POPULARITY
Categories
6,370 episodes with cbs radio
1,389 episodes with cbs radio
445 episodes with cbs radio
709 episodes with cbs radio
583 episodes with cbs radio
79 episodes with cbs radio
199 episodes with cbs radio
93 episodes with cbs radio
109 episodes with cbs radio
108 episodes with cbs radio
883 episodes with cbs radio
42 episodes with cbs radio
44 episodes with cbs radio
22 episodes with cbs radio
20 episodes with cbs radio
32 episodes with cbs radio
48 episodes with cbs radio
57 episodes with cbs radio
77 episodes with cbs radio
30 episodes with cbs radio
9 episodes with cbs radio
39 episodes with cbs radio
13 episodes with cbs radio
18 episodes with cbs radio
14 episodes with cbs radio
16 episodes with cbs radio
6 episodes with cbs radio
6 episodes with cbs radio
7 episodes with cbs radio
9 episodes with cbs radio
6 episodes with cbs radio
4 episodes with cbs radio
5 episodes with cbs radio
6 episodes with cbs radio
3 episodes with cbs radio
3 episodes with cbs radio
5 episodes with cbs radio
10 episodes with cbs radio
2 episodes with cbs radio
3 episodes with cbs radio
9 episodes with cbs radio
3 episodes with cbs radio
2 episodes with cbs radio
3 episodes with cbs radio
2 episodes with cbs radio
Danielle Paige is an International Spiritual Teacher, Soul Astrologer, Host of Cosmic Body Podcast and Founder of Purposely Divine: School For Your Soul and Astrology Mystery School. A self-taught astrologer, who's been reading the stars for lifetimes, she continued her studies with some of the world's top astrologers. She then devoted herself to learning different types of healing to create her own style of spiritual medicine. By fusing astrology, energetic healing, and intuition, she is able to help her clients heal their wounds, clear old patterns, and help them come back home to their heart. Danielle has given talks on mysticism and astrology at Scorpios Mykonos, Glossier Headquarters in NYC, Soho House, The Assemblage, The Goodfest and has traveled to over 32 countries bringing women together while leading retreats in Hawaii, Costa Rica, as well as 3 retreats on the Greek Islands of Mykonos and Kythnos. Her work has been featured in Vogue Netherlands (twice!), Goop, Astrology.com, London Standard, The Numinous, Yogi Approved, Thought Catalog, JDate, CBS Radio and more! We discuss: The power of divine timing and how it shapes life events and meaningful relationships. Using astrology as a supportive guide—while staying rooted in personal agency and free will. The impact of a healthy lifestyle on enhancing mental clarity, intuition, and energetic alignment. Why astrology is just one tool—and the importance of tuning into your own inner guidance and connection to Source. How deep soul connections can anchor us through life's transitions and challenges. Follow Danielle Paige on Instagram @iamdaniellepaige Listen to Danielle's podcast Cosmic Body with Danielle Paige Explore Danielle's offerings here - readings, courses, and membership, designed to support your journey. Learn more about High Vibration Living with Chef Whitney Aronoff on www.StarseedKitchen.com Get 10% off your order of Chef Whitney's organic spices with code STARSEED on www.starseedkitchen.com Follow Chef Whitney Aronoff on Instagram at @whitneyaronoff and @starseedkitchen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
Big Variety Old Time Radio Podcast. (OTR) Presented by Chemdude
Honeymoon With Death
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
Jovanka Ciares is a former entertainment executive turned Integrative Herbalist, Wellness expert; detox specialist, nutrition educator and author. She is the creator of Reclaiming Wellness, an online wellness & learning community for healthy living and founder of Solana Wellness, an herbal supplement line to be released in the Summer of 2023. Jovanka studied nutrition with best-selling author Dr. T. Colin Campbell at Cornell University and herbalism with Dr. Tieraona Low Dog. She offers lectures, workshops and wellness coaching in both English and Spanish. In her social media channels, she shows viewers easy natural cures, home remedies and how to use common herbs and spices to address various health complaints. After years of suffering from IBS, ulcers and fibroids, Jovanka embraced alternative therapies like Ayurveda, Chinese Medicine and Herbalism. Her journey towards self-healing, peace and happiness became her motivation to inspire and support hundreds of others to do the same. Jovanka is a featured expert at People Magazine, Entertainment Tonight, Whole Foods, Veria Living, Fox News LA, NPR and CBS Radio. She's also a regular contributor in Spanish-language media outlets like Telemundo and a contributing guest expert at The Huffington Post, MindBodyGreen, BlogHer and PositivelyPositive. Jovanka gave her first TEDx talk on “Rethinking Failure” in November 2013. Find out more at: www.JovankaCiares.com
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
Jovanka Ciares is a former entertainment executive turned Integrative Herbalist, Wellness expert; detox specialist, nutrition educator and author. She is the creator of Reclaiming Wellness, an online wellness & learning community for healthy living and founder of Solana Wellness, an herbal supplement line to be released in the Summer of 2023. Jovanka studied nutrition with best-selling author Dr. T. Colin Campbell at Cornell University and herbalism with Dr. Tieraona Low Dog. She offers lectures, workshops and wellness coaching in both English and Spanish. In her social media channels, she shows viewers easy natural cures, home remedies and how to use common herbs and spices to address various health complaints. After years of suffering from IBS, ulcers and fibroids, Jovanka embraced alternative therapies like Ayurveda, Chinese Medicine and Herbalism. Her journey towards self-healing, peace and happiness became her motivation to inspire and support hundreds of others to do the same. Jovanka is a featured expert at People Magazine, Entertainment Tonight, Whole Foods, Veria Living, Fox News LA, NPR and CBS Radio. She's also a regular contributor in Spanish-language media outlets like Telemundo and a contributing guest expert at The Huffington Post, MindBodyGreen, BlogHer and PositivelyPositive. Jovanka gave her first TEDx talk on “Rethinking Failure” in November 2013.Find out more at: www.JovankaCiares.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
PARANORMAL ENCOUNTERS: Be Careful What You Wish For. This episode will run on the Para-X Radio Network (www.paraxradionetwork.com) on Thursday, August 7, 2025 from 11:00 PM-12:00 Midnight (EST). Educational. Entertaining. Intriguing.Rick Hayes is recognized as one of the top 25 Psychic Mediums in the United States. His work extends over 19 years in the industry to share his inspiration and validations that there is life after death. Rick is a sought after and popular keynote speaker/lecturer in many venues including colleges/spiritual/business sector and well-being conferences.As a Life Coach, Rick has assisted many individuals searching for a ‘re-balance' and purpose in life through his ‘BElieve To Be A Better You' program, individual consulting and on the speaking circuit.He is the host of the popular podcast - 'BElieve with Rick Hayes' available on many podcast platforms including Stitcher, Google Play, Apple, and Spotify. Rick has also appeared on film/television including SYFY Network, Travel Channel, CBS, Sirius Radio Network, and more.As a published and best-selling author, Rick's books include ‘Stepping Stones –Thoughts Along Life's Path' (ISBN# 978-0-9765434-3-5) and ‘You're not Crazy, You Have A Ghost' (ISBN#978-0-0965434-2-8). Rick's articles appear on numerous print and online publications.Rick is a media favorite appearing on television, film, radio, and print media including appearances on The Travel Channel, SYFY Network, Destination America, Chiller Channel, Fox Television, CBS Radio, and Sirius Satellite Radio. Rick enjoys his time with family, visiting historic locations, traveling, and embracing the value of life.WEBSITEwww.lifesgift.comEMAILlgteam@lifesgift.comSCHEDULING FOR READINGS812-776-7678To learn more about me, read my biography at www.paranormaluniversalpress.com. Click on the upper right Podomatic button to go into my podcast site to hear my guests. View my books on my website or go to Amazon.com. Copyrighted. Go to Amazon.com, Kindle, Barnes & Noble to purchase. PLAY, LIKE, FOLLOW, and SUBSCRIBE to this program to be notified of future episodes. Doing so is FREE.TO WATCH GUESTS ON "DISEMBODIED VOICES" TV TALK SHOWTake a moment to WATCH my guests visually in a personal interview. Rick Hayes can be visually seen on PARAFlixx (www.paraflixx.com) on August 3, 2025 on Season 17, Episode 5. Shows are scheduled to launch at 8/7 Central (USA time). Shows remain on PARAFlixx indefinitely until changes to remove are made. Please allow an additional day in the event the show does not get launched as scheduled due to unforeseen circumstances "by the network."DETAILS FOR 3-DAY FREE TRIAL and SUBSCRIBING to PARAFLIXXON INITIAL PAGE - Go To The Bottom (see free trial box)IF SUBSCRIBINGEnter into your search bar this campaign link: https://bit.ly/3FGvQuYDiscount Code = DV10$4.99/month (U.S.); discount is 10% off first three monthsCancel AnytimeWAYS TO ACCESS SHOWS - go to www.paraflixx.com. Find my show by going to the upper left corner, click on BROWSE. Scroll down to TALK SHOWS. "Disembodied Voices."
What a mess – markets under siege. Powell attacked, then a reversal – one week policy reversals. Market now pushing policy – Team Trump wakes up to reality. This week's guest, Patrick O'Hare – Chief Market Analyst for Briefing.com. NEW! DOWNLOAD THIS EPISODE'S AI GENERATED SHOW NOTES (Guest Segment) Patrick has been with Briefing.com since 1997 and authors the Page One, The Big Picture, Fed Brief, Market View, and Economic Data Reviews columns. He also provides commentary on Live In Play. Every Wednesday morning Patrick is a guest on KDOW's The Rob Black Show. He is quoted regularly in the financial press and has also appeared on CBS Radio, CNBC, CNN International, Fox Business Network, and PBS' Nightly Business Report. Patrick is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and is located in Chicago. Follow @Briefingcom Check this out and find out more at: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/ Follow @andrewhorowitz Stocks mentioned in this episode: (CMG), (IBM), (SPY), (BA), (AMZN), (MSFT)
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
The Man Called X || India Quinine Contract || International Blackmail Racket || Stolen Diamonds || Broadcast dates: September 30, 1944; October 14, 1944; November 25, 1944Herbert Marshall played the role of intelligence agent Ken Thurston/"Mr. X." Leon Belasco played his sidekick, Pegon Zellschmidt. Zellschmidt annoyed and helped Mr. X.The Man Called X was broadcast on CBS Radio and NBC Radio from July 10, 1944, to May 20, 1952.: : : : :My other podcast channels include: DRAMA X THEATER -- SCI FI x HORROR -- COMEDY x FUNNY HA HA -- VARIETY X ARMED FORCES -- THE COMPLETE ORSON WELLESEnjoying my podcast? You can subscribe to receive new post notices. Also, if you have a moment, please give a 4-5 star rating and/or write a 1-2 sentence positive review on your preferred service -- that would help me a lot.Thank you for your support.https://otr.duane.media | Instagram @duane.otr@duaneOldTimeRadio #duaneOldTimeRadio#mysteryclassics #oldtimeradio #otr #mysteryradio #radioclassics #rodserling #agathachristie #thewhistler #mystery #suspense #oldtimeradioclassics #classicradio #crimeclassics #duaneotr:::: :
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
The beer industry is filled with challenges—economic pressures, shifting consumer trends, and the constant noise of uncertainty. But instead of succumbing to doom and gloom, how can we cultivate resilience and purpose? In this session, Chris Douglas, a coach at Growth Equation, joins to explore the concept of tragic optimism—finding meaning and growth in difficult times. Through practical insights on core values, controlling what's within your power, and identifying the battles worth fighting, we'll discuss strategies to overcome procrastination, stay grounded, and build a strong community. True performance and lasting well-being aren't built on quick fixes—they emerge from intentional, consistent habits. Join us for a conversation on turning challenges into opportunities and sustaining success in an ever-evolving industry.Prior to joining The Growth Equation as COO and starting my performance coaching practice, Chris Douglas worked as a civil rights attorney and clinical law professor at Berkeley Law for over ten years before launching my own consulting business where I have partnered with athletes, events, start-ups, law firms, and small businesses to actualize success. My expertise in these areas has been featured in print and online publications including Outside, Ultrarunning Magazine, The Recorder, Triathlete, The Daily Journal and The San Francisco Chronicle and been heard on NPR and CBS Radio.When I'm not working, I enjoy spending time with my family, reading, and engaging in athletic feats of endurance.Learn more about The Growth Equation: https://thegrowtheq.com/Stay up to date with CBP: http://update.craftbeerprofessionals.orgJoin us in-person for CBP ConnectsHalf workshop, half networkingCharlotte, NC | June 9-11, 2025Register now: https://cbpconnects.com/
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
Nina Kolb is Senior Manager of Talent for Dick Clark Productions in California. Throughout her career in the entertainment industry, she has worn many hats including: Talent Booker & Project Manager, Social Media, VIP & Talent Relations, Publicity Director, work in the music business arena, as well as gaining experience working in promotions and producing while at CBS Radio in Chicago. Tom and Nina have a wide-ranging conversation about Nina's rise in the industry, the circuitous route to her current position, and detail some of her everyday duties working for Dick Clark Productions.
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
(00:00) First up, we have AL COLE from CBS RADIO joining the show! (xx:xx) Want more? We welcome GUY FROM MACHINE! CONNECT WITH TOUCHER & HARDY: linktr.ee/ToucherandHardy For the latest updates, visit the show page on 985thesportshub.com. Follow 98.5 The Sports Hub on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Watch the show every morning on YouTube, and subscribe to stay up-to-date with all the best moments from Boston’s home for sports!
Julian KheelFounder and CEOPoints PathOver the last 15 years, Julian Kheel has become one of the world's top experts on travel rewards. He first learned the ins and outs of travel loyalty programs while flying more than 200,000 miles a year as a TV producer and director for World Wrestling Entertainment (and yes, of course it's all real). He expanded his expertise on travel topics in the following years, writing about travel for U.S. News and World Report, along with popular weekly columns for the travel rewards websites Frequent Miler and Travel Codex.Noting Kheel's growing following, he was recruited in 2016 to work at The Points Guy, the largest website in the world covering travel rewards, where he served as both Editorial Director and Director of Special Projects. He was the creator of the site's now‐annual “Best and Worst U.S. Airlines” special report, as well as personally authoring its first and second yearly editions, both of which drew attention from hundreds of media outlets across the country.Following his time at The Points Guy, Kheel became a Senior Editor at CNN covering both travel and finance topics, and launched the company's first e‐commerce division focused on travel rewards. Battling through the global stoppage in travel from the pandemic, he grew the small section from its infancy to over seven figures of annual revenue in only three years.In 2023, Kheel left CNN to become the founder and CEO of Points Path, a company that helps people utilize their travel rewards. The company's browser extension not only shows travelers the cost in points and miles of every flight directly in Google Flights, but also indicates whether using points or miles for each flight is the better deal. In just 8 months, Points Path has grown to over 40,000 users, and has been lauded by numerous travel publications.Kheel has appeared regularly as an analyst to discuss finance, travel and loyalty programs on national television segments for CNN, Bloomberg News, CNBC's “Squawk Box,” Yahoo Finance and Cheddar TV, as well as on ABC and CBS Radio. He has been quoted in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and many other print and web outlets on travel-related topics. He has also worked as a consultant for the “Big 3” US airlines, advising them on their frequent flyer programs.Originally from New York and South Florida, Kheel is a graduate of Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications with a bachelor's degree in television, radio and film production. His hobbies include managing his ever‐changing personal inventory of 25+ credit cards while maintaining a credit score of over 800.summaryIn this episode of the Big World Made Small podcast, host Jason Elkins interviews Julian Kheel, founder and CEO of Points Path. Julian shares his unique journey from being a reluctant traveler to becoming an expert in travel rewards and frequent flyer miles. He discusses his experience working with WWE, the importance of understanding travel points, and how Points Path simplifies the process of finding the best flight deals. The conversation also covers tips for maximizing travel rewards, the value of credit cards, and the future of Points Path.takeawaysJulian Kheel initially disliked travel but overcame his discomfort through frequent flying for work.Points Path is a browser extension that helps users find the best flight deals using points or cash.Frequent flyer programs are more valuable than airlines themselves, especially post-pandemic.S Learn more about Big World Made Small Adventure Travel Marketing and join our private community to get episode updates, special access to our guests, and exclusive adventure travel offers on our website.
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar – The Man with the Action-Packed Expense Account For over a decade, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar reigned as one of the greatest detective dramas of radio's golden age, captivating audiences with thrilling investigations, sharp wit, and a unique storytelling style. From its debut in 1949 to its final broadcast in 1962, it followed the adventures of Johnny Dollar—America's “fabulous freelance insurance investigator”—as he tackled high-stakes fraud, mysterious disappearances, and deadly deceptions, all while meticulously documenting his expenses. Johnny wasn't your typical gumshoe. He didn't work for the police or a detective agency—his cases came straight from the world of insurance claims. Whether it was a suspicious death, a missing person, or a million-dollar con, Johnny took the case, traveling across the country—and sometimes around the world—armed with little more than his wits, a badge of credibility from his employer, and a knack for getting into trouble. The show's signature format set it apart. Each story was told through Johnny's first-person narration as he recounted his cases via his expense account. Every episode was peppered with dry humor and clever scene transitions: “Item seven, $1.25 – Lunch. It should've been steak, but something about the guy across the table made me lose my appetite.” These little details gave Johnny a personality beyond the typical hardboiled detective—he was a man who could be tough when needed but was also introspective, sarcastic, and at times, deeply human. Over its 12-year run, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar saw multiple actors bring the character to life. The early versions, played by Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien, and John Lund, followed the standard private-eye formula. But the show hit its stride in 1955 when it was revived with Bob Bailey in the lead role. Under writer-director Jack Johnstone, the series adopted a serialized format, stretching cases across five gripping episodes each week. The extra time allowed for richer storytelling, deeper character development, and some of the finest radio drama ever produced. Fans widely regard Bailey's portrayal as the definitive Johnny Dollar—equal parts tough, charming, and emotionally complex. Despite format changes and cast shifts, Johnny Dollar remained a staple of CBS Radio until its final episode on September 30, 1962—marking the end of the golden age of radio drama. Though other shows would attempt to revive radio storytelling in the years that followed, Johnny Dollar's final expense report closed the book on an era of entertainment unlike any other. Even today, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar stands as a masterclass in detective fiction, blending action, intrigue, and a touch of humor with one unforgettable character at its center.
