Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and a lot of all things tech and on Monday
Speaker 1: we released a special episode about three D audio, and
Speaker 1: in it I had some examples of three D audio
Speaker 1: within the show. Now, typically for a show like tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: three D audio isn't you know, a natural fit. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone needs the experience of hearing me
Speaker 1: virtually walk around them while I explain technology. We might
Speaker 1: do the occasional soundscaping for an episode, but that's about
Speaker 1: the extent of it. Where three D audio really shines
Speaker 1: is in dramatized audio fiction podcasts, or maybe the occasional
Speaker 1: re enact it for something like true crime podcasts. And
Speaker 1: that got me thinking about the old art form of
Speaker 1: radio theater or radio drama. I have a personal connection
Speaker 1: with radio drama. I used to be a member of
Speaker 1: the board for the Atlanta Radio Theater Company or art
Speaker 1: c a r TC. I also wrote and performed with
Speaker 1: Artsy for several years, as did another Stuff host Stuff
Speaker 1: You Missed in History Classes Tracy Wilson did the same.
Speaker 1: My father still writes and performs with them. The Atlanta
Speaker 1: Radio Theater Company typically doesn't perform or record old radio
Speaker 1: drama scripts, like existing ones from the forties or fifties. Rather,
Speaker 1: the company mainly focuses on original works and radio adaptations
Speaker 1: of existing works, and largely in the speculative fiction genres,
Speaker 1: so stuff like science fiction and horror and fantasy. When
Speaker 1: I was writing ups for them and performing in shows,
Speaker 1: it was really before podcasts had become a big thing.
Speaker 1: There wasn't much place for radio drama outside of a
Speaker 1: niche market here in the United States. We might once
Speaker 1: in a while have a piece that would be broadcast
Speaker 1: on local public radio, but otherwise we were pretty much
Speaker 1: limited to doing live performances, typically at things like science
Speaker 1: fiction conventions, and making recordings. That was pretty much it.
Speaker 1: Flash forward just a few years and now radio drama
Speaker 1: or audio drama or audio theater or theater of the
Speaker 1: mind is back in full force. There are so many
Speaker 1: podcasts that fall into that general category. Some do close
Speaker 1: to the old style of the original serials of the
Speaker 1: radio days. Some take the art form to really unusual places,
Speaker 1: freed from the concerns of broadcast standards, people can really
Speaker 1: ex floor of the medium. So today I thought we'd
Speaker 1: look a little bit at the history and evolution of
Speaker 1: radio theater. We can talk about how art and technology
Speaker 1: combined to create an experience for the listener. And it's
Speaker 1: really cool stuff because it's not just the technology, it's
Speaker 1: how do you use that technology to do something specific?
Speaker 1: How do you create an outcome with that technology that
Speaker 1: involves not just tech but art and psychology. But let's
Speaker 1: get a few basic ideas out of the way. Theater
Speaker 1: in general relies partly upon the imagination of the audience,
Speaker 1: and I referenced this in the three D audio episode
Speaker 1: in which I recited the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth.
Speaker 1: In that prologue, a member of the theater known as
Speaker 1: the chorus implores the audience to utilize their imaginations to
Speaker 1: fill out the action of the play. The actors can't
Speaker 1: bring up horses on stage or fill up the theater
Speaker 1: with an entire army, and yet the action of Henry
Speaker 1: the Fifth references such things. Is talking about a war
Speaker 1: between England and France. So it's the audience's job to
Speaker 1: supply the show with those elements they have to imagine
Speaker 1: them to be. Thus, it's part of the willing suspension
Speaker 1: of disbelief. Yes, you know that in reality you are
Speaker 1: actually inside a theater, perhaps standing on the ground, looking
Speaker 1: at a stage, and you're watching actors in costumes pretending
Speaker 1: to be people who have been dead for more than
Speaker 1: a century. But you suspend that disbelief to get lost
Speaker 1: in the story. Stories are powerful things. I mean, they
Speaker 1: connect us to our history and to each other. It's
Speaker 1: an ancient form of communication and one that still has
Speaker 1: incredible power today. Well, radio drama has no visuals whatsoever.
Speaker 1: So the challenge for a radio drama writer, as well
Speaker 1: as for perform and producers, is to create an audio
Speaker 1: experience that compels the audience to engage their imaginations and
Speaker 1: supply everything that you cannot. The brilliant part of this
Speaker 1: is that an audience's imagination can always exceed anything you
Speaker 1: might manage to do were you to produce the show
Speaker 1: in some other medium. So Peter Jackson had a budget
Speaker 1: of hundreds of millions of dollars to make The Lord
Speaker 1: of the Rings movies, but a good radio production can
Speaker 1: make a comparable experience for a fraction of the price.
Speaker 1: As long as the audience goes along for the ride,
Speaker 1: your imagination is going to be far more spectacular than
Speaker 1: any big budget special effects. But it also means that
Speaker 1: the audio production has to supply enough information for the
Speaker 1: audience to know what's going on so that they can
Speaker 1: imagine things. That is its own challenge. So how do
Speaker 1: you convey action in a way that seems natural to
Speaker 1: the list her? There's nothing like listening to say, a
Speaker 1: horror story on the radio, and here one character say
Speaker 1: to another, Oh, no, he's reaching into his coat and
Speaker 1: pulling out what is it? It's a knife, a big, sharp,
Speaker 1: pointy knife, and now he is holding the knife in
Speaker 1: a threatening way and advancing upon us with malicious intent.
