solid whodunit, even though I prefer them in print instead of visualized on the screen or dramatized for radio, as I explained previously. I nonetheless put aside my copy of Agatha Christie’s Poirot puzzler The Clocks to commemorate a milestone in radio mystery drama. It was on this day, 20 October, in 1930, that master detective Holmes and his sidekick-chronicler, the logic-deficient Dr. Watson solved their first mystery on the air.

The mystery, “The Speckled Band,” was a familiar one, to be sure, as was the actor who assumed the role of the brilliant if conceited armchair detective. The performer before the microphone that night was none other than William Gillette, who had not only played Holmes more than a thousand times before but had rewritten some of his adventures to create a stage melodrama that was to serve as his star vehicle for over three decades.

As a Theatre Magazine critic pointed out, Gillette “himself cut the radio score, arranged by Edith Meiser [. . .], directed his cast, and spoke into the microphone from the special glass-curtained stage of the National Broadcasting Company’s Times Square studio” atop the theater that had been “the scene of Gillette’s farewell return to the footlights” earlier that year.

Gillette was already in his late 70s and did not return to the microphone for subsequent episodes; but, being described by a New York Times reviewer as standing “erect and unbending” and as having a “clear, precise, vibrant” voice, the aged thespian was lured out of retirement now and again to play the part for several years longer, returning to the airwaves once more for the 18 November 1935 Lux Radio Theatre production of his stage success.

Holmes survived Gillette’s death in 1937 and continued for another decade to solve mysteries on US radio, even though he had to face plenty of competition on the blood-speckled bandwidths. Like the motion picture series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the Holmes adventures on the air also played an important role in home front motivation, endearing Americans to their at times veddy peculiar and snobby sounding allies in Britain. After the war, the British reclaimed Holmes and continued to dramatize his adventures on BBC radio.

Although I was not immediately taken by such pastiche, the American dramatizations eventually won me over with their charm. Retaining Watson as the narrator added much to the cozy atmosphere of these miniature mysteries; the banter between Holmes and his friend supplied the wit; and the thrills were not wanting either, as aforementioned writer-adaptor Meiser managed to keep the guessing game going despite the challenge of making the short plays intelligible by reducing the number of suspects and dropping fairly conspicuous hints.

So, as the sun is setting earlier or refuses to appear altogether on these gray autumn days, I will sit back more often to join Dr. Watson at his fireside, listening attentively to his tales of intrigue and murder. Just don’t call it an obsession . . .

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On This Day in 1942: Orson Welles Lures Fred Allen into the Sewers

Last night, watching BBC 4, I was in for a cinematic treat: Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). Cinematographically stunning and compellingly told, it is not unlike Reed’s best-known film, The Third Man, particularly in its investigation of that most dangerous game, the manhunt. Both films are 20th-century updates of novels like Caleb Williams or Les Miserables, stories of pursuit that challenge readers to distinguish between what is right and what is just, between law and ethics. The backdrops are often dark and seedy—the slums, dumps, the sewers. Contrasted with the dwellings of the elite, they serve as reminders that the dregs of society are not commoners but discarded ideals.

Welles found himself trapped in the sewers in both Les Miserables and The Third Man; and both stories were adapted for radio, starring Welles. On this day, 18 October, in 1942. Welles made another descent into the muck of humanity, this time to have his revenge on Fred Allen, the radio wit who had mocked him once too often.

The confrontation between Hugo’s Javert and Jean Valjean, that clash between ethics and law, was reduced to a mismatch of lowbrow and highbrow art as played out by two quintessential middlebrow artists, radio comedian Fred Allen and Shadow graduate-turned-thespian Wunderkind Orson Welles. Could radio and literature be reconciled? Could the airwaves be a fount of high culture?

Presumably, Welles had come to the realization that he was “getting along in years” and that he could “no longer carry on alone.” In search of a co-star “with a flair for the buskin,” he turned to Allen and offered him the role of Javert in Les Miserables.

As it turns out, however, Welles was not prepared to share the stage. He had to remain in charge of every aspect of the production and could not bring himself to letting Allen utter even a single line. Flattery soon turned into humiliation, and Allen began to protest:

ALLEN. Now look, Orson, I don’t want to hog the whole thing.  But in two acts all I’ve done so far is knock on a door and blow a whistle.  Now, after all, I’m an actor, not a soundman.  When do I get to read some lines?