Old-Time Radio Essentials' fourth season continues with their late-entry Valentine's Day offering, "Cathy and Elliott Lewis On Stage", which is Patte's pick, an episode entitled "Heartbreak", which aired on CBS Radio in 1954. Will co-hosts Paul and Pete applaud the mid-century melodrama? Or will they respond with typical masculine avoidance? TUNE IN AND FIND OUT! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Old-Time Radio Essentials' fourth season continues with their late-entry Valentine's Day offering, "Cathy and Elliott Lewis On Stage", which is Patte's pick, an episode entitled "Heartbreak", which aired on CBS Radio in 1954. Will co-hosts Paul and Pete applaud the mid-century melodrama? Or will they respond with typical masculine avoidance? TUNE IN AND FIND OUT! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk #sleep #insomnia #relax #chill #night #nighttime #bed #bedtime #oldtimeradio #drama #comedy #radio #talkradio #hancock #tonyhancock #hancockshalfhour #sherlock #sherlockholmes #radiodrama #popular #viral #viralpodcast #podcast #podcasting #podcasts #podtok #podcastclip #podcastclips #podcasttrailer #podcastteaser #newpodcastepisode #newpodcast #videopodcast #upcomingpodcast #audiogram #audiograms #truecrimepodcast #historypodcast #truecrime #podcaster #viral #popular #viralpodcast #number1 #instagram #youtube #facebook #johnnydollar #crime #fiction #unwind #devon #texas #texasranger #beer #seaton #seaside #smuggler #colyton #devon #seaton #beer #branscombe #lymebay #lymeregis #brett #brettorchard #orchard #greatdetectives #greatdetectivesofoldtimeradio #detectives #johnnydollar #thesaint #steptoe #texasrangers Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar is a radio drama that aired on CBS Radio from February 18, 1949 to September 30, 1962. The first several seasons imagined protagonist Johnny Dollar as a private investigator drama, with Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien and John Lund portraying Dollar in succession over the years. In 1955 after a yearlong hiatus, the series came back in its best-known incarnation with Bob Bailey starring in "the transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account – America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator." There were 809 episodes (plus two not-for-broadcast auditions) in the 12-year run, and more than 710 still exist today. Jim Cox's book American Radio Networks: A History cites "886 total performances" which includes repeat performances. Format The format best remembered was instituted by writer-director Jack Johnstone. Each case usually started with a phone call from an insurance adjuster, calling on Johnny to investigate an unusual claim: a suspicious death, an attempted fraud, a missing person, or other mysterious circumstances. Each story required Johnny to travel to some distant locale, usually within the United States but sometimes abroad, where he was almost always threatened with personal danger in the course of his investigations. He would compare notes with the police officials who had first investigated each strange occurrence, and followed every clue until he figured out what actually happened. Johnny's file on each case was usually referenced as a "matter," as in "The Silver Blue Matter" or "The Forbes Matter". Later episodes were more fanciful, with titles like "The Wayward Trout Matter" and "The Price of Fame Matter" (the latter featuring a rare guest-star appearance by Vincent Price as himself; here Price and Dollar team up to retrieve a painting stolen by Price's insurance agent). Johnny usually stuck to business, but would sometimes engage in romantic dalliances with women he encountered in his travels; later episodes gave Johnny a steady girlfriend, Betty Lewis. Johnny's precious recreational time was usually spent fishing, and it was not uncommon for Johnny's clients to exploit this favorite pastime in convincing him to take on a job near good fishing locations. His past was rarely mentioned, but Dollar in “The Bennett Matter” described himself as a four-year US Marine veteran who then worked as a police officer for a decade before changing careers to insurance investigation.[5] In "The Blackburn Case" Dollar also refers to his time as a Pinkerton Detective. Each story was recounted in flashback, and every few minutes the action would be interrupted by Johnny listing a line item from his expense account, which served as an effective scene transition. Most of the expense account related to transportation, lodging, and meals, but no incidental expense was too small for Johnny to itemize, as in "Item nine, 10 cents. Aspirin. I needed them." The monetary amounts weren't always literal: the smallest line item Johnny ever recorded was "two cents: what I felt like" after a professional setback; the largest was "one million dollars" (the way he felt after finding a missing woman and her daughter in a snowbound cabin). The episodes generally finished with Johnny tallying up his expense account and traveling back to Hartford, Connecticut, where he was based. Sometimes Johnny would add a sardonic postscript under "Remarks," detailing the aftermath of the case. ("The Todd Matter," which especially disgusted Johnny, ended abruptly with "Remarks – nil!") In later seasons the program sometimes referred to itself, with other characters recognizing Dollar's voice from the radio; in the episode “The Salkoff Sequel Matter” Johnny's radio show becomes an important plot point. Original run As originally conceived, Johnny Dollar was a smart, tough, wisecracking detective who tossed silver-dollar tips to waiters and bellhops. Dick Powell starred in the audition show, recorded in 1948, but withdrew from the role in favour of other detective programs, Rogue's Gallery and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. The Johnny Dollar role went instead to Charles Russell. The show for which Powell auditioned was originally titled Yours Truly, Lloyd London, although the name of the show and its lead character were changed to avoid legal problems with the actual insurance company, Lloyd's of London, before the audition tape of December 7, 1948, was recorded. With the first three actors to play Johnny Dollar – radio actor Russell and movie tough-guy actors Edmond O'Brien and John Lund – there was little to distinguish Johnny Dollar from other detective series at the time (Richard Diamond, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade). While always a friend of the police, Johnny wasn't necessarily a stickler for the strictest interpretation of the law. He was willing to let some things slide to satisfy his own sense of justice, as long as the interests of his employer were also protected. The series ended in September 1954. Revival CBS Radio revived Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar in October 1955 with a new leading man, a new director, and a new format. The program changed from a 30-minute, one-episode-per-week program to a 15-minute, five-nights-a-week serial (Monday through Friday, 8–8:15 pm EST) produced and directed by radio veteran Jack Johnstone. The new Johnny Dollar was Bob Bailey, who had just come off another network detective series, Let George Do It. With a new lead and 75 minutes of air time each week, it became possible to develop each storyline with more detail and with more characters. Almost all of the Johnny Dollar serials were presented by CBS Radio on a sustaining basis (unsponsored, with no commercials); only two of the 55 serials take time out for a sponsor's message. Bob Bailey was exceptionally good in this format, making Johnny more sensitive and thoughtful in addition to his other attributes. Vintage-radio enthusiasts often endorse Bailey as the best of the Johnny Dollars, and consider the 13-month run of five-part stories to be some of the greatest drama in radio history. The serial scripts were usually written by Johnstone, "John Dawson" (a pseudonym for E. Jack Neuman), Les Crutchfield, or Robert Ryf. Blake Edwards also contributed several scripts and the show was always produced and directed by Johnstone. The show featured a stock company of supporting actors, including Virginia Gregg, Harry Bartell, Vic Perrin, Lawrence Dobkin, Stacy Harris, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, John Dehner, Barney Phillips, Lillian Buyeff, Tony Barrett, Don Diamond, Alan Reed, and Forrest Lewis. Movie character actors appeared occasionally, including Jay Novello, Hans Conried, Frank Nelson, Leon Belasco, William Conrad, Edgar Barrier, Jeanne Bates, Gloria Blondell, and Billy Halop. In late 1956, CBS Radio retooled the show, which reverted to a weekly half-hour drama, airing on late Sunday afternoons. Bob Bailey continued in the leading role until 1960 and wrote one episode, "The Carmen Kringle Matter," under his first and middle names (Robert Bainter). Staff announcer Dan Cubberly introduced the program during the Edmond O'Brien run; Roy Rowan was the announcer for the first two years of Bob Bailey's run; he also was an announcer on CBS's I Love Lucy. In "The Laird Douglas Matter," the only Johnny Dollar serial played for laughs, Roy Rowan was written into the script as dog-show expert "Ray Roland." In 1957 Rowan was succeeded by Dan Cubberly, returning to the series. Changes at CBS CBS Radio tried to institute an economy measure in June 1959: its four remaining dramatic series (Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar; Suspense; Gunsmoke starring William Conrad; and Have Gun, Will Travel starring John Dehner) would be moved from Hollywood to New York. The plan met with some resistance, because the cast members and crews of Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel were willing to cancel the shows themselves rather than move to New York. The situation was stalemated for 17 months, as all four programs remained on the air. Finally, in November 1960, CBS Radio kept Gunsmoke in California, discontinued Have Gun, Will Travel, and moved Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense to New York. Bob Bailey, unwilling to relocate, gave up the Johnny Dollar role. Bailey's last performance, aired November 27, 1960, was in a script titled "The Empty Threat Matter," perhaps writer Johnstone's editorial comment on CBS's intention to shut down production in California. In New York, CBS staff producer Bruno Zirato Jr. (who also directed TV game shows for CBS) took over Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, although Johnstone continued to write the scripts. Former child actor Bob Readick took over the leading role in a manner reminiscent of the original Dollar, Charles Russell. After six months he was replaced by Mandel Kramer, who gave the role his own low-key interpretation. Many fans found Mandel Kramer second only to Bailey as the most effective Johnny Dollar. Both Readick and Kramer were members of CBS's stock company in New York, and both appeared in other CBS dramas. The end The final episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense, airing on CBS, are often cited as the end of the golden age of radio. The last episode of Johnny Dollar, "The Tip-Off Matter", ended at 6:35 pm. Eastern Time on September 30, 1962, followed immediately by the final broadcast of Suspense. Although network radio drama returned to the airwaves – in ABC's Theater Five (1964–65), and CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974–82) – these were more experimental "drama workshop" shows, and did not adhere to a continuing format or leading character, albeit the latter did spark a bit of a revival of drama on US commercial radio networks in the 1970s. The "Golden Age" of radio drama, as pioneered in the 1920s, died with Johnny Dollar in 1962. Three unsuccessful attempts were made to transfer the success of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar to television. Charles Russell starred in a 1949 pilot directed by Ralph Levy, Bob Bailey starred in a 1958 pilot entitled The Adventures of Johnny Dollar (which failed because Bailey's 5-foot 9-inch, 150-pound physique didn't match the tough-guy characterization), and William Bryant starred in a 1962 pilot entitled Johnny Dollar. The latter was written, produced, and directed by Blake Edwards. Actors who portrayed Dollar Dick Powell (Audition show in 1948) Charles Russell (February 1949 – January 1950) Edmond O'Brien (February 1950 – September 1952) John Lund (November 1952 – September 1954) Gerald Mohr (Audition show in 1955) Bob Bailey (October 1955 – November 1960) Bob Readick (December 1960 – June 1961) Mandel Kramer (June 1961 – September 1962) Legacy Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was so familiar to CBS Radio's listeners that the network's resident comedians, Bob and Ray, occasionally satirized it. Their version, "Ace Willoughby, International Detective," followed the Johnny Dollar format of exotic locales, continental officials, cool villains, and tense confrontations, with Ray Goulding doing a letter-perfect imitation of Bob Bailey's delivery. In the comedy version, however, the detective usually gave up on the case after being beaten up incessantly. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was a popular weekly radio mystery play in the 1960s and early 1970s on Radio Iran. The role of Johnny Dollar was played by Heidar Saremi, a popular radio performer. Contrary to the original, Johnny Dollar was more of a criminal investigator. At the end of each episode, the narrator asked the radio audience how Johnny found the perpetrators, making the show a mystery quiz as well as a drama; those who guessed correctly were entered into a raffle for a prize. In the 1970s and 1980s the comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre released a number of satirical record albums; several featured spoofs of old-time radio featuring the character Nick Danger, Third Eye, who was loosely based on Sam Spade and Johnny Dollar. The scripts included inside references to radio with lines such as, "It had been snowing in Santa Barbara ever since the top of the page," and riffs on radio sound effects. In 2003, Moonstone Books adapted the Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar radio program into a graphic novel illustrated by Éric Thériault and written by David Gallaher. The show has been the opening item on The Big Broadcast on WAMU in Washington, D.C. off and on since the early 1990s. As of August 2017, the show is being aired several times a day on KTQA FM 95.3 in Tacoma, WA and CHLU FM in Middle LaHave, Nova Scotia, Canada. In August 2021, the SiriusXM satellite radio network began airing many episodes of the show on its "Radio Classics" channel 148. As of February 2019, a documentary about the program, Last Man Standing – Johnny Dollar & the End of Old-Time Radio, has been produced.[12] In 2023, a new graphic novel series was launched with Johnny Dollar investigating cybercrimes of the modern age. "The man with the action packed expense account" is a cyberinsurance investigator, taking on ransomware actors in the modern age. sleep insomnia relax chill night nightime bed bedtime oldtimeradio drama comedy radio talkradio hancock tonyhancock hancockshalfhour sherlock sherlockholmes radiodrama popular viral viralpodcast podcast brett brettorchard orchard east devon seaton beer lyme regis village condado de alhama spain murcia The Golden Age of Radio Also known as the old-time radio (OTR) era, was an era of radio in the United States where it was the dominant electronic home entertainment medium. It began with the birth of commercial radio broadcasting in the early 1920s and lasted through the 1950s, when television gradually superseded radio as the medium of choice for scripted programming, variety and dramatic shows. Radio was the first broadcast medium, and during this period people regularly tuned in to their favourite radio programs, and families gathered to listen to the home radio in the evening. According to a 1947 C. E. Hooper survey, 82 out of 100 Americans were found to be radio listeners. A variety of new entertainment formats and genres were created for the new medium, many of which later migrated to television: radio plays, mystery serials, soap operas, quiz shows, talent shows, daytime and evening variety hours, situation comedies, play-by-play sports, children's shows, cooking shows, and more. In the 1950s, television surpassed radio as the most popular broadcast medium, and commercial radio programming shifted to narrower formats of news, talk, sports and music. Religious broadcasters, listener-supported public radio and college stations provide their own distinctive formats. Origins A family listening to the first broadcasts around 1920 with a crystal radio. The crystal radio, a legacy from the pre-broadcast era, could not power a loudspeaker so the family must share earphones During the first three decades of radio, from 1887 to about 1920, the technology of transmitting sound was undeveloped; the information-carrying ability of radio waves was the same as a telegraph; the radio signal could be either on or off. Radio communication was by wireless telegraphy; at the sending end, an operator tapped on a switch which caused the radio transmitter to produce a series of pulses of radio waves which spelled out text messages in Morse code. At the receiver these sounded like beeps, requiring an operator who knew Morse code to translate them back to text. This type of radio was used exclusively for person-to-person text communication for commercial, diplomatic and military purposes and hobbyists; broadcasting did not exist. The broadcasts of live drama, comedy, music and news that characterize the Golden Age of Radio had a precedent in the Théâtrophone, commercially introduced in Paris in 1890 and available as late as 1932. It allowed subscribers to eavesdrop on live stage performances and hear news reports by means of a network of telephone lines. The development of radio eliminated the wires and subscription charges from this concept. Between 1900 and 1920 the first technology for transmitting sound by radio was developed, AM (amplitude modulation), and AM broadcasting sprang up around 1920. On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden is said to have broadcast the first radio program, consisting of some violin playing and passages from the Bible. While Fessenden's role as an inventor and early radio experimenter is not in dispute, several contemporary radio researchers have questioned whether the Christmas Eve broadcast took place, or whether the date was, in fact, several weeks earlier. The first apparent published reference to the event was made in 1928 by H. P. Davis, Vice President of Westinghouse, in a lecture given at Harvard University. In 1932 Fessenden cited the Christmas Eve 1906 broadcast event in a letter he wrote to Vice President S. M. Kinter of Westinghouse. Fessenden's wife Helen recounts the broadcast in her book Fessenden: Builder of Tomorrows (1940), eight years after Fessenden's death. The issue of whether the 1906 Fessenden broadcast actually happened is discussed in Donna Halper's article "In Search of the Truth About Fessenden"[2] and also in James O'Neal's essays.[3][4] An annotated argument supporting Fessenden as the world's first radio broadcaster was offered in 2006 by Dr. John S. Belrose, Radioscientist Emeritus at the Communications Research Centre Canada, in his essay "Fessenden's 1906 Christmas Eve broadcast." It was not until after the Titanic catastrophe in 1912 that radio for mass communication came into vogue, inspired first by the work of amateur ("ham") radio operators. Radio was especially important during World War I as it was vital for air and naval operations. World War I brought about major developments in radio, superseding the Morse code of the wireless telegraph with the vocal communication of the wireless telephone, through advancements in vacuum tube technology and the introduction of the transceiver. After the war, numerous radio stations were born in the United States and set the standard for later radio programs. The first radio news program was broadcast on August 31, 1920, on the station 8MK in Detroit; owned by The Detroit News, the station covered local election results. This was followed in 1920 with the first commercial radio station in the United States, KDKA, being established in Pittsburgh. The first regular entertainment programs were broadcast in 1922, and on March 10, Variety carried the front-page headline: "Radio Sweeping Country: 1,000,000 Sets in Use." A highlight of this time was the first Rose Bowl being broadcast on January 1, 1923, on the Los Angeles station KHJ. Growth of radio Broadcast radio in the United States underwent a period of rapid change through the decade of the 1920s. Technology advances, better regulation, rapid consumer adoption, and the creation of broadcast networks transformed radio from a consumer curiosity into the mass media powerhouse that defined the Golden Age of Radio. Consumer adoption Through the decade of the 1920s, the purchase of radios by United States homes continued, and accelerated. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) released figures in 1925 stating that 19% of United States homes owned a radio. The triode and regenerative circuit made amplified, vacuum tube radios widely available to consumers by the second half of the 1920s. The advantage was obvious: several people at once in a home could now easily listen to their radio at the same time. In 1930, 40% of the nation's households owned a radio,[8] a figure that was much higher in suburban and large metropolitan areas. The superheterodyne receiver and other inventions refined radios even further in the next decade; even as the Great Depression ravaged the country in the 1930s, radio would stay at the centre of American life. 83% of American homes would own a radio by 1940. Government regulation Although radio was well established with United States consumers by the mid-1920s, regulation of the broadcast medium presented its own challenges. Until 1926, broadcast radio power and frequency use was regulated by the U.S. Department of Commerce, until a legal challenge rendered the agency powerless to do so. Congress responded by enacting the Radio Act of 1927, which included the formation of the Federal Radio Commission (FRC). One of the FRC's most important early actions was the adoption of General Order 40, which divided stations on the AM band into three power level categories, which became known as Local, Regional, and Clear Channel, and reorganized station assignments. Based on this plan, effective 3:00 a.m. Eastern time on November 11, 1928, most of the country's stations were assigned to new transmitting frequencies. Broadcast networks The final element needed to make the Golden Age of Radio possible focused on the question of distribution: the ability for multiple radio stations to simultaneously broadcast the same content, and this would be solved with the concept of a radio network. The earliest radio programs of the 1920s were largely unsponsored; radio stations were a service designed to sell radio receivers. In early 1922, American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) announced the beginning of advertisement-supported broadcasting on its owned stations, and plans for the development of the first radio network using its telephone lines to transmit the content. In July 1926, AT&T abruptly decided to exit the broadcasting field, and signed an agreement to sell its entire network operations to a group headed by RCA, which used the assets to form the National Broadcasting Company. Four radio networks had formed by 1934. These were: National Broadcasting Company Red Network (NBC Red), launched November 15, 1926. Originally founded as the National Broadcasting Company in late 1926, the company was almost immediately forced to split under antitrust laws to form NBC Red and NBC Blue. When, in 1942, NBC Blue was sold and renamed the Blue Network, this network would go back to calling itself simply the National Broadcasting Company Radio Network (NBC). National Broadcasting Company Blue Network (NBC Blue); launched January 10, 1927, split from NBC Red. NBC Blue was sold in 1942 and became the Blue Network, and it in turn transferred its assets to a new company, the American Broadcasting Company on June 15, 1945. That network identified itself as the American Broadcasting Company Radio Network (ABC). Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), launched September 18, 1927. After an initially struggling attempt to compete with the NBC networks, CBS gained new momentum when William S. Paley was installed as company president. Mutual Broadcasting System (Mutual), launched September 29, 1934. Mutual was initially run as a cooperative in which the flagship stations owned the network, not the other way around as was the case with the other three radio networks. Programming In the period before and after the advent of the broadcast network, new forms of entertainment needed to be created to fill the time of a station's broadcast day. Many of the formats born in this era continued into the television and digital eras. In the beginning of the Golden Age, network programs were almost exclusively broadcast live, as the national networks prohibited the airing of recorded programs until the late 1940s because of the inferior sound quality of phonograph discs, the only practical recording medium at that time. As a result, network prime-time shows would be performed twice, once for each coast. Rehearsal for the World War II radio show You Can't Do Business with Hitler with John Flynn and Virginia Moore. This series of programs, broadcast at least once weekly by more than 790 radio stations in the United States, was written and produced by the radio section of the Office of War Information (OWI). Live events Coverage of live events included musical concerts and play-by-play sports broadcasts. News The capability of the new medium to get information to people created the format of modern radio news: headlines, remote reporting, sidewalk interviews (such as Vox Pop), panel discussions, weather reports, and farm reports. The entry of radio into the realm of news triggered a feud between the radio and newspaper industries in the mid-1930s, eventually culminating in newspapers trumping up exaggerated [citation needed] reports of a mass hysteria from the (entirely fictional) radio presentation of The War of the Worlds, which had been presented as a faux newscast. Musical features The sponsored musical feature soon became one of the most popular program formats. Most early radio sponsorship came in the form of selling the naming rights to the program, as evidenced by such programs as The A&P Gypsies, Champion Spark Plug Hour, The Clicquot Club Eskimos, and King Biscuit Time; commercials, as they are known in the modern era, were still relatively uncommon and considered intrusive. During the 1930s and 1940s, the leading orchestras were heard often through big band remotes, and NBC's Monitor continued such remotes well into the 1950s by broadcasting live music from New York City jazz clubs to rural America. Singers such as Harriet Lee and Wendell Hall became popular fixtures on network radio beginning in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Local stations often had staff organists such as Jesse Crawford playing popular tunes. Classical music programs on the air included The Voice of Firestone and The Bell Telephone Hour. Texaco sponsored the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts; the broadcasts, now sponsored by the Toll Brothers, continue to this day around the world, and are one of the few examples of live classical music still broadcast on radio. One of the most notable of all classical music radio programs of the Golden Age of Radio featured the celebrated Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra, which had been created especially for him. At that time, nearly all classical musicians and critics considered Toscanini the greatest living maestro. Popular songwriters such as George Gershwin were also featured on radio. (Gershwin, in addition to frequent appearances as a guest, had his own program in 1934.) The New York Philharmonic also had weekly concerts on radio. There was no dedicated classical music radio station like NPR at that time, so classical music programs had to share the network they were broadcast on with more popular ones, much as in the days of television before the creation of NET and PBS. Country music also enjoyed popularity. National Barn Dance, begun on Chicago's WLS in 1924, was picked up by NBC Radio in 1933. In 1925, WSM Barn Dance went on the air from Nashville. It was renamed the Grand Ole Opry in 1927 and NBC carried portions from 1944 to 1956. NBC also aired The Red Foley Show from 1951 to 1961, and ABC Radio carried Ozark Jubilee from 1953 to 1961. Comedy Radio attracted top comedy talents from vaudeville and Hollywood for many years: Bing Crosby, Abbott and Costello, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Victor Borge, Fanny Brice, Billie Burke, Bob Burns, Judy Canova, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Burns and Allen, Phil Harris, Edgar Bergen, Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Jean Shepherd, Red Skelton and Ed Wynn. Situational comedies also gained popularity, such as Amos 'n' Andy, Easy Aces, Ethel and Albert, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Goldbergs, The Great Gildersleeve, The Halls of Ivy (which featured screen star Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume), Meet Corliss Archer, Meet Millie, and Our Miss Brooks. Radio comedy ran the gamut from the small town humor of Lum and Abner, Herb Shriner and Minnie Pearl to the dialect characterizations of Mel Blanc and the caustic sarcasm of Henry Morgan. Gags galore were delivered weekly on Stop Me If You've Heard This One and Can You Top This?,[18] panel programs devoted to the art of telling jokes. Quiz shows were lampooned on It Pays to Be Ignorant, and other memorable parodies were presented by such satirists as Spike Jones, Stoopnagle and Budd, Stan Freberg and Bob and Ray. British comedy reached American shores in a major assault when NBC carried The Goon Show in the mid-1950s. Some shows originated as stage productions: Clifford Goldsmith's play What a Life was reworked into NBC's popular, long-running The Aldrich Family (1939–1953) with the familiar catchphrases "Henry! Henry Aldrich!," followed by Henry's answer, "Coming, Mother!" Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway hit, You Can't Take It with You (1936), became a weekly situation comedy heard on Mutual (1944) with Everett Sloane and later on NBC (1951) with Walter Brennan. Other shows were adapted from comic strips, such as Blondie, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, The Gumps, Li'l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye the Sailor, Red Ryder, Reg'lar Fellers, Terry and the Pirates and Tillie the Toiler. Bob Montana's redheaded teen of comic strips and comic books was heard on radio's Archie Andrews from 1943 to 1953. The Timid Soul was a 1941–1942 comedy based on cartoonist H. T. Webster's famed Caspar Milquetoast character, and Robert L. Ripley's Believe It or Not! was adapted to several different radio formats during the 1930s and 1940s. Conversely, some radio shows gave rise to spinoff comic strips, such as My Friend Irma starring Marie Wilson. Soap operas The first program generally considered to be a daytime serial drama by scholars of the genre is Painted Dreams, which premiered on WGN on October 20, 1930. The first networked daytime serial is Clara, Lu, 'n Em, which started in a daytime time slot on February 15, 1932. As daytime serials became popular in the early 1930s, they became known as soap operas because many were sponsored by soap products and detergents. On November 25, 1960, the last four daytime radio dramas—Young Dr. Malone, Right to Happiness, The Second Mrs. Burton and Ma Perkins, all broadcast on the CBS Radio Network—were brought to an end. Children's programming The line-up of late afternoon adventure serials included Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, The Cisco Kid, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, Captain Midnight, and The Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters. Badges, rings, decoding devices and other radio premiums offered on these adventure shows were often allied with a sponsor's product, requiring the young listeners to mail in a boxtop from a breakfast cereal or other proof of purchase. Radio plays Radio plays were presented on such programs as 26 by Corwin, NBC Short Story, Arch Oboler's Plays, Quiet, Please, and CBS Radio Workshop. Orson Welles's The Mercury Theatre on the Air and The Campbell Playhouse were considered by many critics to be the finest radio drama anthologies ever presented. They usually starred Welles in the leading role, along with celebrity guest stars such as Margaret Sullavan or Helen Hayes, in adaptations from literature, Broadway, and/or films. They included such titles as Liliom, Oliver Twist (a title now feared lost), A Tale of Two Cities, Lost Horizon, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was on Mercury Theatre that Welles presented his celebrated-but-infamous 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, formatted to sound like a breaking news program. Theatre Guild on the Air presented adaptations of classical and Broadway plays. Their Shakespeare adaptations included a one-hour Macbeth starring Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson, and a 90-minute Hamlet, starring John Gielgud.[22] Recordings of many of these programs survive. During the 1940s, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, famous for playing Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in films, repeated their characterizations on radio on The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which featured both original stories and episodes directly adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. None of the episodes in which Rathbone and Bruce starred on the radio program were filmed with the two actors as Holmes and Watson, so radio became the only medium in which audiences were able to experience Rathbone and Bruce appearing in some of the more famous Holmes stories, such as "The Speckled Band". There were also many dramatizations of Sherlock Holmes stories on radio without Rathbone and Bruce. During the latter part of his career, celebrated actor John Barrymore starred in a radio program, Streamlined Shakespeare, which featured him in a series of one-hour adaptations of Shakespeare plays, many of which Barrymore never appeared in either on stage or in films, such as Twelfth Night (in which he played both Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch), and Macbeth. Lux Radio Theatre and The Screen Guild Theater presented adaptations of Hollywood movies, performed before a live audience, usually with cast members from the original films. Suspense, Escape, The Mysterious Traveler and Inner Sanctum Mystery were popular thriller anthology series. Leading writers who created original material for radio included Norman Corwin, Carlton E. Morse, David Goodis, Archibald MacLeish, Arthur Miller, Arch Oboler, Wyllis Cooper, Rod Serling, Jay Bennett, and Irwin Shaw. Game shows Game shows saw their beginnings in radio. One of the first was Information Please in 1938, and one of the first major successes was Dr. I.Q. in 1939. Winner Take All, which premiered in 1946, was the first to use lockout devices and feature returning champions. A relative of the game show, which would be called the giveaway show in contemporary media, typically involved giving sponsored products to studio audience members, people randomly called by telephone, or both. An early example of this show was the 1939 show Pot o' Gold, but the breakout hit of this type was ABC's Stop the Music in 1948. Winning a prize generally required knowledge of what was being aired on the show at that moment, which led to criticism of the giveaway show as a form of "buying an audience". Giveaway shows were extremely popular through 1948 and 1949. They were often panned as low-brow, and an unsuccessful attempt was even made by the FCC to ban them (as an illegal lottery) in August 1949.