Speaker 1: I mean, that doesn't That doesn't really come across well,
Speaker 1: does it? Now? Granted I read that with you know,
Speaker 1: a tongue in cheek, goofy approach. But even if I
Speaker 1: had tried to read that like I was scared, it
Speaker 1: doesn't come across naturally at all. Right, So radio drama
Speaker 1: has its own challenges. Balancing out elements like suspense or
Speaker 1: a comedy or action with keeping things sounding natural is tricky.
Speaker 1: So in the great history of radio drama. There are
Speaker 1: examples that are really fun and some that are real clunkers,
Speaker 1: which is no surprise there. It's the same with any
Speaker 1: art form. Now, storytelling and theater are ancient forms, and
Speaker 1: so it should stand as no surprise that once clever
Speaker 1: humans figured out a way to transmit sounds over great distances,
Speaker 1: they would use that technology to tap into this very
Speaker 1: human activity. And arguably we can say that the birth
Speaker 1: of the radio drama goes back to our buddy Clement Otter. Now,
Speaker 1: if you listen to my episode about three D Audio,
Speaker 1: you heard me talk about how Otter or aider set
Speaker 1: up what was effectively a selection of telephone microphones at
Speaker 1: the Paris Opera and he ran lines to a suite
Speaker 1: of rooms in a building that was a couple of
Speaker 1: kilometers from the opera house. So guests of the Paris
Speaker 1: Electrical Exhibition could go into one of these rooms and
Speaker 1: hold up a receiver to each year, so a telephone receiver,
Speaker 1: but one for each year left end right, and they
Speaker 1: could hear audio from those different microphones on the stage,
Speaker 1: which created a kind of primitive stereo effect. Otter's invention
Speaker 1: predated the age of radio by a couple of decades.
Speaker 1: Honors work formed the basis of a new type of
Speaker 1: business called the teatro phone or the theater phone. The
Speaker 1: company Do Teatrophone was incorporated near the end of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century and promoted the service They made honors demonstration
Speaker 1: an ongoing business. They would get permission to set up
Speaker 1: microphones at various performance venues and then people would be
Speaker 1: able to listen in on those and you could either
Speaker 1: listen in by using a coin operated telephone, which were
Speaker 1: located in places like hotels and clubs and cafes, and
Speaker 1: you just pay a small fee to listen to about
Speaker 1: five minutes worth of transmission. Alternatively, you could subscribe to
Speaker 1: the service for a recurring fee and listen more frequently.
Speaker 1: For those Parisians who were more important and rich enough
Speaker 1: to have a telephone installed in their own home, they
Speaker 1: could even subscribe to the service from home and listen
Speaker 1: in whenever they liked the perform Minses carried by the
Speaker 1: tatra phone weren't catered for audio. Rather, it was a
Speaker 1: way for tech savvy and trendy Parisians to take in
Speaker 1: the latest opera or play in an innovative way. In
Speaker 1: some ways, it helped increase accessibility to art, since each
Speaker 1: theater house has a limited number of seats, and the
Speaker 1: theater phone created opportunities for someone to experience a show,
Speaker 1: even if it was only an audio and even if
Speaker 1: the show had sold out. But the shows were being
Speaker 1: performed in front of audiences as fully staged productions, so
Speaker 1: if you were in the audience, you were seeing a
Speaker 1: full play, So they weren't designed to be experienced just
Speaker 1: through sound alone. And I'm sure there were cases of
Speaker 1: people wondering exactly what the heck was going on on
Speaker 1: stage while they were listening in the theater phone got
Speaker 1: started around eight ninety, which was well before what we
Speaker 1: would consider radio broadcasts. There were people experimenting with radio
Speaker 1: around that time. It took a lot of work and
Speaker 1: a lot of convergence in the world of physics to
Speaker 1: get a deep enough understanding of what radio waves are,
Speaker 1: how they work, how you can generate them, how you
Speaker 1: can encode information onto them, and how you could receive
Speaker 1: and then decode the information to play those signals back
Speaker 1: and get audio to go through. All of that work
Speaker 1: would be way too much for this episode, and besides,
Speaker 1: I've actually covered this a few times before. It's also
Speaker 1: a story that has some really big personalities in it,
Speaker 1: like Marconi and Tesla and Edison. It gets really complicated
Speaker 1: and really dramatic, but that's drama about radio, not drama
Speaker 1: performed on radio. So we're gonna move on now. You
Speaker 1: could argue that the first radio broadcast was in n
Speaker 1: six with Reginald Fessenden sending out a radio signal of
Speaker 1: him playing you know, Christmas songs on violin and reading
Speaker 1: passages from the Bible. But that was a bit of
Speaker 1: a one off, and the only folks who really heard
Speaker 1: that broadcast were somewhat confused radio operators on ships in
Speaker 1: the Atlantic Ocean. Fessenden's broadcast used amplitude modulation or a M,
Speaker 1: and I suppose we should talk about modulation for a second,
Speaker 1: just to understand how it works. So with radio, you
Speaker 1: need to generate a signal of a specific frequency or hurts.