WELLES.  The next scene is all yours, Fred. Your speech is the climax of the entire play.

ALLEN.  Well now we’re getting some place. What’s next?

WELLES.  In this final scene you trail me through the sewers of Paris.

ALLEN.  Oh, the sewers.

WELLES.  You finally corner me single-handed.  There we stand, face to face.  I have just a few words and then you speak.

ALLEN.  I speak.  Well, that sounds good.  Let’s go.

(Music: heavy, then fades.)

WELLES.  Mon Doo! Alone in this sewer! Trapped like a rat who nightly crawls through this hideous muck of the city.  The gloomy darkness, this narrow archway above my head, these two slimy corridor walls.  (Hysteric laugh.) Oh, but hark! That sloshing through the muck. Javert! At last you’ve cornered me, Javert! Don’t talk, Javert! Before you seal my doom, I would speak for the last time. You will never take Jean Valjean alive, Javert. (Laughs.)  The water in this sewer is rising, Javert.  I am six feet nine.  You, Javert, are five feet two.  The water rises, Javert.  There is no turning back.  The water! Higher, higher.  Now, Javert, you have Jean Valjean at your mercy.  Pronounce my doom.  Speak, Javert.  Speak.

ALLEN.  (Gargles.)

Thus, the wit of Fred Allen, radio’s smartest satirist, is drowned in a display of misguided aspirations. As I put it in Etherized Victorians, the promise of radio as a purveyor of great literature is “exposed as so much hogwash.” US radio artists were often called upon to ridicule that which neither sponsors nor network executives were willing to touch: so-called high art (including popular literature of the past that, like Hugo’s novel, had just enough patina to appear precious).

It was easier for producers and audiences alike to deride and dismiss as affected anything that might effectively challenge the status quo or the intellect. In the best games of pursuit, the lines between wrong and right become blurred; in the radio game, at its commercial best, the distinctions between what is wrong and right for the greater American public were always made with comforting clarity.

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On This Day in 1948: Boris Karloff Gets Himself In and Out of a “Beastly Silly Wheeze of a hole!”

“Hole!” said Mr. Polly, and then for a change, and with greatly increased emphasis: “‘Ole!” He paused, and then broke out with one of his private and peculiar idioms: “Oh! Beastly Silly Wheeze of a hole!” —H. G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly (1909)

Well, we’ve all been there, I guess; call it a rut, a depression, or down in the dumps. A hole by any other name is just as deep. To look on while someone you love is stuck in one can make you as miserable as dwelling there yourself; it seems difficult to find a way out either way. One could throw a book, I suppose, in lieu of a rope. Light enough to be hit by without sustaining injury, but profound enough to make what you might call an impact, The History of Mr. Polly is just the right volume to toss. While not exactly a guide to better living without chemistry, it sure is comforting—a friendly reminder to anyone who is deeply dissatisfied with the “hole” of life that it is possible to get out or on with it somehow.

In Mr. Polly’s case, getting out involves a botched suicide attempt, arson and insurance fraud, an unreliable pistol, a pair of stolen trousers, and the fortuitous departure of an abject scoundrel. I didn’t suggest there’s an easy way out, and neither does the author, H. G. Wells.

Middle-aged, mismatched, and miserable, Mr. Polly has very nearly gone crackers; but he learns, at last, that a change of luck or pace is not beyond his own powers. On this day, 17 October, in 1948, Boris Karloff assumed the role of the man in the proverbial ditch, seizing the rare opportunity to step onto the stage for a noteworthy stab at reinvention.

Karloff could probably identify with Wells’s antihero, considering that the actor had been in the beastly hole of typecasting for far too long and was, after a string of horror movies, in danger of becoming a mere caricature. The Grinch of box office calculations had absconded with his thespian options.

The NBC University Theater, a radio program that featured adaptations of literary works of fiction and provided brief lectures between the acts, gave the soft-spoken Londoner an opportunity to take off the Halloween costume he’d been dealt by Hollywood’s costume department and put on the mask of comedy instead.