[23] Broadcast production methods The RCA Type 44-BX microphone had two live faces and two dead ones. Thus actors could face each other and react. An actor could give the effect of leaving the room by simply moving their head toward the dead face of the microphone. The scripts were paper-clipped together. It has been disputed whether or not actors and actresses would drop finished pages to the carpeted floor after use. Radio stations Despite a general ban on use of recordings on broadcasts by radio networks through the late 1940s, "reference recordings" on phonograph disc were made of many programs as they were being broadcast, for review by the sponsor and for the network's own archival purposes. With the development of high-fidelity magnetic wire and tape recording in the years following World War II, the networks became more open to airing recorded programs and the prerecording of shows became more common. Local stations, however, had always been free to use recordings and sometimes made substantial use of pre-recorded syndicated programs distributed on pressed (as opposed to individually recorded) transcription discs. Recording was done using a cutting lathe and acetate discs. Programs were normally recorded at 331⁄3 rpm on 16 inch discs, the standard format used for such "electrical transcriptions" from the early 1930s through the 1950s. Sometimes, the groove was cut starting at the inside of the disc and running to the outside. This was useful when the program to be recorded was longer than 15 minutes so required more than one disc side. By recording the first side outside in, the second inside out, and so on, the sound quality at the disc change-over points would match and result in a more seamless playback. An inside start also had the advantage that the thread of material cut from the disc's surface, which had to be kept out of the path of the cutting stylus, was naturally thrown toward the centre of the disc so was automatically out of the way. When cutting an outside start disc, a brush could be used to keep it out of the way by sweeping it toward the middle of the disc. Well-equipped recording lathes used the vacuum from a water aspirator to pick it up as it was cut and deposit it in a water-filled bottle. In addition to convenience, this served a safety purpose, as the cellulose nitrate thread was highly flammable and a loose accumulation of it combusted violently if ignited. Most recordings of radio broadcasts were made at a radio network's studios, or at the facilities of a network-owned or affiliated station, which might have four or more lathes. A small local station often had none. Two lathes were required to capture a program longer than 15 minutes without losing parts of it while discs were flipped over or changed, along with a trained technician to operate them and monitor the recording while it was being made. However, some surviving recordings were produced by local stations. When a substantial number of copies of an electrical transcription were required, as for the distribution of a syndicated program, they were produced by the same process used to make ordinary records. A master recording was cut, then electroplated to produce a stamper from which pressings in vinyl (or, in the case of transcription discs pressed before about 1935, shellac) were moulded in a record press. Armed Forces Radio Service Frank Sinatra and Alida Valli converse over Armed Forces Radio Service during World War II The Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) had its origins in the U.S. War Department's quest to improve troop morale. This quest began with short-wave broadcasts of educational and information programs to troops in 1940. In 1941, the War Department began issuing "Buddy Kits" (B-Kits) to departing troops, which consisted of radios, 78 rpm records and electrical transcription discs of radio shows. However, with the entrance of the United States into World War II, the War Department decided that it needed to improve the quality and quantity of its offerings. This began with the broadcasting of its own original variety programs. Command Performance was the first of these, produced for the first time on March 1, 1942. On May 26, 1942, the Armed Forces Radio Service was formally established. Originally, its programming comprised network radio shows with the commercials removed. However, it soon began producing original programming, such as Mail Call, G.I. Journal, Jubilee and GI Jive. At its peak in 1945, the Service produced around 20 hours of original programming each week. From 1943 until 1949 the AFRS also broadcast programs developed through the collaborative efforts of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Columbia Broadcasting System in support of America's cultural diplomacy initiatives and President Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbour policy. Included among the popular shows was Viva America which showcased leading musical artists from both North and South America for the entertainment of America's troops. Included among the regular performers were: Alfredo Antonini, Juan Arvizu, Nestor Mesta Chayres, Kate Smith,[26] and John Serry Sr. After the war, the AFRS continued providing programming to troops in Europe. During the 1950s and early 1960s it presented performances by the Army's only symphonic orchestra ensemble—the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. It also provided programming for future wars that the United States was involved in. It survives today as a component of the American Forces Network (AFN). All of the shows aired by the AFRS during the Golden Age were recorded as electrical transcription discs, vinyl copies of which were shipped to stations overseas to be broadcast to the troops. People in the United States rarely ever heard programming from the AFRS,[31] though AFRS recordings of Golden Age network shows were occasionally broadcast on some domestic stations beginning in the 1950s. In some cases, the AFRS disc is the only surviving recording of a program. Home radio recordings in the United States There was some home recording of radio broadcasts in the 1930s and 1940s. Examples from as early as 1930 have been documented. During these years, home recordings were made with disc recorders, most of which were only capable of storing about four minutes of a radio program on each side of a twelve-inch 78 rpm record. Most home recordings were made on even shorter-playing ten-inch or smaller discs. Some home disc recorders offered the option of the 331⁄3 rpm speed used for electrical transcriptions, allowing a recording more than twice as long to be made, although with reduced audio quality. Office dictation equipment was sometimes pressed into service for making recordings of radio broadcasts, but the audio quality of these devices was poor and the resulting recordings were in odd formats that had to be played back on similar equipment. Due to the expense of recorders and the limitations of the recording media, home recording of broadcasts was not common during this period and it was usually limited to brief excerpts. The lack of suitable home recording equipment was somewhat relieved in 1947 with the availability of magnetic wire recorders for domestic use. These were capable of recording an hour-long broadcast on a single small spool of wire, and if a high-quality radio's audio output was recorded directly, rather than by holding a microphone up to its speaker, the recorded sound quality was very good. However, because the wire cost money and, like magnetic tape, could be repeatedly re-used to make new recordings, only a few complete broadcasts appear to have survived on this medium. In fact, there was little home recording of complete radio programs until the early 1950s, when increasingly affordable reel-to-reel tape recorders for home use were introduced to the market. Recording media Electrical transcription discs The War of the Worlds radio broadcast by Orson Welles on electrical transcription disc Before the early 1950s, when radio networks and local stations wanted to preserve a live broadcast, they did so by means of special phonograph records known as "electrical transcriptions" (ETs), made by cutting a sound-modulated groove into a blank disc. At first, in the early 1930s, the blanks varied in both size and composition, but most often they were simply bare aluminum and the groove was indented rather than cut. Typically, these very early recordings were not made by the network or radio station, but by a private recording service contracted by the broadcast sponsor or one of the performers. The bare aluminum discs were typically 10 or 12 inches in diameter and recorded at the then-standard speed of 78 rpm, which meant that several disc sides were required to accommodate even a 15-minute program. By about 1936, 16-inch aluminum-based discs coated with cellulose nitrate lacquer, commonly known as acetates and recorded at a speed of 331⁄3 rpm, had been adopted by the networks and individual radio stations as the standard medium for recording broadcasts. The making of such recordings, at least for some purposes, then became routine. Some discs were recorded using a "hill and dale" vertically modulated groove, rather than the "lateral" side-to-side modulation found on the records being made for home use at that time. The large slow-speed discs could easily contain fifteen minutes on each side, allowing an hour-long program to be recorded on only two discs. The lacquer was softer than shellac or vinyl and wore more rapidly, allowing only a few playbacks with the heavy pickups and steel needles then in use before deterioration became audible. During World War II, aluminum became a necessary material for the war effort and was in short supply. This caused an alternative to be sought for the base on which to coat the lacquer. Glass, despite its obvious disadvantage of fragility, had occasionally been used in earlier years because it could provide a perfectly smooth and even supporting surface for mastering and other critical applications. Glass base recording blanks came into general use for the duration of the war. Magnetic wire recording In the late 1940s, wire recorders became a readily obtainable means of recording radio programs. On a per-minute basis, it was less expensive to record a broadcast on wire than on discs. The one-hour program that required the four sides of two 16-inch discs could be recorded intact on a single spool of wire less than three inches in diameter and about half an inch thick. The audio fidelity of a good wire recording was comparable to acetate discs and by comparison the wire was practically indestructible, but it was soon rendered obsolete by the more manageable and easily edited medium of magnetic tape. Reel-to-reel tape recording Bing Crosby became the first major proponent of magnetic tape recording for radio, and he was the first to use it on network radio, after he did a demonstration program in 1947. Tape had several advantages over earlier recording methods. Running at a sufficiently high speed, it could achieve higher fidelity than both electrical transcription discs and magnetic wire. Discs could be edited only by copying parts of them to a new disc, and the copying entailed a loss of audio quality. Wire could be divided up and the ends spliced together by knotting, but wire was difficult to handle and the crude splices were too noticeable. Tape could be edited by cutting it with a blade and neatly joining ends together with adhesive tape. By early 1949, the transition from live performances preserved on discs to performances pre-recorded on magnetic tape for later broadcast was complete for network radio programs. However, for the physical distribution of pre-recorded programming to individual stations, 16-inch 331⁄3 rpm vinyl pressings, less expensive to produce in quantities of identical copies than tapes, continued to be standard throughout the 1950s. Availability of recordings The great majority of pre-World War II live radio broadcasts are lost. Many were never recorded; few recordings antedate the early 1930s. Beginning then several of the longer-running radio dramas have their archives complete or nearly complete. The earlier the date, the less likely it is that a recording survives. However, a good number of syndicated programs from this period have survived because copies were distributed far and wide. Recordings of live network broadcasts from the World War II years were preserved in the form of pressed vinyl copies issued by the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) and survive in relative abundance. Syndicated programs from World War II and later years have nearly all survived. The survival of network programming from this time frame is more inconsistent; the networks started prerecording their formerly live shows on magnetic tape for subsequent network broadcast, but did not physically distribute copies, and the expensive tapes, unlike electrical transcription ("ET") discs, could be "wiped" and re-used (especially since, in the age of emerging trends such as television and music radio, such recordings were believed to have virtually no rerun or resale value). Thus, while some prime time network radio series from this era exist in full or almost in full, especially the most famous and longest-lived of them, less prominent or shorter-lived series (such as serials) may have only a handful of extant episodes. Airchecks, off-the-air recordings of complete shows made by, or at the behest of, individuals for their own private use, sometimes help to fill in such gaps. The contents of privately made recordings of live broadcasts from the first half of the 1930s can be of particular interest, as little live material from that period survives. Unfortunately, the sound quality of very early private recordings is often very poor, although in some cases this is largely due to the use of an incorrect playback stylus, which can also badly damage some unusual types of discs. Most of the Golden Age programs in circulation among collectors—whether on analogue tape, CD, or in the form of MP3s—originated from analogue 16-inch transcription disc, although some are off-the-air AM recordings. But in many cases, the circulating recordings are corrupted (decreased in quality), because lossless digital recording for the home market did not come until the very end of the twentieth century. Collectors made and shared recordings on analogue magnetic tapes, the only practical, relatively inexpensive medium, first on reels, then cassettes. "Sharing" usually meant making a duplicate tape. They connected two recorders, playing on one and recording on the other. Analog recordings are never perfect, and copying an analogue recording multiplies the imperfections. With the oldest recordings this can even mean it went out the speaker of one machine and in via the microphone of the other. The muffled sound, dropouts, sudden changes in sound quality, unsteady pitch, and other defects heard all too often are almost always accumulated tape copy defects. In addition, magnetic recordings, unless preserved archivally, are gradually damaged by the Earth's magnetic field. The audio quality of the source discs, when they have survived unscathed and are accessed and dubbed anew, is usually found to be reasonably clear and undistorted, sometimes startlingly good, although like all phonograph records they are vulnerable to wear and the effects of scuffs, scratches, and ground-in dust. Many shows from the 1940s have survived only in edited AFRS versions, although some exist in both the original and AFRS forms. As of 2020, the Old Time Radio collection at the Internet Archive contains 5,121 recordings. An active group of collectors makes digitally available, via CD or download, large collections of programs. RadioEchoes.com offers 98,949 episodes in their collection, but not all is old-time radio. Copyright status Unlike film, television, and print items from the era, the copyright status of most recordings from the Golden Age of Radio is unclear. This is because, prior to 1972, the United States delegated the copyrighting of sound recordings to the individual states, many of which offered more generous common law copyright protections than the federal government offered for other media (some offered perpetual copyright, which has since been abolished; under the Music Modernization Act of September 2018, any sound recording 95 years old or older will be thrust into the public domain regardless of state law). The only exceptions are AFRS original productions, which are considered work of the United States government and thus both ineligible for federal copyright and outside the jurisdiction of any state; these programs are firmly in the public domain (this does not apply to programs carried by AFRS but produced by commercial networks). In practice, most old-time radio recordings are treated as orphan works: although there may still be a valid copyright on the program, it is seldom enforced. The copyright on an individual sound recording is distinct from the federal copyright for the underlying material (such as a published script, music, or in the case of adaptations, the original film or television material), and in many cases it is impossible to determine where or when the original recording was made or if the recording was copyrighted in that state. The U.S. Copyright Office states "there are a variety of legal regimes governing protection of pre-1972 sound recordings in the various states, and the scope of protection and of exceptions and limitations to that protection is unclear."[39] For example, New York has issued contradicting rulings on whether or not common law exists in that state; the most recent ruling, 2016's Flo & Eddie, Inc. v. Sirius XM Radio, holds that there is no such copyright in New York in regard to public performance.[40] Further complicating matters is that certain examples in case law have implied that radio broadcasts (and faithful reproductions thereof), because they were distributed freely to the public over the air, may not be eligible for copyright in and of themselves. The Internet Archive and other organizations that distribute public domain and open-source audio recordings maintain extensive archives of old-time radio programs. Legacy United States Some old-time radio shows continued on the air, although in ever-dwindling numbers, throughout the 1950s, even after their television equivalents had conquered the general public. One factor which helped to kill off old-time radio entirely was the evolution of popular music (including the development of rock and roll), which led to the birth of the top 40 radio format. A top 40 show could be produced in a small studio in a local station with minimal staff. This displaced full-service network radio and hastened the end of the golden-age era of radio drama by 1962. (Radio as a broadcast medium would survive, thanks in part to the proliferation of the transistor radio, and permanent installation in vehicles, making the medium far more portable than television). Full-service stations that did not adopt either top 40 or the mellower beautiful music or MOR formats eventually developed all-news radio in the mid-1960s. Scripted radio comedy and drama in the vein of old-time radio has a limited presence on U.S. radio. Several radio theatre series are still in production in the United States, usually airing on Sunday nights. These include original series such as Imagination Theatre and a radio adaptation of The Twilight Zone TV series, as well as rerun compilations such as the popular daily series When Radio Was and USA Radio Network's Golden Age of Radio Theatre, and weekly programs such as The Big Broadcast on WAMU, hosted by Murray Horwitz. These shows usually air in late nights and/or on weekends on small AM stations. Carl Amari's nationally syndicated radio show Hollywood 360 features 5 old-time radio episodes each week during his 5-hour broadcast. Amari's show is heard on 100+ radio stations coast-to-coast and in 168 countries on American Forces Radio. Local rerun compilations are also heard, primarily on public radio stations. Sirius XM Radio maintains a full-time Radio Classics channel devoted to rebroadcasts of vintage radio shows. Starting in 1974, Garrison Keillor, through his syndicated two-hour-long program A Prairie Home Companion, has provided a living museum of the production, tone and listener's experience of this era of radio for several generations after its demise. Produced live in theatres throughout the country, using the same sound effects and techniques of the era, it ran through 2016 with Keillor as host. The program included segments that were close renditions (in the form of parody) of specific genres of this era, including Westerns ("Dusty and Lefty, The Lives of the Cowboys"), detective procedurals ("Guy Noir, Private Eye") and even advertising through fictional commercials. Keillor also wrote a novel, WLT: A Radio Romance based on a radio station of this era—including a personally narrated version for the ultimate in verisimilitude. Upon Keillor's retirement, replacement host Chris Thile chose to reboot the show (since renamed Live from Here after the syndicator cut ties with Keillor) and eliminate much of the old-time radio trappings of the format; the show was ultimately cancelled in 2020 due to financial and logistics problems. Vintage shows and new audio productions in America are accessible more widely from recordings or by satellite and web broadcasters, rather than over conventional AM and FM radio. The National Audio Theatre Festival is a national organization and yearly conference keeping the audio arts—especially audio drama—alive, and continues to involve long-time voice actors and OTR veterans in its ranks. Its predecessor, the Midwest Radio Theatre Workshop, was first hosted by Jim Jordan, of Fibber McGee and Molly fame, and Norman Corwin advised the organization. One of the longest running radio programs celebrating this era is The Golden Days of Radio, which was hosted on the Armed Forces Radio Service for more than 20 years and overall for more than 50 years by Frank Bresee, who also played "Little Beaver" on the Red Ryder program as a child actor. One of the very few still-running shows from the earlier era of radio is a Christian program entitled Unshackled! The weekly half-hour show, produced in Chicago by Pacific Garden Mission, has been continuously broadcast since 1950. The shows are created using techniques from the 1950s (including home-made sound effects) and are broadcast across the U.S. and around the world by thousands of radio stations. Today, radio performers of the past appear at conventions that feature re-creations of classic shows, as well as music, memorabilia and historical panels. The largest of these events was the Friends of Old Time Radio Convention, held in Newark, New Jersey, which held its final convention in October 2011 after 36 years. Others include REPS in Seattle (June), SPERDVAC in California, the Cincinnati OTR & Nostalgia Convention (April), and the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention (September). Veterans of the Friends of Old Time Radio Convention, including Chairperson Steven M. Lewis of The Gotham Radio Players, Maggie Thompson, publisher of the Comic Book Buyer's Guide, Craig Wichman of audio drama troupe Quicksilver Audio Theatre and long-time FOTR Publicist Sean Dougherty have launched a successor event, Celebrating Audio Theatre – Old & New, scheduled for October 12–13, 2012. Radio dramas from the golden age are sometimes recreated as live stage performances at such events. One such group, led by director Daniel Smith, has been performing re-creations of old-time radio dramas at Fairfield University's Regina A. Quick Centre for the Arts since the year 2000. The 40th anniversary of what is widely considered the end of the old time radio era (the final broadcasts of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense on September 30, 1962) was marked with a commentary on NPR's All Things Considered. A handful of radio programs from the old-time era remain in production, all from the genres of news, music, or religious broadcasting: the Grand Ole Opry (1925), Music and the Spoken Word (1929), The Lutheran Hour (1930), the CBS World News Roundup (1938), King Biscuit Time (1941) and the Renfro Valley Gatherin' (1943). Of those, all but the Opry maintain their original short-form length of 30 minutes or less. The Wheeling Jamboree counts an earlier program on a competing station as part of its history, tracing its lineage back to 1933. Western revival/comedy act Riders in the Sky produced a radio serial Riders Radio Theatre in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to provide sketch comedy on existing radio programs including the Grand Ole Opry, Midnite Jamboree and WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. Elsewhere Regular broadcasts of radio plays are also heard in—among other countries—Australia, Croatia, Estonia,[46] France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, and Sweden. In the United Kingdom, such scripted radio drama continues on BBC Radio 3 and (principally) BBC Radio 4, the second-most popular radio station in the country, as well as on the rerun channel BBC Radio 4 Extra, which is the seventh-most popular station there. Special thanks to Wikipedia. #starradio #totalstar #star1075 #heart #heartradio #lbc #bbc #bbcradio #bbcradio1 #bbcradio2 #bbcradio3 #bbcradio4 #radio4extra #absoluteradio #absolute #capital #capitalradio #greatesthitsradio #hitsradio #radio #adultcontemporary #spain #bristol #frenchay #colyton #lymeregis #seaton #beer #devon #eastdevon #brettorchard #brettsoldtimeradioshow fe2f4df62ffeeb8c30c04d3d3454779ca91a4871
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely winters night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an instagram page and youtube channel both called brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk #sleep #insomnia #relax #chill #night #nighttime #bed #bedtime #oldtimeradio #drama #comedy #radio #talkradio #hancock #tonyhancock #hancockshalfhour #sherlock #sherlockholmes #radiodrama #popular #viral #viralpodcast #podcast #podcasting #podcasts #podtok #podcastclip #podcastclips #podcasttrailer #podcastteaser #newpodcastepisode #newpodcast #videopodcast #upcomingpodcast #audiogram #audiograms #truecrimepodcast #historypodcast #truecrime #podcaster #viral #popular #viralpodcast #number1 #instagram #youtube #facebook #johnnydollar #crime #fiction #unwind #devon #texas #texasranger #beer #seaton #seaside #smuggler #colyton #devon #seaton #beer #branscombe #lymebay #lymeregis #brett #brettorchard #orchard #greatdetectives #greatdetectivesofoldtimeradio #detectives #johnnydollar #thesaint #steptoe #texasrangers Suspense is a radio drama series broadcast on CBS Radio from 1940 through 1962. One of the premier drama programs of the Golden Age of Radio, was subtitled "radio's outstanding theatre of thrills" and focused on suspense thriller-type scripts, usually featuring leading Hollywood actors of the era. Approximately 945 episodes were broadcast during its long run, and more than 900 still exist. Suspense went through several major phases, characterized by different hosts, sponsors, and director/producers. Formula plot devices were followed for all but a handful of episodes: the protagonist was usually a normal person suddenly dropped into a threatening or bizarre situation; solutions were "withheld until the last possible second"; and evildoers were usually punished in the end. In its early years, the program made only occasional forays into science fiction and fantasy. Notable exceptions include adaptations of Curt Siodmak's Donovan's Brain and H. P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror", but by the late 1950s, such material was regularly featured. Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock directed its audition show (for the CBS summer series Forecast). This was an adaptation of The Lodger a story Hitchcock had filmed in 1926 with Ivor Novello. Martin Grams Jr., author of Suspense: Twenty Years of Thrills and Chills, described the Forecast origin of Suspense: On the second presentation of July 22, 1940, Forecast offered a mystery/horror show titled Suspense. With the co-operation of his producer, Walter Wanger, Alfred Hitchcock received the honor of directing his first radio show for the American public. The condition agreed upon for Hitchcock's appearance was that CBS make a pitch to the listening audience about his and Wanger's latest film, Foreign Correspondent. To add flavor to the deal, Wanger threw in Edmund Gwenn and Herbert Marshall as part of the package. All three men (including Hitch) would be seen in the upcoming film, which was due for a theatrical release the next month. Both Marshall and Hitchcock decided on the same story to bring to the airwaves, which happened to be a favorite of both of them: Marie Belloc Lowndes' "The Lodger." Alfred Hitchcock had filmed this story for Gainsborough in 1926, and since then it had remained as one of his favorites. Herbert Marshall portrayed the mysterious lodger, and co-starring with him were Edmund Gwenn and character actress Lurene Tuttle as the rooming-house keepers who start to suspect that their new boarder might be the notorious Jack-the-Ripper. [Gwenn was actually repeating the role taken in the 1926 film by his brother, Arthur Chesney. And Tuttle would work again with Hitchcock nearly 20 years later, playing Mrs. Al Chambers, the sheriff's wife, in Psycho.] Character actor Joseph Kearns also had a small part in the drama, and Wilbur Hatch, head musician for CBS Radio at the time, composed and conducted the music specially for the program. Adapting the script to radio was not a great technical challenge for Hitchcock, and he cleverly decided to hold back the ending of the story from the listening audience in order to keep them in suspense themselves. This way, if the audience's curiosity got the better of them, they would write in to the network to find out whether the mysterious lodger was in fact Jack the Ripper. For the next few weeks, hundreds of letters came in from faithful listeners asking how the story ended. Actually a few wrote threats claiming that it was "indecent" and "immoral" to present such a production without giving the solution 1942–1962 In the earliest years, the program was hosted by "The Man in Black" (played by Joseph Kearns or Ted Osborne) with many episodes written or adapted by the prominent mystery author John Dickson Carr. One of the series' earliest successes and its single most popular episode is Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry, Wrong Number", about a bedridden woman (Agnes Moorehead) who panics after overhearing a murder plot on a crossed telephone connection but is unable to persuade anyone to investigate. First broadcast on May 25, 1943, it was restaged seven times (last on February 14, 1960) – each time with Moorehead. The popularity of the episode led to a film adaptation in 1948. Another notable early episode was Fletcher's "The Hitch Hiker" (aired September 2, 1942), in which a motorist (Orson Welles) is stalked on a cross-country trip by a nondescript man who keeps appearing on the side of the road; however, the first performance of "The Hitch-Hiker" actually took place on The Orson Welles Show the previous year. "The Hitch-Hiker" was later adapted for television by Rod Serling as a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone. After the network sustained the program during its first two years, the sponsor became Roma Wines (1944–1947), and then (after another brief period of sustained hour-long episodes, initially featuring Robert Montgomery as host and "producer" in early 1948),[3] Autolite Spark Plugs (1948–1954); eventually Harlow Wilcox (of Fibber McGee and Molly) became the pitchman. William Spier, Norman Macdonnell and Anton M. Leader were among the producers and directors. Suspense received a Special Citation of Honor Peabody Award for 1946. Second issue of the 1946 magazine tie-in The program's heyday was in the early 1950s, when radio actor, producer and director Elliott Lewis took over (still during the Wilcox/Autolite run). Here the material reached new levels of sophistication.[opinion] The writing was taut,[opinion] and the casting, which had always been a strong point of the series (featuring such film stars as Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich, Eve McVeagh, Lena Horne, and Cary Grant), took an unexpected turn when Lewis expanded the repertory to include many of radio's famous drama and comedy stars – often playing against type – such as Jack Benny. Jim and Marian Jordan of Fibber McGee and Molly were heard in the episode "Backseat Driver", which originally aired February 3, 1949. The highest production values enhanced Suspense, and many of the shows retain their power to grip and entertain.[opinion] At the time he took over Suspense, Lewis was familiar to radio fans for playing Frankie Remley, the wastrel guitar-playing sidekick to Phil Harris in The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. On the May 10, 1951 Suspense, Lewis reversed the roles with "Death on My Hands": A bandleader (Harris) is horrified when an autograph-seeking fan accidentally shoots herself and dies in his hotel room, and a vocalist (Faye) tries to help him as the townfolk call for vigilante justice against him. With the rise of television and the departures of Lewis and Autolite, subsequent producers (Antony Ellis, William N. Robson and others) struggled to maintain the series due to shrinking budgets, the availability of fewer name actors, and listenership decline. To save money, the program frequently used scripts first broadcast by another noteworthy CBS anthology, Escape. In addition to these tales of exotic adventure, Suspense expanded its repertoire to include more science fiction and supernatural content. By the end of its run, the series was remaking scripts from the long-canceled program The Mysterious Traveler. A time travel tale like Robert Arthur's "The Man Who Went Back to Save Lincoln" or a thriller about a death ray-wielding mad scientist would alternate with more run-of-the-mill crime dramas. The series expanded to television with the Suspense series on CBS from 1949 to 1954, and again in 1962. The radio series had a tie-in with Suspense magazine which published four 1946–47 issues edited by Leslie Charteris. The final broadcasts of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense, ending at 7:00 pm Eastern Time on September 30, 1962, are often cited as the end of the Golden Age of Radio. The final episode of Suspense was Devilstone, starring Christopher Carey and Neal Fitzgerald. It was sponsored by Parliament cigarettes.[5] Opening introductions There were several variations of program introductions. A typical early opening is this from April 27, 1943: (MUSIC ... BERNARD HERRMANN'S SUSPENSE THEME ... CONTINUES IN BG) THE MAN IN BLACK: Suspense! This is The Man in Black, here again to introduce Columbia's program, Suspense. Our stars tonight are Miss Agnes Moorehead and Mr. Ray Collins. You've seen these two expert and resourceful players in "Citizen Kane" – "The Magnificent Ambersons" in which Miss Moorehead's performance won her the 1942 Film Critics' Award. Mr. Collins will soon be seen in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Technicolor film, "Salute to the Marines." Miss Moorehead and Mr. Collins return this evening to their first love, the CBS microphone, to appear in a study in terror by Lucille Fletcher called "The Diary of Sophronia Winters." The story told by this diary is tonight's tale of... suspense. If you've been with us on these Tuesday nights, you will know that Suspense is compounded of mystery and suspicion and dangerous adventure. In this series are tales calculated to intrigue you, to stir your nerves, to offer you a precarious situation and then withhold the solution... until the last possible moment. And so it is with "The Diary of Sophronia Winters" and the performances of Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins, we again hope to keep you in... (MUSIC: ... UP, DRAMATICALLY) THE MAN IN BLACK: ... Suspense! Recognition Suspense was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2011. Since 2007, Radio Classics, on Sirius XM channel 82, has been airing episodes of Suspense. The show is also streamed nightly at 7 pm Pacific time on kusaradio.com from the original masters. Satire The familiar opening phrase "tales well-calculated to..." was satirized by Mad as the cover blurb "Tales Calculated to Drive You... Mad" on its first issue (October–November 1952) and continuing until issue #23 (May 1955). Radio comedians Bob and Ray had a recurring routine lampooning the show called "Anxiety." Their character Commander Neville Putney told stories that were presented as dramatic but were intentionally mundane, with the opening line "A tale well designed to keep you in... Anxiety." In the “Chicken Heart” sketch on his Wonderfulness album Bill Cosby relates radio programs during his youth “that were scary.” One is Suspense. Theatre #sundaynightmystery For PowPAC, San Diego actor-director Robert Hitchcox mounted a 2006 stage production recreating two episodes of Suspense, complete with commercials, in a stage set designed like a CBS radio studio.