Speaker 1: So when you look at a radio station, those numbers
Speaker 1: of the radio station relate to the frequency of the
Speaker 1: radio signal, and frequency refers to the number of cycles
Speaker 1: of a radio wave passing a given point per second.
Speaker 1: All radio waves travel at the same speed, which is
Speaker 1: the speed of light, but the actual length of those
Speaker 1: waves themselves are different. So a radio wave that has
Speaker 1: you know, that's really long is going to have fewer
Speaker 1: cycles per second than a radio wave that's really short.
Speaker 1: Both are traveling at the speed of light, but the
Speaker 1: long waves are is going to be fewer of them
Speaker 1: per second. It So, let's say you have got a
Speaker 1: way to broadcast a radio wave of fifty killer hurts.
Speaker 1: That means fifty thousand radio waves will pass a given
Speaker 1: point in a second. This is the approximate frequency that
Speaker 1: Festenden used. Well, if you just sent out a smooth
Speaker 1: radio wave of fifty killer hurts and you didn't do
Speaker 1: anything to it, someone with a radio receiver tuned to
Speaker 1: the frequency of fifty killer hurts would really only see
Speaker 1: if a signal was coming through or not. But no
Speaker 1: meaningful information is coming across. You have to transform that
Speaker 1: signal in some way. Now, the way a m works
Speaker 1: is by changing or modulating the amplitude of a radio signal.
Speaker 1: That is, changing the height of the peaks and the
Speaker 1: depths of the valleys that the radio wave makes. And
Speaker 1: you've got your carrier wave of fifty killer hurts. You
Speaker 1: encode information on top of that carrier wave with modulating
Speaker 1: an amplitude, and a receiver picks up the fifty killer
Speaker 1: hurt signal and decodes those modulations, and that's how you
Speaker 1: get the playback of the audio. FM radio or frequency
Speaker 1: modulation works a little differently. Rather than changing the amplitude
Speaker 1: of a carrier wave, and you make slight changes to
Speaker 1: the radio waves frequency. Now you don't change it a lot,
Speaker 1: because if you go too far outside the carrier waves
Speaker 1: home frequency, the receiving radio won't be able to stay
Speaker 1: tuned to it. But either way, you can modulate that
Speaker 1: wave to carry information with it, and the receiving radio
Speaker 1: tuned to that frequency can demodulate it and play the
Speaker 1: transmitted audio. It would take a decade and a half
Speaker 1: for the first commercial radio stations to begin operations. One
Speaker 1: reason for that was a little thing called World War One,
Speaker 1: or what people back then referred to as the Great War,
Speaker 1: because you know, calling something world War one right from
Speaker 1: the start marks a level of pessimism we just don't need. Now,
Speaker 1: that's not to say people weren't experimenting and creating early
Speaker 1: radio broadcast stations during this time. They were. There was
Speaker 1: the predecessor to San Jose's k CBS, there was Canada's
Speaker 1: x w A, which would evolve into c I in
Speaker 1: w A. Few colleges established their own small stations as well,
Speaker 1: like Union College, which had a station called to YU,
Speaker 1: which evolved into w r U c UH. Some people
Speaker 1: called Pittsburgh's k d K a station the first real
Speaker 1: commercial radio station. It's hard to give a definitive first
Speaker 1: because many of these early stations were only broadcasting some
Speaker 1: of the time, like for a couple of hours a day,
Speaker 1: and sometimes to a relatively small service area, and there
Speaker 1: were very few people who could, you know, actually listen
Speaker 1: in on them. There were also radio stations that served
Speaker 1: as wireless telegraph stations. In the United States, the military
Speaker 1: took control of those types of stations because they were
Speaker 1: part of a vital communications infrastructure during World War One,
Speaker 1: and at the conclusion of the war, the U. S.
Speaker 1: Government told the Navy, hey, you should return those stations
Speaker 1: to the original owners, which wasn't something that the Navy
Speaker 1: was too terribly keen on doing. And part of the
Speaker 1: reason for that, you know, why the Navy was so
Speaker 1: reluctant was that a lot of those stations were owned
Speaker 1: by foreign companies, and the Navy viewed the radio communication
Speaker 1: system as critical to the national security of the United States,
Speaker 1: so there was a lot of pressure to move ownership
Speaker 1: of these radio stations to domestic companies, which again, these
Speaker 1: stations were mostly about sending wireless telegraphs rather than you know,
Speaker 1: radio broadcasts as we would think of them. From this situation,
Speaker 1: the Radio Corporation of America or r c A was formed.
Speaker 1: The technology had reached a stage that allowed for the
Speaker 1: transmitting and receiving a radio signals, and companies like our
Speaker 1: CIA had the opportunity to sell radio sets to American consumers.
Speaker 1: But these Americans would need stuff to listen to or
Speaker 1: else the radios wouldn't be very useful, and so our
Speaker 1: CI A was also in the business of creating radio
Speaker 1: station networks and producing content to air over the radio.
Speaker 1: When we come back, we'll look at how this gave
Speaker 1: birth to the art form of radio theater. But first
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break. So in the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: radio was starting to become a popular medium. Lots of
Speaker 1: places began to establish real, honest to goodness radio stations. A.
