h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello,

Lately I've been wallowing in the treasure trove of radio plays that's available over the web - Lux Radio Theater, Suspense, Escape, etc. Somehow I missed the fact that BBC still puts out lots of radio plays today, and in the last few weeks, I've been devouring them. So then I got to wondering, why does BBC still produce modern radio plays, but they've been phased out of American radio? Why don't we make radio plays anymore? I'm aware of a few companies that have created occasional plays for NPR. And at least Prairie Home Companion gives stories and comedy sketches.

So then I got to thinking about CBC, which I thought had a few radio dramas now and then, but I could be wrong.

Is it something about public broadcasting corporations that keeps radio plays alive? Is it a dying art that BBC and CBC are quixotically trying to resuscitate, or have American broadcasting companies stopped because they're catering to the lowest common denominator, and they assume we don't have the attention span to listen to radio plays?

You worked with the CBC in some capacity in radio, didn't you? Can you give an insider's opinion?

Later,
Deidzoeb

The way I heard it is that TV didn't catch on elsewhere to the extent that it did in the US.
By 1953, most of the radio shows were gone or loosing audiences, because the majority of the fifteen minute and half hour top rated shows were run in what we know as prime time.
Jack Benny held onto his show almost to the end, if I remember correctly, even when he was doing TV.
Some of the smaller independent stations still run old classics but they don't want to pay for new programmes.
A DJ with a disc machine or a satellite feed from Clear Channel is cheaper than real programming.

Auntie and some of the French and German radio companies still do new drama because it is actually easier to listen to a program while cooking, eating dinner or cleaning up than it is to stay glued to the tube.

I share your dispair.
I tried my best to get new plays on the air in Austin, but I was beating my head against the ignorance of the children running it.
They'd rather have a DJ show or the Pacifica feed than try something real or risky.

I've been hearing rumors of internet broadcasters thinking or trying to bring back drama on the "air" as it were.
If you find any of them, let me know.

Radio drama is the Theatre of the Mind. The greatest artform created in the 20th century.

The impact it had on the collective imagination between the mid 30s and early 60s is so ingrained in the cultural changes that occurred over those 3 decades that historians may never realise it was radio-stimulated thinking and radio-drama-stimulated imaginings that took us from the Depression to the Psychadelic era.

TV subsequently has only created non-thinking but vocally critical demographic profiles for consumer researchers and produced a society of barking and running dogs.

My judgement is still out on the internet as a source for positive change in a general societal way like radio was. But I remain hopeful and acknowledge its personal (and therefore delusional) impact has been significant.

I began doing dramas at the CBC in the early 50s as a child of 7. I have done hundreds in the 50 years since including a series with Papa Denny Doherty back in 80s. We played a pair of burned out hippies running a boarding house.

Yes the market is drying up. While I was able to make an enviable living in the 60s doing two or three shows per week, the work has diminished. I have done only two shows in the past two years.

But the Theatre-0-the-Mind DREAM lives on. There are production companies in the US privately creating new radio drama series and these are being sold in to a few select FM stations and PBS outlets. The CBC even bought a a one-hour series package that included re-mixes of old 50s 1/2 hour mysteries as companions to a new mystery series.

An old friend and former Haligonian, Bill Howell, is now in Toronto at the CBC as head of dramatic production or somesuch. He is also known as the Head of the Mystery Project. He is a devotee of the genre and he was the one who told me about the 'private undergroundswell' of new dramas.

You can probably reach him thru the CBC website www.CBC.ca if you click on Radio and then look for Drama and search his name. Hey I wonder if a search for John Fulton would produce any results at that point? Probably not, but Bill Howell should have a profile and a contact link. He would love to hear from anyone who shares his passion. Tell him I sent ya. Tell him I need work.

peace
jwf

Garcias.

I don't know if the internet will fulfill its potential in this area, but I think the potential is there. With a common computer (state of the art circa 1998), some free programs and a DSL connection, my wife and I have started recording comedy sketches and leaving them around on websites where anyone can listen. The really weird & fantastic thing is that you could get a friend on the other side of the world to record a few minutes of a script onto an mp3 file, and mix it together to sound like you were in the same room. Getting a varied cast of voices from around the world shouldn't be too tricky for an enterprising "producer." Assuming you have computers already and the overhead is paid for, then recording the stuff is practically free.

