Tag: Wales

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Felicitous Tintinkering; or, Take Note, Mr. Spielberg

Considering that he inspired the adventures of Indiana Jones, Tintin should do well under Steven Spielberg’s direction. Little is known as yet about the project; and I wonder whether Spielberg, preparing the boy reporter for his first Hollywood outing, is paying attention to the Young Vic production of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, which I caught at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff prior to its return to London, where the production will soon reopen in the West End. What an inspired piece of pop culture this dramatization of Tintin in Tibet (1958-59) turned out to be.

I was not prepared to be charmed. I expected something along the lines of the previously reviewed Thirty-Nine Steps (which will soon open on Broadway); but, despite its wit, David Greig and Rufus Norris’s stage version was not so much tongue-in-cheek as it was true to and respectful toward its source without being slavish in its fidelity.

The psychedelic opening sequence had me worried a bit. Although entirely in keeping with Tintin in Tibet, which draws on surrealism to explore the dreams and visions of its central characters, the parading of famous Hergé figures who have no part in the story had something of a routinely choreographed theme park performance. From this costume ball, however, a number of strong characters soon emerged.

Matthew Parish was ideally cast in the title role, conveying both the vigor and vulnerability of our hero, who is driven to the point of madness and despair in his selfless yet lives-endangering quest to find and rescue a friend whom everyone assumes to have perished in a plane crash. Particularly haunting is a scene in which Tintin investigates the crash site and is faced with the ghosts of the dead passengers.

Miltos Yerolemou (previously hidden in the costume of the giant Yeti) was entirely believable as Snowy, the reporter’s four-legged companion. Their friendship, and indeed the very concept of friendship, is at the heart of Tintin in Tibet, a story with whose gentle lesson the creative team behind Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin did not try to tinker. Heartwarming and pulse-quickening, the result is energetic, charming, and altogether absorbing.

Unlike most of today’s Hollywood blockbusters, the stage play suggests as much as it shows, leaving the audience, assisted by ingenious props, to imagine themselves high in the Himalayas, a hidden lamasery, or the cave of a legendary monster. The props, in this case, are not a substitute for the imagination. They are a stimulant. Let’s hope that big screen, big budget special effects won’t do away with this give and take of make-believe . . .

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Memorials War; or, Names Are Dropped Faster Than Guns

Well, is anyone else having a hangover? This, after all, is the day after. All over Britain, people of all ages could be observed last weekend pinning poppies on their apparel, in observance or remembrance of . . . what? War? The end or the ends of it? The heroes who fought battles or those who forged peace? Or did they simply try to remember to bin that doubtful ornament of imitation flora once Remembrance Sunday had made way for another week of everydays? The period of oblivion has set in as scheduled. No doubt, the swastikas splashed days earlier on the local cenotaph here in Aberystwyth have long been expunged.

It seems that, instead of looking around, we tend to look back, probably without learning a thing about our present selves. As I tried to express it when last we were through observing Armistice Day, I am ill at ease about those fixed periods set aside for collective reflection. Not that there are any memorials in Germany, where I grew up, an absence of tributes that serves as a reminder to me that what is to be brought chiefly to mind here is national honor, not international horrors.

I am uneasy, too, when faced with responses to war as expressed by one of the readers (of this recent journal entry) with whom pride seems to go before considerations about those who fall on the other side. As the current conflict in Iraq demonstrates, blind followers are still falling for the kind of arguments for which thousands must fall, determined to stick to their guns no matter how devastating their discharges have proven to be.

Here in Britain, big gun names are being rolled out for the occasion, dropped like bombs whose aim it is to awe rather than make a political impact. Such, at least, is the rationale behind the decisions of those who stage the ratings war. Daniel Radcliffe, for instance, who is best known for having landed the title role in the Harry Potter series, appeared last night in the television drama My Boy Jack, playing the teenage son of Rudyard Kipling, the patriotic author who used his pull to push his offspring into battle, despite the young man’s visual impairment. Private Potter did not even have to drop his trademark eyewear.