Speaker 1: T and T began investing in radio stations and formed
Speaker 1: a network of stations in various cities before the company
Speaker 1: decided to exit the industry in nineteen six. At that point,
Speaker 1: our c A purchased a stake in the network that A.
Speaker 1: T and T had been running, and General Electric and
Speaker 1: Westinghouse divided up the other fifty percent of ownership, and
Speaker 1: together they formed the National Broadcasting Company or in BC.
Speaker 1: R c A would later acquire full ownership of NBC
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty. Over in the UK you had the
Speaker 1: foundation of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was the predecessor,
Speaker 1: was established in nineteen twenty two with a radio service
Speaker 1: called two l oh. It would become the BBC in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty seven. Companies like our c A began offering
Speaker 1: up consumer radios for sale, and r c A promoted
Speaker 1: radio by selling tickets to venues that had radios that
Speaker 1: could play a live broadcast a big events from across
Speaker 1: the country, such as a heavyweight championship boxing match in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty one. It wasn't that dissimilar to the old
Speaker 1: theater phones when you think about it, but the whole
Speaker 1: point was to lure people in and convince them that
Speaker 1: getting a radio set for the home would be a
Speaker 1: really great idea, and it proved to be a huge winner. This,
Speaker 1: by the way, was in the pre transistor days, so
Speaker 1: radio amplifiers relied on vacuum tubes, and so a radio
Speaker 1: set was a hefty piece of furniture. The typical radio
Speaker 1: looked a bit like a side table, and for many
Speaker 1: people in the US and the UK, it was considered
Speaker 1: a must have for the home. There's a bit of
Speaker 1: a debate about what the earliest audio drama was that
Speaker 1: was produced for the radio. In nineteen two, w g
Speaker 1: Y station in Schenectady, New York, produced an adaptation of
Speaker 1: the stage play by Eugene Walter titled The Wolf. The
Speaker 1: original play had a three act structure, but w g
Speaker 1: Y program director Colin Hagar was concerned that audiences wouldn't
Speaker 1: have that kind of patience for a full length show,
Speaker 1: so the production team decided to edit the story down
Speaker 1: to a tight forty minutes script. Now, I have never
Speaker 1: seen a production of this play, nor have I heard
Speaker 1: the radio version. There's apparently a novelization out there, but
Speaker 1: I haven't read it. I did read a synopsis and
Speaker 1: it sounds like pure melodrama, and pretty dated mel of
Speaker 1: drama at that, But then the original play debuted around
Speaker 1: nineteen o eight. So in the play, there's a naive, young,
Speaker 1: innocent woman. There's a man who's intent on seeking revenge
Speaker 1: for the death of a step sister he never knew
Speaker 1: he had. There's the villainous cad who was responsible for
Speaker 1: leading said step sister astray, and then there's the the
Speaker 1: young woman I mentioned earlier. Her her crusty old father
Speaker 1: is in it too. And it sounds terrible. At least,
Speaker 1: it sounds like I would hate it. But apparently it
Speaker 1: was a big hit for w g Y, and that
Speaker 1: was enough to convince the program director to commission more
Speaker 1: adaptations of stage plays for broadcast. Between nineteen twenty two
Speaker 1: and nineteen twenty three, that station broadcast forty three different productions,
Speaker 1: and from what I gather, these were all just strictly
Speaker 1: readings of existing plays, rather than plays that were catering
Speaker 1: specific lead to audio. However, one thing to keep in
Speaker 1: mind is that these performances were all live. Nothing was
Speaker 1: prerecorded unless it was very very short. Typically, a large
Speaker 1: station would produce a performance live in studio, and if
Speaker 1: it was a production that was shorter than fifteen minutes long,
Speaker 1: they might record that performance to aluminium discs and then
Speaker 1: send those aluminium discs to regional stations to play from there.
Speaker 1: But the disc can only hold fifteen minutes of audio,
Speaker 1: so anything longer than fifteen minutes absolutely had to be
Speaker 1: performed live because there just wasn't enough capacity to record
Speaker 1: them at that time. That meant that, just as is
Speaker 1: the case with live stage theater, there was the opportunity
Speaker 1: for stuff to go wrong. An actor could drop a
Speaker 1: line or skip a queue, or a sound effect might
Speaker 1: come in too late or too early. The audience probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't be as aware of any problems as the cast
Speaker 1: crew would be unless it was something, you know, really spectacular,
Speaker 1: but it did create a type of energy to the performances.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no take two and the show must
Speaker 1: go on. It's generally believed that the first theatrical piece
Speaker 1: written specifically for radio was a play titled A Comedy
Speaker 1: of Danger, which aired in January fift nineteen twenty four
Speaker 1: in the UK. It was produced in the Savoy region
Speaker 1: and in London, and it was written by Richard Hughes,
Speaker 1: who later wrote the novel A High Wind in Jamaica.
