CBC Nightfall:

“The Monkeys Paw”

(7-11-80).

***

Suspense:

”The Body Snatchers”

(11/24/42).

***

The Columbia Workshop:

“The Fall of the City”

(1937).

***

The Mysterious Traveler:

“The Accusing Corpse””

().

Right Click here to download

In segment one is the often produced short story “The Monkey’s Paw”. This time it is from the Canadian Broadcasting Company Via the Program Nightfall. it aired on July the 11th of 1980.

Nightfall, was a radio drama series produced by CBC Radio from July 1980 to June 1983. While primarily a supernatural/horror series, Nightfall featured some episodes in other genres, such as science fiction, mystery, fantasy, and human drama. The series became one of the most popular shows in CBC Radio history, running 100 episodes that featured a mix of original tales and adaptations of both classic and obscure short stories.

You know this one. “The Monkey’s Paw” is a horror short story by author W. W. Jacobs. It was published in England in 1902.

The story is based on the famous “setup” in which three wishes are granted. In the story, the paw of a dead monkey is a talisman that grants its possessor three wishes, but the wishes come with an enormous price for interfering with fate.

For segment 2 Suspense gives us Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “The Body Snatchers” from October the 24th of 1942.

The guiding light of this show was William Spier, whose formula of human drama set in interesting situations attracted the best of Hollywood and radio actors. Orson Welles was in many episodes. Cary Grant said, “If I ever do any more radio work, I want to do it on Suspense, where I get a good chance to act.”

Spier’s method with actors was to keep them under-rehearsed, and there-by a bit uneasy. He got great performances, and the show gained great popularity.

All the production values were first class. With Bernard Hermann, who had worked with Orson Welles on the Mercury Theater and would work with Alfred Hitchcock, doing the musical scores.

A medical student studying anatomy gets entangled with murderers and psychos in order to attain the cadavers he needs to complete his studies. Yep, it’s the Robert Louis Stevenson classic given the once over by John Dickson Carr. Hey…They could have done worse by old Bobby Louie.

The Fall of the City, a 1937 CBS radio drama by Archibald MacLeishn.

The Columbia Workshop is high art radio at its finest with expert writing and direction by a slew of talented, but relatively unknown people of the moment. The goal of Columbia Workshop old time radio shows included separating itself from popular radio’s overuse of film celebrities and general triviality of commercial orientated old time radio shows. This lead to several revolutions in the method in which a show is made including the development of a soundboard with complicated noises now considered essential to radio production.

Irving Reis created Columbia Workshop after working as a sound engineer and as a radio director.  Reis was excited about using Columbia Workshop as a platform for radio sound and narrative experimentation.  He believed that radio was a distinct and novel medium where sound effects could vividly bring the radio show to life in the homes of radio listeners.  In one Columbia Workshop episode there were more than 30 different distinct characters and hundreds of sound effects as a demonstration of radio’s possibilities .

Staring  Orson Welles and Burgess Meredith this is considered one of the most socially significant – and boldly experimental – works in the history of radio. Written in response to the rising tide of fascism in Europe, the production included innovative key sound effects, some of which, ironically, were later employed by Joseph Goebbels in rallies he orchestrated for Adolf Hitler..

A close cousin to the Whistler and the Strange Dr. Weird, The Mysterious Traveller was another memorable radio host. Easy to imagine yourself on a train, at night, seated next to a curious gentleman who invites you “to join me on another journey into the strange and terrifying. I hope you will enjoy the trip, that it will thrill you a little and chill you a little. So settle back, get a good grip on your nerves and be comfortable — if you can!”

The Mysterious Traveler was the second outing for pulp writers Robert Arthur and David P. Kogan. Their first effort, a show called  Dark Destiny, ran for parts of 1942 and 1943 on The Mutual Broadcasting System. This show was, unfortunately. not particularly successful. Surviving for only 27 episodes of which only one is known to still exist.

For this, their next effort, they teamed up with producer/director Sherman ‘Jock’ MacGregor, and actor Maurice Tarplin to create a show that would have a very successful run on  Mutual  between 1944 and 1952. Eventually becoming one of the highest rated programs of the era and spawning a handful of spin offs.

These included:

The Strange Dr. Weird (1945),The Sealed Book (1945),Dark Venture (1946),Murder By Experts (1949) and The Teller of Tales (1950).

This doesn’t happen every day.These old scams usually don’t lead to accusations from a dead body.

Sometimes the secretes of the dead are best left with the dead.

“Peter Drake”

(2/2/48).

***

Lights Out:

“Chicken Heart”

(2/23/38).

***

Dimension X:

Nightfall

(9/9/51).

***

LibriVox:

H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Street”

(Dec. 1920).

***

(Right click to download).

Heed well you who listen, and remember, there is a page for you in, "The Diary of Fate."

"The Diary of Fate" was a horror program where “Fate”, personified in the person of actor Herbert Lytton, narrates a morality tale, and woe be to the person on the wrong end. This program plays the usual stories of murder, hitchhikers, blackmail, love gone wrong, and the guilty getting their just desserts. The character of Fate plays a bit more of a role than mere observer; he creates situations to force the protagonist into a choice. For the sake of the show, they always choose badly, and the audience gets to listen to their demise unfold.

The show aired from 1947 to 1948, only 24 episodes are known to survive. The show wasn’t as successful as similar shows, like Inner Sanctum, but it did have solid stars, including Lurene Tuttle, Larry Dobkin, Hal Sawyer, Gloria Blondell, Frank Albertson, Jerry Hausner, Howard McNear, Peter Leeds, Ken Peters, Daws Butler and William Johnstone.

February the 23rd of 1948 entry in the “The Diary Of Fate” . A peak into the life of “Peter Drake”. A man comfortable in his life and work. Peter loves his wife Marsha, a proud, greedy woman. And because of that love he finds himself with his pistol pressed against his temple by his own hand.

Light’s Out, one of the most famous radio shows of all time. Pretty much everyone has heard of it. Although , I admit sometimes this awareness is limited to Bill Cosby’s Chicken Heart routine.

Created by Willis Cooper in 1934, and passed on to Arch Oboler in 1936. Lights Out as a radio series would finally succumb to its own mortality in 1947. The franchise did not end with the demise of the radio show. Lights Out would  turn up as a TV series from 1949 to 1952. There have been occasional attempts to revive the series that never had any notable success.

It’s only 11 minutes long it’s from February 23rd of 1938. Far more people have heard of it than have ever heard it. Now, is your chance . From Light’s Out and the pen and tongue in cheek of Arch Olber, it’s the “Chicken Heart”.

Dimension X (April 8 of 1950 – September of 1951) was not the first Science Fiction anthology series on radio, (that distinction belongs to the short-lived and not particularly lamented 2000 plus ) It, however, was the first to utilize published stories from established Science fiction authors, mostly drawing from short stories appearing in Smith and Street’s, Astounding Science Fiction. The show made a practice of adapting the work’s of authors such as Murray Leinster, Ray Bradbury,  William Tenn, Robert Heinlein and many others.
A footnote to history is that dimension X was one of the first shows to be recorded on tape. This was so new that one show, “Mars is Heaven”, had to be re-recorded 3 times because the engineer kept erasing the tape while editing it.

This time it’s Dimension X’s adaptation of one of the most famous stories by one of the most Famous Science Fiction authors of all time. Isaac Asimov’s, “Nightfall” from September the 9th of 1951

From the LibriVox website..

“Established in 2005 by Hugh McGuire, LibriVox is a world wide group of volunteers who record, catalog and publish works as audio files to provide audiobooks and readings of short stories and poetry at no cost to all comers.
The LibriVox mission is “the acoustical liberation of books in the public domain”.
By recording books that are in the public domain, LibriVox is giving people access to audio versions of classics such as books by Louise May Alcott through to Israel Zangwall, with hundreds more in between. These include works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and HG Wells. Books by a huge range of different authors are being recorded and published constantly.

The LibriVox catalog provides an up to date list of all the different audiobooks that are available currently.

The last segment is (thanks again to the Librivox Project) Glen Hallstrom (AKA Smokestack Jones ) reading H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Street” which was Published in December of 1920 by The Wolverine magazine.

“The Man Who Came Back (8/21/48).

***

Nightfall:

“Love and the Lonely One”.(7/4/80)

.***

LibriVox:  Evelyn E. Smith’s:

“The Blue Tower”(1958).

***

Mystery in the Air:

“The Marvelous Barastro” (8/7/47).

***

Strange Doctor Weird:

“The Man Who Lived Twice” (1/30/45).

***

Right Click here to download

Originating from WKY in Oklahoma City Dark Fantasy was a short lived program (producing only 31 episodes) dedicated to tales of the unknown on Friday nights for parts of 1941 and 1942.

Oklahoma City was far from alone in producing it’s own successful series. In point of fact many excellent programs were produced in places that today would seem surprising. Of course, thinking about it, the barriers to entry to radio production were and are much lower than for movies or television. All you really need is a little equipment and a few talented people of which there was then, and is now, no monopoly of in Hollywood.

Dark Fantasy had a shoestring of a budget which the show was able to rise above through the creative establishment of an effective but spare atmospheric ambiance resulting in an excellent show that was, in some ways, well ahead of it’s time.

Dark Fantasy was written by Scott Bishop, who would later write for The Mysterious Traveler and The Sealed Book.

Keith Paynton served as announcer.

We start off with a segment of Dark Fantasy from August 21st of 1948.

It’s an old story. A wronged husband, an unfaithful wife, a cad and a murder. Oh, and also, a promise to return from the grave.

Nightfall, was a radio drama series produced  by CBC Radio from July 1980 to June 1983. While primarily a supernatural/horror series, Nightfall featured some episodes in other genres, such as science fiction, mystery, fantasy, and human drama. The series became one of the most popular shows in CBC Radio history, running 100 episodes that featured a mix of original tales and  adaptations of both classic and obscure short stories.