Now, I chose not to follow this televised memorial on ITV. I decided instead to screen Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), which, rather than seeming dated or coming across like a costume drama, has lost none of its documentarian urgency, couched as its pacifist message is in symbolism. Unlike “Armistice Day,” a sentimental radio play of the same period (brought to you courtesy of OTRCat.com), All Quiet still asks the questions we must insist on asking ourselves: Why and what ought we to remember? What are the agenda of those who recall, those who call on us to hear roll calls?

Too apt to look upon history as representations of what is dead, gone, and past restoring, we fail to take note of the dying of our days, the necrology of our present lives, and the deaths that are owing to our blindness and silence.

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Passport to Ridicule

Well, who needs fun house mirrors? When it comes to deriving amusement from staring at distorted reflections of yourself, there is nothing like the jack-in-the-box of old photographs. However familiar, they still manage to surprise. Sometimes, those snapshots of your past take on lives of their own as, in the eyes of others, they begin to resemble the faces of strangers. It becomes rather trying when you begin to think of your former self as a latter-day Frankenstein who, attempting to create life in his image, unwittingly gave birth to something monstrous beyond his control.

Owing to a current television program, I am the subject of much joshing here at Ty Newydd, our home (“ty” being Welsh for house). Once again, we are tuning in to The X Factor, one of those illegitimate, hyperactive offspring of the aforementioned Major Bowes so eagerly adopted these days and brought into the homes of an adoring public. And until such time as the show’s televoting devotees decide they have had their fill and be rid of him, I must expect to be mocked each Saturday evening for allegedly resembling the decidedly odd Rhydian Roberts, one of the two Welsh contestants in this year’s competition.

Each week, Rhydian is making a spectacle of himself as he appears before a panel of judges (the cocky Simon Cowell, the confidently second-rate Dannii Minogue, the feisty Sharon Osborne, and the amiable Irishman Louis Walsh) to take on a duet from The Phantom of the Opera or take the stage like an ice-sculptured Liberace in sequins and faux furs, belting like Welsh pop icon Shirley Bassey to the bewilderment of the British people who never beheld anyone quite like him.

Remote and humorless, Rhydian seems to come to life only on the stage. Thus far, he has remained an impenetrable mystery. Too straight for camp, he has a discipline and drive more chilling than the ambitions of Eve Harrington. He is a regular storm-trouper. It is no less disconcerting to be likened to him. Fortunately, the theatrical one can carry a tune, which is where any comparisons between us two, unwarrantable as they are to begin with, must most assuredly come to an end. In the words of frustrated blues singer Eve Peabody, “mine is strictly a bathtub voice.”

No, I don’t mind making a display of myself (as I have done here on numerous occasions). In fact, before I made up my mind that one journal was quite enough of me, I briefly contemplated dedicating one to the history of my hair, an autobiographical venture I intended to call The Shoulderpadded Atlas (for which this picture might have qualified). It would have been another argument for the non-visual arts, no doubt, which is better put forward here on broadcastellan. That said, it is just as well that I share my life here, given that the past preserved on my old computer seems to have been lost in yesterday’s crash.

Since then, I have had as much reason to cheer as I have sense not to burst into song. It was determined this morning that I shall have to dig up my passport again. Another trip to the old haunts of Gotham is in the offing. Considering that the above picture has changed more accurately to reflect my present exterior, I shall probably get through immigrations without suffering much ridicule (let alone comparisons to a man as yet unknown stateside). Of course, that also means I am going to miss the season finale of X Factor. Not a void a bottle of Aqua Net can’t fill.

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Napoleon Solo Dynamite: Robert Vaughn “Behind the Iron Curtain”

Well, it wasn’t exactly the Summer of Love, back in 1968, when American film and television actor Robert Vaughn, then known to millions of Americans as “Napoleon Solo” came to Czechoslovakia to play a Nazi officer in The Bridge at Remagen. Four decades later, Vaughn got the opportunity to share his experience in Tracy Spottiswoode’s radio play “Solo Behind the Curtain.” The play aired last Monday on BBC Radio 4.

Now, Spottiswoode told me about “Solo” some 18 months ago when we sat in the kitchen of her Cardiff home (as mentioned here, in passing); by now, I had almost given up on ever getting to hear it, especially since I have visited Prague in the meantime and dined at the Cafe Europa on Wenceslas Square, where Vaughn enjoys a cool drink and the warmth of late spring as the play opens.