Speaker 1: The story behind how A Comedy of Danger it came
Speaker 1: to be as pretty entertaining just by itself. Hughes was
Speaker 1: meeting with a director named Nigel Playfair on January eleven,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty four. Playfair had agreed to provide two hours
Speaker 1: of entertainment to broadcast on the radio by and he
Speaker 1: had planned to have some poetry readings and some readings
Speaker 1: of excerpts from Jane Austen works, but he hadn't quite
Speaker 1: found enough material to fill up the two hours, and
Speaker 1: he lamented that it sure would be nice to have
Speaker 1: something that was composed specifically for the medium of radio,
Speaker 1: rather than just adapted from some other source. Hughes agreed
Speaker 1: with Playfair and said he wished that he could have
Speaker 1: written such a piece, and Playfair essentially set the hook,
Speaker 1: and Hughes, eager to try his hand at the task,
Speaker 1: agreed to try and write something for Playfair, and he
Speaker 1: stayed up all night in order to have a finished
Speaker 1: play in Playfair's hands by the following morning. And that's
Speaker 1: how the first radio play was written, in haste, behind
Speaker 1: deadline and in a desperate attempt to fill up air time.
Speaker 1: It would not be the last time those criteria would
Speaker 1: apply to a piece that was written for radio, the
Speaker 1: play would also feature sound effects, something pretty novel at
Speaker 1: the time. While actors would read the lines, other performers
Speaker 1: would use a mishmash of various props and odds and
Speaker 1: ends to create the soundscape for the show. In the
Speaker 1: film world, these became known as Folly effects, named after
Speaker 1: a great artist in the field, Jack Effects. Wait, no,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I meant Jack Foley. Whether for audio, theater
Speaker 1: or film, the folly effects artist has to have impeccable timing.
Speaker 1: The sound effects complete the scene and give the audience
Speaker 1: information that they normally would pick up with their eyes.
Speaker 1: If it were a standard play, characters in motion might
Speaker 1: be accompanied by the sound of crunching shoes on gravel,
Speaker 1: or maybe squishy sounds to represent walking through a muddy field.
Speaker 1: A door opening might signal that someone has entered or
Speaker 1: left a room, and you know, a good sound effect
Speaker 1: can really lift the need for characters to have to
Speaker 1: say all that clunky stuff I mentioned earlier. In this episode,
Speaker 1: Hughes also wanted to avoid having a narrator. He felt
Speaker 1: that that would be a bit like cheating, and he
Speaker 1: wanted to convey all the necessary information through the action
Speaker 1: of the play and through the dialogue, and again this
Speaker 1: is tricky stuff. When I was writing for the Atlanta
Speaker 1: Radio Theater Company, I frequently would use a narrator, mostly
Speaker 1: for comedic effect, but otherwise I tried to avoid it
Speaker 1: as much as I could, because I agree it does
Speaker 1: take the listener out of stuff. A comedy of Danger
Speaker 1: takes place deep below ground and a coal mine in Wales.
Speaker 1: An early line in the play is the lights have
Speaker 1: gone out, something that Playfair had actually suggested, as he
Speaker 1: and Hughes were first musing about the possibility of radio
Speaker 1: play and an audience that might listen to the piece
Speaker 1: in total darkness. The studio they broadcast from was a
Speaker 1: padded room with a single microphone. So in order to
Speaker 1: create the effect of people in an underground gallery in
Speaker 1: a coal mine, Playfair had all the actors at play
Speaker 1: their parts with buckets on their head to create that
Speaker 1: kind of echoe sound. I'm not making that up. According
Speaker 1: to Hughes himself, that's how they achieved the effect of
Speaker 1: being in an echoe chamber to to actually as a
Speaker 1: with a buckethead. The script is actually available online, as
Speaker 1: are recordings of various performances of the piece. You can
Speaker 1: listen to them. The YouTube has quite a few of them,
Speaker 1: and it features three main characters. There's Jack, Marie and Backs.
Speaker 1: All three of these characters are touring the coal mine
Speaker 1: for some odd reason and the lights go out and
Speaker 1: soon the three characters are going through various stages of
Speaker 1: panic and resolution as they ponder their fate, which has
Speaker 1: made all the more chaotic upon the sound of some
Speaker 1: explosions and rushing water. It's a bit of an odd piece. Um.
Speaker 1: There are characters who vacillate between being resolute in the
Speaker 1: face of certain death and trying to negotiate with the
Speaker 1: hours that be so that they can live longer. But
Speaker 1: it is an interesting one. Playfair, being a bit of
Speaker 1: a rogue, arranged for the press to hear the broadcast
Speaker 1: from a special room with a loudspeaker in it. And
Speaker 1: the loudspeaker had a lot more power behind it than
Speaker 1: a typical radio set would, and it would give the
Speaker 1: press the ability to actually hear what was going on
Speaker 1: with the broadcast. In fact, Hugh said the average radio
Speaker 1: listener would probably have trouble distinguishing the various sounds, and
Speaker 1: to cap it off, Playfair allegedly arranged to set off
Speaker 1: the equivalent of firecrackers in the room next to the
Speaker 1: press to augment the explosion effect heard in the piece.
Speaker 1: The press, unaware that the boom they heard came not
Speaker 1: from the loudspeaker but from the room next door, were
Speaker 1: suitably impressed. Hughes was very clever to have set a
Speaker 1: play in a completely dark setting. His characters couldn't see anything,
Speaker 1: so there was no need for them to describe their
Speaker 1: surroundings or even describe each other, or the voices would
Speaker 1: give all the clues to the audience. Jack and Marie
Speaker 1: are obviously young, they are played by young actors, and
Speaker 1: they have young voices. Backs is an older man, and
Speaker 1: the information the audience needed was all right there in
Speaker 1: the performance, and thus the era of radio drama was born.