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk #sleep #insomnia #relax #chill #night #nighttime #bed #bedtime #oldtimeradio #drama #comedy #radio #talkradio #hancock #tonyhancock #hancockshalfhour #sherlock #sherlockholmes #radiodrama #popular #viral #viralpodcast #podcast #podcasting #podcasts #podtok #podcastclip #podcastclips #podcasttrailer #podcastteaser #newpodcastepisode #newpodcast #videopodcast #upcomingpodcast #audiogram #audiograms #truecrimepodcast #historypodcast #truecrime #podcaster #viral #popular #viralpodcast #number1 #instagram #youtube #facebook #johnnydollar #crime #fiction #unwind #devon #texas #texasranger #beer #seaton #seaside #smuggler #colyton #devon #seaton #beer #branscombe #lymebay #lymeregis #brett #brettorchard #orchard #greatdetectives #greatdetectivesofoldtimeradio #detectives #johnnydollar #thesaint #steptoe #texasrangers Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar is a radio drama that aired on CBS Radio from February 18, 1949 to September 30, 1962. The first several seasons imagined protagonist Johnny Dollar as a private investigator drama, with Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien and John Lund portraying Dollar in succession over the years. In 1955 after a yearlong hiatus, the series came back in its best-known incarnation with Bob Bailey starring in "the transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account – America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator." There were 809 episodes (plus two not-for-broadcast auditions) in the 12-year run, and more than 710 still exist today. Jim Cox's book American Radio Networks: A History cites "886 total performances" which includes repeat performances. Format The format best remembered was instituted by writer-director Jack Johnstone. Each case usually started with a phone call from an insurance adjuster, calling on Johnny to investigate an unusual claim: a suspicious death, an attempted fraud, a missing person, or other mysterious circumstances. Each story required Johnny to travel to some distant locale, usually within the United States but sometimes abroad, where he was almost always threatened with personal danger in the course of his investigations. He would compare notes with the police officials who had first investigated each strange occurrence, and followed every clue until he figured out what actually happened. Johnny's file on each case was usually referenced as a "matter," as in "The Silver Blue Matter" or "The Forbes Matter". Later episodes were more fanciful, with titles like "The Wayward Trout Matter" and "The Price of Fame Matter" (the latter featuring a rare guest-star appearance by Vincent Price as himself; here Price and Dollar team up to retrieve a painting stolen by Price's insurance agent). Johnny usually stuck to business, but would sometimes engage in romantic dalliances with women he encountered in his travels; later episodes gave Johnny a steady girlfriend, Betty Lewis. Johnny's precious recreational time was usually spent fishing, and it was not uncommon for Johnny's clients to exploit this favorite pastime in convincing him to take on a job near good fishing locations. His past was rarely mentioned, but Dollar in “The Bennett Matter” described himself as a four-year US Marine veteran who then worked as a police officer for a decade before changing careers to insurance investigation.[5] In "The Blackburn Case" Dollar also refers to his time as a Pinkerton Detective. Each story was recounted in flashback, and every few minutes the action would be interrupted by Johnny listing a line item from his expense account, which served as an effective scene transition. Most of the expense account related to transportation, lodging, and meals, but no incidental expense was too small for Johnny to itemize, as in "Item nine, 10 cents. Aspirin. I needed them." The monetary amounts weren't always literal: the smallest line item Johnny ever recorded was "two cents: what I felt like" after a professional setback; the largest was "one million dollars" (the way he felt after finding a missing woman and her daughter in a snowbound cabin). The episodes generally finished with Johnny tallying up his expense account and traveling back to Hartford, Connecticut, where he was based. Sometimes Johnny would add a sardonic postscript under "Remarks," detailing the aftermath of the case. ("The Todd Matter," which especially disgusted Johnny, ended abruptly with "Remarks – nil!") In later seasons the program sometimes referred to itself, with other characters recognizing Dollar's voice from the radio; in the episode “The Salkoff Sequel Matter” Johnny's radio show becomes an important plot point. Original run As originally conceived, Johnny Dollar was a smart, tough, wisecracking detective who tossed silver-dollar tips to waiters and bellhops. Dick Powell starred in the audition show, recorded in 1948, but withdrew from the role in favour of other detective programs, Rogue's Gallery and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. The Johnny Dollar role went instead to Charles Russell. The show for which Powell auditioned was originally titled Yours Truly, Lloyd London, although the name of the show and its lead character were changed to avoid legal problems with the actual insurance company, Lloyd's of London, before the audition tape of December 7, 1948, was recorded. With the first three actors to play Johnny Dollar – radio actor Russell and movie tough-guy actors Edmond O'Brien and John Lund – there was little to distinguish Johnny Dollar from other detective series at the time (Richard Diamond, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade). While always a friend of the police, Johnny wasn't necessarily a stickler for the strictest interpretation of the law. He was willing to let some things slide to satisfy his own sense of justice, as long as the interests of his employer were also protected. The series ended in September 1954. Revival CBS Radio revived Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar in October 1955 with a new leading man, a new director, and a new format. The program changed from a 30-minute, one-episode-per-week program to a 15-minute, five-nights-a-week serial (Monday through Friday, 8–8:15 pm EST) produced and directed by radio veteran Jack Johnstone. The new Johnny Dollar was Bob Bailey, who had just come off another network detective series, Let George Do It. With a new lead and 75 minutes of air time each week, it became possible to develop each storyline with more detail and with more characters. Almost all of the Johnny Dollar serials were presented by CBS Radio on a sustaining basis (unsponsored, with no commercials); only two of the 55 serials take time out for a sponsor's message. Bob Bailey was exceptionally good in this format, making Johnny more sensitive and thoughtful in addition to his other attributes. Vintage-radio enthusiasts often endorse Bailey as the best of the Johnny Dollars, and consider the 13-month run of five-part stories to be some of the greatest drama in radio history. The serial scripts were usually written by Johnstone, "John Dawson" (a pseudonym for E. Jack Neuman), Les Crutchfield, or Robert Ryf. Blake Edwards also contributed several scripts and the show was always produced and directed by Johnstone. The show featured a stock company of supporting actors, including Virginia Gregg, Harry Bartell, Vic Perrin, Lawrence Dobkin, Stacy Harris, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, John Dehner, Barney Phillips, Lillian Buyeff, Tony Barrett, Don Diamond, Alan Reed, and Forrest Lewis. Movie character actors appeared occasionally, including Jay Novello, Hans Conried, Frank Nelson, Leon Belasco, William Conrad, Edgar Barrier, Jeanne Bates, Gloria Blondell, and Billy Halop. In late 1956, CBS Radio retooled the show, which reverted to a weekly half-hour drama, airing on late Sunday afternoons. Bob Bailey continued in the leading role until 1960 and wrote one episode, "The Carmen Kringle Matter," under his first and middle names (Robert Bainter). Staff announcer Dan Cubberly introduced the program during the Edmond O'Brien run; Roy Rowan was the announcer for the first two years of Bob Bailey's run; he also was an announcer on CBS's I Love Lucy. In "The Laird Douglas Matter," the only Johnny Dollar serial played for laughs, Roy Rowan was written into the script as dog-show expert "Ray Roland." In 1957 Rowan was succeeded by Dan Cubberly, returning to the series. Changes at CBS CBS Radio tried to institute an economy measure in June 1959: its four remaining dramatic series (Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar; Suspense; Gunsmoke starring William Conrad; and Have Gun, Will Travel starring John Dehner) would be moved from Hollywood to New York. The plan met with some resistance, because the cast members and crews of Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel were willing to cancel the shows themselves rather than move to New York. The situation was stalemated for 17 months, as all four programs remained on the air. Finally, in November 1960, CBS Radio kept Gunsmoke in California, discontinued Have Gun, Will Travel, and moved Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense to New York. Bob Bailey, unwilling to relocate, gave up the Johnny Dollar role. Bailey's last performance, aired November 27, 1960, was in a script titled "The Empty Threat Matter," perhaps writer Johnstone's editorial comment on CBS's intention to shut down production in California. In New York, CBS staff producer Bruno Zirato Jr. (who also directed TV game shows for CBS) took over Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, although Johnstone continued to write the scripts. Former child actor Bob Readick took over the leading role in a manner reminiscent of the original Dollar, Charles Russell. After six months he was replaced by Mandel Kramer, who gave the role his own low-key interpretation. Many fans found Mandel Kramer second only to Bailey as the most effective Johnny Dollar. Both Readick and Kramer were members of CBS's stock company in New York, and both appeared in other CBS dramas. The end The final episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense, airing on CBS, are often cited as the end of the golden age of radio. The last episode of Johnny Dollar, "The Tip-Off Matter", ended at 6:35 pm. Eastern Time on September 30, 1962, followed immediately by the final broadcast of Suspense. Although network radio drama returned to the airwaves – in ABC's Theater Five (1964–65), and CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974–82) – these were more experimental "drama workshop" shows, and did not adhere to a continuing format or leading character, albeit the latter did spark a bit of a revival of drama on US commercial radio networks in the 1970s. The "Golden Age" of radio drama, as pioneered in the 1920s, died with Johnny Dollar in 1962. Three unsuccessful attempts were made to transfer the success of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar to television. Charles Russell starred in a 1949 pilot directed by Ralph Levy, Bob Bailey starred in a 1958 pilot entitled The Adventures of Johnny Dollar (which failed because Bailey's 5-foot 9-inch, 150-pound physique didn't match the tough-guy characterization), and William Bryant starred in a 1962 pilot entitled Johnny Dollar. The latter was written, produced, and directed by Blake Edwards. Actors who portrayed Dollar Dick Powell (Audition show in 1948) Charles Russell (February 1949 – January 1950) Edmond O'Brien (February 1950 – September 1952) John Lund (November 1952 – September 1954) Gerald Mohr (Audition show in 1955) Bob Bailey (October 1955 – November 1960) Bob Readick (December 1960 – June 1961) Mandel Kramer (June 1961 – September 1962) Legacy Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was so familiar to CBS Radio's listeners that the network's resident comedians, Bob and Ray, occasionally satirized it. Their version, "Ace Willoughby, International Detective," followed the Johnny Dollar format of exotic locales, continental officials, cool villains, and tense confrontations, with Ray Goulding doing a letter-perfect imitation of Bob Bailey's delivery. In the comedy version, however, the detective usually gave up on the case after being beaten up incessantly. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was a popular weekly radio mystery play in the 1960s and early 1970s on Radio Iran. The role of Johnny Dollar was played by Heidar Saremi, a popular radio performer. Contrary to the original, Johnny Dollar was more of a criminal investigator. At the end of each episode, the narrator asked the radio audience how Johnny found the perpetrators, making the show a mystery quiz as well as a drama; those who guessed correctly were entered into a raffle for a prize. In the 1970s and 1980s the comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre released a number of satirical record albums; several featured spoofs of old-time radio featuring the character Nick Danger, Third Eye, who was loosely based on Sam Spade and Johnny Dollar. The scripts included inside references to radio with lines such as, "It had been snowing in Santa Barbara ever since the top of the page," and riffs on radio sound effects. In 2003, Moonstone Books adapted the Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar radio program into a graphic novel illustrated by Éric Thériault and written by David Gallaher. The show has been the opening item on The Big Broadcast on WAMU in Washington, D.C. off and on since the early 1990s. As of August 2017, the show is being aired several times a day on KTQA FM 95.3 in Tacoma, WA and CHLU FM in Middle LaHave, Nova Scotia, Canada. In August 2021, the SiriusXM satellite radio network began airing many episodes of the show on its "Radio Classics" channel 148. As of February 2019, a documentary about the program, Last Man Standing – Johnny Dollar & the End of Old-Time Radio, has been produced.[12] In 2023, a new graphic novel series was launched with Johnny Dollar investigating cybercrimes of the modern age. "The man with the action packed expense account" is a cyberinsurance investigator, taking on ransomware actors in the modern age. sleep insomnia relax chill night nightime bed bedtime oldtimeradio drama comedy radio talkradio hancock tonyhancock hancockshalfhour sherlock sherlockholmes radiodrama popular viral viralpodcast podcast brett brettorchard orchard east devon seaton beer lyme regis village condado de alhama spain murcia The Golden Age of Radio Also known as the old-time radio (OTR) era, was an era of radio in the United States where it was the dominant electronic home entertainment medium. It began with the birth of commercial radio broadcasting in the early 1920s and lasted through the 1950s, when television gradually superseded radio as the medium of choice for scripted programming, variety and dramatic shows. Radio was the first broadcast medium, and during this period people regularly tuned in to their favourite radio programs, and families gathered to listen to the home radio in the evening. According to a 1947 C. E. Hooper survey, 82 out of 100 Americans were found to be radio listeners. A variety of new entertainment formats and genres were created for the new medium, many of which later migrated to television: radio plays, mystery serials, soap operas, quiz shows, talent shows, daytime and evening variety hours, situation comedies, play-by-play sports, children's shows, cooking shows, and more. In the 1950s, television surpassed radio as the most popular broadcast medium, and commercial radio programming shifted to narrower formats of news, talk, sports and music. Religious broadcasters, listener-supported public radio and college stations provide their own distinctive formats. Origins A family listening to the first broadcasts around 1920 with a crystal radio. The crystal radio, a legacy from the pre-broadcast era, could not power a loudspeaker so the family must share earphones During the first three decades of radio, from 1887 to about 1920, the technology of transmitting sound was undeveloped; the information-carrying ability of radio waves was the same as a telegraph; the radio signal could be either on or off. Radio communication was by wireless telegraphy; at the sending end, an operator tapped on a switch which caused the radio transmitter to produce a series of pulses of radio waves which spelled out text messages in Morse code. At the receiver these sounded like beeps, requiring an operator who knew Morse code to translate them back to text. This type of radio was used exclusively for person-to-person text communication for commercial, diplomatic and military purposes and hobbyists; broadcasting did not exist. The broadcasts of live drama, comedy, music and news that characterize the Golden Age of Radio had a precedent in the Théâtrophone, commercially introduced in Paris in 1890 and available as late as 1932. It allowed subscribers to eavesdrop on live stage performances and hear news reports by means of a network of telephone lines. The development of radio eliminated the wires and subscription charges from this concept. Between 1900 and 1920 the first technology for transmitting sound by radio was developed, AM (amplitude modulation), and AM broadcasting sprang up around 1920. On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden is said to have broadcast the first radio program, consisting of some violin playing and passages from the Bible. While Fessenden's role as an inventor and early radio experimenter is not in dispute, several contemporary radio researchers have questioned whether the Christmas Eve broadcast took place, or whether the date was, in fact, several weeks earlier. The first apparent published reference to the event was made in 1928 by H. P. Davis, Vice President of Westinghouse, in a lecture given at Harvard University. In 1932 Fessenden cited the Christmas Eve 1906 broadcast event in a letter he wrote to Vice President S. M. Kinter of Westinghouse. Fessenden's wife Helen recounts the broadcast in her book Fessenden: Builder of Tomorrows (1940), eight years after Fessenden's death. The issue of whether the 1906 Fessenden broadcast actually happened is discussed in Donna Halper's article "In Search of the Truth About Fessenden"[2] and also in James O'Neal's essays.[3][4] An annotated argument supporting Fessenden as the world's first radio broadcaster was offered in 2006 by Dr. John S. Belrose, Radioscientist Emeritus at the Communications Research Centre Canada, in his essay "Fessenden's 1906 Christmas Eve broadcast." It was not until after the Titanic catastrophe in 1912 that radio for mass communication came into vogue, inspired first by the work of amateur ("ham") radio operators. Radio was especially important during World War I as it was vital for air and naval operations. World War I brought about major developments in radio, superseding the Morse code of the wireless telegraph with the vocal communication of the wireless telephone, through advancements in vacuum tube technology and the introduction of the transceiver. After the war, numerous radio stations were born in the United States and set the standard for later radio programs. The first radio news program was broadcast on August 31, 1920, on the station 8MK in Detroit; owned by The Detroit News, the station covered local election results. This was followed in 1920 with the first commercial radio station in the United States, KDKA, being established in Pittsburgh. The first regular entertainment programs were broadcast in 1922, and on March 10, Variety carried the front-page headline: "Radio Sweeping Country: 1,000,000 Sets in Use." A highlight of this time was the first Rose Bowl being broadcast on January 1, 1923, on the Los Angeles station KHJ. Growth of radio Broadcast radio in the United States underwent a period of rapid change through the decade of the 1920s. Technology advances, better regulation, rapid consumer adoption, and the creation of broadcast networks transformed radio from a consumer curiosity into the mass media powerhouse that defined the Golden Age of Radio. Consumer adoption Through the decade of the 1920s, the purchase of radios by United States homes continued, and accelerated. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) released figures in 1925 stating that 19% of United States homes owned a radio. The triode and regenerative circuit made amplified, vacuum tube radios widely available to consumers by the second half of the 1920s. The advantage was obvious: several people at once in a home could now easily listen to their radio at the same time. In 1930, 40% of the nation's households owned a radio,[8] a figure that was much higher in suburban and large metropolitan areas. The superheterodyne receiver and other inventions refined radios even further in the next decade; even as the Great Depression ravaged the country in the 1930s, radio would stay at the centre of American life. 83% of American homes would own a radio by 1940. Government regulation Although radio was well established with United States consumers by the mid-1920s, regulation of the broadcast medium presented its own challenges. Until 1926, broadcast radio power and frequency use was regulated by the U.S. Department of Commerce, until a legal challenge rendered the agency powerless to do so. Congress responded by enacting the Radio Act of 1927, which included the formation of the Federal Radio Commission (FRC). One of the FRC's most important early actions was the adoption of General Order 40, which divided stations on the AM band into three power level categories, which became known as Local, Regional, and Clear Channel, and reorganized station assignments. Based on this plan, effective 3:00 a.m. Eastern time on November 11, 1928, most of the country's stations were assigned to new transmitting frequencies. Broadcast networks The final element needed to make the Golden Age of Radio possible focused on the question of distribution: the ability for multiple radio stations to simultaneously broadcast the same content, and this would be solved with the concept of a radio network. The earliest radio programs of the 1920s were largely unsponsored; radio stations were a service designed to sell radio receivers. In early 1922, American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) announced the beginning of advertisement-supported broadcasting on its owned stations, and plans for the development of the first radio network using its telephone lines to transmit the content. In July 1926, AT&T abruptly decided to exit the broadcasting field, and signed an agreement to sell its entire network operations to a group headed by RCA, which used the assets to form the National Broadcasting Company. Four radio networks had formed by 1934. These were: National Broadcasting Company Red Network (NBC Red), launched November 15, 1926. Originally founded as the National Broadcasting Company in late 1926, the company was almost immediately forced to split under antitrust laws to form NBC Red and NBC Blue. When, in 1942, NBC Blue was sold and renamed the Blue Network, this network would go back to calling itself simply the National Broadcasting Company Radio Network (NBC). National Broadcasting Company Blue Network (NBC Blue); launched January 10, 1927, split from NBC Red. NBC Blue was sold in 1942 and became the Blue Network, and it in turn transferred its assets to a new company, the American Broadcasting Company on June 15, 1945. That network identified itself as the American Broadcasting Company Radio Network (ABC). Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), launched September 18, 1927. After an initially struggling attempt to compete with the NBC networks, CBS gained new momentum when William S. Paley was installed as company president. Mutual Broadcasting System (Mutual), launched September 29, 1934. Mutual was initially run as a cooperative in which the flagship stations owned the network, not the other way around as was the case with the other three radio networks. Programming In the period before and after the advent of the broadcast network, new forms of entertainment needed to be created to fill the time of a station's broadcast day. Many of the formats born in this era continued into the television and digital eras. In the beginning of the Golden Age, network programs were almost exclusively broadcast live, as the national networks prohibited the airing of recorded programs until the late 1940s because of the inferior sound quality of phonograph discs, the only practical recording medium at that time. As a result, network prime-time shows would be performed twice, once for each coast. Rehearsal for the World War II radio show You Can't Do Business with Hitler with John Flynn and Virginia Moore. This series of programs, broadcast at least once weekly by more than 790 radio stations in the United States, was written and produced by the radio section of the Office of War Information (OWI). Live events Coverage of live events included musical concerts and play-by-play sports broadcasts. News The capability of the new medium to get information to people created the format of modern radio news: headlines, remote reporting, sidewalk interviews (such as Vox Pop), panel discussions, weather reports, and farm reports. The entry of radio into the realm of news triggered a feud between the radio and newspaper industries in the mid-1930s, eventually culminating in newspapers trumping up exaggerated [citation needed] reports of a mass hysteria from the (entirely fictional) radio presentation of The War of the Worlds, which had been presented as a faux newscast. Musical features The sponsored musical feature soon became one of the most popular program formats. Most early radio sponsorship came in the form of selling the naming rights to the program, as evidenced by such programs as The A&P Gypsies, Champion Spark Plug Hour, The Clicquot Club Eskimos, and King Biscuit Time; commercials, as they are known in the modern era, were still relatively uncommon and considered intrusive. During the 1930s and 1940s, the leading orchestras were heard often through big band remotes, and NBC's Monitor continued such remotes well into the 1950s by broadcasting live music from New York City jazz clubs to rural America. Singers such as Harriet Lee and Wendell Hall became popular fixtures on network radio beginning in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Local stations often had staff organists such as Jesse Crawford playing popular tunes. Classical music programs on the air included The Voice of Firestone and The Bell Telephone Hour. Texaco sponsored the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts; the broadcasts, now sponsored by the Toll Brothers, continue to this day around the world, and are one of the few examples of live classical music still broadcast on radio. One of the most notable of all classical music radio programs of the Golden Age of Radio featured the celebrated Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra, which had been created especially for him. At that time, nearly all classical musicians and critics considered Toscanini the greatest living maestro. Popular songwriters such as George Gershwin were also featured on radio. (Gershwin, in addition to frequent appearances as a guest, had his own program in 1934.) The New York Philharmonic also had weekly concerts on radio. There was no dedicated classical music radio station like NPR at that time, so classical music programs had to share the network they were broadcast on with more popular ones, much as in the days of television before the creation of NET and PBS. Country music also enjoyed popularity. National Barn Dance, begun on Chicago's WLS in 1924, was picked up by NBC Radio in 1933. In 1925, WSM Barn Dance went on the air from Nashville. It was renamed the Grand Ole Opry in 1927 and NBC carried portions from 1944 to 1956. NBC also aired The Red Foley Show from 1951 to 1961, and ABC Radio carried Ozark Jubilee from 1953 to 1961. Comedy Radio attracted top comedy talents from vaudeville and Hollywood for many years: Bing Crosby, Abbott and Costello, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Victor Borge, Fanny Brice, Billie Burke, Bob Burns, Judy Canova, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Burns and Allen, Phil Harris, Edgar Bergen, Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Jean Shepherd, Red Skelton and Ed Wynn. Situational comedies also gained popularity, such as Amos 'n' Andy, Easy Aces, Ethel and Albert, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Goldbergs, The Great Gildersleeve, The Halls of Ivy (which featured screen star Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume), Meet Corliss Archer, Meet Millie, and Our Miss Brooks. Radio comedy ran the gamut from the small town humor of Lum and Abner, Herb Shriner and Minnie Pearl to the dialect characterizations of Mel Blanc and the caustic sarcasm of Henry Morgan. Gags galore were delivered weekly on Stop Me If You've Heard This One and Can You Top This?,[18] panel programs devoted to the art of telling jokes. Quiz shows were lampooned on It Pays to Be Ignorant, and other memorable parodies were presented by such satirists as Spike Jones, Stoopnagle and Budd, Stan Freberg and Bob and Ray. British comedy reached American shores in a major assault when NBC carried The Goon Show in the mid-1950s. Some shows originated as stage productions: Clifford Goldsmith's play What a Life was reworked into NBC's popular, long-running The Aldrich Family (1939–1953) with the familiar catchphrases "Henry! Henry Aldrich!," followed by Henry's answer, "Coming, Mother!" Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway hit, You Can't Take It with You (1936), became a weekly situation comedy heard on Mutual (1944) with Everett Sloane and later on NBC (1951) with Walter Brennan. Other shows were adapted from comic strips, such as Blondie, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, The Gumps, Li'l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye the Sailor, Red Ryder, Reg'lar Fellers, Terry and the Pirates and Tillie the Toiler. Bob Montana's redheaded teen of comic strips and comic books was heard on radio's Archie Andrews from 1943 to 1953. The Timid Soul was a 1941–1942 comedy based on cartoonist H. T. Webster's famed Caspar Milquetoast character, and Robert L. Ripley's Believe It or Not! was adapted to several different radio formats during the 1930s and 1940s. Conversely, some radio shows gave rise to spinoff comic strips, such as My Friend Irma starring Marie Wilson. Soap operas The first program generally considered to be a daytime serial drama by scholars of the genre is Painted Dreams, which premiered on WGN on October 20, 1930. The first networked daytime serial is Clara, Lu, 'n Em, which started in a daytime time slot on February 15, 1932. As daytime serials became popular in the early 1930s, they became known as soap operas because many were sponsored by soap products and detergents. On November 25, 1960, the last four daytime radio dramas—Young Dr. Malone, Right to Happiness, The Second Mrs. Burton and Ma Perkins, all broadcast on the CBS Radio Network—were brought to an end. Children's programming The line-up of late afternoon adventure serials included Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, The Cisco Kid, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, Captain Midnight, and The Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters. Badges, rings, decoding devices and other radio premiums offered on these adventure shows were often allied with a sponsor's product, requiring the young listeners to mail in a boxtop from a breakfast cereal or other proof of purchase. Radio plays Radio plays were presented on such programs as 26 by Corwin, NBC Short Story, Arch Oboler's Plays, Quiet, Please, and CBS Radio Workshop. Orson Welles's The Mercury Theatre on the Air and The Campbell Playhouse were considered by many critics to be the finest radio drama anthologies ever presented. They usually starred Welles in the leading role, along with celebrity guest stars such as Margaret Sullavan or Helen Hayes, in adaptations from literature, Broadway, and/or films. They included such titles as Liliom, Oliver Twist (a title now feared lost), A Tale of Two Cities, Lost Horizon, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was on Mercury Theatre that Welles presented his celebrated-but-infamous 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, formatted to sound like a breaking news program. Theatre Guild on the Air presented adaptations of classical and Broadway plays. Their Shakespeare adaptations included a one-hour Macbeth starring Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson, and a 90-minute Hamlet, starring John Gielgud.[22] Recordings of many of these programs survive. During the 1940s, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, famous for playing Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in films, repeated their characterizations on radio on The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which featured both original stories and episodes directly adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. None of the episodes in which Rathbone and Bruce starred on the radio program were filmed with the two actors as Holmes and Watson, so radio became the only medium in which audiences were able to experience Rathbone and Bruce appearing in some of the more famous Holmes stories, such as "The Speckled Band". There were also many dramatizations of Sherlock Holmes stories on radio without Rathbone and Bruce. During the latter part of his career, celebrated actor John Barrymore starred in a radio program, Streamlined Shakespeare, which featured him in a series of one-hour adaptations of Shakespeare plays, many of which Barrymore never appeared in either on stage or in films, such as Twelfth Night (in which he played both Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch), and Macbeth. Lux Radio Theatre and The Screen Guild Theater presented adaptations of Hollywood movies, performed before a live audience, usually with cast members from the original films. Suspense, Escape, The Mysterious Traveler and Inner Sanctum Mystery were popular thriller anthology series. Leading writers who created original material for radio included Norman Corwin, Carlton E. Morse, David Goodis, Archibald MacLeish, Arthur Miller, Arch Oboler, Wyllis Cooper, Rod Serling, Jay Bennett, and Irwin Shaw. Game shows Game shows saw their beginnings in radio. One of the first was Information Please in 1938, and one of the first major successes was Dr. I.Q. in 1939. Winner Take All, which premiered in 1946, was the first to use lockout devices and feature returning champions. A relative of the game show, which would be called the giveaway show in contemporary media, typically involved giving sponsored products to studio audience members, people randomly called by telephone, or both. An early example of this show was the 1939 show Pot o' Gold, but the breakout hit of this type was ABC's Stop the Music in 1948. Winning a prize generally required knowledge of what was being aired on the show at that moment, which led to criticism of the giveaway show as a form of "buying an audience". Giveaway shows were extremely popular through 1948 and 1949. They were often panned as low-brow, and an unsuccessful attempt was even made by the FCC to ban them (as an illegal lottery) in August 1949.