Some three years later, when Anthony Pelissier’s motion picture adaptation of the novel opened in New York City, the audience was faced with a Mr. Polly who had the features and figure of John Mills; but on radio, it was Karloff who inhabited the role in a moving study of malady conquered and hope restored.

Let’s assume life is a broadcast studio. Consider the possibilities. Grab that microphone, my friend. I’ll be listening.

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On This Day in 1941: Molly Goldberg Nearly Chickens Out

Today, I spent so much time updating my homepage, surfing for internet television channels, and catching up with yesterday’s X Factor (rooting for Brenda, Andy, and Maria), that I neglected to commemorate the birthdays of Eugene O’Neill and Angela Lansbury (and discuss their respective radio connections). Instead, given the temporal restrictions, I decided to take in a 9-minute episode of one of radio’s earliest domestic serials, The Goldbergs.

I don’t mind listening to daytime radio serials. I certainly don’t condemn them outright; nor do I call them “soap operas,” for the same reason I don’t label crime dramas or variety shows “after shave thrillers” and “cigarette follies.” True, the so-called soaps (or washboard weepers) were largely manufactured by the makers of bubble baths and detergents. Still, it is wrong to single them out as being mere product placement opportunities, since promotional efforts also defined (or at least influence the content of) Jack Benny’s Lucky Strikes Program, The Lux Radio Theatre, and a great many other sponsored series.

The main problem I have with serials, as opposed to episodic or anthology dramas, is that I don’t give them enough time to grow on me or that too many installments are no longer extant to assist me in fostering an appreciation. In other words, I do not want to get engrossed and could not, anyway.

I do like Molly Goldberg; but she can—and occasionally does—get on my nerves. She is too frazzled, too neurotic, too much of a stereotype at times; whatever her accomplishments as a wife and mother, she too often fishes for sympathy, rather than compliments. Take the confession, for instance, that she was nearly too embarrassed to make on this day, 16 October, in 1941.

The entire episode could be summed up in one sentence: With considerable difficulty, Molly can be induced to admit that she has invested money in a friend’s possibly dubious poultry business. In this particular script, Gertrude Berg left out the story and depended solely on her portrayal of the kindhearted matriarch she created.

The stalling becomes a bit too obvious, and eventually desperate and tiresome. I’ve got nothing tonight, you can just hear Berg saying as she sits at her desk (pictured above), but I’ll pull it off because my public loves to hear Molly struggle.

Sure, I love you, Molly, and I appreciate the fact that you didn’t expect I’d be listening to your radio program today (with avian flu on my mind); still, parcel out a more generous piece of plot for me and I might stop by for another visit. After all, quite a few successive installments are available from October 1941, a period rife with war anxieties and home front preparations for inevitable shortages in food and consumer goods. Don’t count your chickens, Molly—there’s trouble ahead!

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How a Picture Perfect Brief Encounter Dissolved into a Not-So-Still Life

Last night, when it was time to dim the lights, set up the screen, and decide upon a movie to take in, I could be convinced to leave Broadway and Hollywood behind to make it David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945). Mind you, it did not require much coaxing. I purchased a copy of the film a few weeks ago, but believed myself to be not deserving of experiencing it just yet. Some motion pictures are so grand that they demand not only our attention but our emotional receptiveness.

I have always thought it possible, and indeed imperative, to approach art with a keen eye and an open heart, to feel it and to feel like thinking about it at the same time. To examine Brief Encounter without being enveloped by it would be tantamount to noting the ingredients of a great meal without taking time to savor it.

Only after I had dried the tears I was neither inclined nor able to hold back, did I go in search of another interpretation of the story—cinema reconstituted as radio drama. A while back, I did as much with Lean’s Blithe Spirit, but knew right away that, in this case, radio could not hold a candle to a portrait so delicately outlined and exquisitely lit.

When the Theatre Guild reworked both Brief Encounter and Still Life, the Noel Coward play of which the film is an adaptation, the show’s producers made a number of sensible choices. They managed to bring Ingrid Bergman to the microphone to assume the role of Laura Jesson, the married woman who inwardly rehearses the miracle and misery of her recent indiscretion rather than confessing it openly to the husband beside her. Subtle and dignified, Bergman is perfect for the part, her emotive voice well suited to capturing moments of dignity under the assault of passion.