Speaker 1: Radio drama emerged largely because there was a need for content,
Speaker 1: just as Playfair had expressed that was universal. You had
Speaker 1: this new technology that allowed people to broadcast programming across
Speaker 1: wide regions. You had sponsors who are willing to pay
Speaker 1: to have advertisements read out over the air to the listeners.
Speaker 1: But how do you fill up all that time. Most
Speaker 1: radio stations would balance out their programming with newscasts music
Speaker 1: and other forms of entertainment, and a lot of that
Speaker 1: came in the form of reading existing material out over
Speaker 1: the air, but the adaptation of dramatic works and more ordinally,
Speaker 1: the creation of works intended specifically for the medium position
Speaker 1: Radio for a transformation, and that meant there was a
Speaker 1: sudden demand for storytellers to create or adapt material and
Speaker 1: for actors to perform it. Over the following years, tons
Speaker 1: of different radio programs began to take shape, hundreds of them.
Speaker 1: Our CIA had a real stranglehold on a lot of
Speaker 1: the radio in the United States, owning two NBC radio networks.
Speaker 1: Both of them were called NBC. One was designated NBC
Speaker 1: Red Network and the other was NBC Blue Network. They
Speaker 1: each independently had their own programming, so Red had its
Speaker 1: own slate of programs and Blue head its. Occasionally one
Speaker 1: would end up airing content that that originated from the other,
Speaker 1: or they would both air the same live event, but
Speaker 1: that was pretty rare. They pretty much stayed distinct from
Speaker 1: each other, although our c A owned both of them. Now.
Speaker 1: The NBC Blue Network would eventually evolve into the American
Speaker 1: Broadcasting Company or ABC. The U s Government kind of
Speaker 1: stepped in and forced our c A to divest itself
Speaker 1: of one of the NBC networks. In the late nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: the CBS Radio network took shape, and there was really
Speaker 1: fierce competition between CBS and NBC for talent, with networks
Speaker 1: signing performers and writers to exclusive contracts that would last years.
Speaker 1: This was the time of Old Time Radio or o
Speaker 1: t R. You could find radio dramas across every genre,
Speaker 1: soap operas, police procedurals, westerns, science fiction, horror, children's shows,
Speaker 1: superhero shows and more. Shows that would go on to
Speaker 1: become television programs got their start on the radio, like
Speaker 1: The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, or Dragnet or the
Speaker 1: Jack Benny Program. And this was also era of sponsored programming.
Speaker 1: A lot of shows would feature prominent sponsor spots. Frequently
Speaker 1: they would actually weave sponsor bits into storylines or even
Speaker 1: into the titles of the shows. There was perhapst Blue
Speaker 1: Ribbon Town, which was a comedy variety show. There was
Speaker 1: Oldsmobile Program which was another variety show, or the General
Speaker 1: Mills Radio Adventure Theater, for example. And there were some
Speaker 1: shows with titles that really made me wonder what the
Speaker 1: heck they were, like, for example, The Strange Doctor Weird. Now,
Speaker 1: based on what I've read, it sounds like it was
Speaker 1: kind of a Twilight Zone style show, but it was
Speaker 1: one that was frequently repurposing scripts that have been used
Speaker 1: for a similar show titled The Mysterious Traveler. So apparently, uh,
Speaker 1: the Strange Doctor Weird would take scripts written for The
Speaker 1: Mysterious Traveler, condense them into shorter formats, and then broadcast them.
Speaker 1: Then there were other shows with great titles like I
Speaker 1: Was a Communist for the FBI, which was a crime
Speaker 1: series that ran in the nineteen fifties. There was The
Speaker 1: Goon Show, which was a British comedy radio program that
Speaker 1: would inspire the likes of Monty Python, and the Fire
Speaker 1: Sign Theater. Firesign Theater is another great example they made
Speaker 1: absurdist radio theater programs. Some of my favorite radio theater
Speaker 1: comedy came out of Fire Sign Theater, like Nick Danger
Speaker 1: Third Eye. When we come back, we'll talk about a
Speaker 1: few other standouts in radio theater and also where the
Speaker 1: art form is now. But first let's take another quick
Speaker 1: break by radio drama made up about four percent of
Speaker 1: network programming in the US, much of the radio drama
Speaker 1: was short form and sketch based, so it was stuff
Speaker 1: that you could fit into more of a variety show format.
Speaker 1: If you listen to programs like The Jack Benny Show,
Speaker 1: you'll hear several scenes that can more or less stand
Speaker 1: alone and serve as comedic vehicles for the various performers,
Speaker 1: and they do string together to make a full story,
Speaker 1: but it feels more like a program that could cater
Speaker 1: to people who just tune in for a short while,
Speaker 1: rather than necessarily hearing the whole thing. But there were
Speaker 1: artists who really wanted to push the boundaries of the
Speaker 1: established formats, some who wanted to take more of a
Speaker 1: slow and methodical paste is storytelling. A lot of early
Speaker 1: radio drama is packaged as these really short, exciting bursts
Speaker 1: of activity, typically ending on some sort of cliffhanger in
Speaker 1: order to encourage people to tune into the next episode.