The Second segment is from the CBC’s program Nightfall. “Love and the Lonely One” From July the 4th of 1980.

I guess this is a program of firsts. “Love and the Lonely One” is also the premiere show for its series. It’s a story about George, Fred, a cadaver, and a sorority house. As you can see it brings together all of the ingredients for a tight little horror story, or a teen comedy from Troma Pictures.

From the LibriVox website..

“Established in 2005 by Hugh McGuire, LibriVox is a world wide group of volunteers who record, catalog and publish works as audio files to  provide audiobooks and readings of short stories and poetry at no cost to all comers.
The LibriVox mission is “the acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.
By recording books that are in the public domain, LibriVox is giving people access to audio versions of classics such as books by Louise May Alcott through to Israel Zangwall, with hundreds more in between. These include works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and HG Wells. Books by a huge range of different authors are being recorded and published constantly.

The LibriVox catalog provides an up to date list of all the different audiobooks that are available currently”.

For segment three we turn to the LibriVox project again… this time volunteer Betsie Bush reads Evelyn E. Smith’s “The Blue Tower”. “The Blue Tower” was originally published in Galaxy magazine’s February, 1958 issue.

There can be no doubt about it. Peter Lorre was born to do radio. He always just saunters in and begins to chew up the scenery. He does it every time. He does it in Mystery In The Air. His NBC summer replacement show for the Abbot and Costello program.

There is another familiar voice on this show, that of the announcer Mr. Harry Morgan. We all tend these days to think of Morgan as a T.V actor ( Col. Potter of M.A.S.H.). But like most early T.V. actors Morgan had deep roots in radio.

Sponsored by Camel Cigarettes the show ran between 1945 and 1947. Today I can find only eight episodes (those are from 1947). We can, however hope. Although it does not happen every day, or even very often. It is not unheard of for lost episodes of old radio shows to reappear covered with the dust of time and the cobwebs of someone’s attic.

You never know. It could happen.

For segment four we run with “The Marvelous Barastro”, an episode of Mystery in the Air from August the 7th of 1947.

It stars Peter Lorre as a vengeful magician. From a script by Ben Hecht.”The Marvelous Barastro” was also done for the series Suspense in 1944 starring Orson Welles.

Also in this segment is a Strange Doctor Weird, “The Man Who Lived Twice” from January the 30th of 1945.

“A Good and Faithful Servant”

(6/2/52).

***

”Inquest”

(8/3/47).

***

X minus one:

“Martian Sam”

(4/3/57).

***

Murder at Midnight:

“The Lodger”

(8/14/47).

***

Right Click here to download

In this segment is an episode of Suspense  that first aired on June 2 of 1952 starring none other than Mr. Jack Benny.

Suspense is one of the classics of old time radio. Some fans have special favorites in the thriller/chiller/macabre genre, but most agree that Suspense is right at the top.

The guiding light of this show was William Spier, whose formula of human drama set in interesting situations attracted the best of Hollywood and radio actors. Orson Welles was in many episodes. Cary Grant said, “If I ever do any more radio work, I want to do it on Suspense, where I get a good chance to act.”

Spier’s method with actors was to keep them under-rehearsed, and there-by a bit uneasy. He got great performances, and the show gained great popularity.

All the production values were first class. With Bernard Hermann, who had worked with Orson Welles on the Mercury Theater and would work with Alfred Hitchcock, doing the musical scores.

Jack Benny is one of the great American comedians. His work spans the 20th century, from vaudeville to radio and movies to TV. In vaudeville, he delivered the snappy comebacks and one liners with intelligence and wit, but it was only with the continuing development of his personal trait comedy that he really became the Jack Benny we all know so well. “Who else could play for four decades the part of a vain, miserly, argumentative skinflint, and emerge a national treasure?The secret of his success was deceptively simple: he was a man of great heart.” That’s John Dunning’s assessment from “On the Air, The Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio,” 

In the Suspense program, “A Good and Faithful Servant,” Jack Benny stars as a man who devises his own retirement plan by faking a robbery and hiding the loot in his desk. It just goes to show that even the most “perfect” employees, may not be what they seem.

“A Good and Faithful Servant” was written by Richard M. Powell and produced/directed by Elliott Lewis. Also appearing were Hy Averback, Charles Calvert, Joseph Kearns, Gerald Mohr, Doris Singleton, and Norma Varden. This episode aired on June 2, 1952.

.

The second segment this week consist of an episode from Willis Cooper’s excellent Quiet, Please 08/73) “The Inquest” which first aired on August 3 of 1947.

Quiet, Please ran from June 8th of 1947 through June 20th of 1949. Appearing on the Mutual Network until September the 13th of 1948, then moving, for the rest of its run, to ABC.

Behind the series at Quiet, Please were Wyllis Cooper (creator, writer and director) and Ernest Chappell as the star and host. It was Cooper who created the popular horror series Lights Out in 1934. There are many similarities between the shows. In each the listener is invited to shut off outside noise and turn down the lights to fully concentrate on the story.

Cooper and Chappell worked well together, having been close friends before the series began. Chappell’s sympathy with Cooper helped him to understand and portray the characters Cooper created. Knowing Chappell so well, Cooper was able to write characters tailored to his strengths as a performer. This level of partnership brought about a depth of characterization that was and is uncommon in any performance media.

Often intense with it’s tight writing Quite, Please challenged the usual formulas of entertainment.

Chappell would introduce the story to the strains of a dark and somber music that engendered a mysterious mood. Then the story would begin. Always a tale with a touch of the supernatural. Each episode concluded as atmospherically as it began, a few seconds of silence. Then the slow strands ofCesar Franck‘s Symphony in D Minor would swell up and the end came.

After living with his contentious, yet pleading, sister for more years than he can remember, Mr. Ross has had enough and decides to do something about it. Unfortunately, things get out of hand and Mr. Ross finds himself at a coroner’s inquest trying to explain to a jury why it was, really, justifiable homicide.

With James Van Dyke (the coroner), Pat O’Malley (Malcolm), Syvia Cole (Eileen), John Morley (Arthur), and Ernest Chappell (Ross).

Snippet: “Yes, it certainly was. But is that MY fault? I offered not once but a dozen times to take her to a doctor and have the arm re-broken and set again. Could have been done very easy. Just re-break it and set again but…”

I must confess that the audio quality on this and, in fact, every existing transcription of  Quiet, Please  is substantially below par. Fortunately, the original script is available. So if you’d like to read along as you listen, you can download the the script from:

 Here .

Heading in towards home base with runners on all 4, X minus one is up to bat with “Martian Sam” from April 3 of 1957.

X Minus One is considered the finest science fiction drama ever produced for radio. It was  not the first. That honor belongs to 2000+. It wasn’t the second, That would be Dimension X. In fact the first 15 episodes of it’s  1955 to 1958 run on NBC were new versions of Dimension X episodes. The remainder were all most entirely adaptations of recently published science fiction stories (Mostly from Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine) usually written by the leading writers of the time, including  Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, J.T. McIntosh, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon.

For all of us who were weaned on  The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone and for the Trekkies (er,Trekkers) among us, you should know that X Minus One is the forefather of the science fiction you grew up on. You will find that it still is some of the best Science Fiction ever aired.

Look, I know that sometimes you can cheat yet still be, strictly speaking, with-in the rules.

But a Picher with eight arms? And what if one those arms is 32 feet long ? Now is that kosher?

The LA Dodgers intend to find out.

Also in this segment is a short story from the LibriVox Project ,  Lost in the Future written by John Victor Peterson  and published Fantastic Universe for November of 1954

“Did you ever wonder what might happen if mankind ever exceeded the speed of light? Here is a profound story based on that thought—a story which may well forecast one of the problems to be encountered in space travel.

They had discovered a new planet—but its people did not see them until after they had traveled on.”

And Peter Lorre’s mystery in the air  brings it all home with “The Lodger ” from August 14 of 1947.

There can be no doubt about it. Peter Lorre was born to do radio. He always just saunters in and begins to chew up the scenery. He does it every time. He does it in Mystery In The Air. His NBC summer replacement show for the Abbot and Costello program.

There is another familiar voice on this show, that of the announcer Mr. Harry Morgan. We all tend these days to think of Morgan as a T.V actor ( Col. Potter of  M.A.S.H.). But like most early T.V. actors Morgan had deep roots in radio.

Sponsored by Camel Cigarettes the show ran  between 1945 and 1947. Today  I can find only eight episodes (those are from 1947). We can, however hope. Although it does not happen every day, or even very often. It is not unheard of for lost episodes of old radio shows to reappear covered with the dust of time and the cobwebs of someone’s attic.

You never know. It could happen.

In there have been several adaptations of the film The Lodger a silent film directed by Hitchcock in 1926 Which concerns the hunt for a “Jack the Ripper” type of serial killer in London.

The story was adapted for the CBS Radio series Suspense, turned into an opera in two acts composed by Phyllis Tateand. And has also been the basis of four other films:

• The Lodger (1932) directed by Maurice Elvey and also starring Ivor Novello in the lead role The Lodger (1944) directed by John Brahm and starring Laird CregarMan in the Attic (1953) directed by Hugo Fregonese and starring Jack PalanceThe Lodger (2009) directed by David Ondaatje and starring Alfred Molina. So, is not unreasonable that Peter Laurie would give it a go as he does here.

If you are interested in seeing the original, silent, version of the film It is available on the Internet archive…Here

The Price Of Fear – William And Mary (09/08/73)

The Price Of Fear was a Horror-Mystery program produced sporadically by BBC Radio. Enormously successful in the United Kingdom and abroad, it produced  a total of 22 episodes between 1972 and 1982.

For it’s writing talent the show drew from a pool of talented new writers, such as William Ingram (who wrote the majority of the scripts). Dramatizing the most chilling stories they could find the show often  did  adaptations of the works of established writers: Roald Dahl, A.M. Burrage, Bram Stoker and others.