It's too bad US radio couldn't try a few radio dramas in morning drive-time blocks, when people are stuck in their cars. It seems clear to me that the tendency to program comedy teams in the mornings has been necessary because people would rather hear talk or commentary than music on their drive to work. Sometimes they use clips from stand-up comics, or they perform sketches anyway. Why not take the next step and create 15 minute or 30 minute stories? And look at the boom in audio book sales over the last decade or so. I work at data entry all day, and there must be millions of people around the world who work factory or office jobs which require their visual attention, but would allow them to listen to stories all day. And if you have a boring task like this to do, then listening to stories takes your mind off it, makes the day pass much more quickly.

Oh well.

On some AM stations, you can catch a syndicated show called "When Radio Was" -- which is basically rebroadcasts of old Shadow and Jack Benny and Gildersleeves, with commercials in between to sell tapes or CD collections of old time radio. They play it every night as I head home from work, but unfortunately I lose the signal about half-way home.

Not sure if I have anything worth writing to Mr. Howell about, but I'll definitely poke around cbc.ca and see if they have any audio archives available online. (Forgot to mention that I saw your appearance on the Martha Stewart movie, jwf! )

tonsil revenge, I knew you had worked in radio in Austin, but I didn't know it was Pacifica. My wife knows a bunch of djs at KPFT in Houston, and she still listens over the web and spends most of her waking hours arguing with other listeners on web message boards about how the station or network ought to be run. Mainly she spends her time trying to get the others to stop insulting each other in their message board arguments.

www.live365.com used to have some stations that played original radio dramas. At one time they allowed users to create their own radio stations on the site for free, but eventually they had to start charging. It's still free to listen, but I'm not sure how many of those original stations are still operational.

scifi.com has been producing a few original radio plays at http://www.scifi.com/set/

There are a few out there, but not a lot. Maybe in a few years we'll start to see that groundswell. Or maybe I'm not searching enough yet.

Curiously, and conveniently for future historians, the world 'progressed' thru 4 stages of telecommunications, coming every 30 years, beginning with the telephone at the dawn of the 20th century. The impact was dramatic and life began to change. It was suddenly hard to keep a secret.

Then 30 years later, in the 1930s, radio became a 'must have' consumer item. It was the one positive thing in a dark Depression. It was relatively inexpensive, could be shared by groups and it created a common mind, a kind of socialism of the soul. Everyone listened. And exercised their imaginations. It brought the nation together with FDRs fireside chats and Edward R Murrow's reports from the War in Europe.

It was in the 1930s that all the major national brands were created. Most had already been successful on a local or regional basis but radio brought them to the nation. Coke for example was only really popular in the Southeast until radio made it a national drink. Same for most other consumer products from RCA and Westinghouse and Nescafe and Quaker Oats to Lucky Strikes and Marlboros.

Think how many automobiles brands there were before the big three started using radio to promote their names by sponsoring major radio drama and live musical shows. Next time someone tells you how the Depression killed off hundreds of automobile companies, tell them it was because radio saved the big three. The same thing happened in every other consumer and manufacturing sector from soap to Mister Peanut.

Radio sponsorship worked big time and did more to centralise and stabilise and develop the current North American economy than any policy ever implemented by government. All the divisions of General Motors saw the "one nation indivisible" thru radio and took that idea into the battlefields of WW2 where the USA finally did become 'one nation under god' and regional products and choices were subordinated to the strength and virtues (real or percieved) of 'national' brands.



30 years later, by 1960, TV became a must have. Every household had to have one and daily conversations at work and school were about nothing but what was on the box the night before. Somehow the miracle of pictures was so dazzlingly amazing that everyone went into a state of shock and awe. But since everyone had 'seen' the same thing and not just 'imagined' it, the art of conversation began to suffer.

Television stole back the imagination and replaced it with conformity and standards of dress and social behaviour while allowing persons to rant and rave at the screen in the privacy of their own homes. The content was constantly being aimed at a lower and lower and younger and younger audience. Today, the biggest shows are still about working class stiffs trying to sneak a peak at womens or skive off to the ballgame or the pub. These characters are always surrounded by morons and weirdos we can all identify with.

Another 30 years and in the 1990s the computer becomes the must have home entertainment system. But by now most prefer to play DVDs and watch all the latest movies in the comfort and safety of their homes thus avoiding the mean streets of the 'real world' which TV has convinced them is full of thugs and villains who will shoot you for your pocket change and sell your women to Arabs.

Public communications on the web suffer from the 30 year old TV habit of an audience who love to yell at the screen. For many the only satisfaction (and ultimately the great frustration) is that this screen yells back.