Speaker 1: I think of it as sort of the Dan Brown
Speaker 1: approach to writing, where every chapter has to be a
Speaker 1: cliffhanger to get you to go to the next chapter.
Speaker 1: And that's what a lot of early radio theater was
Speaker 1: like too. But then we get to nineteen thirty eight
Speaker 1: and a famous or perhaps infamous radio broadcast that would
Speaker 1: have its own reputation, UH, which was largely unearned, as
Speaker 1: we will learn. So the production was a piece by
Speaker 1: the Mercury Theater on the Air, which was on CBS Radio.
Speaker 1: The star and host for this program was Orson Wells,
Speaker 1: who of course would go on to become a lauded
Speaker 1: actor and filmmaker. In October Night, the Mercury Theater Ensemble
Speaker 1: performed an adaptation of H. G. Wells is classic The
Speaker 1: War of the World's Now. In the book, Martians invade
Speaker 1: Earth because the resources of Mars are running dangerously low,
Speaker 1: and the Martians are using giant machines and heat rays
Speaker 1: to wreak havoc on Earth, attacking towns. UH. The show is,
Speaker 1: or the novel rather said in Britain. So towns and
Speaker 1: Britain are just totally level. London is emptied because of
Speaker 1: these attacks, and the Martians essentially lay waste to the
Speaker 1: towns and are seemingly unstoppable. But eventually the narrator of
Speaker 1: the novel discovers that the Martians are all dying off
Speaker 1: because they have no immunity to earthly pathogens, and so
Speaker 1: they essentially all caught a cold and died. In other words,
Speaker 1: Wells's theater group performed a dramatized adaptation of this story
Speaker 1: for the radio, and the first half of the program
Speaker 1: comes across like a newscast, and in fact, the show
Speaker 1: didn't have commercial breaks, so it felt like it was
Speaker 1: kind of a genuine newscast approach. There's a famous myth
Speaker 1: that lots of people totally flipped out when they heard
Speaker 1: the broadcast, believing it to be a legitimate newscast rather
Speaker 1: than a radio play, and the story goes that huge
Speaker 1: groups of people panicked, believing Earth to have been invaded
Speaker 1: by Martians and that entire cities were being level as
Speaker 1: a result of it. However, the truth of the matter
Speaker 1: is that there was no widespread panic. The streets were
Speaker 1: not filled with people trying to flee to the countryside.
Speaker 1: The press of the day made it sound as though
Speaker 1: Wells had really pulled a fast one on the American
Speaker 1: public and given everyone a real fright before Halloween, but
Speaker 1: there doesn't seem to be any evidence for that. There
Speaker 1: were a few isolated incidents of people being a little
Speaker 1: concerned about hearing this newscast and wondering what was going on,
Speaker 1: but there was no like mass hysteria. However, the War
Speaker 1: of the World's broadcast helped put Wells on the cultural map,
Speaker 1: and it also elevated the art form of the radio play.
Speaker 1: Leaning on that newscast format, created new ways to tell stories,
Speaker 1: ways that leveraged how radio works and got around some
Speaker 1: of the awkward elements we've already talked about. And in fact,
Speaker 1: if you're a fan of shows like Welcome to night Vale,
Speaker 1: they owe a lot to the War. The War olds
Speaker 1: you listen to that show and you realize that it's
Speaker 1: taking that sort of newscast approach. I often think of
Speaker 1: Welcome to night Vale as being a combination of Twilight Zone, UH,
Speaker 1: the Prairie Home Companion radio Show, and War of the
Speaker 1: World's and it does it extremely well. Generally speaking, in
Speaker 1: the United States, the years between nineteen twenty and nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty are considered the golden age of radio drama, but
Speaker 1: by the nineteen fifties television was starting to make up
Speaker 1: ground and began sapping summer radio's talent and money. Stars
Speaker 1: who had made a name for themselves on the radio
Speaker 1: moved over to TV, and a lot of shows and
Speaker 1: people who worked on them weren't able to make the move. Now,
Speaker 1: what's really sad is that a lot of these shows
Speaker 1: of that era they were never recorded. They were always
Speaker 1: intended as live broadcasts, and you know, reruns weren't always
Speaker 1: a thing. So the radio drama began to fade from
Speaker 1: speakers and from minds. We've got, like, you know, scripts
Speaker 1: of different shows, and there are lots of recordings. It's
Speaker 1: not like every show went unrecorded, but a lot of
Speaker 1: them did, so there are a lot of lost episodes.
Speaker 1: Radio would switch over to formats that were more like
Speaker 1: news and music and talk radio here in the US,
Speaker 1: but you didn't hear nearly as much dramatized fiction not here.