The Show was hosted by, and usually starred Vincent Price. Price whose background in horror and suspense on radio,television and, of course, movies back dropped the series in a way only a handful of performers could. Mostly though it was the way Price narrated these tales (as though he himself had actually lived them) that was responsible for the success of the show.

Based on the short story by Roald Dahl William and Mary  has been dramatized a number of times and is something of a twist on the famous Donovan’s Brain.

Mary Pearl’s husband William has passed away. Soon after the funeral she is shocked to discover that William’s brain was removed from his skull immediately upon death, hooked up to an artificial heart machine and now resides in a basin. William is, after all, not quite dead yet.

Vanishing point The Stories Of J .G. Ballard Low Flying Aircraft (12/05/88)

Vanishing Point is a science fiction anthology series that ran on CBC Radio Under that exact title from 1984 until 1986. Then continued for another several years with various subtitles. One example of this is, “Vanis in today’s program we have hing Point: The Stories of JG Ballard.” This practice has confused OTR historians. How do you date this thing? Most have given the dates from above with the caveat from above.

The series was produced by Bill Lane in the C.B.C.’s Toronto studios and produced some excellent radio.

In 1988, Canada’s national radio corporation broadcast a series of 30-minute radio dramas, based on the short stories of JG Ballard.  The writers commissioned to create the dramas included Lawrence Russell (A Question of Re-entry, The Dead Astronaut), Margaret Hollingsworth (The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D), Brian Wade (Low Flying Aircraft, News From The Sun), Paul Milliken (Having A Wonderful Time), and James R. Wallen (Escapement). Lauded at the time, these forgotten gems explore the dramatic aspects of JGB’s early short stories within an auditory medium. today’s story,  Low Flying Aircraft  was originally published in a collection of short stories Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories  in 1976 and is one  of Ballard’s dystopian,  rather Orwellian,  takes on the near future. The number of people have been severely reduced and pregnancy requires a license.

Privacy, has pretty much disappeared.

Sleep No More presented two short stories, “Thus I Refute Beelzy” and “The Bookshop” on March 6 of 1956

Nelson Olmsted  was a national treasure. For more than 35 years, Olmsted’s  extraordinary vocal performances were the basis for his exceptional success as a radio and TV performer .

In “Sleep No More”, Olmsted followed a rich tradition of broadcasting with his presentation of supernatural and suspense dramas for which he drew from some of the finest short literature the English language.

It is true that, “Sleep No More” arrived late in the Golden age of radio running from 1952 to November 1956.

This was a popular show; popular enough for  Vanguard Records to produce a record,  also called, “Sleep No More” contains six  stories that never made it into the Radio series:

The Signalman, The Mummy’s Foot, Markheim, An Occurrence At Owl Creek, What Was It?, The Body Snatcher.

In this particular episode  of Sleep No More Nelson Olmsted brings us two short stories. The first is John Collier’s, “Thus I Refute Mr. Beelzy”. This is the story of Mr. Carter (the “I” of the title) a cruel, selfish father locked in a struggle with the invisible “Mr. Beelzy” for the love and soul of his young son Simon.

“Thus I Refute Beelzy”  was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly for October of 1940

The second story is a Nelson Bond work, “The Bookshop” which was originally published in  The Blue Book Magazine’s, October of 1941 issue. It’s the story of a writer who is having difficulty finishing his great novel.  In the course of the story he takes a trip to a small  spooky bookshop in New York. It is here that he discovers the finished  editions of  stories left unfinished  by their authors. How about his book? Will it end up there?

“Sorry, Wrong Number”

(5/25/43).

***

CBS Mystery Theater:

Two plus Two Equals Death

(2/29/76).

***

Dark Fantasy:

“Rendezvous With Satan”

(5/29/42).

***

[audio http://archive.org/download/Nighttransmisions126-130/NighttransmissionsShow129.mp3 ]

Right Click here to download

Suspense is one of the classics of old time radio. Some fans have special favorites in the thriller/chiller/macabre genre, but most agree that Suspense is right at the top.

The guiding light of this show was William Spier, whose formula of human drama set in interesting situations attracted the best of Hollywood and radio actors. Orson Welles was in many episodes. Cary Grant said, “If I ever do any more radio work, I want to do it on Suspense, where I get a good chance to act.”

Spier’s method with actors was to keep them under-rehearsed, and there-by a bit uneasy. He got great performances, and the show gained great popularity.

All the production values were first class. With Bernard Hermann, who had worked with Orson Welles on the Mercury Theater and would work with Alfred Hitchcock, doing the musical scores.

Suspense – “Sorry Wrong Number” aired on May 5 of 1943.

Now let’s see, how much did the producers of suspense and the entertainment industry think of this Lucille Fletcher play?

How high the Moon?

Between 1943 and 1960 Suspense produced eight versions of this play, each time starring Agnes Moorhead, of which only seven have survived.

In 1948 There was a movie starring Barbara Stanwyck with Lucille Fletcher expanding and  opening up her radio script. That year The Lux Radio Theater would produce a another radio version based on the movie with Barbara Stanwyck reprising her role of Mrs. Stevenson.

This particular episode is the first of the eight   and is at a slight variance from your normal run of Suspense in that it is taken  from an Armed Forces radio rebroadcast.  The only real difference being the opening and closing which differ slightly from the standard.

Violet Louise Fletcher`s (who was born in in 1912 and died in 2000) long list of credits include another very famous radio play, The Hitchhiker. Originally Performed by Orson Welles on his Mercury Theater  Of The Air then later adapted for an episode of, The Twilight Zone. Much more recently  served as the inspiration for an episode of Supernatural.

If this one episode is insufficient for you here is a link to all seven surviving episodes of Suspense featuring, “Sorry Wrong Number” as well as the Lux Radio Theater’s version.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was an ambitious effort by veteran radio producer Himan Brown to revive interest in American radio drama. Every night from 1974 to 1982, host E.G. Marshall (laterTammy Grimes) ushered listeners through a creaking door — for 52 Min of “the fear you can hear.” Brown produced nearly 200 new episodes of Mystery Theater every year, using both original scripts and adaptations of classic stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain,Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Mystery Theater brought many veterans from radio’s golden age back before the microphone, including Agnes Moorehead, Richard Widmark,Celeste Holm, Mercedes McCambridge and Howard Da Silva. The show also featured performances from many up-and-coming stage and film actors, including Tony Roberts, John Lithgow, Morgan Fairchild, Mandy Patinkin and Sarah Jessica Parker.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater won the George A. Peabody Award in 1974.

After eight years and 1,399 shows, the show ended its run on December 30, 1982. And was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1990.

CBS Mystery Theater – Two plus Two Equals Death Part 1 April 29, 1976.
In this play by Alfred Bester,  an aspiring architect is drawn into the world of the circus when he falls in love with one of the beautiful ballerinas in the show. Unfortunately, his beloved has a cruel, heartless, identical twin sister. Can he marry one without marrying them both.

Bare in mind that this was written by Alfred Bester so it may turn out a bit different.

CBS Mystery Theater – “Two plus Two Equals Death” part 2.

Also in this segment, What’s He Doing in There?

What’s He Doing in There? is a short story from Fritz Leiber and was originallypublished in Galaxy Science Fiction for December 1957.

“He went where no Martian ever went before—but would he come out—or had he gone for good?”

Originating from WKY in Oklahoma City Dark Fantasy was a short lived program (producing only 31 episodes) dedicated to tales of the unknown on Friday nights  for parts of 1941 and 1942.

Oklahoma City was far from alone in producing it’s own successful series. In point of fact many excellent programs were produced in places that today would seem surprising. Of course, thinking about it, the barriers to entry to radio production were and are much lower than for movies or television. All you really need is a little equipment and a few talented people of which there was then, and is now, no monopoly of in Hollywood.

Dark Fantasy  had a shoestring of a budget which the show was able to rise above through the creative establishment of an effective but spare atmospheric ambiance resulting in an excellent show that was, in some ways, well ahead of it’s time.

Dark Fantasy was written by Scott Bishop, who would later write for The Mysterious Travelerand The Sealed Book.

Keith Paynton served as announcer.

Dark Fantasy –   Rendezvous With Satan May 29 of 1943.

 This episode of Dark Fantasy begins at a funeral where there is a bit of a commotion when somebody sees the corpse’s hand move. You see while his body is lying in the church Carl Fisher’s soul is in a much warmer place you can guess the place, another hint, the air is filled with brimstone. Don’t worry about Carl, well  on second thought, maybe you should worry about Carl. One thing is for sure though…

Carl, won’t be lonely not with the devil for company.   Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. It seems that the devil has a offer for him .

I guess Carl has never read Faust.

May-hap it’ll work out better for him.

“The Sun Is a Witness”

(04/03/47 ).

***

NBC Short Story :

“The Lottery”

(03/14/51).

**

Alien Worlds:

Seeds Of Time

(4/8/79).

***

Murder at Midnight:

“Island Of The Dead”

(12/20/46).

Right Click here to download

Produced and directed by Willis Cooper (Lights Out, Quiet Please) The Crime Club was a series that ran in 1946 and 1947, featuring murder and mystery stories.

The radio series opens as a phone rings and a voice answers, “Hello, I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. Yes, this is the Crime Club. I’m the Librarian…” (Actually it’s Raymond Johnson (best known as the host of Inner Sanctum).

Although there exists no evidence of a contractual arrangement between the Mutual Network and Doubleday publishing even a casual exploration of the titles in  this series makes it clear that the inspiration for the series has to be  the literary imprint, The Crime Club.  As most of the stories told were adaptations from this Doubleday series.

This imprint of books began in 1928 with the publication of The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan (creator of one of the first female fictional detectives).

The imprint continued to publish until 1991.

From April 3rd of 1947 by way of the Mutual network. We have, “The Sun Is A Witness”.

Aaron Marc Stein (1906-1985), provided the novel of the same name (published in 1940) from which this radio play is adapted. Stein who specialized in mystery fiction enjoyed considerable success with many of his works being translated into German, French, and Spanish.

