I was listening to some old-timey radio shows on the local public radio station a few days ago. Some shows had cultural references that placed them solidly in the 1950s - moving to the suburbs, shopping plazas, scary Russians, etc. This was also the time when broadcast television was on the rise.
Radio didn’t stop broadcasting serials and variety shows, and move to all-music and all-news formats, when broadcast television first arrived on the scene. I’m curious about the time when both radio and television had similar programming. Did the likes of I Love Lucy compete with equivalent radio shows? When did regularly scheduled soap operas, sitcoms, police and detective shows, cowboy shows, and the like disappear from radio for good? Were there odd holdouts, like a serial that survived into the 1960s or 1970s?
IIRC, a couple of the old radio shows survived until 1960, but the format was dying throughout the 50s.
Some shows had both TV and radio versions running at the same time. Jack Benny was an obvious example. And radio shows (e.g., Dragnet, Gunsmoke) often were transferred to television. I don’t think there was the same hostility that movies had toward TV.
There were a handful of radio soap operas still on the air in 1960, but all of them were canceled by the end of the year. Ditto for Groucho Marx and *You Bet Your Life, *which was on both radio and TV.
Gunsmoke made it until 1961, with an entirely different cast from the TV version.
Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, a low-key talk/music show, made it through 1968 while Arthur Godfrey’s daily show stayed on radio until 1972. Wikipedia claims Godfrey’s show was the last daily long-form entertainment program on network radio. Then in 1974, The CBS Raio Mystery Theater premiered and stayed on the air for eight years.
Some of the episodes of “My Favorite Husband,” the radio show Lucy was on before “I Love Lucy,” are on the ILL DVDs. From the airdates, it doesn’t look like they overlapped, but that she went straight from the one to the other. The writing team was the same and a lot of scripts from the radio show were recycled for television–some scenes pretty much word for word, and other revised to adjust for the differences between a suburban housewife married to a banker and a New York City dweller married to a Cuban bandleader.
Amos ‘n’ Andy, perhaps the most popular show in the history of radio, made its final broadcast on November 25, 1960. I can recall catching an episode of it on my grandparents’ old radio sometime that year, or perhaps the year before.
The show made its first broadcast on March 19, 1928, while its predecessor show, Sam ‘n’ Henry (which featured the same actors and a similar approach) began in January of 1926.
Also TV licenses were originally given to the owners of radio stations so the goal was to maximize profits for both by selling ads on both. It was not a competition.
This is still the case in Britain. BBC Radio 4 (and its subsidiary channels, and, more occasionally occasionally some of the other main BBC Radio channels) still regularly broadcasts a wide variety of comedy shows, serials, plays, thrillers etc., as well as its news and documentary output.
I am very grateful that it does. I can scarcely manage without it. (When I lived in the USA I would get my Radio 4 fix via the internet.)
To a much lesser degree (and on much more of a shoestring budget), NPR also does this in the United States, but I am pretty sure that the percentage of people in Britain who listen to Radio 4 is much higher than the percentage of Americans who listen to Public Radio.
Up until 1955 all four radio networks tried to keep a full schedule. Here’s a partial schedule from 1953. But by 1955, of the 46 million radio households in the U.S, less than a million bothered listening to network radio in prime time hours. All the networks than rapidly slashed non-news programming until they pretty much abandoned it in 1960.
If you really want to know about 50s network radio, this book is an excellent resource.
Were there any shows that ran the same exact show in both formats? A lot of the TV back then seemed to be perfectly understandable with audio only. (Heck, it’s still often the case. And I’ve definitely heard the exact same ad on TV and radio.)
a tv script and radio script wouldn’t be identical event with the same plot.
in radio there has to be dialog (spoken by a character) or narration to describe a scene. in tv you see the scene. so radio took longer to have the same event or correspondingly tv did it in shorter time. tv could then throw in some filler.
Gunsmoke did have a script that went both radio and tv within that season. there were modifications for each medium.
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts and Arthur Godfrey Time were simulcast at least part-time on radio and TV, as was* The Voice of Firestone*, featuring the NBC SymphonyOrchestra. *Meet The Press *was also simulcast for awhile, but all of those shows were essentially radio programs with minimal staging.
Both the 1970’s and the 1990’s versions of the ABC series In Concert were also simulcast on radio.