I love radio dramas, just not on the radio. I think most people would have trouble setting up a consistent enough listening schedule, especially if there was an ongoing story. It’s much easier to get them on CD or listen on the iPod. The best of course is the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I would also recommend the great selection at ZBS especially Ruby The Galactic Gumshoe and the Jack Flanders series. Also decent is the radio reenvisioning of the original Star Wars trilogy.
According to Auntie Beeb, people outside the UK can listen to most of their radio shows via iPlayer.
I think quite a few people in the UK have got a story of listening to a drama on their car radio, and then having to park up a listen to the conclusion because they have come to the end of their journey and not to the end of the play. I know it’s happened to me a couple of times.
ZBS has already been mentioned. The BBC version of Lord of the Rings is good too - great for a long car trip. Ian Holm (Bilbo in the movies) plays Frodo.
I’d like to get Canticle for Liebowitz(sp?) last time I checked it was unavailable.
Brian
Radio dramas I highly recommend-
Gunsmoke (with William Conrad as Matt Dillon)
Suspense
Dragnet
Dimension X/X Minus One (basically the same show, if you like The Twilight Zone TV show, you should like X Minus One)
As for comedy, to modern ears, a lot of it is very outdated. It’s an acquired taste for people who aren’t used to it, but there are some shows that would still get laughs without much adjustment. Try Jack Benny, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, Our Miss Brooks and Burns & Allen. The comedies that hold up best are the ones that aren’t bases on the personalities of the stars. Fred Allen is very funny, but not recommended for new OTR listeners, as it’s very topical.
Jack Benny is my absolute favorite. To appreciate the Benny programs, you need to listen to about 10 or so shows to get a feel for the running gags that were a cornerstone of the Benny show’s comedy. After that, it’s one of the most hysterical radio shows there is. The show ran from 1932-1955, but the “Lucky Strike Program” from about 1946-52 are the highest point.
Maybe we’re just too much of a visual culture at this point - and I mean everyone alive today, unless they’ve been blind since the dawn of TV - for our imaginations to be stimulated by sound or spoken, nonwritten words. I know I have trouble that way. YMMV - I’m ADD, and have trouble fully absorbing any narrative - but a purely aural narrative is hardest of all, followed by written and visual/aural (the easiest).
How can audio narrative - narrative being a constant chain - overcome short attention spans? Let’s consider radio’s last thriving form of storytelling: the documentary. This American Life is popular, I think, because it tells stories in “acts” - one story per act - that come across as experiences. Each is a set of impressions that relate to each other, but often they avoid rigid narrative in favor of a loose, personal theme that all the “acts” have in common (life’s ironies, losses, connections…).
The question is: can that work as anything but first person documentary? I don’t know. No one’s trying. There are probably very few places to try. In a media age, nothing is deader than a dead medium.
It can’t be underestimated how much technical quality interferes with some people’s listening. Especially that older, tech-positivist, hi-fi/early stereo generation: my dad is in his 70s, did college radio in the 1950s, and has deep mental convictions against any sound recording that’s less refined than the state of the art in the '50s. I play him a 78 from the '20s or a broadcast from the '30s and he simply cannot hear past the surface noise, wow, and narrow bandwidth. He cannot appreciate or enjoy anything that sound artifact has to offer, and I suspect he is not alone.
I listen to OTR and everytime I play one and someone hears it, it hooks them very easily.
You can go to Archive (Dot) Org and download dramas free. And comedies and others too. They are in Public Domain
There’s no need to make new ones since the old ones are out there and so well done.
Most are fairly easy to get around the topical information. Like if the lead character says “We can’t eat meat today,” it’s a reference to food rationing in WWII.
I think there is a built in prejudice against old things.
For instance, I had a friend and she loved movies and would complain about the cost. I said “The Chicago Public Library” has hundreds of DVDs for free. She says “Yeah but they’re old.” I said “But they’re new to you, you’ve never seen them.” Still she doesn’t want to watch the old stuff. And a lot of people are like that.
Classic films by Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth etc are brilliant and it’s a shame people don’t want to see them, except for old film buffs.
Sure there were a lot of junk but still, I love the “Blondie” movies they’re definately second rate but they’re a cut better than what we have now.
It’s like varitey, people seem to love the old Carol Burnett sketches but variety shows have never been able to take hold since she left the air, (and even her ratings were moving South when she left).
Airing these old broadcasts over the air is difficult because there is no real clear cut method for determaining which is in the public domain, outside of those works published before 1923. There isn’t a list of this is in public domain and this isn’t. You basically have to search out every potential claim on it and it’s not worth it.
Old radio dramas have a novelty value that is short-lived, except for the small minority. The other problems are insurmountable.
Remember that radio programs were often simulcast with the television versions in the late 40s and early 50s. People who had faithfully listened to radio dramas for twenty years went over to the televised versions almost instantly. Television meant buying expensive sets, with terrible pictures and bad sound. Screens were tiny. Signals were bad and hard to focus on. Even today’s sets would be wildly inferior because of how primitive the cameras and broadcasting equipment were. Movies had many times better quality, and were increasingly in color and widescreen. There were no more than three channels and many cities only had one. They broadcast limited hours with few choices of programming. Television was the most awful form of entertainment in history to that point.
And dedicated radio listeners chose it overwhelmingly and nearly instantaneously over the programs they loved, on equipment that was near perfection for the time already in their homes.