At the time of the broadcast (6 April 1947), Bergman starred on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, along with Sam Wanamaker and Romney Brent. Both her costars were heard in the Guild’s “Still Life,” with Wanamaker as Laura’s lover and Brent as her husband. Unlike Bergman, the two male leads do not quite communicate the vulnerability with which Trevor Howard and Cyril Raymond invested their parts.

Watching the film, I was under the impression that Laura was tormented by her overwhelming emotions, whereas the radio version suggested that she was torn apart by the two disparate men in her life, by the one wanting so little and the other demanding so much. What contributed to this impression was the way in which the adaptation by radio playwright and noted broadcast historian Erik Barnouw reframed Laura’s narrative without having access to a camera’s perspectival manipulations.

Lean’s film opens with the lovers’ last parting at the train station, a final farewell rendered furtive and mute by the sudden intrusion of one of Laura’s chatty acquaintances. Before the story of Laura’s affair unfolds in retrospect, the viewer already knows that something went terribly wrong for her, that the man who merely touches her shoulder has a stronger hold over her than she can permit herself to make public. Close-ups convey Laura’s grief, her isolation.

The radio version, on the other hand, opens with a scene of domestic life, as Laura’s husband struggles to control his two children who are unwilling to go to sleep before their mother returns home, presumably from a day of shopping. The listener is thus encouraged to prejudge Laura’s actions, to question the indiscretion of an inattentive mother who leaves her charge in the care of her husband while amusing herself with another man. Before she utters even one word of remorse, Laura is already a marked woman. In other words, whereas radio listeners are invited to accuse or pardon her, the film audience is given access to Laura’s own sense of guilt, her inner turmoil.

Generally, radio plays are quite capable of performing close-ups by means of whispered or closely-miked narration; in this particular cinematic challenge, however, the camera suggests so much more than unillustrated speech can express. When Laura acts on the impulse to end her life, her movements and features (pictured above) bespeak the horror that is her emotional imbalance.

In Barnouw’s adaptation, Laura merely talks in retrospect of having wanted to “throw [herself] under his [that is, her lover’s] train”—an unfortunate prosaic shortcut for the sweep and sway of Lean’s storytelling, aurally underscored images that reminded me, despite my love for the non-visual medium, what a sacrifice it can be to take leave of one’s complementary senses.

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On This Day in 1953: Business as Bloody Usual on the “gaudiest, the most violent, the lonesomest mile in the world”

Well, Broadway is no longer the stuff of romance; having cleaned up its act in the dull spirit of corporate greed, it no longer is the “gaudiest, the most violent, the lonesomest mile in the world,” as it was once eulogized in hard-boiled and slightly over-cooked prose on the US radio thriller series Broadway Is My Beat (1949-54). Still, since I am returning to the Big Apple next month, having just booked my flight, I am going to rekindle my own romance with Manhattan by following Detective Danny Clover on his beat somewhere between or around Times Square and Columbus Circle.

On this day, 14 October, in 1953, Clover walked once again past “the hawkers, the gawkers, the ‘hurry up’ boys and the ‘slow down’ girls” to find himself confronted with some suitably sordid business of jealousy and murder—the “Cora Lee” case.

It’s “party time” on East 63rd. The shrill laughter of a drunken woman and the breaking of glass tells us at once that this ain’t a black tie affair. College graduate Cora Lee is in hot water; anyway, her head’s in a tub filled with it. The young woman very nearly drowned, and the bruise on her head suggests that she didn’t take the dive on her own free will. Now, the woman who reported the incident resents being thought of as a suspect. “You’re a stinker,” she tells Clover’s assistant. “And that’s the word I use in mixed company.” Cora comes to, eventually; but everyone around her, including her husband and her father, is too drunk to be of any use to her or the police.

A few days later, the “wild dame” celebrates her recovery with a few drinks in the company of husband and friends, party people who keep living it up while Cora is stretched out dead on the floor with a knife in her heart. Good-natured bunch, ain’t it?