In this story an old man and his fortune are the subject of interest and, in the end, a motivation for murder. A murder and murder who are undone by shadows on a roll of film.

This program stars, Raymond Edward Johnson, Sidney Smith, Stedman Coles (adaptor), Roger Bower (producer, director).

This is a pretty good story, mostly quite well presented and reasonably well acted. It moves right along, but unfortunately, as often happens with attempts to adapt a full-length novel to a 25 or 26 min. format for radio shortcuts were taken. And I at least, end up not entirely satisfied with the pacing. The ending in particular feels rushed.

NBC Short Story – The Lottery (03/14/51).

N.B.C Short Story was not a commercial success lasting as it did only one season in 1951..

That’s a hell of a way to start an introduction isn’t it? Well it is true. But then, we all know that commercial success and artistic success do not necessarily ride the same horse. That was certainly the case with this series.

One thing this series does do is to provide evidence of how compatible the short story and the half hour anthology format so common in radio was . Utilizing as it did the short stories of many of the best writers of the era, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, many others.

Very high on any list of suspense/horror writers would be Shirley Jackson. This is her timeless short story, “The Lottery”. A justifiably famous story that takes  place in a small town Probably one not unlike Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson lived  and worked.

The strength of this story lies in Jackson’s ability to expose the unexamined evil in everyday life that goes  right down to the root of human nature itself. There is a well produced reading of the short story provided by the New Yorker  magazine available Here.

Alien Worlds – Seeds Of Time (4/8/79)

Alien Worlds was an American syndicated radio show that produced 26 episodes in 1979 beginning on January 7th. With its excellent soundtrack and production standards The successful series eventually would play on over 500 radio stations all over the country. Between 1979 and 1980 the series found even more success internationally lottery justifiably famous story after it was picked up in New Zealand and Australia.

The stories involve the governing body for the development and exploration of space, the I.S.A. (International Space Authority). Organized by all earth nations, the ISA advances the interests of humans in interstellar space. Their base is officially named “The Arthur C. Clarke Astronomical Observatory” but is mostly referred to as, “Starlab”. From here a small cadre of scientists diplomats and explorers and a computer named after Sherlock’s smarter older brother Mycroft, undertake awesome responsibilities as humanities emissaries to the stars.

Aside from the 26 programs that were broadcast; there were four more produced but never aired.

Returning from a patrol, Capts. Graydon and Griff salvage a metallic space capsule that nearly collides with their ship. Alienologist David Ballin, while examining the capsule alone, is overtaken and transformed into a strange placenta that duplicates his DNA.

Oddly enough this turns out to not be as bad as it would seem.

Is Murder at Midnight –  “Island Of The Dead” which first aired on December 20 of 1946.

Produced in New York, Murder At Midnight was heard over the Mutual Network starting on Sept. 16th of 1946 until Sept. 8th of 1947. Produced by radio station WJZ. The show was known to occasionally reproduce scripts that had been performed on Inner Sanctum. This practice allowed the show to feature tales of murder most macabre by some of radio’s top writers without paying top dollar.

The show was filled with tales of death and mayhem, not always at midnight. The show was hosted by Raymond Morgan with his memorable introduction, “… The witching hour, when night is darkest, our fears the strongest, our strength at it’s lowest ebb. Midnight when the graves gape open and Death strikes”.

The cast featured Elspeth Eric, Mercedes McCambridge, Barry Kroeger, Betty Kane, Carl Frank, Barry Hopkins, Lawson Zerbie. Charles Paul played the creepy organ music, and Anton M. Leader directed.

I have grown to love “Murder at Midnight”. Certainly I Know that the show is often silly. But it has cultivated the grace of becoming Camp. The program is far more “Noir” than it’s sister program Inner Sanctum taking as, it does, a more hard-boiled approach to the supernatural.

A man just out of jail after fifteen years, kills those who sent him there…one at a time. The program has a good grisly ending which of course adds to its pleasure for me.

Robert Newman was the writer  and Louis G. Cowan produced.

There is a short story from Philip K Dick, “The Eyes Have It”.This story was published in Science Fiction Stories #1 sometime in 1953 (I think this is probably wrong. At least this story is not cited as being among the contents of this collection in the Wikipedia article). It is in public domain and is  available here.

We will be going out with a song from Thomas Edison Records  recorded in 1901, Silas Leachman’s, Fortune-Telling Man.  

This song  might be considered racist today as it was performed by a white performer in black-face. On the other hand while the practice of performing in black-face is very much frowned on today. Silas Leachman (1859-1936) was a very popular performer who often performed music composed by black artists who regrettably had few outlets for their creativity. Yet I am uncomfortable in suggesting any positive side to this practice.

However I feel about it, it is also undeniably a historic cultural artifact.

Escape:

  Bird  of  Paradise.

03/11/54.

***

Inner Sanctum:

“Song of the Slasher”

(04/24/45).

***

Mindwebs:

“The Man Who Returned”

(12/08/78).

***

Strange As It Seems:

“The Author Who Ate His Book”

(1935-39).

Right Click here to download

In episode one we have an Escape involving a “Bird of Paradise” from March 11 of 1954.

A spin off from Suspense, Escape ran on CBS from 1947 to 1954, and dealt in a wide variety of stories: science fiction, horror, murder.
You know,good fun for the whole family!
The program displayed a fondness for adventure tales set in the tropics or on the high seas. As far as I have been able to find out, there were a total of 194 stories.
Many of the episodes were taken from the classics, but not all. Often the writers and producers of Escape  culled material from stories that were not then considered classics but have gained that status since. Not that the radio show had anything to do with that. This distinction was brought about by the excellence of the material itself and the garnishment of time.

“Bird of Paradise” was adapted from the short story of the same name by John Russell, first published in Colliers, August 19, 1916.

Andrew Harben, a want-a-be  fortune hunter, arrives at one of the spice Islands. Once there he makes his way to a dealer in rare birds. Then with more muscle and ambition than good sense, attempts to muscle his way into the trade.

Success, after a fashion, he does find. While wandering the Solomon Sea he succumbs to an illness. Barely alive he and his boat make landfall. Uncertain of where he is, it is nevertheless here that he finds this opportunity and his nemesis. Oh, and the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Well, there’s always a Dame. Ain’t there?

Held prisoner on the island by a huge man.  He is nothing more than a slave.

This is not what he intended for himself. It does not fit in with his plans  at all!

The story was adapted for radio by John Meston and produced/directed by Norman MacDonnell. John Dehner starred and the cast included Andrew Harbin and Lawrence Dobkin.

Inner Sanctum presents a marry tune, ” Song of the Slasher”; Which originally aired on April 24 of 1945.

Taking its name from a popular series of mystery novels, Inner Sanctum Mysteries debuted over NBC’s Blue Network in January 1941.

 Inner Sanctum Mysteries featured one of the most iconic openings in radio history. First an organist hit’s a dissonant chord. Next a doorknob turns, and the “creaking door” slowly began to open. So impressive was this opening that when South African radio ran its own version of the show it was called The Creaking Door

Every week, Inner Sanctum told stories of ghosts, murderers and lunatics, with a cast consisting of veteran radio actors. Although Produced in New York, there were occasional guest appearances by Hollywood stars such as Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Claude Rains.

Raymond”, the host, had a droll sense of humor, and an appetite for ghoulish puns. Raymond’s influence can be seen among horror hosts everywhere, from The Crypt-Keeper to Elvira, and even more so among his contemporaries on radio .”Raymond” was played until 1945 by Raymond Edward Johnson. Then Paul McGrath took over and played “Raymond” until the show ended production in 1952 .

Producer Hiram Brown was so taken with the creaking door that when he produced and directed The CBS Radio Mystery Theater in the 1970s he would use it again.

Inner Sanctum Mysteries was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1984.

“The slasher has murdered and mutilated five victims in eight days, and there is no sign that he will be stopping any time soon. In fact, Detective Miller arrives on scene just as the Slasher’s latest victim is in the final throws of death. Such a hard-boiled dick is he–dick being the operative word–that when she does keel over, he actually has the intestinal fortitude to chastise her. “Hey! Don’t do that!”
He has no real clues to go on other than the fact that the Slasher whistles while he works, some “queer tune” that Detective Miller just can’t place. And on this particularly dark and foggy night, he chases that tune through the neighborhood, trying to locate the knife-wielding madman that seems to be consistently one step ahead and always just out of sight.
It’s a brief and relatively fun 30-minutes, but not too shocking to modern audiences. We’re too used to the silver screen to be frightened by the silver speakers. Still, its got a bit of old-school tough-guy lingo and an off-kilter musician that would be at home in any number of those black-and-white crime films that exploited the jazz generation. It will probably be of interest to fans of the old E.C. Comics stories, as well as slasher film fanatics that want a little history lesson.”… Midnight Media

Mindwebs – “The Man Who Returned” from December 8, 1978.

MindWebs, was a program of Science fiction stories that ran on WHA radio in Madison, Wisconsin from 1976 to 1984. The programs are actually more like audio books than audio drama, or really, maybe, someplace in between. The producers of the show took some of the very best science fiction short stories and gave them a dramatic reading with multiple performers taking the parts of various characters. These performances are rounded off with the addition of good, atmospheric background music and excellent, realistic sound effects.

. 

Edmond Hamilton was a pulp science fiction writer of the highest reputation, a veteran writer who was not only popular with readers, but also a very prolific writer who managed his prodigious output without sacrificing quality (according to Jack Williamson, in his biography Wonder’s Child, Hamilton sent 40 stories to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales without a single rejection or request for revision). And on something of a personal note; He was one of my absolute favorite writers of all time, beginning in about 1960 with his novel , The Haunted Stars. 

I think I’ve read every one of Hamilton’s novels.

The Man who Returned” was first published in the February 1934 edition Of Weird Tales.

Is he dead, or is he not dead? That is the question.