Speaker 1: But in the UK it was a different story. The
Speaker 1: British Broadcasting Corporation is a state run corporation, not a
Speaker 1: private company, and while radio drama effectively went into hibernation
Speaker 1: here in the States, the UK would continue producing radio
Speaker 1: dramas well beyond nineteen Some radio programs would later make
Speaker 1: the leap from radio to TV, even as late as
Speaker 1: the two thousand's. For example, The Mighty Boush, which is
Speaker 1: a truly weird comedy series, originally debuted on the radio
Speaker 1: in two thousand one, It grew out of little comedy
Speaker 1: shows that the creators were doing in pubs and small
Speaker 1: theaters in in the UK, so they got a radio
Speaker 1: series in two thousand one, and later The Mighty Bush
Speaker 1: became a TV series in two thousand four. And if
Speaker 1: you know what I'm talking about, then lift the old
Speaker 1: shoe and drink your Bailey's because I'm old Greg. And
Speaker 1: then there's The Archers Man The Archers. Okay, So The
Speaker 1: Archers is a radio drama that originally aired in the
Speaker 1: UK back in nine. It's still going today. There have
Speaker 1: been more than nineteen thousand, four hundred episodes of the
Speaker 1: Darned Thing, which makes my fift hundred episodes seem like
Speaker 1: nothing in comparison. I mean Lowsers. The Archers is set
Speaker 1: in a fictional small village in England and it follows
Speaker 1: the lives of you know, simple country folk as it were.
Speaker 1: I don't mean that as like an insult or anything.
Speaker 1: It's literally kind of the focus of the show. And
Speaker 1: episodes were on about twelve minutes each these days. So
Speaker 1: while radio theater had an unbroken history in the UK,
Speaker 1: over here in the US we didn't really see a
Speaker 1: return to it until we started getting these dramatic audio podcasts.
Speaker 1: You did have organizations like the Atlanta Radio Theater Company
Speaker 1: that kept the art form alive, kept on generating new
Speaker 1: works using the techniques and the uh the approaches of
Speaker 1: old time radio with some flare of new time technologies
Speaker 1: to throw in there, like we could throw in digital
Speaker 1: effects if we wanted to, which was kind of cool.
Speaker 1: But outside of those small groups, you didn't really see
Speaker 1: much radio theater. Maybe once in a while it's kind
Speaker 1: of a special performance, but other than that, not so much.
Speaker 1: But then in podcasts we started to see it take off.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of shows that are all about
Speaker 1: narrative fiction, radio drama style stuff. I mean, there's The
Speaker 1: God's Head, Incidental, the Pnumbra podcast, the Magnus Archives. You know,
Speaker 1: we've got the Thirteen Days of Halloween. Like, there are
Speaker 1: lots of programs that tap into this now and it's
Speaker 1: really an exciting time for storytellers. Soundscaping and three D
Speaker 1: audio have opened up new opportunities to create rich audio
Speaker 1: experiences for listeners, and it is important for us to
Speaker 1: remember that cool effects don't necessarily mean that you will
Speaker 1: have a good show, but when they're used properly, with
Speaker 1: the right material, they can really elevate a piece into
Speaker 1: something special. I really love radio theater. I love theater
Speaker 1: in general, but radio theater has a special place in
Speaker 1: my heart. When it has done well, when it's written
Speaker 1: well and performed well, it can be incredibly entertaining or
Speaker 1: unsettling or really make you think it is hard to
Speaker 1: do well. I have been in lots of different radio
Speaker 1: productions that, not necessarily through the fault of anyone in particular,
Speaker 1: maybe didn't go as planned. You know, maybe there were
Speaker 1: technical issues, maybe someone had a script that was missing
Speaker 1: a page. Those sort of things do happen. It's just
Speaker 1: like with live theater. As I said, things can go wrong. Um,
Speaker 1: but when things are going really well, it it just
Speaker 1: it clicks and you get something special. In fact, my
Speaker 1: co host of large Nerdron Colleider Aerial Cast, and she
Speaker 1: and I have performed in numerous radio theater productions um
Speaker 1: at least, and several of them were on based on
Speaker 1: Heineland stories, which was kind of interesting. So if you
Speaker 1: are interested in more radio theater, go check out the
Speaker 1: various audio drama podcasts that are out there. We have
Speaker 1: some on I Heart Radio. They are phenomenal. I highly
Speaker 1: recommend them. But there's no shortage of radio drama style
Speaker 1: shows out there, and I'm sure there's something out there
Speaker 1: for you. If this is the kind of thing you're into.
Speaker 1: You can even look up the Atlanta Radio Theater Company.
Speaker 1: A lot of their recordings are available to listen to
Speaker 1: right now. They've recorded many of them in podcast form,
Speaker 1: including stuff that I wrote back in the day. Um
Speaker 1: and they also have a catalog of recordings that you
Speaker 1: can order if you want to listen to specific shows.
Speaker 1: They do great work. Make sure you check those out.
Speaker 1: And that's it for this episode. A little bit of
Speaker 1: a shorter one today, but it was a fun thing
Speaker 1: to talk about. We'll be getting back to more technologically
Speaker 1: oriented episodes. This one was sort of the merger of
Speaker 1: art and tech, and I love talking about that as well.
Speaker 1: I'm sure i'll revisit that in the future. But if
Speaker 1: you have suggestions for things I should cover in future
Speaker 1: episodes of tech Stuff, reach out let me know. The
Speaker 1: best way to do that is over on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle we use is tech Stuff h s W and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I heart radio production. For more podcasts from my
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.