In a nod to Vaughn’s most famous role, “Solo” comes on like a 1960s spy thriller, with suave Vaughn feeling “pretty sure” that he was “being followed. In those days, there was nothing surprising in that. An American in an Iron Curtain country, during the Cold War. It would have been unusual not to be followed. What was surprising, though, was just how pretty she was.”

Her name is Pepsi (wonderfully portrayed by Serbian actress Vesna Stanojevic), and she is used to being called “bubbly.” Perhaps it is her blood (Pepsi’s father was American communist who, in a moment of nostalgia, named his daughter after the soft drink he could no longer enjoy in his wife’s homeland of Czechoslovakia). The smart if malapropism prone young woman, who serves as the crew’s interpreter, is proud of her country’s relative freedom, but eager to leave with the Americans as those freedoms are being crushed.

Vaughn is an excellent narrator, as his father Walter had been, back in the mid-1940s, when he narrated wartime propaganda plays like “Assignment USA” for the series Words at War, aside from appearing on thriller programs like Murder at Midnight and Gangbusters.

Unlike his father, Vaughn was busy exposing propaganda, rather than delivering it. During the time of the filming, he was at work on his doctoral dissertation, which was later published as Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. As you will hear, it very nearly got lost as a peaceful spring gave way to a bloody summer.

His is not the voice of a 35-year-old, to be sure; but Vaughn draws you into his story all the same as he recreates his experience shooting in Czechoslovakia . . . until the shooting began in the streets. In August 1968, a short period of reformed communism under Alexander Dubček, known as the Prague Spring, came to an end as Soviet tanks rolled into the city. Not that Vaughn was ready to say U.N.C.L.E. and get stranded in a country hostile to the west in general and a film crew in particular, engaged as it was in firing explosives and blowing up things to restage a war for maximum box office impact.

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Brandishing the Pen: The War of “Seeing It Through”

Well, this is Guy Fawkes Day (or Bonfire Night) here in Britain. I am hearing the fireworks exploding as I write. Last year, I dragged Tallulah Bankhead into the Popish Plot; but it really seems an occasion to handle something explosive. To write about war and propaganda, or the war of propaganda, for instance. Bonfire Night coincides with the third anniversary of my move to Wales. So, I might as well write about something relating to the Welsh. And since this 5th of November is also the first day of the WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike that is intended to cripple the television and motion picture industry in the US, I might as well express my solidarity by turning a deaf ear to overseas media and lend a keen one to the voices of Britain.

Propaganda, a Welsh Prime Minister (pictured), and a group of famous authors including H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, and Arnold Bennett—“Seeing It Through” promises nothing less.

“Seeing” is the latest radio play by Neil Brand—last seen here in Wales accompanying The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918). Dining with the writer, I remarked that, these days, the BBC seems most interested in airing biographical or historical drama. No exception is today’s Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4, Tracy Spottiswoode’s “Solo Behind the Iron Curtain” (starring Robert Vaughn as himself, caught in revolutionary Prague anno 1968, and reviewed in my next entry into this journal). What sells these days are purportedly true stories, opportunities to eavesdrop on prominent, eminent or at any rate historical personages.

If it is to fly, the drama of the air is expected to have weight, especially now that such texts are generally being relegated to the footnotes of popular culture. Those in charge of allotting time for aural play try to salvage a dying art gasping for air by turning recorded sound into sound records and reducing storytelling into a substitute for oral history. A footnote-and-mouth disease is contaminating the airwaves, a corrupting influence in the theater of the mind for which there exists no talking cure. For the record, Brand has not so much caught the disease than braved it.

Cinematic in its architecture, in its designs on the mind’s eye, “Seeing It Through” opens like a house of worship, resounding with a hymn whose words are based on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, written in imprisonment: “He who would valiant be / ’gainst all disaster, / Let him in constancy / follow the Master.”

The music gives way to the sounds of a crowded auditorium and the words of one of the most famous British writers of the late 19th and early 20th century. None other than the man who invented The War of the Worlds: “You know me. My name is H. G. Wells,” the novelist addresses a conservative crowd and is very nearly booed off the stage, clearly not the master of his domain.