***

I have posted links to some of Edmund Hamilton’s works that are in the public domain. This includes both E-books and voice recordings as done by Various people at the Librivox Project.

Click Here

Segment four is an episode of Strange As It Seems about, “The Author Who Ate His Book” From somewhere in between 1935 and 1939. 

Strange As It Seems began as a 15 minute radio program on March 22, 1935 broadcast over the Columbia radio network. The scheduled at first was for was 3 nights a week – Sunday, Wednesday and Friday at 7:45 PM. The sponsor was Ex‐Lax. In late September 1935 the show changed to two shows per week,The stories themselves were Believe It or Not type tales, only instead of being based on Ripley‘s famous newspaper cartoon panels, they used a competing cartoon series drawn by John Hix. These tales were interesting, but not scary.

Over the years this show would go through a couple of more incarnations. It would come to exist as a 30 min. show and then as a 1 min. show. I have not been able to find many of these shows so far only a handful of the 15 min. versions.

Well, the title of the episode tells a part of the story but not all. There are four or five segments in this 15 min. episode, not all of them amazing.

I did not, for example, know that  Calvin Coolidge was never a governor.  But  I must say that I do not find this fact  to be particularly strange.

Crime Crime Classics:

The Boorn Brothers & The Hangman – A study in Nip and Tuck(01/27/54).

***

Lights Out:

Knock at the Door (12/15/42 ).

***

X Minus One:

Early Model (07/11/57).

***

Arch Obolers Plays:

The Ways of Men; Past,

Present and Future (04/15/39).

Right Click here to download 

Is Crime Crime Classics – “The Boorn Brothers & The Hangman – A study in Nip and Tuck” which originally aired on January 27, 1954.

Crime Classics is sometimes called a, “Docudrama“( I know I’ve been guilty of that myself).  But I have come to think that this is a bit too grand a claim. To start off with you have, in the person of the host, a completely fictional “expert”. There is not now nor was there ever a ,”Thomas Hyland” (played by Lou Merrill ). Also, I have found while researching backgrounds of individual programs the historical content to be a bit dodgy; with the show willingly repeating legends and interesting anecdotes as well-established facts. Nonetheless, I will rise in defense of the program (of which I am very fond), to remind you that the entertainment industry of the 1950s was not different from that of our own time when inconvenient facts are simply not allowed to interfere with a good story. 

I do not think that producer/writer Elliott Lewis intended for these shows to be taken as historical documents. He was, after-all, a producer of popular entertainment using the vehicle of tongue-in-cheek re-creations of some of history’s more interesting crimes.

The fact is Crime Classics freely mixes fact and fiction and tosses in apocryphal and anecdotal details as garnishments. I don’t think the producers were attempting to create an historically accurate account but entertainment. In this they succeeded, for entertaining they were and are.

And so we are off…

“The Boorn Brothers and the Hangman–A study in Nip and Tuck” which takes place in early 19th-century New England presents itself as the true tale of a wife who, with her two brothers, plot to dispose of her rather lack-wit husband.

I Have to say that the series, in this case, exhibits a somewhat loose connection to the facts. The story is based on something that actually did happen and it happened to the people named in the location given. But, in several of the details should not be trusted.

If you’re interested in knowing more about this case I ran into a pretty good, not overly verbose discussion:

Here.

Segment two is from Lights Out for December 15th of 1942, “Knock at the Door”.

 Light’s Out, is one of the most famous radio shows of all time. Pretty much everyone has heard of it. Although , I admit sometimes this awareness is limited to Bill Cosby’s Chicken Heart routine.
Created by Willis Cooper in 1934, and passed on to Arch Oboler in 1936. Lights Out as a radio series would finally succumb to its own mortality in 1947. The franchise did not end with the demise of the radio show. Lights Out would  turn up as a TV series from 1949 to 1952. There have been occasional attempts to revive the series that never had any notable success.

“Knock at the Door” is a fairly decent ghost story that starts with a woman who drowns her mother-in-law in a basement well.That’s pretty bad but soon she hatches a plot to dispose of her not too bright husband in the same way.

Ah, but mothers love takes a hand from beyond the grave, or maybe it’s just from the grave. Whatever… mama loves her boy.

It’s a fun little ghost yarn that has everything you’d want from old-time radio horror. Oh, and on what I consider to be on the positive side. The three main characters are completely unlikeable.

I enjoyed this episode where once again Oboler displays his ability, his facility, with dialogue.  …

X Minus One does an adaptation of one of Robert Sheckley’s short stories, “ Early Model” (07/11/57).

X Minus One is considered the finest science fiction drama ever produced for radio. It was  not the first. That honor belongs to 2000+. It wasn’t the second, That would be Dimension X. In fact the first 15 episodes of it’s  1955 to 1958 run on NBC were new versions of Dimension X episodes. The remainder were all most entirely adaptations of recently published science fiction stories (Mostly from Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine) usually written by the leading writers of the time, including  Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, J.T. McIntosh, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon.
For all of us who were weaned on  The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone and for the Trekkies (er,Trekkers) among us, you should know that X Minus One is the forefather of the science fiction you grew up on. You will find that it still is some of the best Science Fiction ever aired.

This episode of X minus one is the adaptation of a Robert Sheckley story, “Early Model”, which first appeared in “Galaxy Science Fiction” for August of 1956.

It’s the story of a first contact specialist saddled with this bulky device called a, “Proteck” for its test run.

Well wouldn’t you know it! It turns out that the, “Proteck” isn’t quite up to the job. Well, afterall it’s just a “Early Model”.

Robert Sheckley (July 16, 1928 – December 9, 2005) was a Hugo and Nebula nominated American author. First published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist and broadly comical.

A few quotes:

• “Robert Sheckley: the best short-story writer the field has produced.” — Alan Dean Foster.
• “I had no idea the competition was so terrifyingly good.” — Douglas Adams.
• “Sheckley at his best is Voltaire and Soda.” — Brian W. Aldiss.
• “Probably the best short-story writer during the 50s to the mid-1960s working in any field.” — Neil Gaiman.
• “Always he crackles with ideas.” — Kingsley Amis.
• “[Robert Sheckley is] witty and ingenious… a draught of pure Voltaire and tonic.” — J. G. Ballard.
• “If the Marx Brothers had been literary rather than thespic fantasists … they would have been Robert Sheckley.” — Harlan Ellison.
• If this has whetted your appetite, whether or not you are familiar with Robert Sheckley’s work there is this nice webpage that I ran across recently, “Free Science Fiction online”. There is a lot of great stuff here.

• May I suggest that you peruse this resource beginning with these stories from Robert Sheckley.

Here in segment and we have another dose of   Arch Oboler  this time as, “Arch Obolers Plays” presets, “The Ways of Men; Past, Present and Future” from April 13, 1939.

In 1939, with his own money, Oboler recorded an audition record of his play The Ugliest Man In the World, from which he hoped to launch a new radio series of idea plays. He brought the recording to his network, NBC. At the time, NBC was looking to launch an experimental radio series to rival CBS‘s Columbia Workshop. NBC was also looking for a radio writer and director to rival CBS’s Norman Corwin. NBC gave Oboler his own series, without a sponsor and with complete creative control. It was NBC that named the series Arch Oboler’s Plays. It was an almost unheard of honor. The time slot was less auspicious, the series occupied the Sunday 7-7:30 period opposite Jack Benny. An impressive roster of actors worked for scale to appear in Oboler’s plays, actors such as Bette Davis, Ronald Colman, Edmond O’Brien, Elsa Lanchester,James Cagney. Perhaps the most memorable broadcast was Oboler’s adaptation of Dalton Trumbo‘s Johny Got His Gun, starring James Cagney. The harrowing story of John Bonham, a World War I casualty with no limbs, eyes, ears, or mouth, was particularly suited to radio. Oboler created striking sound effects for the play, including the eerie vibration of bed springs, which Joe Bonham learns to recognize as the movement of people entering and exiting his hospital room.

Oboler’s series was so successful that it attracted the sponsorship of Proctor and Gamble. The new series was titled Everyman’s Theatre. Everyman’s Theatre was essentially Arch Oboler’s Plays with commercial sponsorship. The series ran from 1940 to early 1941. Oboler lost patience with the series because of the middle commercial interruption that came during his plays. After the series ended, it took almost a year before Oboler’s services were called on again.

Arch Oboler’s Plays was Oboler’s breakout dramatic showcase over Radio. Everyman’s Theater further established Oboler’s versatility and range, while underscoring Oboler’s growing appeal to a far wider audience than he’d already established with Lights Out!. Though eight years his senior, the diminutive Oboler, while never as widely popular as Orson Welles, invites comparison to the other great young playwright-actor-director. Their skills were clearly each other’s equal, their versatility had already been amply demonstrated by 1940, and their genius was indisputable. It’s also clear that both Wyllis Cooper and Norman Corwin served to influence and inform Oboler’s growing, wider appeal.
The Arch Oboler’s Plays franchise aired in one form or another over a period of almost thirty-three years, counting the original canon of fifty-three new radioplays, the subsequent special canon of twenty-six radioplays for the Mutual Broadcasting System (1945), then a 1964 revival, and finally a 1971 revival. The original canon of scripts encompassed some ninety-plus original stories. And, as dyed in the wool Lights Out! fans will surely point out, a good number of Lights Out! stories were reprised among the Arch Oboler’s Plays canon over the years as well.

This Episode is really a compendium of three stories with  a common theme running through them .

Reference Please(01/05/47)

Tales From The Morgue:

Elmer Versus The Mutant Mole Rats.

Vanishing Point:

Strange Child (12/22/86)

Whitehall 1212 :

The Heathrow Affair (12/23/51)

Right Click here to download 

The Clock: Reference Please (01/05/47).

Produced in Australia by Grace Gibson Productions The Clock was a  thirty-minute series featuring  stories of suspense and mystery . The introduction to each show was always the same; “Sunrise and sunset, promise and fulfillment, birth and death the whole drama of life is written in the sands of time”.