Today the best radio is a few well produced TV shows like the Simspons. Yes, he's just another beer swilling working class git surrounded by idiots but the sound tracks are simply amazing. Try just 'listening' to the Simpsons. Sure you'll miss a few 'sight gags' and want to sneak a peak at the screen, but resist. Absorb all the subtle nuances of the sound effects and the actors marvelous radio performances. Remember that they record these as 'radio shows' and get off-shore slave labourers to draw the pictures after the fact! Yes, listen to the Simpsons and feel the sound forming and shaping your imagination the way radio should.

[The (free) distribution of music via radio also changed the world but that is another story which also follows the same 30 year cycle from the (expensive turn-of-the-century) Victrola to (radio's free) Guy Lombardo and the Grand Ole Opry to (TV's 'trend setting') American Bandstand and (most recently) Napster.]


~jwf~

I tried finding Mr. Howell (lovey, darling, get me another daiquiri, please!) on the cbc site.
No go, yet.

I gurgled him and found references to him four years back, but nothing current.

Funny you should mention the number of auto firms that went under.
According to data I recently found while researching the Ford centennial advertising bumpf, around 2008 auto assembling or manufacturing companies bit the dust between 1898 and 1968 in the US alone.

In 1912 there were 275 recognized assemblers or manufacturers in the US actually functioning or at least advertising.
That's not counting the number that had gone under or been subsumed since 1898.

Ford, GM and Chrysler bought out or assumed control of over 150 makes or parts manufacturers themselves.
Studebaker during it's tenure, up 'til 1963 (effectively, they continued to operate at a limp until 1965) bought or took control of 18 other firms, most notable Packard.

I dare say that all that carnage cannot directly be attributed to radio. Ford alone made and sold more automobiles between 1908 and 1918 than the entire national total before 1912. By 1918 half the autos and trucks in the US were Ford Model Ts.
By 1923, according to their sales literature then and now, which through diligent research I have not been able to refute, half the autos and trucks in the world were Fords.
In all, they made 15,000,000 Model Ts according to a few possibly impeachable sources.

Chervrolet began kicking their butts in 1924 because one could buy a used vehicle of much better quality than a Model T for less than a new one would cost and people began looking at autos as an investment rather than a throw-away commodity. GM produced in the Chevy a slightly more expensive car with more power, a sturdier body and a greater promise of reliability, coupled with the easy terms.
Model T sales began to slide and ol'Henry and Edsel had to read the writing on the bathroom wall.
Also, Chevy began in the mid-twenties a trade-in and demolish program that continued into the late thirties. It was their idea to remove a lot of the competition from the used car market by actually destroying them. Last guess I found suggested over 130,000 vehicles dispatched in this manner.

I would mark the true predominance of the big three to about 1968.
By that time American Motors truly was on it's last legs and Studebaker had taken a dive.
Of course that was also the dawn of the imports.

Wow. Originally I meant to provoke an essay from jwf, but now it looks like we have two essays from jwf and a potential guide entry from tonsil!

Another factor in nationalization and consolidation of companies that probably played alongside radio: transportation. If you made cookies in Philadelphia in 1850, you might have shipped them halfway or all the way across the country eventually, but would they still be edible when they arrived? Some of the reason for products going national, besides getting nation-wide advertising, was probably the increasing speed and reliability of transport across the country or around the world.

...Anyhow, I like this 30 year cycle of telecommunications, but I wonder if it fits together with my late pen-pal's thesis about technology being motivated by the need for better and cheaper PORN. Maybe this applies to visual technologies more than audio, but if you look for the earliest porn photos, you'll find them shortly after the first cameras. If you look for the earliest porn in motion pictures, you'll find them shortly after the invention of motion picture cameras. Broadcasting technologies seemed to run on a separate course from porn because they needed to meet community standards. However, technologies that allowed movies or photos to be created in the privacy of one's home were embraced and encouraged by amateur pornographers: home movies, polaroid cameras, and especially video.

Then we come to the internet, where the most common synonyms for "woman" or "girl" or even "teens" are all porn sites. Where an "amateur facial" no longer has anything to do with cosmetology schools. And where the most money made in early years of the web boom were made by porn sites.

Yay for technology!

Stand back, Jwf, I think he's getting off on the smileys!