[23] Broadcast production methods The RCA Type 44-BX microphone had two live faces and two dead ones. Thus actors could face each other and react. An actor could give the effect of leaving the room by simply moving their head toward the dead face of the microphone. The scripts were paper-clipped together. It has been disputed whether or not actors and actresses would drop finished pages to the carpeted floor after use. Radio stations Despite a general ban on use of recordings on broadcasts by radio networks through the late 1940s, "reference recordings" on phonograph disc were made of many programs as they were being broadcast, for review by the sponsor and for the network's own archival purposes. With the development of high-fidelity magnetic wire and tape recording in the years following World War II, the networks became more open to airing recorded programs and the prerecording of shows became more common. Local stations, however, had always been free to use recordings and sometimes made substantial use of pre-recorded syndicated programs distributed on pressed (as opposed to individually recorded) transcription discs. Recording was done using a cutting lathe and acetate discs. Programs were normally recorded at 331⁄3 rpm on 16 inch discs, the standard format used for such "electrical transcriptions" from the early 1930s through the 1950s. Sometimes, the groove was cut starting at the inside of the disc and running to the outside. This was useful when the program to be recorded was longer than 15 minutes so required more than one disc side. By recording the first side outside in, the second inside out, and so on, the sound quality at the disc change-over points would match and result in a more seamless playback. An inside start also had the advantage that the thread of material cut from the disc's surface, which had to be kept out of the path of the cutting stylus, was naturally thrown toward the centre of the disc so was automatically out of the way. When cutting an outside start disc, a brush could be used to keep it out of the way by sweeping it toward the middle of the disc. Well-equipped recording lathes used the vacuum from a water aspirator to pick it up as it was cut and deposit it in a water-filled bottle. In addition to convenience, this served a safety purpose, as the cellulose nitrate thread was highly flammable and a loose accumulation of it combusted violently if ignited. Most recordings of radio broadcasts were made at a radio network's studios, or at the facilities of a network-owned or affiliated station, which might have four or more lathes. A small local station often had none. Two lathes were required to capture a program longer than 15 minutes without losing parts of it while discs were flipped over or changed, along with a trained technician to operate them and monitor the recording while it was being made. However, some surviving recordings were produced by local stations. When a substantial number of copies of an electrical transcription were required, as for the distribution of a syndicated program, they were produced by the same process used to make ordinary records. A master recording was cut, then electroplated to produce a stamper from which pressings in vinyl (or, in the case of transcription discs pressed before about 1935, shellac) were moulded in a record press. Armed Forces Radio Service Frank Sinatra and Alida Valli converse over Armed Forces Radio Service during World War II The Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) had its origins in the U.S. War Department's quest to improve troop morale. This quest began with short-wave broadcasts of educational and information programs to troops in 1940. In 1941, the War Department began issuing "Buddy Kits" (B-Kits) to departing troops, which consisted of radios, 78 rpm records and electrical transcription discs of radio shows. However, with the entrance of the United States into World War II, the War Department decided that it needed to improve the quality and quantity of its offerings. This began with the broadcasting of its own original variety programs. Command Performance was the first of these, produced for the first time on March 1, 1942. On May 26, 1942, the Armed Forces Radio Service was formally established. Originally, its programming comprised network radio shows with the commercials removed. However, it soon began producing original programming, such as Mail Call, G.I. Journal, Jubilee and GI Jive. At its peak in 1945, the Service produced around 20 hours of original programming each week. From 1943 until 1949 the AFRS also broadcast programs developed through the collaborative efforts of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Columbia Broadcasting System in support of America's cultural diplomacy initiatives and President Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbour policy. Included among the popular shows was Viva America which showcased leading musical artists from both North and South America for the entertainment of America's troops. Included among the regular performers were: Alfredo Antonini, Juan Arvizu, Nestor Mesta Chayres, Kate Smith,[26] and John Serry Sr. After the war, the AFRS continued providing programming to troops in Europe. During the 1950s and early 1960s it presented performances by the Army's only symphonic orchestra ensemble—the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. It also provided programming for future wars that the United States was involved in. It survives today as a component of the American Forces Network (AFN). All of the shows aired by the AFRS during the Golden Age were recorded as electrical transcription discs, vinyl copies of which were shipped to stations overseas to be broadcast to the troops. People in the United States rarely ever heard programming from the AFRS,[31] though AFRS recordings of Golden Age network shows were occasionally broadcast on some domestic stations beginning in the 1950s. In some cases, the AFRS disc is the only surviving recording of a program. Home radio recordings in the United States There was some home recording of radio broadcasts in the 1930s and 1940s. Examples from as early as 1930 have been documented. During these years, home recordings were made with disc recorders, most of which were only capable of storing about four minutes of a radio program on each side of a twelve-inch 78 rpm record. Most home recordings were made on even shorter-playing ten-inch or smaller discs. Some home disc recorders offered the option of the 331⁄3 rpm speed used for electrical transcriptions, allowing a recording more than twice as long to be made, although with reduced audio quality. Office dictation equipment was sometimes pressed into service for making recordings of radio broadcasts, but the audio quality of these devices was poor and the resulting recordings were in odd formats that had to be played back on similar equipment. Due to the expense of recorders and the limitations of the recording media, home recording of broadcasts was not common during this period and it was usually limited to brief excerpts. The lack of suitable home recording equipment was somewhat relieved in 1947 with the availability of magnetic wire recorders for domestic use. These were capable of recording an hour-long broadcast on a single small spool of wire, and if a high-quality radio's audio output was recorded directly, rather than by holding a microphone up to its speaker, the recorded sound quality was very good. However, because the wire cost money and, like magnetic tape, could be repeatedly re-used to make new recordings, only a few complete broadcasts appear to have survived on this medium. In fact, there was little home recording of complete radio programs until the early 1950s, when increasingly affordable reel-to-reel tape recorders for home use were introduced to the market. Recording media Electrical transcription discs The War of the Worlds radio broadcast by Orson Welles on electrical transcription disc Before the early 1950s, when radio networks and local stations wanted to preserve a live broadcast, they did so by means of special phonograph records known as "electrical transcriptions" (ETs), made by cutting a sound-modulated groove into a blank disc. At first, in the early 1930s, the blanks varied in both size and composition, but most often they were simply bare aluminum and the groove was indented rather than cut. Typically, these very early recordings were not made by the network or radio station, but by a private recording service contracted by the broadcast sponsor or one of the performers. The bare aluminum discs were typically 10 or 12 inches in diameter and recorded at the then-standard speed of 78 rpm, which meant that several disc sides were required to accommodate even a 15-minute program. By about 1936, 16-inch aluminum-based discs coated with cellulose nitrate lacquer, commonly known as acetates and recorded at a speed of 331⁄3 rpm, had been adopted by the networks and individual radio stations as the standard medium for recording broadcasts. The making of such recordings, at least for some purposes, then became routine. Some discs were recorded using a "hill and dale" vertically modulated groove, rather than the "lateral" side-to-side modulation found on the records being made for home use at that time. The large slow-speed discs could easily contain fifteen minutes on each side, allowing an hour-long program to be recorded on only two discs. The lacquer was softer than shellac or vinyl and wore more rapidly, allowing only a few playbacks with the heavy pickups and steel needles then in use before deterioration became audible. During World War II, aluminum became a necessary material for the war effort and was in short supply. This caused an alternative to be sought for the base on which to coat the lacquer. Glass, despite its obvious disadvantage of fragility, had occasionally been used in earlier years because it could provide a perfectly smooth and even supporting surface for mastering and other critical applications. Glass base recording blanks came into general use for the duration of the war. Magnetic wire recording In the late 1940s, wire recorders became a readily obtainable means of recording radio programs. On a per-minute basis, it was less expensive to record a broadcast on wire than on discs. The one-hour program that required the four sides of two 16-inch discs could be recorded intact on a single spool of wire less than three inches in diameter and about half an inch thick. The audio fidelity of a good wire recording was comparable to acetate discs and by comparison the wire was practically indestructible, but it was soon rendered obsolete by the more manageable and easily edited medium of magnetic tape. Reel-to-reel tape recording Bing Crosby became the first major proponent of magnetic tape recording for radio, and he was the first to use it on network radio, after he did a demonstration program in 1947. Tape had several advantages over earlier recording methods. Running at a sufficiently high speed, it could achieve higher fidelity than both electrical transcription discs and magnetic wire. Discs could be edited only by copying parts of them to a new disc, and the copying entailed a loss of audio quality. Wire could be divided up and the ends spliced together by knotting, but wire was difficult to handle and the crude splices were too noticeable. Tape could be edited by cutting it with a blade and neatly joining ends together with adhesive tape. By early 1949, the transition from live performances preserved on discs to performances pre-recorded on magnetic tape for later broadcast was complete for network radio programs. However, for the physical distribution of pre-recorded programming to individual stations, 16-inch 331⁄3 rpm vinyl pressings, less expensive to produce in quantities of identical copies than tapes, continued to be standard throughout the 1950s. Availability of recordings The great majority of pre-World War II live radio broadcasts are lost. Many were never recorded; few recordings antedate the early 1930s. Beginning then several of the longer-running radio dramas have their archives complete or nearly complete. The earlier the date, the less likely it is that a recording survives. However, a good number of syndicated programs from this period have survived because copies were distributed far and wide. Recordings of live network broadcasts from the World War II years were preserved in the form of pressed vinyl copies issued by the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) and survive in relative abundance. Syndicated programs from World War II and later years have nearly all survived. The survival of network programming from this time frame is more inconsistent; the networks started prerecording their formerly live shows on magnetic tape for subsequent network broadcast, but did not physically distribute copies, and the expensive tapes, unlike electrical transcription ("ET") discs, could be "wiped" and re-used (especially since, in the age of emerging trends such as television and music radio, such recordings were believed to have virtually no rerun or resale value). Thus, while some prime time network radio series from this era exist in full or almost in full, especially the most famous and longest-lived of them, less prominent or shorter-lived series (such as serials) may have only a handful of extant episodes. Airchecks, off-the-air recordings of complete shows made by, or at the behest of, individuals for their own private use, sometimes help to fill in such gaps. The contents of privately made recordings of live broadcasts from the first half of the 1930s can be of particular interest, as little live material from that period survives. Unfortunately, the sound quality of very early private recordings is often very poor, although in some cases this is largely due to the use of an incorrect playback stylus, which can also badly damage some unusual types of discs. Most of the Golden Age programs in circulation among collectors—whether on analogue tape, CD, or in the form of MP3s—originated from analogue 16-inch transcription disc, although some are off-the-air AM recordings. But in many cases, the circulating recordings are corrupted (decreased in quality), because lossless digital recording for the home market did not come until the very end of the twentieth century. Collectors made and shared recordings on analogue magnetic tapes, the only practical, relatively inexpensive medium, first on reels, then cassettes. "Sharing" usually meant making a duplicate tape. They connected two recorders, playing on one and recording on the other. Analog recordings are never perfect, and copying an analogue recording multiplies the imperfections. With the oldest recordings this can even mean it went out the speaker of one machine and in via the microphone of the other. The muffled sound, dropouts, sudden changes in sound quality, unsteady pitch, and other defects heard all too often are almost always accumulated tape copy defects. In addition, magnetic recordings, unless preserved archivally, are gradually damaged by the Earth's magnetic field. The audio quality of the source discs, when they have survived unscathed and are accessed and dubbed anew, is usually found to be reasonably clear and undistorted, sometimes startlingly good, although like all phonograph records they are vulnerable to wear and the effects of scuffs, scratches, and ground-in dust. Many shows from the 1940s have survived only in edited AFRS versions, although some exist in both the original and AFRS forms. As of 2020, the Old Time Radio collection at the Internet Archive contains 5,121 recordings. An active group of collectors makes digitally available, via CD or download, large collections of programs. RadioEchoes.com offers 98,949 episodes in their collection, but not all is old-time radio. Copyright status Unlike film, television, and print items from the era, the copyright status of most recordings from the Golden Age of Radio is unclear. This is because, prior to 1972, the United States delegated the copyrighting of sound recordings to the individual states, many of which offered more generous common law copyright protections than the federal government offered for other media (some offered perpetual copyright, which has since been abolished; under the Music Modernization Act of September 2018, any sound recording 95 years old or older will be thrust into the public domain regardless of state law). The only exceptions are AFRS original productions, which are considered work of the United States government and thus both ineligible for federal copyright and outside the jurisdiction of any state; these programs are firmly in the public domain (this does not apply to programs carried by AFRS but produced by commercial networks). In practice, most old-time radio recordings are treated as orphan works: although there may still be a valid copyright on the program, it is seldom enforced. The copyright on an individual sound recording is distinct from the federal copyright for the underlying material (such as a published script, music, or in the case of adaptations, the original film or television material), and in many cases it is impossible to determine where or when the original recording was made or if the recording was copyrighted in that state. The U.S. Copyright Office states "there are a variety of legal regimes governing protection of pre-1972 sound recordings in the various states, and the scope of protection and of exceptions and limitations to that protection is unclear."[39] For example, New York has issued contradicting rulings on whether or not common law exists in that state; the most recent ruling, 2016's Flo & Eddie, Inc. v. Sirius XM Radio, holds that there is no such copyright in New York in regard to public performance.[40] Further complicating matters is that certain examples in case law have implied that radio broadcasts (and faithful reproductions thereof), because they were distributed freely to the public over the air, may not be eligible for copyright in and of themselves. The Internet Archive and other organizations that distribute public domain and open-source audio recordings maintain extensive archives of old-time radio programs. Legacy United States Some old-time radio shows continued on the air, although in ever-dwindling numbers, throughout the 1950s, even after their television equivalents had conquered the general public. One factor which helped to kill off old-time radio entirely was the evolution of popular music (including the development of rock and roll), which led to the birth of the top 40 radio format. A top 40 show could be produced in a small studio in a local station with minimal staff. This displaced full-service network radio and hastened the end of the golden-age era of radio drama by 1962. (Radio as a broadcast medium would survive, thanks in part to the proliferation of the transistor radio, and permanent installation in vehicles, making the medium far more portable than television). Full-service stations that did not adopt either top 40 or the mellower beautiful music or MOR formats eventually developed all-news radio in the mid-1960s. Scripted radio comedy and drama in the vein of old-time radio has a limited presence on U.S. radio. Several radio theatre series are still in production in the United States, usually airing on Sunday nights. These include original series such as Imagination Theatre and a radio adaptation of The Twilight Zone TV series, as well as rerun compilations such as the popular daily series When Radio Was and USA Radio Network's Golden Age of Radio Theatre, and weekly programs such as The Big Broadcast on WAMU, hosted by Murray Horwitz. These shows usually air in late nights and/or on weekends on small AM stations. Carl Amari's nationally syndicated radio show Hollywood 360 features 5 old-time radio episodes each week during his 5-hour broadcast. Amari's show is heard on 100+ radio stations coast-to-coast and in 168 countries on American Forces Radio. Local rerun compilations are also heard, primarily on public radio stations. Sirius XM Radio maintains a full-time Radio Classics channel devoted to rebroadcasts of vintage radio shows. Starting in 1974, Garrison Keillor, through his syndicated two-hour-long program A Prairie Home Companion, has provided a living museum of the production, tone and listener's experience of this era of radio for several generations after its demise. Produced live in theatres throughout the country, using the same sound effects and techniques of the era, it ran through 2016 with Keillor as host. The program included segments that were close renditions (in the form of parody) of specific genres of this era, including Westerns ("Dusty and Lefty, The Lives of the Cowboys"), detective procedurals ("Guy Noir, Private Eye") and even advertising through fictional commercials. Keillor also wrote a novel, WLT: A Radio Romance based on a radio station of this era—including a personally narrated version for the ultimate in verisimilitude. Upon Keillor's retirement, replacement host Chris Thile chose to reboot the show (since renamed Live from Here after the syndicator cut ties with Keillor) and eliminate much of the old-time radio trappings of the format; the show was ultimately cancelled in 2020 due to financial and logistics problems. Vintage shows and new audio productions in America are accessible more widely from recordings or by satellite and web broadcasters, rather than over conventional AM and FM radio. The National Audio Theatre Festival is a national organization and yearly conference keeping the audio arts—especially audio drama—alive, and continues to involve long-time voice actors and OTR veterans in its ranks. Its predecessor, the Midwest Radio Theatre Workshop, was first hosted by Jim Jordan, of Fibber McGee and Molly fame, and Norman Corwin advised the organization. One of the longest running radio programs celebrating this era is The Golden Days of Radio, which was hosted on the Armed Forces Radio Service for more than 20 years and overall for more than 50 years by Frank Bresee, who also played "Little Beaver" on the Red Ryder program as a child actor. One of the very few still-running shows from the earlier era of radio is a Christian program entitled Unshackled! The weekly half-hour show, produced in Chicago by Pacific Garden Mission, has been continuously broadcast since 1950. The shows are created using techniques from the 1950s (including home-made sound effects) and are broadcast across the U.S. and around the world by thousands of radio stations. Today, radio performers of the past appear at conventions that feature re-creations of classic shows, as well as music, memorabilia and historical panels. The largest of these events was the Friends of Old Time Radio Convention, held in Newark, New Jersey, which held its final convention in October 2011 after 36 years. Others include REPS in Seattle (June), SPERDVAC in California, the Cincinnati OTR & Nostalgia Convention (April), and the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention (September). Veterans of the Friends of Old Time Radio Convention, including Chairperson Steven M. Lewis of The Gotham Radio Players, Maggie Thompson, publisher of the Comic Book Buyer's Guide, Craig Wichman of audio drama troupe Quicksilver Audio Theatre and long-time FOTR Publicist Sean Dougherty have launched a successor event, Celebrating Audio Theatre – Old & New, scheduled for October 12–13, 2012. Radio dramas from the golden age are sometimes recreated as live stage performances at such events. One such group, led by director Daniel Smith, has been performing re-creations of old-time radio dramas at Fairfield University's Regina A. Quick Centre for the Arts since the year 2000. The 40th anniversary of what is widely considered the end of the old time radio era (the final broadcasts of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense on September 30, 1962) was marked with a commentary on NPR's All Things Considered. A handful of radio programs from the old-time era remain in production, all from the genres of news, music, or religious broadcasting: the Grand Ole Opry (1925), Music and the Spoken Word (1929), The Lutheran Hour (1930), the CBS World News Roundup (1938), King Biscuit Time (1941) and the Renfro Valley Gatherin' (1943). Of those, all but the Opry maintain their original short-form length of 30 minutes or less. The Wheeling Jamboree counts an earlier program on a competing station as part of its history, tracing its lineage back to 1933. Western revival/comedy act Riders in the Sky produced a radio serial Riders Radio Theatre in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to provide sketch comedy on existing radio programs including the Grand Ole Opry, Midnite Jamboree and WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. Elsewhere Regular broadcasts of radio plays are also heard in—among other countries—Australia, Croatia, Estonia,[46] France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, and Sweden. In the United Kingdom, such scripted radio drama continues on BBC Radio 3 and (principally) BBC Radio 4, the second-most popular radio station in the country, as well as on the rerun channel BBC Radio 4 Extra, which is the seventh-most popular station there. Special thanks to Wikipedia. #starradio #totalstar #star1075 #heart #heartradio #lbc #bbc #bbcradio #bbcradio1 #bbcradio2 #bbcradio3 #bbcradio4 #radio4extra #absoluteradio #absolute #capital #capitalradio #greatesthitsradio #hitsradio #radio #adultcontemporary #spain #bristol #frenchay #colyton #lymeregis #seaton #beer #devon #eastdevon #brettorchard #brettsoldtimeradioshow fe2f4df62ffeeb8c30c04d3d3454779ca91a4871
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely winters night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an instagram page and youtube channel both called brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk #sleep #insomnia #relax #chill #night #nighttime #bed #bedtime #oldtimeradio #drama #comedy #radio #talkradio #hancock #tonyhancock #hancockshalfhour #sherlock #sherlockholmes #radiodrama #popular #viral #viralpodcast #podcast #podcasting #podcasts #podtok #podcastclip #podcastclips #podcasttrailer #podcastteaser #newpodcastepisode #newpodcast #videopodcast #upcomingpodcast #audiogram #audiograms #truecrimepodcast #historypodcast #truecrime #podcaster #viral #popular #viralpodcast #number1 #instagram #youtube #facebook #johnnydollar #crime #fiction #unwind #devon #texas #texasranger #beer #seaton #seaside #smuggler #colyton #devon #seaton #beer #branscombe #lymebay #lymeregis #brett #brettorchard #orchard #greatdetectives #greatdetectivesofoldtimeradio #detectives #johnnydollar #thesaint #steptoe #texasrangers Suspense is a radio drama series broadcast on CBS Radio from 1940 through 1962. One of the premier drama programs of the Golden Age of Radio, was subtitled "radio's outstanding theatre of thrills" and focused on suspense thriller-type scripts, usually featuring leading Hollywood actors of the era. Approximately 945 episodes were broadcast during its long run, and more than 900 still exist. Suspense went through several major phases, characterized by different hosts, sponsors, and director/producers. Formula plot devices were followed for all but a handful of episodes: the protagonist was usually a normal person suddenly dropped into a threatening or bizarre situation; solutions were "withheld until the last possible second"; and evildoers were usually punished in the end. In its early years, the program made only occasional forays into science fiction and fantasy. Notable exceptions include adaptations of Curt Siodmak's Donovan's Brain and H. P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror", but by the late 1950s, such material was regularly featured. Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock directed its audition show (for the CBS summer series Forecast). This was an adaptation of The Lodger a story Hitchcock had filmed in 1926 with Ivor Novello. Martin Grams Jr., author of Suspense: Twenty Years of Thrills and Chills, described the Forecast origin of Suspense: On the second presentation of July 22, 1940, Forecast offered a mystery/horror show titled Suspense. With the co-operation of his producer, Walter Wanger, Alfred Hitchcock received the honor of directing his first radio show for the American public. The condition agreed upon for Hitchcock's appearance was that CBS make a pitch to the listening audience about his and Wanger's latest film, Foreign Correspondent. To add flavor to the deal, Wanger threw in Edmund Gwenn and Herbert Marshall as part of the package. All three men (including Hitch) would be seen in the upcoming film, which was due for a theatrical release the next month. Both Marshall and Hitchcock decided on the same story to bring to the airwaves, which happened to be a favorite of both of them: Marie Belloc Lowndes' "The Lodger." Alfred Hitchcock had filmed this story for Gainsborough in 1926, and since then it had remained as one of his favorites. Herbert Marshall portrayed the mysterious lodger, and co-starring with him were Edmund Gwenn and character actress Lurene Tuttle as the rooming-house keepers who start to suspect that their new boarder might be the notorious Jack-the-Ripper. [Gwenn was actually repeating the role taken in the 1926 film by his brother, Arthur Chesney. And Tuttle would work again with Hitchcock nearly 20 years later, playing Mrs. Al Chambers, the sheriff's wife, in Psycho.] Character actor Joseph Kearns also had a small part in the drama, and Wilbur Hatch, head musician for CBS Radio at the time, composed and conducted the music specially for the program. Adapting the script to radio was not a great technical challenge for Hitchcock, and he cleverly decided to hold back the ending of the story from the listening audience in order to keep them in suspense themselves. This way, if the audience's curiosity got the better of them, they would write in to the network to find out whether the mysterious lodger was in fact Jack the Ripper. For the next few weeks, hundreds of letters came in from faithful listeners asking how the story ended. Actually a few wrote threats claiming that it was "indecent" and "immoral" to present such a production without giving the solution 1942–1962 In the earliest years, the program was hosted by "The Man in Black" (played by Joseph Kearns or Ted Osborne) with many episodes written or adapted by the prominent mystery author John Dickson Carr. One of the series' earliest successes and its single most popular episode is Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry, Wrong Number", about a bedridden woman (Agnes Moorehead) who panics after overhearing a murder plot on a crossed telephone connection but is unable to persuade anyone to investigate. First broadcast on May 25, 1943, it was restaged seven times (last on February 14, 1960) – each time with Moorehead. The popularity of the episode led to a film adaptation in 1948. Another notable early episode was Fletcher's "The Hitch Hiker" (aired September 2, 1942), in which a motorist (Orson Welles) is stalked on a cross-country trip by a nondescript man who keeps appearing on the side of the road; however, the first performance of "The Hitch-Hiker" actually took place on The Orson Welles Show the previous year. "The Hitch-Hiker" was later adapted for television by Rod Serling as a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone. After the network sustained the program during its first two years, the sponsor became Roma Wines (1944–1947), and then (after another brief period of sustained hour-long episodes, initially featuring Robert Montgomery as host and "producer" in early 1948),[3] Autolite Spark Plugs (1948–1954); eventually Harlow Wilcox (of Fibber McGee and Molly) became the pitchman. William Spier, Norman Macdonnell and Anton M. Leader were among the producers and directors. Suspense received a Special Citation of Honor Peabody Award for 1946. Second issue of the 1946 magazine tie-in The program's heyday was in the early 1950s, when radio actor, producer and director Elliott Lewis took over (still during the Wilcox/Autolite run). Here the material reached new levels of sophistication.[opinion] The writing was taut,[opinion] and the casting, which had always been a strong point of the series (featuring such film stars as Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich, Eve McVeagh, Lena Horne, and Cary Grant), took an unexpected turn when Lewis expanded the repertory to include many of radio's famous drama and comedy stars – often playing against type – such as Jack Benny. Jim and Marian Jordan of Fibber McGee and Molly were heard in the episode "Backseat Driver", which originally aired February 3, 1949. The highest production values enhanced Suspense, and many of the shows retain their power to grip and entertain.[opinion] At the time he took over Suspense, Lewis was familiar to radio fans for playing Frankie Remley, the wastrel guitar-playing sidekick to Phil Harris in The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. On the May 10, 1951 Suspense, Lewis reversed the roles with "Death on My Hands": A bandleader (Harris) is horrified when an autograph-seeking fan accidentally shoots herself and dies in his hotel room, and a vocalist (Faye) tries to help him as the townfolk call for vigilante justice against him. With the rise of television and the departures of Lewis and Autolite, subsequent producers (Antony Ellis, William N. Robson and others) struggled to maintain the series due to shrinking budgets, the availability of fewer name actors, and listenership decline. To save money, the program frequently used scripts first broadcast by another noteworthy CBS anthology, Escape. In addition to these tales of exotic adventure, Suspense expanded its repertoire to include more science fiction and supernatural content. By the end of its run, the series was remaking scripts from the long-canceled program The Mysterious Traveler. A time travel tale like Robert Arthur's "The Man Who Went Back to Save Lincoln" or a thriller about a death ray-wielding mad scientist would alternate with more run-of-the-mill crime dramas. The series expanded to television with the Suspense series on CBS from 1949 to 1954, and again in 1962. The radio series had a tie-in with Suspense magazine which published four 1946–47 issues edited by Leslie Charteris. The final broadcasts of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense, ending at 7:00 pm Eastern Time on September 30, 1962, are often cited as the end of the Golden Age of Radio. The final episode of Suspense was Devilstone, starring Christopher Carey and Neal Fitzgerald. It was sponsored by Parliament cigarettes.[5] Opening introductions There were several variations of program introductions. A typical early opening is this from April 27, 1943: (MUSIC ... BERNARD HERRMANN'S SUSPENSE THEME ... CONTINUES IN BG) THE MAN IN BLACK: Suspense! This is The Man in Black, here again to introduce Columbia's program, Suspense. Our stars tonight are Miss Agnes Moorehead and Mr. Ray Collins. You've seen these two expert and resourceful players in "Citizen Kane" – "The Magnificent Ambersons" in which Miss Moorehead's performance won her the 1942 Film Critics' Award. Mr. Collins will soon be seen in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Technicolor film, "Salute to the Marines." Miss Moorehead and Mr. Collins return this evening to their first love, the CBS microphone, to appear in a study in terror by Lucille Fletcher called "The Diary of Sophronia Winters." The story told by this diary is tonight's tale of... suspense. If you've been with us on these Tuesday nights, you will know that Suspense is compounded of mystery and suspicion and dangerous adventure. In this series are tales calculated to intrigue you, to stir your nerves, to offer you a precarious situation and then withhold the solution... until the last possible moment. And so it is with "The Diary of Sophronia Winters" and the performances of Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins, we again hope to keep you in... (MUSIC: ... UP, DRAMATICALLY) THE MAN IN BLACK: ... Suspense! Recognition Suspense was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2011. Since 2007, Radio Classics, on Sirius XM channel 82, has been airing episodes of Suspense. The show is also streamed nightly at 7 pm Pacific time on kusaradio.com from the original masters. Satire The familiar opening phrase "tales well-calculated to..." was satirized by Mad as the cover blurb "Tales Calculated to Drive You... Mad" on its first issue (October–November 1952) and continuing until issue #23 (May 1955). Radio comedians Bob and Ray had a recurring routine lampooning the show called "Anxiety." Their character Commander Neville Putney told stories that were presented as dramatic but were intentionally mundane, with the opening line "A tale well designed to keep you in... Anxiety." In the “Chicken Heart” sketch on his Wonderfulness album Bill Cosby relates radio programs during his youth “that were scary.” One is Suspense. Theatre #sundaynightmystery For PowPAC, San Diego actor-director Robert Hitchcox mounted a 2006 stage production recreating two episodes of Suspense, complete with commercials, in a stage set designed like a CBS radio studio.