The show debuted on  November the 3rd of 1946 and would run for a bit more than a year  closing out on May the 23rd of 1948 for a total of 65 shows.

Although the series was produced in Australia the locales for the stories were rather generic.

The actors and actresses spoke without a perceptible Australian accent which caused the program to sound, “American”. This marked the program as a natural for export to the American market where it would be  picked up by ABC.

The show must have been reasonably successful because ABC then continued for another 13 weeks with an All-American cast and crew producing 13 new scripts bringing the series to a total of 78 episodes.

This is a bit like Charles “Dickens Christmas Carol”. It is clearly some sort of derivative. I mean when an unpleasant rich old man, finds himself traveling in the company of a spirit to find out what people really think of him. Well suspicions should  be aroused, don’t you think? But still, it’s rather fun.

Tales From The Morgue – Elmer Versus The Mutant Mole Rats.

Chet Chetter’s Tales from the Morgue is a series of short stories as told by an old obliging morgue attendant, licensed embalmer and resident story teller named Chet Chetter to a passing stranger of the night played by you the listener. The stories Chet relates to us are all quite fanciful. They deal with topics that would be classified supernatural and science fiction. They border on outrageous but that is how they are meant to be. Roughly half of the shows feature a nice, likable, rural southern manure hauler by the name of Elmer Korn who always finds himself involved in some inane predicament. The creators of the series themselves admit the show is rather off-beat but, you will find, not without it’s own charm which lies within the humorous writing and the recurring characters.

“Where-in Elmer Korn and other residents of Biloxi, Mississippi are troubled by Mole Rats the size of cats and dogs.

Soon enough Elmer goes down the rat hole to find that the trap has turned. It all turns out okay for Elmer.
Not so well for the rats though.

Vanishing Point – Strange Child (12/22/86). 

Vanishing Point is a science fiction anthology series that ran on CBC Radio from 1984 until 1986. Declared by the shows introduction to be, “The point between reality and fantasy.
The series was produced by Bill Lane in the C.B.C.’s Toronto studios and produced some excellent radio.
 
In 1986 Vanishing Point produced a, what I guess you would have to call a miniseries of  six programs, each featuring a story that was suggested by ideas found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notepad.Collectively these six episodes are known as, “Thrice Told Tales”.

This is one of those.

The story seems rather Bradberryian (with a dash of Stephen King thrown in for good measure) with it’s conception of the story of a Science Fiction writer and his family, who have taken, what is for the father, a working vacation to the beach.

The children spend their time playing with sand castles on the beach. Well the Girl calls them sand castles. The boy insists they are, “Space Castles”.

In the blink of an eye something terrible seems to happen. The boy shows up at the cabin screaming, and claiming they were visited by a space ship that his sister is dead! Almost as quickly the girl comes back.  But in the coming back. She came back strange.

Whitehall 1212 – The Heathrow Affair (12/23/51)

NBC was the first network to  capitalize in 1952 with it’s  44, or maybe it’s, 52 episodes of  Whitehall 1212 (the exact number is in dispute. So far I have found 43. ). On what was at the time the recent opening of a raft of Scotland Yard’s files.

Whitehall 1212 was a thoroughly American production. Despite being both written and directed by the American Wyllis Cooper (Lights Out, Quiet, Please and a whole lot more). The production would be billed  as if it were a completely British undertaking.

I suppose this was an attempt to underscore it’s  authenticity.

Not that NBC was alone. By the time Whitehall 1212 was well under way the Orson Welles-narrated Black Museum had began airing. So,when I said that NBC was the first network to present crimes from the annals of Scotland Yard I did not mean to imply that they were the first radio show to do so. That was actually, The Secrets of Scotland Yard in 1950. But this was not a network program. In fact it was first broadcast from a pirate radio station in South-Eastern Africa, Mozambique to be exact. This was a production of  Harry Alan Towers and the Towers of London syndication company.

Later  (1952 to 1953) Harry Towers would produce, The Black Museum which he also, at first, aired out of a pirate station, Radio Luxembourg.

The three shows are very  similar using so many of the same cases that the episodes are often conflated, intermixed, in the memory of even the most knowledgeable Golden Age Radio collectors. The main difference seems to be  that Whitehall 1212 has a more police procedural  take on the cases. Focusing mostly on the day-to-day events surrounding the crime as it affected the police. The other two are more heavily dramatized and usually involve a recreation of the crime itself, whereas Whitehall 1212 did not.

What made Whitehall 1212 stand out from the other two is the presents of  the actual superintendent of the Black Museum (Chief Superintendent John Davidson) as the host. He may not have sounded as dramatic as Orson Welles or Clive Brook, but he didn’t have to pretend to know what he was talking about. He was, after all, a veteran of the force. Likewise, the researcher for the series was Percy Hoskins, the chief crime reporter for the  Daily Express. Hoskins was sometimes the newspaperman who had initially reported on some of the crimes being dramatized by the show.

Like Joe Friday on Dragnet, Cooper tried to “stick to the facts”. Oh, there was still plenty of blood and guts, but, only eluded to as the detectives stepped over the bodies looking for clues. So, although all three series are similar, Whitehall 1212 was oriented toward mystery rather than horror with a more intellectual approach to each crime.

But still there is plenty of satisfaction in listening to the  investigators as they gradually tighten the noose.

Murder By Experts: 

“Summer Heat” (6/13/49)

CBS Radio workshop: 

“Season of Disbelief and Hail and Farewell”

Weird Circle:

“The Passion In The Desert” (2/25/32)

The origins of superstition:

“Rabbit’s Foot” ( 1935)

Richard Wilson:

“Back To Julie”

(Galaxy Science Fiction May 1954)

Right Click here to download 

Murder By Experts – Summer Heat

Murder By Experts was  an  anthology that ran in the United States between 1949 and 1951 on the Mutual Network. The program was at first  hosted by mystery writer  John Dickson Carr. Who would leave the show in 1950 to be replaced by Brett Halliday.

With a catalog of 130 episodes (unfortunately only a handful are known to have survived) the show revolved around the premise that each week a guest mystery writer would select a story from another writer (as in not themselves) to be presented as that  week’s show.  Sometimes at the end of the show (I guess as time permitted)  there would be a  critical postmortem of the episode, sometimes featuring well-known personalities.

Murder by Experts  was created by David Kogan. A man who is well remembered in old-time radio circles as the writer/creator of The Mysterious Traveler, The Strange Doctor Weird and, if not countless then at least numerous, other radio programs dotting the landscape the radio’s “Golden Age“.

A newly graduated lawyer awakes with a dead body sharing his  bedroom. He quickly finds that an old truism applies. “A friend will help you move. A really good friend will help you move a body. He could have used a friend like that as he has a very difficult time getting rid of that body!

Weird Circle – “The Passion In The Desert” (2/25/32)

The Weird Circle was a syndicated series produced in New York and licensed by Mutual, and later, NBC’s Red network (Digital Deli Too). For two seasons, it cranked out 39 shows (78 total) consisting mostly of radio adaptations of classic horror stories.

Contradiction Alert: Some sources date The Weird Circle as being produced from 1943 – 1945 (Digital Deli). Others state it was produced from 1946 – 1947.

This adaptation strays considerably from Honore de Balzac’s 1830 short story. It’s a tale about a man who encounters a leopard in the desert with which he develops an uneasy relationship.

Serious  consequences entail.

I thought inasmuch as this story differs rather considerably from the original story. And since the original story is now safely in the public domain, I thought I would provide links to either read online, or download the story from the Internet.

I have had, in the past, some difficulty providing ancillary material in a manner that remains axillary. That is to say, I do not want the RSS feed to scrape this particular material and send it along. After a little bit of thought it seemed to me the best thing to do would be to create another blog at WordPress which I have called, “The NightTransmissions Annex”.

Here is the first entry…

CBS Radio Workshop – “Season of Disbelief and Hail and Farewell” from February 17th of 1956.

The CBS Radio Workshop was an experimental dramatic radio anthology series that aired on CBS from January 27, 1956, until September 22, 1957. Subtitled “radio’s distinguished series to man’s imagination,” it was a revival of the earlier Columbia Workshop, broadcast by CBS from 1936 to 1943, and it used some of the same writers and directors employed on the earlier series. The CBS Radio Workshop was one of American network radio’s last attempts to hold onto, and perhaps recapture, some of the demographics they had lost to television in the post-World War Two era.

Music for the series was composed by Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, Amerigo Moreno, Ray Noble and Leith Stevens. Other writers

Adapted for the series were the likes of Robert A. Heinlein, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederik Pohl, James Thurber, Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe.

This episode features two Ray Bradbury’s character studies both introduced by Ray Bradbury himself, and narrated by John Dehner and Stacy Harris respectively. The musical accompaniment for both studies was scored and conducted by young Jerry Goldsmith.

The origins of superstition – “Rabbit’s Foot” from 1935.

The Origin of Superstition, witch was also known as Superstition On The Air, ran in 1935 for 39 episodes (At least that’s all that are known to have survived,) offers interesting and enlightening tales grounded in folklore and common Superstitions.

They were really there, they were making real radio.  And now, they are gone, faded into the sepia shades of another time.

As the title suggests this particular Episodes of,  (well in this case, Superstition on the air) deals with Rabbit’s feet. Or why they are considered “lucky” by those who possess  them.

Although perhaps they are only lucky for rabbits when they manage to use them to get away from humans intent on culling a bit of “good luck”.

Play Show (Right click to download).

The Final Reckoning” – May the 2nd of 1944

Creeps by Night Was A 1944 horror series with two hosts, one for each coast. in New York it was hosted by the anonymous, “Dr. X” who, as near as I can find, is anonymous to this day. From Hollywood it was hosted by Boris Karloff.