Just as the transister made things truly portable and the invention of the metal cartridge casing made 300 rounds a minute a possibility, it was something simple that made the Model T the car that put almost half the world on the road.
Henry was an Edisonian engineer.
He was no simple farm boy. He was a scientist. Not the best, but an efficient one. Like Ferdinand Porsche, he didn't have any problems getting his hands dirty.
The Model T is a bitch to drive. It has imaginary brakes. The early one's were mostly wood and the later metal bodied one's had the thinnest metal outside of a box of Reynold's Wrap.
The secret was the engine. It was a notoriously unreliable piece of crap but it was a consistently unreliable piece of crap. A decent man who believed in preventative maintenance could get that ugly little four to run for years. An idiot could run it into the ground in a few months and turn around and buy another engine for quite cheap and then beat that one to death.
And unlike other classy autos, the T could be very simply modified into a truck, a tractor, a source of power for a small wood mill or a water pump, or even a radio or a movie projector.
To the untrained and the trained urbanites and farmer's boys, the T was easy to buy on time and easy to tinker with. Within a couple of years of the T's introduction in 1908, hundreds of small after-market accessory firms, most notable among them Western Auto, sprang up to help you replace whatever fell off your T or to sell you stuff that Henry never thought you would need, like an electric starter or a seat cushion that didn't feel like a photo of itself.

In order to ship these bundles of joy across country at the cheapest possible rate, Henry used to ship the tires on one car and the bodies on another, stacked without roofs or glass, the seats tossed in another car. He let the railroads charge him by the pound and he shipped far cheaper than the manufacturers who shipped by the unit.

Another factor in national distribution is that the railroads not only allowed, say, eastern manufacturers to ship their goods, but also the machinery. Florsheim used to have little plants all over the place. The Hollywood Candy Company used to have little plants scattered regionally, also. The soda bottlers and the beer makers still do.

One of the biggest successes in radio drama in the last twenty years was the "Star Wars" dramatizations. I've heard that some people recorded them and listen to them often. I've heard others claim that it was better than the movie and others say it is the closest thing american radio has ever come to "Hitchhikers".
I wouldn't go that far, but it was an FM production and the sound effects were better than the movie.

Yes it's good to see tonsil writing at length in his well crafted and informative way. He must be holding Ford stock. It's good to have us all together again for a change.

Glad you saw me in that closing Farmer's Market scene in Martha Inc. But who was that guy the other day in California who drove his car thru a Farmer's Market? I can understand someone not liking crowds or fresh veg but really! What did a home baked pie ever do to him!

Has anyone tried my Simspon's as good radio drama theory yet?
It's on about ten times a day, on about six different channels around here, so I spend a lot of time in the kitchen listening to them. Every show obviously has something you 'need' to see; they are after all illustrated radio plays, but 90% of them are best heard and not seen, especially the early years before the character drawings were well defined.


~jwf~

I do most of my TV watching by listening from another room. This comes from growing up in a house with only one room heated in the winter. So I used to do my homework while my parents watched TV. Also became a pretty fancy knitter. Somehow in the fifties, women weren't allowed to just sit and watch TV without something in their hands. Can't watch TV here alas as an enormous skyscraper has blocked all possible reception. My friends who work in TV here tell me I'm not missing much.

My wife still knits or crochets in front of the tv when she gets on a knitting or crocheting kick, and she was only born in 1975. I think it has more to do with knitting than with the era, but I could be wrong. When you have ten or twenty more hours ahead of you before you finish a hat, the knitting seems more vital than following the visuals from tv shows. (She taught me too. I've made a couple hats & boring scarves.)

>> I do most of my TV watching by listening from another room. <<

I realise (and encourage but don't fully understand) that you have lately lost touch with TV in Hong Kong, but I wonder if any TV show or shows stand out in your memory as being as good or better to listen to than watch.

Older TV shows were written so thick with 'plotlines' that one simply didn't need the eyestrain. Except for a few brilliant film classics, pictures were unnecessary except to fill up time with long scenes of cars moving thru traffic and the occassional close-up of weapons beings fondled. The audio was sufficient because it was as fully developed as it would have been on radio as old writers moved to the new medium.

Very few screenwriters and directors ever used the visual media properly until the advent of music videos and a new generation of users changed the narrative cues. Recently, film and tv scripts have finally become almost visually dependent and the actors scripted lines are minimal. You have to watch to understand what they're talking about if they say anything at all.

My own experience as an actor reading small parts for auditions is that I have no idea what's going on or what my character is supposedly talking about because I only get a page or three of the script to work with. When I recently complained to a director that I could make no sense of my lines because they seemed so out of context without any other part of the script, I got the distinct impression that I am now officially 'out of context' with modern film and tv styles.