“I was in college with Cora,” one of the drunken guests, a gal with feathers in her hair, tells Clover without a hint of compassion. “I knew her for two weeks, and I said to myself: there’s a classmate who’ll never see thirty. One way or another, she’ll never make it.” The deceased, she claims, was “the most, jealous, vicious, detestable, beautiful girl in the class of 1950.” Who might have killed her? Well, “anyone with a knife,” she sneers, especially the young woman who is so eager now to take Cora’s place as hostess of the merry gathering, offering highballs and sandwiches to the detective while threatening to do “damage” with her “high heel” if the feathered one doesn’t keep her mouth shut.

With all that talk going on, there isn’t time left to weave much of a mystery; but the thrill of listening to realist crime dramas like Gangbusters, Dragnet, or Twenty-first Precinct is not generated by suspense or surprise anyway. The criminal, whoever it happens to be, will in all likelihood be apprehended somehow. The excitement lies in going along for the ride, in the privilege of being in the presence of criminal elements, of witnessing the tawdry and treacherous, the vile and violent from a comforting distance.

With a dash of purple prose and a helping of humor, Broadway Is My Beat is as gaudy and violent as the formerly “lonesomest” mile it evokes in word and sound. As white as the Great White Way is nowadays, you just won’t get that kind of kick out of strolling past the Olive Garden or watching the out-of-towners going around on the Toys “R” Us ferris wheel. Let Detective Clover take you on a tour . . .

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Hoping for More Scandal; or, When the “head’s modern, though the trunk’s antique”

As I mentioned yesterday, I had the pleasure of being lectured on sentiment and sensationalism in one of the back rows of The School for Scandal. It was a lesson conveyed with great wit and delivered without frills by the Northern Broadsides theatre company. I didn’t expect Sheridan’s characters to gossip in marked northern accents and thought Maria was less of a prize now that she was shouting just as angrily as the “odious” and “disagreeable” people around her. Generally, however, the coarseness of tongue lent realism to the idle chatter of the upper crust.

The Radio Guild players in 1930

Gone was the Cowardian disparity between elocution and vulgarity, between high class and mean instincts. Rather than being vocal acrobats in a Wildean vein, the graduates of this School were crass, brazen, and dangerous mudslingers. Only Joseph Surface was given the slick treatment in voice and appearance, a suitable gloss to reflect his falsehood. What might an American radio production do with such caricatures, I wondered, and went in pursuit of more Scandal on the air.

When aiming at respectability, US radio of the 1930s and 1940s not infrequently availed itself of British drama. Soap operas were for the kitchen—but Shakespeare and Pinero were for the parlor. As I put it in Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on so-called old-time radio, Sir Benjamin Backbite’s remark about Mrs. Evergreen is an apt comment on US radio drama, a novel form of production that often exhausted itself in re-productions.”

“[W]hen she has finished her face,” Sir Benjamin quips, the unseen Mrs. Evergreen “joins it on so badly to her neck, that she looks like a mended statue, in which the connoisseur may see at once that the head’s modern, though the trunk’s antique.” Now, radio drama truly was a “mended statue,” a patched-up art form that rarely resembled the genuine article it tried to copy.

In radio, the trunk (the smart console) was modern, but the head, the boardroom of executives in charge of programming, was decidedly “antique,” that is, backward-looking rather than avant-garde when it came to defining wholesome or commercially viable entertainment. To be sure, in the case of Pre-Victorian plays like Sheridan’s Scandal, mending the statue might have required some whitewash to tone down its display of adultery and cover up its hints of abortion.

Unfortunately, the productions of Scandal as heard on the Radio Guild program are no longer extant, since no transcription have been preserved or recovered. Indeed, nearly the entire series seems to have been destroyed, an act as scandalous as the reputation of Sheridan’s characters. This is all the more lamentable considering that the Radio Guild (pictured above, anno 1930) was the first major theater anthology on US network radio. Beginning in 1929, just days after Wall Street laid its infamous egg, it brought free theater into the homes of millions, producing plays ranging from Shakespeare to Wilde, from Goldsmith to Boucicault.

Even if its producers kept their heads mainly in antique trunks, Radio Guild surely sounds like a statue worth mending, if only its pieces had been scattered instead of obliterated. So, if you find a fragment, please fling it my way.