Tag: Radio Primer

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Old-time Radio Primer: K Stands for Knowledge

Well, I don’t know. About my last poll, I mean. With this survey, the responses to which are captured below, I wanted to raise questions about the ways in which the mass media reflect our everyday lives or fail to do so. Can we rely on the media to represent—to talk to and tell of—those who are exposed to them? Will future generations watch archive footage of Big Brother or Desperate Housewives in order to learn about life in America during these early years of the 21st century? To what extent can popular culture serve as a time capsule by means of which scholars yet unborn might presume to enter our minds and mine our psyche?

The question of representation through media is of interest to anyone who, in some aspect of his or her existence, is not or cannot conform with the norms propagated and enforced by them. To anyone, in short. We all have qualities that, we sense, marginalize us, be it a particular of our physical being, our mentality, or our upbringing. Whether simplistic or symbolic, popular culture cannot reflect all that renders us distinctive. It is apt to alienate us at times, to create moments in which we do not feel that we are being considered or addressed, moments in which we resent being inaccurately depicted or altogether ignored.

Such instances do not merely affirm our individuality; they make apparent that those creating popular culture have a vested interest in shaping us in their image. Yet to demand that media be more sensitive to our differences may result in their leveling, an insistence on universality that makes popular culture even more generic. Political correctness, which is largely the invention of litigious societies, accomplishes no less.

However bland its offerings may strike those whose senses have been dulled by long exposure to pictures that leave little to the imagination, radio in the pre-television age (the 1930s, ‘40s, and early ‘50s) was not nearly as concerned about offending minorities as television is today. It was indifferent to millions whom sponsors did not consider relevant, either because those millions were unlikely to become potential consumers of the products advertised or because their business was not deemed desirable as it clashed with the image in light of which advertisers wanted goods and services to be received.

It does not follow, however, that we cannot glean knowledge about American life from recordings of soap operas, comedy programs, and thrillers. The soap operas of the 1930s may drive home anxieties about the depression; 1940s radio comedies will tell you much about life on the homefront; and the thrillers of the 1950s create more or less readily translatable scenarios of fear, prejudice and hatred during the McCarthy era.

Propaganda and advertising, it is true, were meant to trigger anticipated reactions, even though the reactions of those tuning in can never be entirely predicted, which, in turn, can make the most generic program highly personal to anyone listening. Yet there is nothing intrinsic in the recording of such programs that gives us access to those very personal responses. The theater of the mind is still open to us today; but how about the mind of anyone else staging productions in this legendary venue?

Faced with the challenge of tracing real lives in presumably faceless escapism, it might help to conceive of popular culture not so much as a reflector of everyday life but as its generator; not, to modify the old and meaningful analogy, as a shallow reflecting pool, but as a radiating sun. Programs create their audiences, in a real and literal sense. And while not all minds are quite so cooperative, the sun of these broadcasts nonetheless captures the shadows of those who were cast or outcast by this light.

Instead of listening for echoes of those who once sat before their receivers, we might discover them in the act of reception. All it takes is the imagination and empathy of today’s listeners to turn indistinct outlines into responsive minds as distinctive as we believe our own to be. To consider chiefly as occasions to determine, dream of or deride otherness (as historic, nostalgic, or camp) diminishes the opportunity of reading with an understanding ear.

This is by no means my last word on the subject of radio as a depot of cultural knowledge or a dispenser of knowledge about culture. As these contradictory reflections suggest, I don’t have any definitive answers to the question I posed; if ever I develop them, I hope to have the humility to become suspicious of my simplifying mind. As always, I prefer to keep circulating ideas rather than put a full stop to the inquiry.

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Old-time Radio Primer: A Stands for Audience

Well, we all crave it. An audience, I mean. Not that “audience” is the most precise term for visitors, readers, or spectators. Audiences are people who come to audit—to hear and judge—a performance as sound; and to no medium does the experience of aural appreciation seem more germane than to radio, the only forum in which a single recital has been known to have come, instantaneously, to the ears of nearly half the US population. So, I am opening my “Old-time Radio Primer,” as announced yesterday (and as inspired by Norman Corwin’s 1941 play “Radio Primer”) with just that word: “audience.”

Is “audience” a synonym of “radio listeners”? “Audience” generally implies membership, partaking of something or taking something in, whether singly or jointly, as an individual belonging to a certain group—be it a group of theatregoers or Roman Catholics. Radio listening, however, requires no such membership; nor is it a group experience.

The so-called members of the radio audience are separated, often tuning in alone. They are not unlike the anonymous websurfer in their isolation; but, back in the pre-TV era of the 1930s and ’40s, tuners-in were even more remote and less interactive than today’s rovers of the blogosphere. Radio listeners might talk to friends about a certain broadcast; they might even call in or write letters to a station or sponsor; but the interactivity of what has been called “yesterday’s internet” was nonetheless limited.

It was a removal from the public eye that was rather daunting to many performers, especially those coming to radio from the defunct vaudeville circuit. Actors standing behind the microphone in an empty, austere studio might have thought something like this (you’ve got to have some rhyme in a Corwin inspired primer):

An audience before you
Is easy to assess:
Folks sneer, snore or adore you,
Respond as you address.

It’s not so for the speaker
Behind the microphone;
The limelight sure seems bleaker
Faced millionfold alone.

This sense of isolation from the public made stage-trained performers reluctant to step into the theater of the mind. A notable exception was the great Alla Nazimova, an actress who very much embraced the opportunity to dis-appear on the air. “Always,” she confessed to the delight of a decidedly catty reviewer of one of her radio performances, “I have hated audiences. Always!”

Producers and sponsors of radio entertainment were concerned about the medium’s missing group dynamic. What would induce listeners at home to sit still during commercials, let alone purchase the articles advertised? To create this sense of a shared experience, broadcasters resorted to some aural trickery that has shaped television and influences it to this day.

I am referring, of course, to the “live studio audience.” In the 1930s and ’40s, most radio broadcasting was live; and it was widely believed that radio plays would sound even more like live entertainment, or at any rate more lively and interactive, if spectators were to come to the studio to howl and clap on cue.

There was considerable dispute over this definition of “live audience” as referring to studio visitors who could testify—through laughter and applause—that a certain performer truly was there, appearing in the flesh for some to see while dematerializing as sound for all to hear.

As I discuss it in Etherized Victorians, my study on old-time radio, those who believed in the autonomy of radio drama as an art very much resented this spectacle approach to soundstaging, which gave listeners at home the impression that they were not witnessing the real thing because they never got to see the stars performing for them.

In a statement read at the close of the Campbell Playhouse presentation of Liliom (22 October 1939), Helen Hayes reminded listeners that a program barring spectators was

a real radio show, produced for the air, without a stage, without a curtain, without an audience in the studio. It allows the producer to produce and the actors to act for their real radio audience, for those millions of listeners sitting at their radio sets in their own homes all over the country.

Today, of course, “live studio audiences” in the age of time-delayed transmission and laughtrack accompaniment are neither truly live nor, for the most part, present in the studio. Given such progress, could I be hearing a chorus of disapproval?