Wells was hoping to lend support to Charles Masterman, a liberal politician to whom we are introduced as he tries to promote welfare reforms. A gifted orator, Masterman disappears from the public stage to become the mastermind or mouthpiece of the newly established War Propaganda Bureau, Britain’s response to German duplicity. “There is no such thing as a clean war,” future Prime Minister David Lloyd George warns the radical idealist. “Then, Masterman replies, “we should create one.”

Rallied to aid him are the leading novelists of the time, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Hardy, Galsworthy and Bennett. As Wells is heard expressing it: “The ultimate purpose of this war is propaganda, the destruction of certain beliefs, and the creation of others.” Unlike the radio propaganda penned by US playwrights, poets, and novelists in the 1940s (as discussed here), their activities in publicizing an unpopular war was being kept a secret until well after armistice was declared.

As is revealed in a well-soundstaged scene symbolizing Masterman’s struggle to navigate the moral maze of a publicly invisible office, the alcoholic in charge gets lost in the structure he is meant to control. Trying to find his way, he relies on the guidance of a suffragette who once dared to toss pig’s blood in his face and whose brother is facing a breakdown on the front that she assisted in putting up: “I’ve learned,” she tells Masterman, that “there is no truth where war is concerned, except one: that the greatest cruelty is to let it go on when it could be stopped.”

She, too, operates under the influence, hers being Frances Stevenson, personal secretary, mistress, and future wife of Lloyd George, a woman Wells calls the “sphinx that guards the labyrinth of Whitehall.” It is in this nexus of oblique channels and hidden agenda that the lives of thousands are rewritten and expended.

That this is not merely a war of the words is demonstrated in noisy reports from the front and driven home in a sequence reminiscent of Howard Koch’s adaptation of Wells’s science fictional War: as London faces its first air raid, the weaponizers of words, Wells among them, look on and listen in the dark, Masterman speechless, his master’s voice overmastered: “If they’re smart, [the British public will] never trust any of us again.”

“Seeing” is a challenge to the audience. Instead of recounting an old if little known story, Brand puts listeners right a history in the making, thereby inviting us to draw parallels between the so-called Great War that was and the nominal anti-terrorism of the present, a war that some demand we see through while others struggle to see through it. Trying to make sense of the spin you will find yourself in, the acts of betrayal and false assurances you will overhear, you may feel yourself in need of another voice “Seeing [You] Through.” As in all history lessons that matter, this voice will have to be your own . . .

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In My Library: Emlyn (1973)

Like the man in the old Schlitz commercials says, “I was curious.” So, earlier this week, I went to the local second-hand bookstore in search of George, an autobiography of actor-playwright Emlyn Williams. It had been recommended to me at the recent Fflics film festival here in Aberystwyth as the insightful source of The Corn Is Green, a play and movie about the relationship between a Welsh student and his English teacher. The shelves of Ystwyth Books (shown here in a picture I found on flickr) are well stocked with titles on Welsh history and culture.

Not that titles about Hollywood or radio are wanting. In fact, the first purchase I made in this country shortly after moving here in November 2004 was made in that very store. It was a book on radio writing that had just come out (new releases can be found downstairs). Radio writing? In 2004? There was a chance, I thought, that I might feel at home here, eventually.

Anyway, there was no sign of George. The shop’s new proprietor offered to descend into the basement to check the inventory with which he is as yet not entirely familiar. After a few minutes, he emerged with Emlyn, subtitled a “Sequel” to George. Would I want it, not having been introduced to George (Williams’s other first name)? I opened the book, and it seemed to speak to me and anticipate my doubts:

I don’t think I’ll read this—it says it’s a sequel and I didn’t read the first one so I’d feel out of it from the first page . . .

And even if you did read “the first one,” your mind needs refreshing. It is up to me to ensure that the reader need know nothing of George by supplying rapid salient information about my life up to April 1927.

An author so forthright and accommodating deserves to be given a chance, I thought. Then I read on, sensing that what I wanted to learn from and about the playwright of Night Must Fall (and He Was Born Gay) was something he might not wish to share:

Before I do so, one thing: at the moment when I embarked on the “first one” I decided I would travel no further than the age of twenty-one, feeling that while a writer’s first two decades might be of interest, the third must present a formidable task.  Can he be as honest about it?