So it's a shame there isn't more work for 'radio actors'.

jwf

Video killed the radio star, eh?
Dr Who was much better if you couldn't see it, as was most other science fiction until fairly recently in my opinion, because the special effects were so naff. I also remember a play by Marghanita Laski from the 1950's about post nuclear war in Britain, most of which I "watched" while doing the washing up in the kitchen.
I recently bought a couple of Simpsons videos and agree with you about them.
I am currently directing a bill of 3 one-act plays (for mid September) and I think a couple of them would be good, if not better, on radio as well.

One interesting device is staging a play as if it were a radio studio broadcast with the actors standing round the mic reading from their scripts.

A film re-creation of the famous Orson Welles 'War of the Worlds' fiasco created at least three levels of reality for the audience. The device has also been used as a very clever mystery builder in which the 'actors' and their 'characters' were suspects in a murder. Again, the suspension of reality is established by showing 'inner workings' not normally part of the audiences 'real world'.

I have always wanted to start off a stage play as if it were a radio play. Then as the audience was just getting used to the idea, perhaps as only one central actor or narrator was left at the mic, to have other characters, without their scripts in hand, begin perfoming as in a stage play until eventually everyone has dropped their script. They now appear 'alive' and 'on stage' rather than as 'disembodied' (but obviously physically present) voices 'at the mic'. Trouble is I'd probably have to write a script to fit it.

Which three one act plays are you doing? Chekov, Albee and an excerpt from Shakespeare?


~jwf~

One interesting device is staging a play as if it were a radio studio broadcast with the actors standing round the mic reading from their scripts.

A film re-creation of the famous Orson Welles 'War of the Worlds' fiasco created at least three levels of reality for the audience. The device has also been used as a very clever mystery builder in which the 'actors' and their 'characters' were suspects in a murder. Again, the suspension of reality is established by showing 'inner workings' not normally part of the audiences 'real world'.

I have always wanted to start off a stage play as if it were a radio play. Then as the audience was just getting used to the idea, perhaps as only one central actor or narrator was left at the mic, to have other characters, without their scripts in hand, begin perfoming as in a stage play until eventually everyone has dropped their script. They now appear 'alive' and 'on stage' rather than as 'disembodied' (but obviously physically present) voices 'at the mic'. Trouble is I'd probably have to write a script to fit it.

Which three one act plays are you doing? Chekov, Albee and an excerpt from Shakespeare?


~jwf~

lol - er no.
I wish I'd thought of your staging for Elaine May's "Adaptation" It would probably have worked better than my rather stylised effort. We're also doing "English made simple" by David Ives and "Last Tango in..." by David Tristram.
Why? stage booking made. Play that was supposed to go on kiboshed by SARS and summer holidays. So I looked for comedies with small casts. I have now got to the stage when I wish I'd kept my mouth shut (the last thing thing I directed was Britten's Beggars Opera in Malawi 25 years ago)
There is, however, a very small voice in the background twitting me for not having had the guts to do it professionally .I was quite good at university and a couple of my contempories have gone on to have their names in lights.

Re: plays on several levels. I don't know if this is what you mean, but have you seen "Noises Off"? The movie version that I've seen was mostly slapstick physical comedy, but on the one level they perform a scene straightforwardly with interruptions during a rehearsal. Then they perform the same opening scene with actors drunk or depressed, showing some problems behind the scenes with actors competing for the affection of actresses. Then they perform the scene a third time, shown almost entirely from behind the scenery, so you hear the original play, but you see actors punching each other, struggling to keep a bottle of alcohol away from a stereotypically crazed alcoholic, trying to give a bundle of flowers to one actress while other women and men accept the flowers as if intended for them.

Not exactly the intellectual pinnacle of how those different levels could be used, but that sounds a little bit like what you're talking about.

If I remember correctly, "Noises Off" is by Carl Reiner, the mastermind behind the "Dick Van Dyke Show". The play was based on an experience he'd had with another play years earlier that didn't make it out of rehearsal.

I worked on a stage-bound radio show play script for a prospective benefit in Austin once.
The sheer cost of paying to have the scripts copied bogged me down in the end.

My favorite part was parodying the ads in character that they used to do on radio.

My daughter, Schnooks, has been hooked on some Burns and Allen radio shows and TV shows that I have on tape. She finds the various ways they managed to work the products into the shows fascinating.
The radio shows are Maxwell House Coffee sponsored and the TV shows are Carnation Brand Condensed Milk (from contented cows) sponsored.

Staging a play, particularly a small cast one, is more entertaining the fewer options you have. Many directors go hog wild when presented with the opportunity to remake the stage and the viewing space.
I have had my fill of theatre in the round.