In this episode I explore an article in History Magazine written by Brad Myers about when ventriloquist Edgar Bergen performed with Charlie McCarthy in his hometown of Decatur, Michigan in 1952. The performance was recorded before a live audience by CBS Radio, and included performances by some local people in the community. For more information on the Historical Society of Michigan and to subscribe to the magazine Michigan History, visit: https://www.hsmichigan.orgFor more information on Michael Delaware, visit:https://michaeldelaware.comRecording of the Edgar Bergen show in 1952 was obtained from Internet Archive and is used under fair use .
Send us a textDorothy Kolb, a seasoned operations and finance executive with over 20 years of experience in sports, media, and creative agency spaces, shares her journey from working at CBS, Fox Sports, NBC, Scripps Networks, and CBS Radio, to founding her own business as an outsourced CFO. A single mother of four, Dorothy navigates challenges of balancing her career and family life, leveraging her diverse skill set to help businesses grow financially. She also touches on her personal experience with imposter syndrome, balancing multiple responsibilities, and the importance of self-care. Dorothy emphasizes empowering women to understand their financials and make informed decisions for their business growth. Her story is one of determination, resilience, and evolving through different phases of life and career.Dorothy Kolb on InstagramDorothy Kolb's Website Podcast Guest MatchPodMatch Automatically Matches Ideal Podcast Hosts And Guests For Interviews Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showyou an F50Woman who's “not done yet?” Subscribe and connect with me if you would like to tell me your story: f50woman.com@gmail.com | www.f50woman.com We welcome you to follow us on our Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn pages and invite you to share us on all of your media channels with the F50Woman Hashtags: #F50WNDY #F50Woman
(00:00) Al Cole from CBS RADIO joins Toucher & Hardy to talk about the most romantic day of the year… Valentine’s Day! (19:40) Cedric Maxwell is part of the radio broadcasts on 98.5 The Sports Hub Celtics Radio Network and joins the show to share his thoughts on the current state of the Boston Celtics. (34:00) We kinda revisit Sarge GPT after a listener sent us a version CONNECT WITH TOUCHER & HARDY: linktr.ee/ToucherandHardy For the latest updates, visit the show page on 985thesportshub.com. Follow 98.5 The Sports Hub on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Watch the show every morning on YouTube, and subscribe to stay up-to-date with all the best moments from Boston’s home for sports!
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk #sleep #insomnia #relax #chill #night #nighttime #bed #bedtime #oldtimeradio #drama #comedy #radio #talkradio #hancock #tonyhancock #hancockshalfhour #sherlock #sherlockholmes #radiodrama #popular #viral #viralpodcast #podcast #podcasting #podcasts #podtok #podcastclip #podcastclips #podcasttrailer #podcastteaser #newpodcastepisode #newpodcast #videopodcast #upcomingpodcast #audiogram #audiograms #truecrimepodcast #historypodcast #truecrime #podcaster #viral #popular #viralpodcast #number1 #instagram #youtube #facebook #johnnydollar #crime #fiction #unwind #devon #texas #texasranger #beer #seaton #seaside #smuggler #colyton #devon #seaton #beer #branscombe #lymebay #lymeregis #brett #brettorchard #orchard #greatdetectives #greatdetectivesofoldtimeradio #detectives #johnnydollar #thesaint #steptoe #texasrangers Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar is a radio drama that aired on CBS Radio from February 18, 1949 to September 30, 1962. The first several seasons imagined protagonist Johnny Dollar as a private investigator drama, with Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien and John Lund portraying Dollar in succession over the years. In 1955 after a yearlong hiatus, the series came back in its best-known incarnation with Bob Bailey starring in "the transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account – America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator." There were 809 episodes (plus two not-for-broadcast auditions) in the 12-year run, and more than 710 still exist today. Jim Cox's book American Radio Networks: A History cites "886 total performances" which includes repeat performances. Format The format best remembered was instituted by writer-director Jack Johnstone. Each case usually started with a phone call from an insurance adjuster, calling on Johnny to investigate an unusual claim: a suspicious death, an attempted fraud, a missing person, or other mysterious circumstances. Each story required Johnny to travel to some distant locale, usually within the United States but sometimes abroad, where he was almost always threatened with personal danger in the course of his investigations. He would compare notes with the police officials who had first investigated each strange occurrence, and followed every clue until he figured out what actually happened. Johnny's file on each case was usually referenced as a "matter," as in "The Silver Blue Matter" or "The Forbes Matter". Later episodes were more fanciful, with titles like "The Wayward Trout Matter" and "The Price of Fame Matter" (the latter featuring a rare guest-star appearance by Vincent Price as himself; here Price and Dollar team up to retrieve a painting stolen by Price's insurance agent). Johnny usually stuck to business, but would sometimes engage in romantic dalliances with women he encountered in his travels; later episodes gave Johnny a steady girlfriend, Betty Lewis. Johnny's precious recreational time was usually spent fishing, and it was not uncommon for Johnny's clients to exploit this favorite pastime in convincing him to take on a job near good fishing locations. His past was rarely mentioned, but Dollar in “The Bennett Matter” described himself as a four-year US Marine veteran who then worked as a police officer for a decade before changing careers to insurance investigation.[5] In "The Blackburn Case" Dollar also refers to his time as a Pinkerton Detective. Each story was recounted in flashback, and every few minutes the action would be interrupted by Johnny listing a line item from his expense account, which served as an effective scene transition. Most of the expense account related to transportation, lodging, and meals, but no incidental expense was too small for Johnny to itemize, as in "Item nine, 10 cents. Aspirin. I needed them." The monetary amounts weren't always literal: the smallest line item Johnny ever recorded was "two cents: what I felt like" after a professional setback; the largest was "one million dollars" (the way he felt after finding a missing woman and her daughter in a snowbound cabin). The episodes generally finished with Johnny tallying up his expense account and traveling back to Hartford, Connecticut, where he was based. Sometimes Johnny would add a sardonic postscript under "Remarks," detailing the aftermath of the case. ("The Todd Matter," which especially disgusted Johnny, ended abruptly with "Remarks – nil!") In later seasons the program sometimes referred to itself, with other characters recognizing Dollar's voice from the radio; in the episode “The Salkoff Sequel Matter” Johnny's radio show becomes an important plot point. Original run As originally conceived, Johnny Dollar was a smart, tough, wisecracking detective who tossed silver-dollar tips to waiters and bellhops. Dick Powell starred in the audition show, recorded in 1948, but withdrew from the role in favour of other detective programs, Rogue's Gallery and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. The Johnny Dollar role went instead to Charles Russell. The show for which Powell auditioned was originally titled Yours Truly, Lloyd London, although the name of the show and its lead character were changed to avoid legal problems with the actual insurance company, Lloyd's of London, before the audition tape of December 7, 1948, was recorded. With the first three actors to play Johnny Dollar – radio actor Russell and movie tough-guy actors Edmond O'Brien and John Lund – there was little to distinguish Johnny Dollar from other detective series at the time (Richard Diamond, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade). While always a friend of the police, Johnny wasn't necessarily a stickler for the strictest interpretation of the law. He was willing to let some things slide to satisfy his own sense of justice, as long as the interests of his employer were also protected. The series ended in September 1954. Revival CBS Radio revived Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar in October 1955 with a new leading man, a new director, and a new format. The program changed from a 30-minute, one-episode-per-week program to a 15-minute, five-nights-a-week serial (Monday through Friday, 8–8:15 pm EST) produced and directed by radio veteran Jack Johnstone. The new Johnny Dollar was Bob Bailey, who had just come off another network detective series, Let George Do It. With a new lead and 75 minutes of air time each week, it became possible to develop each storyline with more detail and with more characters. Almost all of the Johnny Dollar serials were presented by CBS Radio on a sustaining basis (unsponsored, with no commercials); only two of the 55 serials take time out for a sponsor's message. Bob Bailey was exceptionally good in this format, making Johnny more sensitive and thoughtful in addition to his other attributes. Vintage-radio enthusiasts often endorse Bailey as the best of the Johnny Dollars, and consider the 13-month run of five-part stories to be some of the greatest drama in radio history. The serial scripts were usually written by Johnstone, "John Dawson" (a pseudonym for E. Jack Neuman), Les Crutchfield, or Robert Ryf. Blake Edwards also contributed several scripts and the show was always produced and directed by Johnstone. The show featured a stock company of supporting actors, including Virginia Gregg, Harry Bartell, Vic Perrin, Lawrence Dobkin, Stacy Harris, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, John Dehner, Barney Phillips, Lillian Buyeff, Tony Barrett, Don Diamond, Alan Reed, and Forrest Lewis. Movie character actors appeared occasionally, including Jay Novello, Hans Conried, Frank Nelson, Leon Belasco, William Conrad, Edgar Barrier, Jeanne Bates, Gloria Blondell, and Billy Halop. In late 1956, CBS Radio retooled the show, which reverted to a weekly half-hour drama, airing on late Sunday afternoons. Bob Bailey continued in the leading role until 1960 and wrote one episode, "The Carmen Kringle Matter," under his first and middle names (Robert Bainter). Staff announcer Dan Cubberly introduced the program during the Edmond O'Brien run; Roy Rowan was the announcer for the first two years of Bob Bailey's run; he also was an announcer on CBS's I Love Lucy. In "The Laird Douglas Matter," the only Johnny Dollar serial played for laughs, Roy Rowan was written into the script as dog-show expert "Ray Roland." In 1957 Rowan was succeeded by Dan Cubberly, returning to the series. Changes at CBS CBS Radio tried to institute an economy measure in June 1959: its four remaining dramatic series (Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar; Suspense; Gunsmoke starring William Conrad; and Have Gun, Will Travel starring John Dehner) would be moved from Hollywood to New York. The plan met with some resistance, because the cast members and crews of Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel were willing to cancel the shows themselves rather than move to New York. The situation was stalemated for 17 months, as all four programs remained on the air. Finally, in November 1960, CBS Radio kept Gunsmoke in California, discontinued Have Gun, Will Travel, and moved Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense to New York. Bob Bailey, unwilling to relocate, gave up the Johnny Dollar role. Bailey's last performance, aired November 27, 1960, was in a script titled "The Empty Threat Matter," perhaps writer Johnstone's editorial comment on CBS's intention to shut down production in California. In New York, CBS staff producer Bruno Zirato Jr. (who also directed TV game shows for CBS) took over Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, although Johnstone continued to write the scripts. Former child actor Bob Readick took over the leading role in a manner reminiscent of the original Dollar, Charles Russell. After six months he was replaced by Mandel Kramer, who gave the role his own low-key interpretation. Many fans found Mandel Kramer second only to Bailey as the most effective Johnny Dollar. Both Readick and Kramer were members of CBS's stock company in New York, and both appeared in other CBS dramas. The end The final episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense, airing on CBS, are often cited as the end of the golden age of radio. The last episode of Johnny Dollar, "The Tip-Off Matter", ended at 6:35 pm. Eastern Time on September 30, 1962, followed immediately by the final broadcast of Suspense. Although network radio drama returned to the airwaves – in ABC's Theater Five (1964–65), and CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974–82) – these were more experimental "drama workshop" shows, and did not adhere to a continuing format or leading character, albeit the latter did spark a bit of a revival of drama on US commercial radio networks in the 1970s. The "Golden Age" of radio drama, as pioneered in the 1920s, died with Johnny Dollar in 1962. Three unsuccessful attempts were made to transfer the success of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar to television. Charles Russell starred in a 1949 pilot directed by Ralph Levy, Bob Bailey starred in a 1958 pilot entitled The Adventures of Johnny Dollar (which failed because Bailey's 5-foot 9-inch, 150-pound physique didn't match the tough-guy characterization), and William Bryant starred in a 1962 pilot entitled Johnny Dollar. The latter was written, produced, and directed by Blake Edwards. Actors who portrayed Dollar Dick Powell (Audition show in 1948) Charles Russell (February 1949 – January 1950) Edmond O'Brien (February 1950 – September 1952) John Lund (November 1952 – September 1954) Gerald Mohr (Audition show in 1955) Bob Bailey (October 1955 – November 1960) Bob Readick (December 1960 – June 1961) Mandel Kramer (June 1961 – September 1962) Legacy Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was so familiar to CBS Radio's listeners that the network's resident comedians, Bob and Ray, occasionally satirized it. Their version, "Ace Willoughby, International Detective," followed the Johnny Dollar format of exotic locales, continental officials, cool villains, and tense confrontations, with Ray Goulding doing a letter-perfect imitation of Bob Bailey's delivery. In the comedy version, however, the detective usually gave up on the case after being beaten up incessantly. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was a popular weekly radio mystery play in the 1960s and early 1970s on Radio Iran. The role of Johnny Dollar was played by Heidar Saremi, a popular radio performer. Contrary to the original, Johnny Dollar was more of a criminal investigator. At the end of each episode, the narrator asked the radio audience how Johnny found the perpetrators, making the show a mystery quiz as well as a drama; those who guessed correctly were entered into a raffle for a prize. In the 1970s and 1980s the comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre released a number of satirical record albums; several featured spoofs of old-time radio featuring the character Nick Danger, Third Eye, who was loosely based on Sam Spade and Johnny Dollar. The scripts included inside references to radio with lines such as, "It had been snowing in Santa Barbara ever since the top of the page," and riffs on radio sound effects. In 2003, Moonstone Books adapted the Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar radio program into a graphic novel illustrated by Éric Thériault and written by David Gallaher. The show has been the opening item on The Big Broadcast on WAMU in Washington, D.C. off and on since the early 1990s. As of August 2017, the show is being aired several times a day on KTQA FM 95.3 in Tacoma, WA and CHLU FM in Middle LaHave, Nova Scotia, Canada. In August 2021, the SiriusXM satellite radio network began airing many episodes of the show on its "Radio Classics" channel 148. As of February 2019, a documentary about the program, Last Man Standing – Johnny Dollar & the End of Old-Time Radio, has been produced.[12] In 2023, a new graphic novel series was launched with Johnny Dollar investigating cybercrimes of the modern age. "The man with the action packed expense account" is a cyberinsurance investigator, taking on ransomware actors in the modern age. sleep insomnia relax chill night nightime bed bedtime oldtimeradio drama comedy radio talkradio hancock tonyhancock hancockshalfhour sherlock sherlockholmes radiodrama popular viral viralpodcast podcast brett brettorchard orchard east devon seaton beer lyme regis village condado de alhama spain murcia The Golden Age of Radio Also known as the old-time radio (OTR) era, was an era of radio in the United States where it was the dominant electronic home entertainment medium. It began with the birth of commercial radio broadcasting in the early 1920s and lasted through the 1950s, when television gradually superseded radio as the medium of choice for scripted programming, variety and dramatic shows. Radio was the first broadcast medium, and during this period people regularly tuned in to their favourite radio programs, and families gathered to listen to the home radio in the evening. According to a 1947 C. E. Hooper survey, 82 out of 100 Americans were found to be radio listeners. A variety of new entertainment formats and genres were created for the new medium, many of which later migrated to television: radio plays, mystery serials, soap operas, quiz shows, talent shows, daytime and evening variety hours, situation comedies, play-by-play sports, children's shows, cooking shows, and more. In the 1950s, television surpassed radio as the most popular broadcast medium, and commercial radio programming shifted to narrower formats of news, talk, sports and music. Religious broadcasters, listener-supported public radio and college stations provide their own distinctive formats. Origins A family listening to the first broadcasts around 1920 with a crystal radio. The crystal radio, a legacy from the pre-broadcast era, could not power a loudspeaker so the family must share earphones During the first three decades of radio, from 1887 to about 1920, the technology of transmitting sound was undeveloped; the information-carrying ability of radio waves was the same as a telegraph; the radio signal could be either on or off. Radio communication was by wireless telegraphy; at the sending end, an operator tapped on a switch which caused the radio transmitter to produce a series of pulses of radio waves which spelled out text messages in Morse code. At the receiver these sounded like beeps, requiring an operator who knew Morse code to translate them back to text. This type of radio was used exclusively for person-to-person text communication for commercial, diplomatic and military purposes and hobbyists; broadcasting did not exist. The broadcasts of live drama, comedy, music and news that characterize the Golden Age of Radio had a precedent in the Théâtrophone, commercially introduced in Paris in 1890 and available as late as 1932. It allowed subscribers to eavesdrop on live stage performances and hear news reports by means of a network of telephone lines. The development of radio eliminated the wires and subscription charges from this concept. Between 1900 and 1920 the first technology for transmitting sound by radio was developed, AM (amplitude modulation), and AM broadcasting sprang up around 1920. On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden is said to have broadcast the first radio program, consisting of some violin playing and passages from the Bible. While Fessenden's role as an inventor and early radio experimenter is not in dispute, several contemporary radio researchers have questioned whether the Christmas Eve broadcast took place, or whether the date was, in fact, several weeks earlier. The first apparent published reference to the event was made in 1928 by H. P. Davis, Vice President of Westinghouse, in a lecture given at Harvard University. In 1932 Fessenden cited the Christmas Eve 1906 broadcast event in a letter he wrote to Vice President S. M. Kinter of Westinghouse. Fessenden's wife Helen recounts the broadcast in her book Fessenden: Builder of Tomorrows (1940), eight years after Fessenden's death. The issue of whether the 1906 Fessenden broadcast actually happened is discussed in Donna Halper's article "In Search of the Truth About Fessenden"[2] and also in James O'Neal's essays.[3][4] An annotated argument supporting Fessenden as the world's first radio broadcaster was offered in 2006 by Dr. John S. Belrose, Radioscientist Emeritus at the Communications Research Centre Canada, in his essay "Fessenden's 1906 Christmas Eve broadcast." It was not until after the Titanic catastrophe in 1912 that radio for mass communication came into vogue, inspired first by the work of amateur ("ham") radio operators. Radio was especially important during World War I as it was vital for air and naval operations. World War I brought about major developments in radio, superseding the Morse code of the wireless telegraph with the vocal communication of the wireless telephone, through advancements in vacuum tube technology and the introduction of the transceiver. After the war, numerous radio stations were born in the United States and set the standard for later radio programs. The first radio news program was broadcast on August 31, 1920, on the station 8MK in Detroit; owned by The Detroit News, the station covered local election results. This was followed in 1920 with the first commercial radio station in the United States, KDKA, being established in Pittsburgh. The first regular entertainment programs were broadcast in 1922, and on March 10, Variety carried the front-page headline: "Radio Sweeping Country: 1,000,000 Sets in Use." A highlight of this time was the first Rose Bowl being broadcast on January 1, 1923, on the Los Angeles station KHJ. Growth of radio Broadcast radio in the United States underwent a period of rapid change through the decade of the 1920s. Technology advances, better regulation, rapid consumer adoption, and the creation of broadcast networks transformed radio from a consumer curiosity into the mass media powerhouse that defined the Golden Age of Radio. Consumer adoption Through the decade of the 1920s, the purchase of radios by United States homes continued, and accelerated. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) released figures in 1925 stating that 19% of United States homes owned a radio. The triode and regenerative circuit made amplified, vacuum tube radios widely available to consumers by the second half of the 1920s. The advantage was obvious: several people at once in a home could now easily listen to their radio at the same time. In 1930, 40% of the nation's households owned a radio,[8] a figure that was much higher in suburban and large metropolitan areas. The superheterodyne receiver and other inventions refined radios even further in the next decade; even as the Great Depression ravaged the country in the 1930s, radio would stay at the centre of American life. 83% of American homes would own a radio by 1940. Government regulation Although radio was well established with United States consumers by the mid-1920s, regulation of the broadcast medium presented its own challenges. Until 1926, broadcast radio power and frequency use was regulated by the U.S. Department of Commerce, until a legal challenge rendered the agency powerless to do so. Congress responded by enacting the Radio Act of 1927, which included the formation of the Federal Radio Commission (FRC). One of the FRC's most important early actions was the adoption of General Order 40, which divided stations on the AM band into three power level categories, which became known as Local, Regional, and Clear Channel, and reorganized station assignments. Based on this plan, effective 3:00 a.m. Eastern time on November 11, 1928, most of the country's stations were assigned to new transmitting frequencies. Broadcast networks The final element needed to make the Golden Age of Radio possible focused on the question of distribution: the ability for multiple radio stations to simultaneously broadcast the same content, and this would be solved with the concept of a radio network. The earliest radio programs of the 1920s were largely unsponsored; radio stations were a service designed to sell radio receivers. In early 1922, American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) announced the beginning of advertisement-supported broadcasting on its owned stations, and plans for the development of the first radio network using its telephone lines to transmit the content. In July 1926, AT&T abruptly decided to exit the broadcasting field, and signed an agreement to sell its entire network operations to a group headed by RCA, which used the assets to form the National Broadcasting Company. Four radio networks had formed by 1934. These were: National Broadcasting Company Red Network (NBC Red), launched November 15, 1926. Originally founded as the National Broadcasting Company in late 1926, the company was almost immediately forced to split under antitrust laws to form NBC Red and NBC Blue. When, in 1942, NBC Blue was sold and renamed the Blue Network, this network would go back to calling itself simply the National Broadcasting Company Radio Network (NBC). National Broadcasting Company Blue Network (NBC Blue); launched January 10, 1927, split from NBC Red. NBC Blue was sold in 1942 and became the Blue Network, and it in turn transferred its assets to a new company, the American Broadcasting Company on June 15, 1945. That network identified itself as the American Broadcasting Company Radio Network (ABC). Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), launched September 18, 1927. After an initially struggling attempt to compete with the NBC networks, CBS gained new momentum when William S. Paley was installed as company president. Mutual Broadcasting System (Mutual), launched September 29, 1934. Mutual was initially run as a cooperative in which the flagship stations owned the network, not the other way around as was the case with the other three radio networks. Programming In the period before and after the advent of the broadcast network, new forms of entertainment needed to be created to fill the time of a station's broadcast day. Many of the formats born in this era continued into the television and digital eras. In the beginning of the Golden Age, network programs were almost exclusively broadcast live, as the national networks prohibited the airing of recorded programs until the late 1940s because of the inferior sound quality of phonograph discs, the only practical recording medium at that time. As a result, network prime-time shows would be performed twice, once for each coast. Rehearsal for the World War II radio show You Can't Do Business with Hitler with John Flynn and Virginia Moore. This series of programs, broadcast at least once weekly by more than 790 radio stations in the United States, was written and produced by the radio section of the Office of War Information (OWI). Live events Coverage of live events included musical concerts and play-by-play sports broadcasts. News The capability of the new medium to get information to people created the format of modern radio news: headlines, remote reporting, sidewalk interviews (such as Vox Pop), panel discussions, weather reports, and farm reports. The entry of radio into the realm of news triggered a feud between the radio and newspaper industries in the mid-1930s, eventually culminating in newspapers trumping up exaggerated [citation needed] reports of a mass hysteria from the (entirely fictional) radio presentation of The War of the Worlds, which had been presented as a faux newscast. Musical features The sponsored musical feature soon became one of the most popular program formats. Most early radio sponsorship came in the form of selling the naming rights to the program, as evidenced by such programs as The A&P Gypsies, Champion Spark Plug Hour, The Clicquot Club Eskimos, and King Biscuit Time; commercials, as they are known in the modern era, were still relatively uncommon and considered intrusive. During the 1930s and 1940s, the leading orchestras were heard often through big band remotes, and NBC's Monitor continued such remotes well into the 1950s by broadcasting live music from New York City jazz clubs to rural America. Singers such as Harriet Lee and Wendell Hall became popular fixtures on network radio beginning in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Local stations often had staff organists such as Jesse Crawford playing popular tunes. Classical music programs on the air included The Voice of Firestone and The Bell Telephone Hour. Texaco sponsored the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts; the broadcasts, now sponsored by the Toll Brothers, continue to this day around the world, and are one of the few examples of live classical music still broadcast on radio. One of the most notable of all classical music radio programs of the Golden Age of Radio featured the celebrated Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra, which had been created especially for him. At that time, nearly all classical musicians and critics considered Toscanini the greatest living maestro. Popular songwriters such as George Gershwin were also featured on radio. (Gershwin, in addition to frequent appearances as a guest, had his own program in 1934.) The New York Philharmonic also had weekly concerts on radio. There was no dedicated classical music radio station like NPR at that time, so classical music programs had to share the network they were broadcast on with more popular ones, much as in the days of television before the creation of NET and PBS. Country music also enjoyed popularity. National Barn Dance, begun on Chicago's WLS in 1924, was picked up by NBC Radio in 1933. In 1925, WSM Barn Dance went on the air from Nashville. It was renamed the Grand Ole Opry in 1927 and NBC carried portions from 1944 to 1956. NBC also aired The Red Foley Show from 1951 to 1961, and ABC Radio carried Ozark Jubilee from 1953 to 1961. Comedy Radio attracted top comedy talents from vaudeville and Hollywood for many years: Bing Crosby, Abbott and Costello, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Victor Borge, Fanny Brice, Billie Burke, Bob Burns, Judy Canova, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Burns and Allen, Phil Harris, Edgar Bergen, Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Jean Shepherd, Red Skelton and Ed Wynn. Situational comedies also gained popularity, such as Amos 'n' Andy, Easy Aces, Ethel and Albert, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Goldbergs, The Great Gildersleeve, The Halls of Ivy (which featured screen star Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume), Meet Corliss Archer, Meet Millie, and Our Miss Brooks. Radio comedy ran the gamut from the small town humor of Lum and Abner, Herb Shriner and Minnie Pearl to the dialect characterizations of Mel Blanc and the caustic sarcasm of Henry Morgan. Gags galore were delivered weekly on Stop Me If You've Heard This One and Can You Top This?,[18] panel programs devoted to the art of telling jokes. Quiz shows were lampooned on It Pays to Be Ignorant, and other memorable parodies were presented by such satirists as Spike Jones, Stoopnagle and Budd, Stan Freberg and Bob and Ray. British comedy reached American shores in a major assault when NBC carried The Goon Show in the mid-1950s. Some shows originated as stage productions: Clifford Goldsmith's play What a Life was reworked into NBC's popular, long-running The Aldrich Family (1939–1953) with the familiar catchphrases "Henry! Henry Aldrich!," followed by Henry's answer, "Coming, Mother!" Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway hit, You Can't Take It with You (1936), became a weekly situation comedy heard on Mutual (1944) with Everett Sloane and later on NBC (1951) with Walter Brennan. Other shows were adapted from comic strips, such as Blondie, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, The Gumps, Li'l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye the Sailor, Red Ryder, Reg'lar Fellers, Terry and the Pirates and Tillie the Toiler. Bob Montana's redheaded teen of comic strips and comic books was heard on radio's Archie Andrews from 1943 to 1953. The Timid Soul was a 1941–1942 comedy based on cartoonist H. T. Webster's famed Caspar Milquetoast character, and Robert L. Ripley's Believe It or Not! was adapted to several different radio formats during the 1930s and 1940s. Conversely, some radio shows gave rise to spinoff comic strips, such as My Friend Irma starring Marie Wilson. Soap operas The first program generally considered to be a daytime serial drama by scholars of the genre is Painted Dreams, which premiered on WGN on October 20, 1930. The first networked daytime serial is Clara, Lu, 'n Em, which started in a daytime time slot on February 15, 1932. As daytime serials became popular in the early 1930s, they became known as soap operas because many were sponsored by soap products and detergents. On November 25, 1960, the last four daytime radio dramas—Young Dr. Malone, Right to Happiness, The Second Mrs. Burton and Ma Perkins, all broadcast on the CBS Radio Network—were brought to an end. Children's programming The line-up of late afternoon adventure serials included Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, The Cisco Kid, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, Captain Midnight, and The Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters. Badges, rings, decoding devices and other radio premiums offered on these adventure shows were often allied with a sponsor's product, requiring the young listeners to mail in a boxtop from a breakfast cereal or other proof of purchase. Radio plays Radio plays were presented on such programs as 26 by Corwin, NBC Short Story, Arch Oboler's Plays, Quiet, Please, and CBS Radio Workshop. Orson Welles's The Mercury Theatre on the Air and The Campbell Playhouse were considered by many critics to be the finest radio drama anthologies ever presented. They usually starred Welles in the leading role, along with celebrity guest stars such as Margaret Sullavan or Helen Hayes, in adaptations from literature, Broadway, and/or films. They included such titles as Liliom, Oliver Twist (a title now feared lost), A Tale of Two Cities, Lost Horizon, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was on Mercury Theatre that Welles presented his celebrated-but-infamous 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, formatted to sound like a breaking news program. Theatre Guild on the Air presented adaptations of classical and Broadway plays. Their Shakespeare adaptations included a one-hour Macbeth starring Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson, and a 90-minute Hamlet, starring John Gielgud.[22] Recordings of many of these programs survive. During the 1940s, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, famous for playing Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in films, repeated their characterizations on radio on The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which featured both original stories and episodes directly adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. None of the episodes in which Rathbone and Bruce starred on the radio program were filmed with the two actors as Holmes and Watson, so radio became the only medium in which audiences were able to experience Rathbone and Bruce appearing in some of the more famous Holmes stories, such as "The Speckled Band". There were also many dramatizations of Sherlock Holmes stories on radio without Rathbone and Bruce. During the latter part of his career, celebrated actor John Barrymore starred in a radio program, Streamlined Shakespeare, which featured him in a series of one-hour adaptations of Shakespeare plays, many of which Barrymore never appeared in either on stage or in films, such as Twelfth Night (in which he played both Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch), and Macbeth. Lux Radio Theatre and The Screen Guild Theater presented adaptations of Hollywood movies, performed before a live audience, usually with cast members from the original films. Suspense, Escape, The Mysterious Traveler and Inner Sanctum Mystery were popular thriller anthology series. Leading writers who created original material for radio included Norman Corwin, Carlton E. Morse, David Goodis, Archibald MacLeish, Arthur Miller, Arch Oboler, Wyllis Cooper, Rod Serling, Jay Bennett, and Irwin Shaw. Game shows Game shows saw their beginnings in radio. One of the first was Information Please in 1938, and one of the first major successes was Dr. I.Q. in 1939. Winner Take All, which premiered in 1946, was the first to use lockout devices and feature returning champions. A relative of the game show, which would be called the giveaway show in contemporary media, typically involved giving sponsored products to studio audience members, people randomly called by telephone, or both. An early example of this show was the 1939 show Pot o' Gold, but the breakout hit of this type was ABC's Stop the Music in 1948. Winning a prize generally required knowledge of what was being aired on the show at that moment, which led to criticism of the giveaway show as a form of "buying an audience". Giveaway shows were extremely popular through 1948 and 1949. They were often panned as low-brow, and an unsuccessful attempt was even made by the FCC to ban them (as an illegal lottery) in August 1949.[23] Broadcast production methods The RCA Type 44-BX microphone had two live faces and two dead ones. Thus actors could face each other and react. An actor could give the effect of leaving the room by simply moving their head toward the dead face of the microphone. The scripts were paper-clipped together. It has been disputed whether or not actors and actresses would drop finished pages to the carpeted floor after use. Radio stations Despite a general ban on use of recordings on broadcasts by radio networks through the late 1940s, "reference recordings" on phonograph disc were made of many programs as they were being broadcast, for review by the sponsor and for the network's own archival purposes. With the development of high-fidelity magnetic wire and tape recording in the years following World War II, the networks became more open to airing recorded programs and the prerecording of shows became more common. Local stations, however, had always been free to use recordings and sometimes made substantial use of pre-recorded syndicated programs distributed on pressed (as opposed to individually recorded) transcription discs. Recording was done using a cutting lathe and acetate discs. Programs were normally recorded at 331⁄3 rpm on 16 inch discs, the standard format used for such "electrical transcriptions" from the early 1930s through the 1950s. Sometimes, the groove was cut starting at the inside of the disc and running to the outside. This was useful when the program to be recorded was longer than 15 minutes so required more than one disc side. By recording the first side outside in, the second inside out, and so on, the sound quality at the disc change-over points would match and result in a more seamless playback. An inside start also had the advantage that the thread of material cut from the disc's surface, which had to be kept out of the path of the cutting stylus, was naturally thrown toward the centre of the disc so was automatically out of the way. When cutting an outside start disc, a brush could be used to keep it out of the way by sweeping it toward the middle of the disc. Well-equipped recording lathes used the vacuum from a water aspirator to pick it up as it was cut and deposit it in a water-filled bottle. In addition to convenience, this served a safety purpose, as the cellulose nitrate thread was highly flammable and a loose accumulation of it combusted violently if ignited. Most recordings of radio broadcasts were made at a radio network's studios, or at the facilities of a network-owned or affiliated station, which might have four or more lathes. A small local station often had none. Two lathes were required to capture a program longer than 15 minutes without losing parts of it while discs were flipped over or changed, along with a trained technician to operate them and monitor the recording while it was being made. However, some surviving recordings were produced by local stations. When a substantial number of copies of an electrical transcription were required, as for the distribution of a syndicated program, they were produced by the same process used to make ordinary records. A master recording was cut, then electroplated to produce a stamper from which pressings in vinyl (or, in the case of transcription discs pressed before about 1935, shellac) were moulded in a record press. Armed Forces Radio Service Frank Sinatra and Alida Valli converse over Armed Forces Radio Service during World War II The Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) had its origins in the U.S. War Department's quest to improve troop morale. This quest began with short-wave broadcasts of educational and information programs to troops in 1940. In 1941, the War Department began issuing "Buddy Kits" (B-Kits) to departing troops, which consisted of radios, 78 rpm records and electrical transcription discs of radio shows. However, with the entrance of the United States into World War II, the War Department decided that it needed to improve the quality and quantity of its offerings. This began with the broadcasting of its own original variety programs. Command Performance was the first of these, produced for the first time on March 1, 1942. On May 26, 1942, the Armed Forces Radio Service was formally established. Originally, its programming comprised network radio shows with the commercials removed. However, it soon began producing original programming, such as Mail Call, G.I. Journal, Jubilee and GI Jive. At its peak in 1945, the Service produced around 20 hours of original programming each week. From 1943 until 1949 the AFRS also broadcast programs developed through the collaborative efforts of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Columbia Broadcasting System in support of America's cultural diplomacy initiatives and President Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbour policy. Included among the popular shows was Viva America which showcased leading musical artists from both North and South America for the entertainment of America's troops. Included among the regular performers were: Alfredo Antonini, Juan Arvizu, Nestor Mesta Chayres, Kate Smith,[26] and John Serry Sr. After the war, the AFRS continued providing programming to troops in Europe. During the 1950s and early 1960s it presented performances by the Army's only symphonic orchestra ensemble—the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. It also provided programming for future wars that the United States was involved in. It survives today as a component of the American Forces Network (AFN). All of the shows aired by the AFRS during the Golden Age were recorded as electrical transcription discs, vinyl copies of which were shipped to stations overseas to be broadcast to the troops. People in the United States rarely ever heard programming from the AFRS,[31] though AFRS recordings of Golden Age network shows were occasionally broadcast on some domestic stations beginning in the 1950s. In some cases, the AFRS disc is the only surviving recording of a program. Home radio recordings in the United States There was some home recording of radio broadcasts in the 1930s and 1940s. Examples from as early as 1930 have been documented. During these years, home recordings were made with disc recorders, most of which were only capable of storing about four minutes of a radio program on each side of a twelve-inch 78 rpm record. Most home recordings were made on even shorter-playing ten-inch or smaller discs. Some home disc recorders offered the option of the 331⁄3 rpm speed used for electrical transcriptions, allowing a recording more than twice as long to be made, although with reduced audio quality. Office dictation equipment was sometimes pressed into service for making recordings of radio broadcasts, but the audio quality of these devices was poor and the resulting recordings were in odd formats that had to be played back on similar equipment. Due to the expense of recorders and the limitations of the recording media, home recording of broadcasts was not common during this period and it was usually limited to brief excerpts. The lack of suitable home recording equipment was somewhat relieved in 1947 with the availability of magnetic wire recorders for domestic use. These were capable of recording an hour-long broadcast on a single small spool of wire, and if a high-quality radio's audio output was recorded directly, rather than by holding a microphone up to its speaker, the recorded sound quality was very good. However, because the wire cost money and, like magnetic tape, could be repeatedly re-used to make new recordings, only a few complete broadcasts appear to have survived on this medium. In fact, there was little home recording of complete radio programs until the early 1950s, when increasingly affordable reel-to-reel tape recorders for home use were introduced to the market. Recording media Electrical transcription discs The War of the Worlds radio broadcast by Orson Welles on electrical transcription disc Before the early 1950s, when radio networks and local stations wanted to preserve a live broadcast, they did so by means of special phonograph records known as "electrical transcriptions" (ETs), made by cutting a sound-modulated groove into a blank disc. At first, in the early 1930s, the blanks varied in both size and composition, but most often they were simply bare aluminum and the groove was indented rather than cut. Typically, these very early recordings were not made by the network or radio station, but by a private recording service contracted by the broadcast sponsor or one of the performers. The bare aluminum discs were typically 10 or 12 inches in diameter and recorded at the then-standard speed of 78 rpm, which meant that several disc sides were required to accommodate even a 15-minute program. By about 1936, 16-inch aluminum-based discs coated with cellulose nitrate lacquer, commonly known as acetates and recorded at a speed of 331⁄3 rpm, had been adopted by the networks and individual radio stations as the standard medium for recording broadcasts. The making of such recordings, at least for some purposes, then became routine. Some discs were recorded using a "hill and dale" vertically modulated groove, rather than the "lateral" side-to-side modulation found on the records being made for home use at that time. The large slow-speed discs could easily contain fifteen minutes on each side, allowing an hour-long program to be recorded on only two discs. The lacquer was softer than shellac or vinyl and wore more rapidly, allowing only a few playbacks with the heavy pickups and steel needles then in use before deterioration became audible. During World War II, aluminum became a necessary material for the war effort and was in short supply. This caused an alternative to be sought for the base on which to coat the lacquer. Glass, despite its obvious disadvantage of fragility, had occasionally been used in earlier years because it could provide a perfectly smooth and even supporting surface for mastering and other critical applications. Glass base recording blanks came into general use for the duration of the war. Magnetic wire recording In the late 1940s, wire recorders became a readily obtainable means of recording radio programs. On a per-minute basis, it was less expensive to record a broadcast on wire than on discs. The one-hour program that required the four sides of two 16-inch discs could be recorded intact on a single spool of wire less than three inches in diameter and about half an inch thick. The audio fidelity of a good wire recording was comparable to acetate discs and by comparison the wire was practically indestructible, but it was soon rendered obsolete by the more manageable and easily edited medium of magnetic tape. Reel-to-reel tape recording Bing Crosby became the first major proponent of magnetic tape recording for radio, and he was the first to use it on network radio, after he did a demonstration program in 1947. Tape had several advantages over earlier recording methods. Running at a sufficiently high speed, it could achieve higher fidelity than both electrical transcription discs and magnetic wire. Discs could be edited only by copying parts of them to a new disc, and the copying entailed a loss of audio quality. Wire could be divided up and the ends spliced together by knotting, but wire was difficult to handle and the crude splices were too noticeable. Tape could be edited by cutting it with a blade and neatly joining ends together with adhesive tape. By early 1949, the transition from live performances preserved on discs to performances pre-recorded on magnetic tape for later broadcast was complete for network radio programs. However, for the physical distribution of pre-recorded programming to individual stations, 16-inch 331⁄3 rpm vinyl pressings, less expensive to produce in quantities of identical copies than tapes, continued to be standard throughout the 1950s. Availability of recordings The great majority of pre-World War II live radio broadcasts are lost. Many were never recorded; few recordings antedate the early 1930s. Beginning then several of the longer-running radio dramas have their archives complete or nearly complete. The earlier the date, the less likely it is that a recording survives. However, a good number of syndicated programs from this period have survived because copies were distributed far and wide. Recordings of live network broadcasts from the World War II years were preserved in the form of pressed vinyl copies issued by the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) and survive in relative abundance. Syndicated programs from World War II and later years have nearly all survived. The survival of network programming from this time frame is more inconsistent; the networks started prerecording their formerly live shows on magnetic tape for subsequent network broadcast, but did not physically distribute copies, and the expensive tapes, unlike electrical transcription ("ET") discs, could be "wiped" and re-used (especially since, in the age of emerging trends such as television and music radio, such recordings were believed to have virtually no rerun or resale value). Thus, while some prime time network radio series from this era exist in full or almost in full, especially the most famous and longest-lived of them, less prominent or shorter-lived series (such as serials) may have only a handful of extant episodes. Airchecks, off-the-air recordings of complete shows made by, or at the behest of, individuals for their own private use, sometimes help to fill in such gaps. The contents of privately made recordings of live broadcasts from the first half of the 1930s can be of particular interest, as little live material from that period survives. Unfortunately, the sound quality of very early private recordings is often very poor, although in some cases this is largely due to the use of an incorrect playback stylus, which can also badly damage some unusual types of discs. Most of the Golden Age programs in circulation among collectors—whether on analogue tape, CD, or in the form of MP3s—originated from analogue 16-inch transcription disc, although some are off-the-air AM recordings. But in many cases, the circulating recordings are corrupted (decreased in quality), because lossless digital recording for the home market did not come until the very end of the twentieth century. Collectors made and shared recordings on analogue magnetic tapes, the only practical, relatively inexpensive medium, first on reels, then cassettes. "Sharing" usually meant making a duplicate tape. They connected two recorders, playing on one and recording on the other. Analog recordings are never perfect, and copying an analogue recording multiplies the imperfections. With the oldest recordings this can even mean it went out the speaker of one machine and in via the microphone of the other. The muffled sound, dropouts, sudden changes in sound quality, unsteady pitch, and other defects heard all too often are almost always accumulated tape copy defects. In addition, magnetic recordings, unless preserved archivally, are gradually damaged by the Earth's magnetic field. The audio quality of the source discs, when they have survived unscathed and are accessed and dubbed anew, is usually found to be reasonably clear and undistorted, sometimes startlingly good, although like all phonograph records they are vulnerable to wear and the effects of scuffs, scratches, and ground-in dust. Many shows from the 1940s have survived only in edited AFRS versions, although some exist in both the original and AFRS forms. As of 2020, the Old Time Radio collection at the Internet Archive contains 5,121 recordings. An active group of collectors makes digitally available, via CD or download, large collections of programs. RadioEchoes.com offers 98,949 episodes in their collection, but not all is old-time radio. Copyright status Unlike film, television, and print items from the era, the copyright status of most recordings from the Golden Age of Radio is unclear. This is because, prior to 1972, the United States delegated the copyrighting of sound recordings to the individual states, many of which offered more generous common law copyright protections than the federal government offered for other media (some offered perpetual copyright, which has since been abolished; under the Music Modernization Act of September 2018, any sound recording 95 years old or older will be thrust into the public domain regardless of state law). The only exceptions are AFRS original productions, which are considered work of the United States government and thus both ineligible for federal copyright and outside the jurisdiction of any state; these programs are firmly in the public domain (this does not apply to programs carried by AFRS but produced by commercial networks). In practice, most old-time radio recordings are treated as orphan works: although there may still be a valid copyright on the program, it is seldom enforced. The copyright on an individual sound recording is distinct from the federal copyright for the underlying material (such as a published script, music, or in the case of adaptations, the original film or television material), and in many cases it is impossible to determine where or when the original recording was made or if the recording was copyrighted in that state. The U.S. Copyright Office states "there are a variety of legal regimes governing protection of pre-1972 sound recordings in the various states, and the scope of protection and of exceptions and limitations to that protection is unclear."[39] For example, New York has issued contradicting rulings on whether or not common law exists in that state; the most recent ruling, 2016's Flo & Eddie, Inc. v. Sirius XM Radio, holds that there is no such copyright in New York in regard to public performance.[40] Further complicating matters is that certain examples in case law have implied that radio broadcasts (and faithful reproductions thereof), because they were distributed freely to the public over the air, may not be eligible for copyright in and of themselves. The Internet Archive and other organizations that distribute public domain and open-source audio recordings maintain extensive archives of old-time radio programs. Legacy United States Some old-time radio shows continued on the air, although in ever-dwindling numbers, throughout the 1950s, even after their television equivalents had conquered the general public. One factor which helped to kill off old-time radio entirely was the evolution of popular music (including the development of rock and roll), which led to the birth of the top 40 radio format. A top 40 show could be produced in a small studio in a local station with minimal staff. This displaced full-service network radio and hastened the end of the golden-age era of radio drama by 1962. (Radio as a broadcast medium would survive, thanks in part to the proliferation of the transistor radio, and permanent installation in vehicles, making the medium far more portable than television). Full-service stations that did not adopt either top 40 or the mellower beautiful music or MOR formats eventually developed all-news radio in the mid-1960s. Scripted radio comedy and drama in the vein of old-time radio has a limited presence on U.S. radio. Several radio theatre series are still in production in the United States, usually airing on Sunday nights. These include original series such as Imagination Theatre and a radio adaptation of The Twilight Zone TV series, as well as rerun compilations such as the popular daily series When Radio Was and USA Radio Network's Golden Age of Radio Theatre, and weekly programs such as The Big Broadcast on WAMU, hosted by Murray Horwitz. These shows usually air in late nights and/or on weekends on small AM stations. Carl Amari's nationally syndicated radio show Hollywood 360 features 5 old-time radio episodes each week during his 5-hour broadcast. Amari's show is heard on 100+ radio stations coast-to-coast and in 168 countries on American Forces Radio. Local rerun compilations are also heard, primarily on public radio stations. Sirius XM Radio maintains a full-time Radio Classics channel devoted to rebroadcasts of vintage radio shows. Starting in 1974, Garrison Keillor, through his syndicated two-hour-long program A Prairie Home Companion, has provided a living museum of the production, tone and listener's experience of this era of radio for several generations after its demise. Produced live in theatres throughout the country, using the same sound effects and techniques of the era, it ran through 2016 with Keillor as host. The program included segments that were close renditions (in the form of parody) of specific genres of this era, including Westerns ("Dusty and Lefty, The Lives of the Cowboys"), detective procedurals ("Guy Noir, Private Eye") and even advertising through fictional commercials. Keillor also wrote a novel, WLT: A Radio Romance based on a radio station of this era—including a personally narrated version for the ultimate in verisimilitude. Upon Keillor's retirement, replacement host Chris Thile chose to reboot the show (since renamed Live from Here after the syndicator cut ties with Keillor) and eliminate much of the old-time radio trappings of the format; the show was ultimately cancelled in 2020 due to financial and logistics problems. Vintage shows and new audio productions in America are accessible more widely from recordings or by satellite and web broadcasters, rather than over conventional AM and FM radio. The National Audio Theatre Festival is a national organization and yearly conference keeping the audio arts—especially audio drama—alive, and continues to involve long-time voice actors and OTR veterans in its ranks. Its predecessor, the Midwest Radio Theatre Workshop, was first hosted by Jim Jordan, of Fibber McGee and Molly fame, and Norman Corwin advised the organization. One of the longest running radio programs celebrating this era is The Golden Days of Radio, which was hosted on the Armed Forces Radio Service for more than 20 years and overall for more than 50 years by Frank Bresee, who also played "Little Beaver" on the Red Ryder program as a child actor. One of the very few still-running shows from the earlier era of radio is a Christian program entitled Unshackled! The weekly half-hour show, produced in Chicago by Pacific Garden Mission, has been continuously broadcast since 1950. The shows are created using techniques from the 1950s (including home-made sound effects) and are broadcast across the U.S. and around the world by thousands of radio stations. Today, radio performers of the past appear at conventions that feature re-creations of classic shows, as well as music, memorabilia and historical panels. The largest of these events was the Friends of Old Time Radio Convention, held in Newark, New Jersey, which held its final convention in October 2011 after 36 years. Others include REPS in Seattle (June), SPERDVAC in California, the Cincinnati OTR & Nostalgia Convention (April), and the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention (September). Veterans of the Friends of Old Time Radio Convention, including Chairperson Steven M. Lewis of The Gotham Radio Players, Maggie Thompson, publisher of the Comic Book Buyer's Guide, Craig Wichman of audio drama troupe Quicksilver Audio Theatre and long-time FOTR Publicist Sean Dougherty have launched a successor event, Celebrating Audio Theatre – Old & New, scheduled for October 12–13, 2012. Radio dramas from the golden age are sometimes recreated as live stage performances at such events. One such group, led by director Daniel Smith, has been performing re-creations of old-time radio dramas at Fairfield University's Regina A. Quick Centre for the Arts since the year 2000. The 40th anniversary of what is widely considered the end of the old time radio era (the final broadcasts of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense on September 30, 1962) was marked with a commentary on NPR's All Things Considered. A handful of radio programs from the old-time era remain in production, all from the genres of news, music, or religious broadcasting: the Grand Ole Opry (1925), Music and the Spoken Word (1929), The Lutheran Hour (1930), the CBS World News Roundup (1938), King Biscuit Time (1941) and the Renfro Valley Gatherin' (1943). Of those, all but the Opry maintain their original short-form length of 30 minutes or less. The Wheeling Jamboree counts an earlier program on a competing station as part of its history, tracing its lineage back to 1933. Western revival/comedy act Riders in the Sky produced a radio serial Riders Radio Theatre in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to provide sketch comedy on existing radio programs including the Grand Ole Opry, Midnite Jamboree and WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. Elsewhere Regular broadcasts of radio plays are also heard in—among other countries—Australia, Croatia, Estonia,[46] France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, and Sweden. In the United Kingdom, such scripted radio drama continues on BBC Radio 3 and (principally) BBC Radio 4, the second-most popular radio station in the country, as well as on the rerun channel BBC Radio 4 Extra, which is the seventh-most popular station there. Special thanks to Wikipedia. #starradio #totalstar #star1075 #heart #heartradio #lbc #bbc #bbcradio #bbcradio1 #bbcradio2 #bbcradio3 #bbcradio4 #radio4extra #absoluteradio #absolute #capital #capitalradio #greatesthitsradio #hitsradio #radio #adultcontemporary #spain #bristol #frenchay #colyton #lymeregis #seaton #beer #devon #eastdevon #brettorchard #brettsoldtimeradioshow fe2f4df62ffeeb8c30c04d3d3454779ca91a4871