Although,  did often feature the conventions typical of horror, werewolves and the like. It often provided a twist ending that brought an unexpected buoyancy to otherwise common place yarns. Karloff himself once said that, “There is no greater mystery than the mystery of the mind.” And many of the episodes dealt in psychological, rather than literal, horror.
Then as now, excellence is not a guarantee of long life.

Creeps by Night did not, “Live long and prosper”. It was a short lived series and only a few episodes seem to have survived. Too common a story in the annals of old time radio.

“The Final Reckoning” an episode starring Boris Karloff which aired first on May the 2nd of 1944. This is the story of George Miller, who was played for a Patsy by an associate. For twenty long years Miller had only one dream… a dream of murder, only one aspiration, his revenge. Then one day Miller, through careful planning and unbelievable patients, finds his chance when he manages to take the place of a barber giving the villain a shave.This turn of events creates the chance to play out a fine scene with Miller carefully, almost lovingly, tracing the contours of his victims throat with the edge of a straight razor. It’s heady stuff.

Suspense – “Menace In Wax”  from Nov. 11th of 1942.

Suspense is one of the classics of old time radio. Some fans have special favorites in the thriller/chiller/macabre genre, but most agree that Suspense is right at the top.

The guiding light of this show was William Spier, whose formula of human drama set in interesting situations attracted the best of Hollywood and radio actors. Orson Welles was in many episodes. Cary Grant said, “If I ever do any more radio work, I want to do it on Suspense, where I get a good chance to act.”

Spier’s method with actors was to keep them under-rehearsed, and there-by a bit uneasy. He got great performances, and the show gained great popularity.

All the production values were first class. With Bernard Hermann, who had worked with Orson Welles on the Mercury Theater and would work with Alfred Hitchcock, doing the musical scores.

“Menace In Wax”. This is a world war II drama set in the city of London involving… I’ll bet you already know… Nazis! Better yet despicable Nazi spies! Do I need to say anything else? Nazi spies! What more could you want?

X Minus One , “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” April the 22nd of 1955.

X Minus One is considered the finest science fiction drama ever produced for radio. It was  not the first. That honor belongs to 2000+. It wasn’t the second, That would be Dimension X. In fact the first 15 episodes of it’s  1955 to 1958 run on NBC were new versions of Dimension X episodes. The remainder were all most entirely adaptations of recently published science fiction stories (Mostly from Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine) usually written by the leading writers of the time, including  Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, J.T. McIntosh, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon.
For all of us who were weaned on  The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone and for the Trekkies (er,Trekkers) among us, you should know that X Minus One is the forefather of the science fiction you grew up on. You will find that it still is some of the best Science Fiction ever aired.

X Minus One and Ray Bradbury with one of his stories set on Mars, “And the Moon Be Still as Bright”. This story was first published in the Thrilling Wonder Stories issue for June of 1948 and would later be included in The Martian Chronicles as the opening story about the Fourth Expedition. Back in show eight we ran X Minus One’s adaptation of “Mars is Heaven”( AKA, “The Third Expedition”), you may want to check that out. This Episode aired on April the 22nd of 1955.
.

The Mysterious Traveler – Murder Goes Free (7/14/46).

A close cousin to the Whistler and the Strange Dr Weird, the Mysterious Traveller was another memorable radio host. Easy to imagine yourself on a train, at night, seated next to a curious gentleman who invites you “to join me on another journey into the strange and terrifying. I hope you will enjoy the trip, that it will thrill you a little and chill you a little. So settle back, get a good grip on your nerves and be comfortable — if you can!”
The Mysterious Traveler was the second outing for pulp writers Robert Arthur and David P. Kogan. Their first effort, a show called  Dark Destiny, ran for parts of 1942 and 1943 on The Mutual Broadcasting System. This show was, unfortunately. not particularly successful. Surviving for only 27 episodes of which only one is known to still exist.
For this, their next effort, they teamed up with producer/director Sherman ‘Jock’ MacGregor, and actor Maurice Tarplin to create a show that would have a very successful run on  Mutual  between 1944 and 1952. Eventually becoming one of the highest rated programs of the era and spawning a handful of spin offs.

When a man fails in his attempt to buy off a gold-digger, he decides to just kill her. He manages it, much to his sorrow! This show aired on March the 31st of 1945 and for some reason it was identified as the last show of the series. It wasn’t, the show actually closed after the July 14th show of 1946.

Right Click here to download

The Avengers South Africa – The Fantasy Game part 1.

The Avengers Radio Program was produced and transmitted in South Africa between 6th December 1971 and 28th December 1973 It featured adoptions  of scripts first aired on the very successful British T.V. show The Avengers. The show starred Donald Monat as John Steed, and Diane Appleby as Emma Peel. Two top  agents of  the British  secret service. 

The radio show was served up pretty much following the style and tempo established by the  BBC Television series during it’s run  from 1961 to 1969. Just like the television series the South African radio presentation features outlandish, quirky villains, mad scientists and secret organizations .  A little James Bond, a touch of SMERSH and SPECTRE, some Napoleon Solo and Illya  Kuryakin a hint of U.N.C. L.E. and THURSH.

Oh, and just a little Max and 99.

It’s all quite, quite fantastic as Steed and Emma romp through other people’s fantasies to thwart a plot to assassinate the cricket-playing prince of an obscure, oil-laden country. While Steed gets chummy with the prince, Emma is “sold” into his harem to flush out the assassins, who are using the QQF, a “fantasy fulfillment” service, to devise the assassination plot for them.

The Avengers South Africa – The Fantasy Game part 2.

The Avengers South Africa – The Fantasy Game part 3 and the short story The Back Dog by Stephen Crane.

The Witch’s Tale – The Truth of Death (37-03-11).

The Witch’s Tale is credited with being the first horror themed radio show in history. This happened in 1931 when writer- director Alonzo Deen Cole somehow convinced WOR (in New York) to try a series devoted entirely to the supernatural. Not really predictably The series became the premier radio program of its day running until 1938 and is fondly remembered by it’s fans to this day.

Only about three dozen episodes survive. According to Dave Siegel’s book The Witch’s Tale, Cole destroyed his recordings when he moved from New York to California. The three dozen or so surviving recordings exist due to the efforts of others. It was just that by 1961 Cole had come to believe that there was no commercial value to the actual radio transcriptions. He did keep bound copies of his 332 scripts which he protected by copy write.

Syndicated by Mutual. The program was hosted by Old Nancy, the Witch of Salem, who introduced a new story each week.

                  Not Old Nancy!

The Sealed Book:
Death Spins a Web (45-04-01).

CBS Radio Mystery Theater:
The Walking Dead (05/76)

Robert L. Ripley’s Radio Scrapbook:
Witchcraft (08/04/47)

Right Click here to download

Strange Wills from July the 13th of 1946 “Treasure to Starboard”. 

Strange Wills was made for syndication in 1946 by Teleways and is  an interesting twist on the mystery drama fare of the late 1940s. Co created  by Teleways and the star of the program, Warren William  (who was at the time a significant stage and film star but who is now little remembered except for his portrayal of Perry Mason in four Warner Bros. features between 1934 and 1936).This program held unusually high production values. At it’s core is an ensemble cast of high caliber. Headed by the host and star, Warren William, and co-starring Howard Culver and Carleton G. Young. Lurene Tuttle also appeared in many of the episodes, as well as William Conrad, Peggy Webber, Will Wright and John Brown. In short, some of the best West Coast’s voice talent on tap at the time.

The series premise  is the investigation of the fascinating–but often overlooked–drama that arises from many last wills and testaments. With Warren William providing a first-person accounting as either the attorney of record or as an investigator of some extraordinary will.

In the opening set-up of each episode some effort is made to assure us of the authenticity of these stories. Perhaps it’s just a function of my own innate skepticism, but be that as it may, I would admonish you not to take these proclamations as gospel. I will say that  this show waswell made with excellent sound quality and performances.

“This is a story of sunken treasure. Of blood red rubies, sparkling diamonds, and lustrous pearls. But these were but a part of this priceless treasure trove. There were golden statues of pagan gods encrusted with precious stones. There were amethysts, opals, and gold … gold … GOLD …“

Another adventure story, started out all too similar to “The Lady and the Pirate” with Captain Fernandez of the treasure ship Toledo making out his will … in 1703. But quickly over 200 years pass before whereabouts of the ship fall into the hands of O’Connell’s friends Paul and Jean. The hunt is on but will the intercession of German treasure hunters foil Paul and Jean’s quest? The post-WWII Germans, who are I assume Nazis in exile, are what makes “Treasure to Starboard” interesting.

The Sealed Book, “Death Spins A Web”, April 1, 1945.

As with The Mysterious Traveler that preceded it, The Sealed Book was an anthology of supernatural drama, produced and directed by Jock MacGregor for the Mutual network, and written by the extraordinary team of Robert Arthur and David Kogan. Indeed this same entire team of network, director, and writers were responsible for the entire run of The Mysterious Traveler. Going even further, The Sealed Book reprised 26 of the Arthur/Kogan scripts written for The Mysterious Traveler. And in yet another similarity, Philip Clarke performed as an actor in five of the original Mysterious Traveler episodes.

Where the series’ differed was in the ‘hook’ or novelty intro to each week’s new episode. With The Mysterious Traveler, the atmospheric element was the mournful whistle of the train, and Maurice Tarplin’s equally exaggerated exposition at the beginning of each episode. With The Sealed Book, each episode opened with the sound of the great gong, followed by Philip Clarke’s observation that the Keeper of The Book had once again opened the door to the secret vault, within which was contained the ‘great sealed book’ recording ‘all the secrets and mysteries of mankind through the ages.’

At the end of all but the last episode, Clarke would tell listeners to tune in the following week when “the sound of the great gong heralds another strange and exciting tale from… the sealed book.”

Granny should be dead soon. I mean she’s really old. Got lots of money and as far as her grandchildren can see no reason to live. No reason she should live. Maybe the cousins, a girl, a girl and a boy can fix that. Real quiet like.