And you think it has a chance at mass entertainment today? Why? Because there are a few people who enjoy it? A few people enjoy anything. That’s not a condemnation but an observable fact. It does not lead to mass success, also an observable fact.
Radio shows died in 1948, although the horrible death pangs lasted a decade. (Read about that era sometime. It’s heartbreaking.) That was 60 years ago and it never has had a moment’s flicker of life since. The entire daily life of world civilization would have to be destroyed before radio had a chance to return. It’s dead, Jim.
This is not a judgement call. It is a fact, as real as gravity. Sorry.
And an agreed-upon one. What is really sad is that without mass success, there is no success, and without success, things deserve to be marginalized and stigmatized and, more or less, buried.
Maybe that’s the price of being a big country where everything’s got to pay its way. But as I said, it’s sad.
You speak the truth, my faithful Indian companion…
So the last 35 years of “A Prairie Home Companion” don’t count as a “flicker of life”? It’s a niche market now, yes, and certainly the variety-show format of PHC lends itself more to the modern use of radio as something that we listen to mostly in cars, but it’s a country-wide show with a dedicated fanbase. Radio will never re-replace television or internet-based media of entertainment, but that doesn’t make it dead.
That said, I don’t know if long-format or serial radio drama will ever be commercially viable again in a broadcast medium, but in this internet age they might be doable as a podcast or something similar. No one is going to schedule their day around catching a particular radio show, but if they can listen to them at their convenience, it could happen.
Which would suggest that audiobooks would only be popular with the blind, though they are now popular with commuters, too. So popular that they are available at bookstores and now have covers similar to the bestsellers they feature, not just large black print against a white background.
Jack’s gold, absolute gold. I’d add to this, though, You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx. He has a razor-sharp wit. I’ll admit that towards the last days of the show he just kinda seemed bored with it, but some of the early broadcasts were stingingly clever.
(Also, as a weird cross-over and aside: When I first started listening to old time radio programs, I was, at one point, playing Warcraft. The X Minus One episode ‘The Road Must Roll’ came on. It’s a sci-fi story that, well… Mirrors almost exactly one of the long-term plotlines in the low levels of WoW, even down to a certain major figure’s name…)
I can’t believe I forgot about You Bet Your Life! I have dozens of shows downloaded. Groucho’s wit is funny no matter which decade it is, and listening to him banter with everyday people instead of say, Margaret Dumont is much more enduring.
A lot of OTR shows are great if you enjoy studying the history of that era. Shows like Fibber McGee & Molly and Fred Allen really give you a great feel for the country’s mood during World War II.
Yes, the niche success of a unique show that spawned no lasting imitators or competitors and that you can listen to parts of without having to stay through the whole thing doesn’t count.
Yes, audio books are extremely popular. People could listen to radio shows the same way. But they don’t. They choose another alternative. I find this significant.
I said in my first posting that radio shows not only exist, but exist in large numbers. Why are you trying to convince me of what I said first? That’s not my argument. My argument is the same as yours. There might be a tiny niche for them. There already is a tiny niche for them, so that’s not a huge speculative step. My argument is that there is nothing beyond that tiny niche. I haven’t seen anything here that provides evidence for the contrary. Just wishful thinking. If that’s the only thing you need, then I wish Groucho would return. But he’s not. And radio has as much chance today as Harpo had on radio in their 1930s heyday. He appeared as a guest. Jack Benny got the career. Radio today is Harpo.
Depends where you live.
Not a great article, admittedly, but radio is still part of the cultural life of some places.
OTR made it into the mid50’s. A number of series on both TV and radio. Lots of interesting carryover and transition of actors, actor’s characters, plots.
HHG and anything from ZBS were all excellent modern productions.
CBS Radio Mystery Theater was from the mid 70’s to early 80’s and rebroadcast in the late 90’s had original shows.
I listened to CBSRMT every night as a kid growing up in the 70’s. I rediscovered them a couple of years ago – great stuff!
As far as modern radio drama is concerned, I’d say the BBC is definitely your best bet. Go to the Beeb’s website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/), select Radio 4 and follow the alphabetical prompts for either The Afternoon Play or The Classic Serial. If you fancy something a bit more highbrow, choose Radio 3 instead and find Drama on Three.
The material available ranges from a fairly lightweight and cosy 45-minute fables to a full-on 3-hour staging of classic or modern theatre. Shakespeare, Chekov, Mamet, you name it.
It’s also worth investigating the many titles BBC Enterprises sells on CD. They did a really good series dramatising all the Sherlock Holmes stories recently, and a great version of Homer’s Odyssey. Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy actually started as a BBC radio series, of course, with Douglas Adams only writing the books to capitalise on that series’ success. My other personal favourite as far as radio humour’s concerned is Hancock’s Half Hour from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and you can buy those on CD too.
Other stuff I’ve enjoyed recently has included The Classic Serial’s excellent dramatisations of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman stories and the complete set of John Le Carre’s George Smiley stories. You can find most of the BBC spoken word CDs on Amazon.com and, I dare say, iTunes too. Radio 4 does a lot of straightforward readings too, using a single narrator, but everything I’ve mentioned here is a full audio dramatisation.
I gather radio drama is now pretty much limited to campy Old Time Radio shows in the US, but that’s far from the case here in Britain. The BBC’s output is an absolute treasure chest for anyone with an interest an this medium, so dig in and enjoy it. You’re in for a treat.