I knew that without honesty the story would deteriorate into a parade of professional ventures interspersed with cautious anecdotes.  The alternative must be a marriage between Candour and Taste, with the continuous likelihood of one partner pushing the other out of bed; even then, it would have to be a different book.

A “different” book. That is just what I expect from a self-conscious gay Welshman with a penchant for serial killers. Will he be honest about “it”? Will he lie in bed with Candour or lie about his bedfellow with Taste? Is this autobiography apologia or play-acting, an author-actor’s chance to don masks of his own design? We think of truth as being naked; but the act of self-exposure, the dropping of guises, the whole tease of the strip itself is performance.

Now, Emlyn, subtitled A Sequel to George, is one of those memoirs whose author is kind enough to provide an index, allowing those as impatient as I am to extract from the text what interests them most without having to go to so many parties, rehearsals, and opening nights. The first thing on my mind was not the open secret of Williams’s private life, but anything relating to Night Must Fall, the thriller I had seen on stage during the centenary of Williams’s birth back in 2005.

Williams recalls how the play came about and how, during a party at the house of fellow actor-playwright Frank Vosper, he discovered that his host appeared to be writing a similar thriller, also involving the case of murderer Patrick Mahon. Vosper’s play was titled Love From a Stranger, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s story “Philomel Cottage.”

Murder must out. Must Mr. Williams?

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Halloweaned from Image Horror

Montague was hoping for a feast as I carved the pumpkin, next to which he condescended to pose for me here. Much to his disappointment, none of his tricks could get a treat out of me. The treats this evening are going to be for the ear, delivered to those who are willing to lend one in exchange for the promise of goose bumps, up-and-down-your-spine shivers, or a state of unease and lingering disquietude. “Did Freddy Kruger Slay Cocteau?” I once asked. I am inclined to think that pictures numb us more quickly than the exposure to sound and silence, and the protean apparitions they conjure, millionfold, in the minds of those who dare to wear a blindfold.

This would be the night to lay your eyes to rest (unless you are already equipped for the trial, like Edward Arnold’s non-sighted detective in Eyes in the Night, which I screened yesterday) and accept the invitation to pass through the Creaking Door into the Inner Sanctum of sonic Terror, a world in The Shadow of doubt and Suspicion removed from the image hell of the in-your-face horrors with which we, jumpy enough at the very mention of “terrorism,” are wont to make ourselves jump these days. You know, the kind of boo! that so quickly turns into the blech! of boredom and disgust. So, Quiet, Please, and Lights Out, everybody. It is time to step into the vault . . .

Mind you, many found their way back into that Black Castle. In this age of podcasting and streaming, the thrill of listening to ghost stories and dramatized tales of terror is once again being experienced by a vast audience, a ratings-defying, multicultural multitude impossible to track down. Anyone anywhere can listen now; and, apparently, quite a few folks do. As of this writing, episodes of The Shadow have been downloaded nearly 225,000 times from the Internet Archives. To be sure, that is a fraction of the original weekly audience for this long-running episodic thriller program (previously discussed here), but a sizeable fraction nonetheless.

“How a thirty-something academic in the valleys of Wales acquired so much knowledge of American old-time radio begins to shape up as the makings of a new Mysterious Traveler script,” remarked the aforementioned radio thriller writer David Kogan. Now, Kogan could have been describing me, who, as a thirty-something academic, moved from the broadcasting metropolis of New York City to this Wild West of Britain. He was, in fact, describing Richard J. Hand, whose Terror on the Air! (2006) I am perusing this Hallowe’en.

I was curious to discover which radio thrillers Hand gave his “thumbs up” and which ones got the finger (there is no mention of Edith Meiser’s Sherlock Holmes thrillers, for instance). Predictably, Howard Koch’s previously discussed adaptation of The War of the Worlds) features prominently. If I were in New York City on 3 November, I would certainly return to the Partners & Crime bookstore in Greenwich Village (last visited here), where this seminal and resonant shockumentary is being recreated in the make-believe studio of W-WOW!. Surely, few American radio plays have surpassed the thrills elicited by that infamous Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast from 30 October 1938.