If they can get along long enough to get the job done that is.

CBS Radio Mystery Theater – “The Walking Dead”.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was an ambitious effort by veteran radio producer Himan Brown to revive interest in American radio drama. Every night from 1974 to 1982, host E.G. Marshall (later Tammy Grimes) ushered listeners through a creaking door — for 52 Min of “the fear you can hear.” Brown produced nearly 200 new episodes of Mystery Theater every year, using both original scripts and adaptations of classic stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain,Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Mystery Theater brought many veterans from radio’s golden age back before the microphone, including Agnes Moorehead, Richard Widmark,Celeste Holm, Mercedes McCambridge and Howard Da Silva. The show also featured performances from many up-and-coming stage and film actors, including Tony Roberts, John Lithgow, Morgan Fairchild, Mandy Patinkin and Sarah Jessica Parker.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater won the George A. Peabody Award in 1974.)

Fondly Fahrenheit is Alfred Bester’s superlative achievement in short Science Fiction. Apparently the story was based an account of an U.S. Antebellum Era slave owner who refused to surrender his murderous chattel because the man was just too valuable. In Fondly Fahrenheit Bester makes brilliant use of the psychological concept of transference, literally smacks you in the forehead with an allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and employs POV shifts that effortlessly blow your consciousness right out of your mind (and into someone else’s)!

The story was adapted as a telepay in 1959 under the title Murder And The Android, an episode of NBC’s Sunday Showcase. But the version I want to tell you about is one that I hadn’t realized existed, until just a few days ago! Bester had again adapted his story, and again changed it’s name! Here is Alfred Bester’s own radio drama adaptation of Fondly Fahrenheit, from 1976 He called it The Walking Dead!.

Robert L. Ripley’s Radio Scrapbook – August the 4th of 1947 – “Witchcraft”.

Robert Ripley began his career as a sports cartoonist on the New York Globe, where in October of 1919 he created the print version of Believe It or Not.

In April 1930, Ripley brought   Believe It or Not to radio, the first of several series that would wander the airwaves and be heard in different incarnations on NBC, CBS and Mutual . These broadcasts varied in length from 15 minutes to 1.

Ripley’s debut on The Collier Hour  brought a strong reaction from the listeners . Knowing a good thing when they heard it, NBC gave Ripley a Monday night spot beginning on April 14, 1930. By 1931 He was airing spots twice a week on NBC’s Saturday Party.

Ripley would host The Baker’s Broadcast from 1935 to 1937. Between 1937 and 1938 He bounced around several different NBC time slots and then took to the road with, See America First with Bob Ripley (1939–40) on CBS. This program would mutate and expand into a 1942 program featuring Latin music, See All the Americas.

During World War II Ripley would be heard five nights a week on Mutual in shows with an emphasis on the war. Then came Romance, Rhythm and Ripley airing on CBS in 1945. From  1947 to 1948.  Pages from Robert L. Ripley’s Radio Scrapbook.

The program ended in 1948 as Ripley and Believe It Or Not migrated to Television.

Finally the show was  resurrected in the 1970s. When there were produced a series of over 400 one minute episodes for use as fillers.

Robert Ripley is known for several radio firsts. He was the first to broadcast nationwide on a radio network from mid-ocean, and he also participated in the first broadcast from Buenos Aires to New York. Assisted by a corps of translators, he was the first to broadcast to every nation in the world simultaneously.

The Ape Song (03/31/47 )

Right Click here to download

The Screen Guild Theater – Arsenic and Old Lace from November 25, 1946.

The Screen Guild Theater was a popular radio anthology series during the Golden Age of Radio, broadcast from 1939 until 1952, with leading Hollywood actors performing in adaptations of popular motion pictures such as Going My Way and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

The show had a long run, lasting for 14 seasons and 527 episodes. It initially was heard on CBS from January 8, 1939 until June 28, 1948, continuing on NBC from October 7, 1948 until June 29, 1950. It was broadcast on ABC from September 7, 1950 to May 31, 1951 and returned to CBS on March 13, 1952. It aired under several different titles: The Gulf Screen Guild Show, The Gulf Screen Guild Theater, The Lady Esther Screen Guild Theater and The Camel Screen Guild Theater.

Actors on the series included Ethel Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Eddie Cantor, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Bette Davis, Jimmy Durante, Nelson Eddy, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Johnny Mercer, Agnes Moorehead, Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore. Fees these actors would typically charge were donated to the Motion Picture Relief Fund, in order to support the creation and maintenance of the Motion Picture Country Home for retired actors.

      Badge of the screen Guild

Arsenic and Old Lace is an appaption of the 1944 Joseph Kesselring‘s play of the same name. The script adaptation was by twins Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein the film was accualy made in 1941, but it was not released until 1944, after the original stage version had finished its run on Broadway. The lead role of Mortimer Brewster was originally intended for Bob Hope, but he couldn’t be released from his contract with Paramount. Frank Capra also approached Jack Benny and Ronald Reagan before going with Cary Grant. Boris Karloff played Jonathan Brewster, who “looks like Karloff”, on the Broadway stage, but he was unable to do the movie as well because he was still appearing in the play during filming, and Raymond Massey took his place but did return for this radio play.

The Creaking Door – Day Of Truce October 12, 1964.

The Creaking Door was an old-time radio series of horror and suspense shows originating in South Africa 1964-65.

The show was South African Radio’s shot at thrillers with a supernatural bent. In the vein of  the Americans show Inner Sanctum. The Creaking Door , however, despite its obvious connection to the American series stands on its own as a unique, well-produced, engaging supernatural thriller series. The emphasis on high production values is perhaps the very reason that several early, morally challenged Radio traders felt they could get away with interspersing many of the Creaking Door episodes with their Inner Sanctum, Mysterious Traveler, and Strange Dr. Weird offerings to a still naive community of radio recording collectors. Although somewhat left-handed, it’s still a compliment to both SABC and Springbok Radio that those early ‘otr hooligans’ managed to get away with the practice for well over 20 years.

That takes nothing away from this excellent series in its own right. The expositions were deftly introduced and shaded with just the right amount of chilling narrative. Not quite as chilling and melodramatic as Raymond Johnson, perhaps, but Peter Broomfield rightly camped up his delivery for The Creaking Door, and it worked. Indeed, given the reported conservative budget of each episode, it’s a tribute to The Creaking Door’s producers that they managed to tease so much quality out of such relatively humbly funded productions. Circulating The Creaking Door productions remain a highly engaging tribute to the supernatural thriller genre and, as such, continue to be a highly sought after series. Definitely still a compelling, ‘lights-out’ listening experience for young and old alike.

It was sponsored by State Express 555 (pronounced “State Express Three Fives”) cigarettes, a British American Tobacco product.

(The above is mostly taken from the entry at Digital  Deli)

This story opens at the graveside of the funeral of a local gangster. Everyone’s there, his gang, his loyal soldiers, his rivals in the gang, the Coppers and members of a rival gang,everyone observing a “Day of Truce”. And subsequently, the greedy ambitions of one mobster in particular. Oh, and there’s a ghost. But maybe I shouldn’t mention that because, maybe there is and maybe there isn’t.

X Minus One – Junkyard, from February 22 of 1956.

X Minus One is considered the finest science fiction drama ever produced for radio. It was  not the first. That honor belongs to 2000+. It wasn’t the second, That would be Dimension X. In fact the first 15 episodes of it’s  1955 to 1958 run on NBC were new versions of  Dimension X  episodes. The remainder were all most entirely adaptations of recently published science fiction stories (Mostly from Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine) usually written by the leading writers of the time, including  Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, J.T. McIntosh, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon.

For all of us who were weaned on  The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone and for the Trekkies (er,Trekkers) among us, you should know that X Minus One is the forefather of the science fiction you grew up on. You will find that it still is some of the best Science Fiction ever aired.

this is the adaptation of a short story by Clifford D. Simak of the same name which was published in the May, 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.

It concerns a spaceship crew exploring a planet they’ve spied from afar, and what looks to them to be a pile of junk. upon investigation one after another the crew begins to exhibit memory loss, and soon can’t remember how to start the ship’s engines for take-off.

Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988) was one of the science-fiction’s most beloved writers. a longtime friends of Gordon R. Dickson and Poul Anderson, he was honored as SFWA’s third Grand Master in 1977 (for the year 1976 in this honor he was preceded  by Robert A. Heinlein and Jack Williamson. This is exalted company indeed! And Clifford D said Mac is not out of place among them. He also won the International Fantasy Award for his classic 1953 Novel City, and was given the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in 1988.

His other awards include three Hugo trophies (“The Big Front Yard”–1959, Way Station–1964, and “Grotto of the Dancing Deer”–1981), and a Nebula Award, also for “Grotto of the Dancing Deer” in 1981. 

Murder at Midnight – The Ape Song first aired on March 31 of 1947.

Produced in New York, Murder At Midnight was heard  over the Mutual Network starting on Sept. 16th  of 1946 until Sept. 8th of 1947. Produced by radio station  WJZ.  The show was known to occasionally reproduce scripts that had been performed on  Inner Sanctum.  This practice allowed the show to feature tales of murder most macabre by some of radio’s top writers without paying top dollar.

The show was filled with tales of death and mayhem, not always at midnight. The show was hosted by Raymond Morgan who had a memorable introduction as he intoned, “… The witching hour, when night is darkest, our fears the strongest, our strength at it’s lowest ebb. Midnight when the graves gape open and Death strikes”.

The cast featured Elspeth Eric, Mercedes McCambridge, Barry Kroeger, Betty Kane, Carl Frank, Barry Hopkins, Lawson Zerbie. Charles Paul played the creepy organ music, and Anton M. Leader directed.
I have grown to love “Murder at Midnight”. Certainly I Know that the show is often silly. But it has cultivated the grace of Camp. The program is far more “Noir” than it’s sister program Inner Sanctum   taking as, it does,  a more hard-boiled approach to the supernatural.