Also mentioned by Hand are the Mercury productions of “Dracula” and “The Hitch-Hiker,” as are radio melodrama anthologies like Creeps by Night, The Hermit’s Cave and Alonzo Deen Cole’s pioneering Witch’s Tale. Making the bloody cut as well is “It Happened” (11 May 1938), one of my favorites among Arch Oboler’s Lights Out offerings, starring Mercedes MacCambridge as a schoolgirl rather too eager to delve into the mysteries of Paris. Hand calls it a “fast-moving play” that combines elements of the “crime thriller” with “Gothic horror,” a play that is “melodramatic in plot but modernist in technique.”

Now, despite leaping at the opportunity of witnessing the “State Executioner” in a soundstaging at the Museum of Radio and Television in New York some years ago, I am no Oboler enthusiast, as I made clear in Etherized Victorians; but “It Happens” is largely devoid of Oboleric pretensions. Dragging listeners Grand Guignolens volens into the sewers of their dirty minds, and there is no mind dirtier than a receptive one, it creates indelible images without having to show—or shower us with—buckets of blood. “Pleasant dreams . . . hmmmmm?”

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How Screened Was My Valley: A Festival of Fflics

Well, this is right up my valley, I thought, when I first heard about Fflics: Wales Screen Classics. That was back in 2005; but this month, the festival is finally getting underway here in Aberystwyth. We went into town this afternoon for the official launch; and whatever promotional boost I might give this event I am only too glad to provide, especially since it brings our friend, the silent screen composer Neil Brand, back into town to provide his musical accompaniment to a long-lost epic whose rediscovery (in the mid-1990s) film historian Kevin Brownlow termed “the find of the century.”

The four-day, thirty events spanning festival opens, rather safely and predictably, with a Hollywood behemoth, the Academy Award winning How Green Was My Valley (1941), based on the international bestseller by Richard Llewellyn. Also on the bill is the Bette Davis vehicle The Corn Is Green (1945), adapted from a stage drama by the aforementioned Welsh playwright Emlyn Night Must Fall Williams.

Williams features prominently in the festival’s offerings, whether as writer, actor, or director. He can be seen in King Vidor’s The Citadel (1938) and Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down (1939), two mining disaster movies I watched earlier this year, but in his only directorial effort, The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949), in which he costars opposite Edith Evans and Richard Burton in his first screen role.

Unlike in the case of Dolwyn, the story of a village threatened to expire in a watery grave to make room for a reservoir, the Welsh connections are tentative, at times. Apart from those fanciful and historically questionable portraits of life in 20th-century Wales produced in Hollywood and England, any film written, inspired by or starring those born, raised or having been creatively active here seems to have qualified. Dead of Night (1945), for instance, happens to star Welshman Mervyn Johns and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) is portrayed by Welsh character actor Roger Livesey (among whose supporting cast members numbers the leading lady saluted in my previous entry).

Entirely justified, and much appreciated, is the spotlight on Welsh matinee idol Ivor Novello, who can be seen in The Rat (1925), with Neil Brand at the piano, and the French production of The Call of the Blood (1920; pictured). Unequivocal Wales Screen Classics, too, are films like Y Chwarelwr (1935), the first feature length Welsh language sound drama, and Proud Valley (1940), starring the great Paul Robeson (pictured and mentioned here), who first came to Wales back in the late 1920s and remained closely connected to its people and culture, despite being denied the privilege of international travel by the US State Department in 1950s.

Fflics also offers rare documentary footage of Buffalo Bill touring the North Wales seaside town of Rhyl back in 1903, introduces today’s audience to “Jerry the Troublesome Tyke,” the first animated shorts to come out of Wales back in the mid-1920s, and provides a fascinating example of British wartime propaganda with The Silent Village (1943), a restaging or reimagining on Welsh soil of the 1942 razing of the Czech village Lidice by the Nazis, with a pictorial account of which I came back from the Jewish Quarter of Prague a few weeks ago (and a poetic response to which I discussed here a couple of years earlier).

Proud Valley, The Rat, and The Silent Village apart, the highlight of the festival is, for me, the screening of the Life Story of David Lloyd George, a 1918 biographical drama, boasting a cast of ten thousand, that never reached the public and disappeared from view for over seven decades. Directed by the prolific Maurice Elvey (whose Hindle Wakes [1927] I briefly discussed here), it features Hitchcock partner and screenwriter Alma Reville in her only acting role. I shall have to report back . . .

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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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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 . . .