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely winters night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an instagram page and youtube channel both called brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk #sleep #insomnia #relax #chill #night #nighttime #bed #bedtime #oldtimeradio #drama #comedy #radio #talkradio #hancock #tonyhancock #hancockshalfhour #sherlock #sherlockholmes #radiodrama #popular #viral #viralpodcast #podcast #podcasting #podcasts #podtok #podcastclip #podcastclips #podcasttrailer #podcastteaser #newpodcastepisode #newpodcast #videopodcast #upcomingpodcast #audiogram #audiograms #truecrimepodcast #historypodcast #truecrime #podcaster #viral #popular #viralpodcast #number1 #instagram #youtube #facebook #johnnydollar #crime #fiction #unwind #devon #texas #texasranger #beer #seaton #seaside #smuggler #colyton #devon #seaton #beer #branscombe #lymebay #lymeregis #brett #brettorchard #orchard #greatdetectives #greatdetectivesofoldtimeradio #detectives #johnnydollar #thesaint #steptoe #texasrangers Suspense is a radio drama series broadcast on CBS Radio from 1940 through 1962. One of the premier drama programs of the Golden Age of Radio, was subtitled "radio's outstanding theatre of thrills" and focused on suspense thriller-type scripts, usually featuring leading Hollywood actors of the era. Approximately 945 episodes were broadcast during its long run, and more than 900 still exist. Suspense went through several major phases, characterized by different hosts, sponsors, and director/producers. Formula plot devices were followed for all but a handful of episodes: the protagonist was usually a normal person suddenly dropped into a threatening or bizarre situation; solutions were "withheld until the last possible second"; and evildoers were usually punished in the end. In its early years, the program made only occasional forays into science fiction and fantasy. Notable exceptions include adaptations of Curt Siodmak's Donovan's Brain and H. P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror", but by the late 1950s, such material was regularly featured. Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock directed its audition show (for the CBS summer series Forecast). This was an adaptation of The Lodger a story Hitchcock had filmed in 1926 with Ivor Novello. Martin Grams Jr., author of Suspense: Twenty Years of Thrills and Chills, described the Forecast origin of Suspense: On the second presentation of July 22, 1940, Forecast offered a mystery/horror show titled Suspense. With the co-operation of his producer, Walter Wanger, Alfred Hitchcock received the honor of directing his first radio show for the American public. The condition agreed upon for Hitchcock's appearance was that CBS make a pitch to the listening audience about his and Wanger's latest film, Foreign Correspondent. To add flavor to the deal, Wanger threw in Edmund Gwenn and Herbert Marshall as part of the package. All three men (including Hitch) would be seen in the upcoming film, which was due for a theatrical release the next month. Both Marshall and Hitchcock decided on the same story to bring to the airwaves, which happened to be a favorite of both of them: Marie Belloc Lowndes' "The Lodger." Alfred Hitchcock had filmed this story for Gainsborough in 1926, and since then it had remained as one of his favorites. Herbert Marshall portrayed the mysterious lodger, and co-starring with him were Edmund Gwenn and character actress Lurene Tuttle as the rooming-house keepers who start to suspect that their new boarder might be the notorious Jack-the-Ripper. [Gwenn was actually repeating the role taken in the 1926 film by his brother, Arthur Chesney. And Tuttle would work again with Hitchcock nearly 20 years later, playing Mrs. Al Chambers, the sheriff's wife, in Psycho.] Character actor Joseph Kearns also had a small part in the drama, and Wilbur Hatch, head musician for CBS Radio at the time, composed and conducted the music specially for the program. Adapting the script to radio was not a great technical challenge for Hitchcock, and he cleverly decided to hold back the ending of the story from the listening audience in order to keep them in suspense themselves. This way, if the audience's curiosity got the better of them, they would write in to the network to find out whether the mysterious lodger was in fact Jack the Ripper. For the next few weeks, hundreds of letters came in from faithful listeners asking how the story ended. Actually a few wrote threats claiming that it was "indecent" and "immoral" to present such a production without giving the solution 1942–1962 In the earliest years, the program was hosted by "The Man in Black" (played by Joseph Kearns or Ted Osborne) with many episodes written or adapted by the prominent mystery author John Dickson Carr. One of the series' earliest successes and its single most popular episode is Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry, Wrong Number", about a bedridden woman (Agnes Moorehead) who panics after overhearing a murder plot on a crossed telephone connection but is unable to persuade anyone to investigate. First broadcast on May 25, 1943, it was restaged seven times (last on February 14, 1960) – each time with Moorehead. The popularity of the episode led to a film adaptation in 1948. Another notable early episode was Fletcher's "The Hitch Hiker" (aired September 2, 1942), in which a motorist (Orson Welles) is stalked on a cross-country trip by a nondescript man who keeps appearing on the side of the road; however, the first performance of "The Hitch-Hiker" actually took place on The Orson Welles Show the previous year. "The Hitch-Hiker" was later adapted for television by Rod Serling as a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone. After the network sustained the program during its first two years, the sponsor became Roma Wines (1944–1947), and then (after another brief period of sustained hour-long episodes, initially featuring Robert Montgomery as host and "producer" in early 1948),[3] Autolite Spark Plugs (1948–1954); eventually Harlow Wilcox (of Fibber McGee and Molly) became the pitchman. William Spier, Norman Macdonnell and Anton M. Leader were among the producers and directors. Suspense received a Special Citation of Honor Peabody Award for 1946. Second issue of the 1946 magazine tie-in The program's heyday was in the early 1950s, when radio actor, producer and director Elliott Lewis took over (still during the Wilcox/Autolite run). Here the material reached new levels of sophistication.[opinion] The writing was taut,[opinion] and the casting, which had always been a strong point of the series (featuring such film stars as Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich, Eve McVeagh, Lena Horne, and Cary Grant), took an unexpected turn when Lewis expanded the repertory to include many of radio's famous drama and comedy stars – often playing against type – such as Jack Benny. Jim and Marian Jordan of Fibber McGee and Molly were heard in the episode "Backseat Driver", which originally aired February 3, 1949. The highest production values enhanced Suspense, and many of the shows retain their power to grip and entertain.[opinion] At the time he took over Suspense, Lewis was familiar to radio fans for playing Frankie Remley, the wastrel guitar-playing sidekick to Phil Harris in The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. On the May 10, 1951 Suspense, Lewis reversed the roles with "Death on My Hands": A bandleader (Harris) is horrified when an autograph-seeking fan accidentally shoots herself and dies in his hotel room, and a vocalist (Faye) tries to help him as the townfolk call for vigilante justice against him. With the rise of television and the departures of Lewis and Autolite, subsequent producers (Antony Ellis, William N. Robson and others) struggled to maintain the series due to shrinking budgets, the availability of fewer name actors, and listenership decline. To save money, the program frequently used scripts first broadcast by another noteworthy CBS anthology, Escape. In addition to these tales of exotic adventure, Suspense expanded its repertoire to include more science fiction and supernatural content. By the end of its run, the series was remaking scripts from the long-canceled program The Mysterious Traveler. A time travel tale like Robert Arthur's "The Man Who Went Back to Save Lincoln" or a thriller about a death ray-wielding mad scientist would alternate with more run-of-the-mill crime dramas. The series expanded to television with the Suspense series on CBS from 1949 to 1954, and again in 1962. The radio series had a tie-in with Suspense magazine which published four 1946–47 issues edited by Leslie Charteris. The final broadcasts of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense, ending at 7:00 pm Eastern Time on September 30, 1962, are often cited as the end of the Golden Age of Radio. The final episode of Suspense was Devilstone, starring Christopher Carey and Neal Fitzgerald. It was sponsored by Parliament cigarettes.[5] Opening introductions There were several variations of program introductions. A typical early opening is this from April 27, 1943: (MUSIC ... BERNARD HERRMANN'S SUSPENSE THEME ... CONTINUES IN BG) THE MAN IN BLACK: Suspense! This is The Man in Black, here again to introduce Columbia's program, Suspense. Our stars tonight are Miss Agnes Moorehead and Mr. Ray Collins. You've seen these two expert and resourceful players in "Citizen Kane" – "The Magnificent Ambersons" in which Miss Moorehead's performance won her the 1942 Film Critics' Award. Mr. Collins will soon be seen in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Technicolor film, "Salute to the Marines." Miss Moorehead and Mr. Collins return this evening to their first love, the CBS microphone, to appear in a study in terror by Lucille Fletcher called "The Diary of Sophronia Winters." The story told by this diary is tonight's tale of... suspense. If you've been with us on these Tuesday nights, you will know that Suspense is compounded of mystery and suspicion and dangerous adventure. In this series are tales calculated to intrigue you, to stir your nerves, to offer you a precarious situation and then withhold the solution... until the last possible moment. And so it is with "The Diary of Sophronia Winters" and the performances of Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins, we again hope to keep you in... (MUSIC: ... UP, DRAMATICALLY) THE MAN IN BLACK: ... Suspense! Recognition Suspense was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2011. Since 2007, Radio Classics, on Sirius XM channel 82, has been airing episodes of Suspense. The show is also streamed nightly at 7 pm Pacific time on kusaradio.com from the original masters. Satire The familiar opening phrase "tales well-calculated to..." was satirized by Mad as the cover blurb "Tales Calculated to Drive You... Mad" on its first issue (October–November 1952) and continuing until issue #23 (May 1955). Radio comedians Bob and Ray had a recurring routine lampooning the show called "Anxiety." Their character Commander Neville Putney told stories that were presented as dramatic but were intentionally mundane, with the opening line "A tale well designed to keep you in... Anxiety." In the “Chicken Heart” sketch on his Wonderfulness album Bill Cosby relates radio programs during his youth “that were scary.” One is Suspense. Theatre #sundaynightmystery For PowPAC, San Diego actor-director Robert Hitchcox mounted a 2006 stage production recreating two episodes of Suspense, complete with commercials, in a stage set designed like a CBS radio studio.
A Certified Professional Life Coach dedicated to helping singles and couples create loving, lasting partnerships. Since 2005, Amy has been empowering her clients through her innovative Motivated to Marry Dating Secrets coaching program, guiding them to clarify their relationship values and connect with their ideal partners—often within just a few dates. As a PCC certified through ICF since 2016, Amy's expertise has been featured in top outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CBS Radio, and she's the acclaimed author of Get It Right This Time – How to Find and Keep Your Ideal Romantic Partner and 30 Very Good Reasons NOT to Get Married Until You Are 30! Whether you're navigating the dating scene or seeking to strengthen your current relationship, Amy's proven strategies and real-life success stories will inspire you to achieve the love life you deserve.
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely December night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an Instagram page and YouTube channel both called Brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk #sleep #insomnia #relax #chill #night #nighttime #bed #bedtime #oldtimeradio #drama #comedy #radio #talkradio #hancock #tonyhancock #hancockshalfhour #sherlock #sherlockholmes #radiodrama #popular #viral #viralpodcast #podcast #podcasting #podcasts #podtok #podcastclip #podcastclips #podcasttrailer #podcastteaser #newpodcastepisode #newpodcast #videopodcast #upcomingpodcast #audiogram #audiograms #truecrimepodcast #historypodcast #truecrime #podcaster #viral #popular #viralpodcast #number1 #instagram #youtube #facebook #johnnydollar #crime #fiction #unwind #devon #texas #texasranger #beer #seaton #seaside #smuggler #colyton #devon #seaton #beer #branscombe #lymebay #lymeregis #brett #brettorchard #orchard #greatdetectives #greatdetectivesofoldtimeradio #detectives #johnnydollar #thesaint #steptoe #texasrangers Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar is a radio drama that aired on CBS Radio from February 18, 1949 to September 30, 1962. The first several seasons imagined protagonist Johnny Dollar as a private investigator drama, with Charles Russell, Edmond O'Brien and John Lund portraying Dollar in succession over the years. In 1955 after a yearlong hiatus, the series came back in its best-known incarnation with Bob Bailey starring in "the transcribed adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account – America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator." There were 809 episodes (plus two not-for-broadcast auditions) in the 12-year run, and more than 710 still exist today. Jim Cox's book American Radio Networks: A History cites "886 total performances" which includes repeat performances. Format The format best remembered was instituted by writer-director Jack Johnstone. Each case usually started with a phone call from an insurance adjuster, calling on Johnny to investigate an unusual claim: a suspicious death, an attempted fraud, a missing person, or other mysterious circumstances. Each story required Johnny to travel to some distant locale, usually within the United States but sometimes abroad, where he was almost always threatened with personal danger in the course of his investigations. He would compare notes with the police officials who had first investigated each strange occurrence, and followed every clue until he figured out what actually happened. Johnny's file on each case was usually referenced as a "matter," as in "The Silver Blue Matter" or "The Forbes Matter". Later episodes were more fanciful, with titles like "The Wayward Trout Matter" and "The Price of Fame Matter" (the latter featuring a rare guest-star appearance by Vincent Price as himself; here Price and Dollar team up to retrieve a painting stolen by Price's insurance agent). Johnny usually stuck to business, but would sometimes engage in romantic dalliances with women he encountered in his travels; later episodes gave Johnny a steady girlfriend, Betty Lewis. Johnny's precious recreational time was usually spent fishing, and it was not uncommon for Johnny's clients to exploit this favorite pastime in convincing him to take on a job near good fishing locations. His past was rarely mentioned, but Dollar in “The Bennett Matter” described himself as a four-year US Marine veteran who then worked as a police officer for a decade before changing careers to insurance investigation.[5] In "The Blackburn Case" Dollar also refers to his time as a Pinkerton Detective. Each story was recounted in flashback, and every few minutes the action would be interrupted by Johnny listing a line item from his expense account, which served as an effective scene transition. Most of the expense account related to transportation, lodging, and meals, but no incidental expense was too small for Johnny to itemize, as in "Item nine, 10 cents. Aspirin. I needed them." The monetary amounts weren't always literal: the smallest line item Johnny ever recorded was "two cents: what I felt like" after a professional setback; the largest was "one million dollars" (the way he felt after finding a missing woman and her daughter in a snowbound cabin). The episodes generally finished with Johnny tallying up his expense account and traveling back to Hartford, Connecticut, where he was based. Sometimes Johnny would add a sardonic postscript under "Remarks," detailing the aftermath of the case. ("The Todd Matter," which especially disgusted Johnny, ended abruptly with "Remarks – nil!") In later seasons the program sometimes referred to itself, with other characters recognizing Dollar's voice from the radio; in the episode “The Salkoff Sequel Matter” Johnny's radio show becomes an important plot point. Original run As originally conceived, Johnny Dollar was a smart, tough, wisecracking detective who tossed silver-dollar tips to waiters and bellhops. Dick Powell starred in the audition show, recorded in 1948, but withdrew from the role in favour of other detective programs, Rogue's Gallery and Richard Diamond, Private Detective. The Johnny Dollar role went instead to Charles Russell. The show for which Powell auditioned was originally titled Yours Truly, Lloyd London, although the name of the show and its lead character were changed to avoid legal problems with the actual insurance company, Lloyd's of London, before the audition tape of December 7, 1948, was recorded. With the first three actors to play Johnny Dollar – radio actor Russell and movie tough-guy actors Edmond O'Brien and John Lund – there was little to distinguish Johnny Dollar from other detective series at the time (Richard Diamond, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade). While always a friend of the police, Johnny wasn't necessarily a stickler for the strictest interpretation of the law. He was willing to let some things slide to satisfy his own sense of justice, as long as the interests of his employer were also protected. The series ended in September 1954. Revival CBS Radio revived Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar in October 1955 with a new leading man, a new director, and a new format. The program changed from a 30-minute, one-episode-per-week program to a 15-minute, five-nights-a-week serial (Monday through Friday, 8–8:15 pm EST) produced and directed by radio veteran Jack Johnstone. The new Johnny Dollar was Bob Bailey, who had just come off another network detective series, Let George Do It. With a new lead and 75 minutes of air time each week, it became possible to develop each storyline with more detail and with more characters. Almost all of the Johnny Dollar serials were presented by CBS Radio on a sustaining basis (unsponsored, with no commercials); only two of the 55 serials take time out for a sponsor's message. Bob Bailey was exceptionally good in this format, making Johnny more sensitive and thoughtful in addition to his other attributes. Vintage-radio enthusiasts often endorse Bailey as the best of the Johnny Dollars, and consider the 13-month run of five-part stories to be some of the greatest drama in radio history. The serial scripts were usually written by Johnstone, "John Dawson" (a pseudonym for E. Jack Neuman), Les Crutchfield, or Robert Ryf. Blake Edwards also contributed several scripts and the show was always produced and directed by Johnstone. The show featured a stock company of supporting actors, including Virginia Gregg, Harry Bartell, Vic Perrin, Lawrence Dobkin, Stacy Harris, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, John Dehner, Barney Phillips, Lillian Buyeff, Tony Barrett, Don Diamond, Alan Reed, and Forrest Lewis. Movie character actors appeared occasionally, including Jay Novello, Hans Conried, Frank Nelson, Leon Belasco, William Conrad, Edgar Barrier, Jeanne Bates, Gloria Blondell, and Billy Halop. In late 1956, CBS Radio retooled the show, which reverted to a weekly half-hour drama, airing on late Sunday afternoons. Bob Bailey continued in the leading role until 1960 and wrote one episode, "The Carmen Kringle Matter," under his first and middle names (Robert Bainter). Staff announcer Dan Cubberly introduced the program during the Edmond O'Brien run; Roy Rowan was the announcer for the first two years of Bob Bailey's run; he also was an announcer on CBS's I Love Lucy. In "The Laird Douglas Matter," the only Johnny Dollar serial played for laughs, Roy Rowan was written into the script as dog-show expert "Ray Roland." In 1957 Rowan was succeeded by Dan Cubberly, returning to the series. Changes at CBS CBS Radio tried to institute an economy measure in June 1959: its four remaining dramatic series (Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar; Suspense; Gunsmoke starring William Conrad; and Have Gun, Will Travel starring John Dehner) would be moved from Hollywood to New York. The plan met with some resistance, because the cast members and crews of Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel were willing to cancel the shows themselves rather than move to New York. The situation was stalemated for 17 months, as all four programs remained on the air. Finally, in November 1960, CBS Radio kept Gunsmoke in California, discontinued Have Gun, Will Travel, and moved Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense to New York. Bob Bailey, unwilling to relocate, gave up the Johnny Dollar role. Bailey's last performance, aired November 27, 1960, was in a script titled "The Empty Threat Matter," perhaps writer Johnstone's editorial comment on CBS's intention to shut down production in California. In New York, CBS staff producer Bruno Zirato Jr. (who also directed TV game shows for CBS) took over Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, although Johnstone continued to write the scripts. Former child actor Bob Readick took over the leading role in a manner reminiscent of the original Dollar, Charles Russell. After six months he was replaced by Mandel Kramer, who gave the role his own low-key interpretation. Many fans found Mandel Kramer second only to Bailey as the most effective Johnny Dollar. Both Readick and Kramer were members of CBS's stock company in New York, and both appeared in other CBS dramas. The end The final episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense, airing on CBS, are often cited as the end of the golden age of radio. The last episode of Johnny Dollar, "The Tip-Off Matter", ended at 6:35 pm. Eastern Time on September 30, 1962, followed immediately by the final broadcast of Suspense. Although network radio drama returned to the airwaves – in ABC's Theater Five (1964–65), and CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974–82) – these were more experimental "drama workshop" shows, and did not adhere to a continuing format or leading character, albeit the latter did spark a bit of a revival of drama on US commercial radio networks in the 1970s. The "Golden Age" of radio drama, as pioneered in the 1920s, died with Johnny Dollar in 1962. Three unsuccessful attempts were made to transfer the success of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar to television. Charles Russell starred in a 1949 pilot directed by Ralph Levy, Bob Bailey starred in a 1958 pilot entitled The Adventures of Johnny Dollar (which failed because Bailey's 5-foot 9-inch, 150-pound physique didn't match the tough-guy characterization), and William Bryant starred in a 1962 pilot entitled Johnny Dollar. The latter was written, produced, and directed by Blake Edwards. Actors who portrayed Dollar Dick Powell (Audition show in 1948) Charles Russell (February 1949 – January 1950) Edmond O'Brien (February 1950 – September 1952) John Lund (November 1952 – September 1954) Gerald Mohr (Audition show in 1955) Bob Bailey (October 1955 – November 1960) Bob Readick (December 1960 – June 1961) Mandel Kramer (June 1961 – September 1962) Legacy Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was so familiar to CBS Radio's listeners that the network's resident comedians, Bob and Ray, occasionally satirized it. Their version, "Ace Willoughby, International Detective," followed the Johnny Dollar format of exotic locales, continental officials, cool villains, and tense confrontations, with Ray Goulding doing a letter-perfect imitation of Bob Bailey's delivery. In the comedy version, however, the detective usually gave up on the case after being beaten up incessantly. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar was a popular weekly radio mystery play in the 1960s and early 1970s on Radio Iran. The role of Johnny Dollar was played by Heidar Saremi, a popular radio performer. Contrary to the original, Johnny Dollar was more of a criminal investigator. At the end of each episode, the narrator asked the radio audience how Johnny found the perpetrators, making the show a mystery quiz as well as a drama; those who guessed correctly were entered into a raffle for a prize. In the 1970s and 1980s the comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre released a number of satirical record albums; several featured spoofs of old-time radio featuring the character Nick Danger, Third Eye, who was loosely based on Sam Spade and Johnny Dollar. The scripts included inside references to radio with lines such as, "It had been snowing in Santa Barbara ever since the top of the page," and riffs on radio sound effects. In 2003, Moonstone Books adapted the Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar radio program into a graphic novel illustrated by Éric Thériault and written by David Gallaher. The show has been the opening item on The Big Broadcast on WAMU in Washington, D.C. off and on since the early 1990s. As of August 2017, the show is being aired several times a day on KTQA FM 95.3 in Tacoma, WA and CHLU FM in Middle LaHave, Nova Scotia, Canada. In August 2021, the SiriusXM satellite radio network began airing many episodes of the show on its "Radio Classics" channel 148. As of February 2019, a documentary about the program, Last Man Standing – Johnny Dollar & the End of Old-Time Radio, has been produced.[12] In 2023, a new graphic novel series was launched with Johnny Dollar investigating cybercrimes of the modern age. "The man with the action packed expense account" is a cyberinsurance investigator, taking on ransomware actors in the modern age. sleep insomnia relax chill night nightime bed bedtime oldtimeradio drama comedy radio talkradio hancock tonyhancock hancockshalfhour sherlock sherlockholmes radiodrama popular viral viralpodcast podcast brett brettorchard orchard east devon seaton beer lyme regis village condado de alhama spain murcia The Golden Age of Radio Also known as the old-time radio (OTR) era, was an era of radio in the United States where it was the dominant electronic home entertainment medium. It began with the birth of commercial radio broadcasting in the early 1920s and lasted through the 1950s, when television gradually superseded radio as the medium of choice for scripted programming, variety and dramatic shows. Radio was the first broadcast medium, and during this period people regularly tuned in to their favourite radio programs, and families gathered to listen to the home radio in the evening. According to a 1947 C. E. Hooper survey, 82 out of 100 Americans were found to be radio listeners. A variety of new entertainment formats and genres were created for the new medium, many of which later migrated to television: radio plays, mystery serials, soap operas, quiz shows, talent shows, daytime and evening variety hours, situation comedies, play-by-play sports, children's shows, cooking shows, and more. In the 1950s, television surpassed radio as the most popular broadcast medium, and commercial radio programming shifted to narrower formats of news, talk, sports and music. Religious broadcasters, listener-supported public radio and college stations provide their own distinctive formats. Origins A family listening to the first broadcasts around 1920 with a crystal radio. The crystal radio, a legacy from the pre-broadcast era, could not power a loudspeaker so the family must share earphones During the first three decades of radio, from 1887 to about 1920, the technology of transmitting sound was undeveloped; the information-carrying ability of radio waves was the same as a telegraph; the radio signal could be either on or off. Radio communication was by wireless telegraphy; at the sending end, an operator tapped on a switch which caused the radio transmitter to produce a series of pulses of radio waves which spelled out text messages in Morse code. At the receiver these sounded like beeps, requiring an operator who knew Morse code to translate them back to text. This type of radio was used exclusively for person-to-person text communication for commercial, diplomatic and military purposes and hobbyists; broadcasting did not exist. The broadcasts of live drama, comedy, music and news that characterize the Golden Age of Radio had a precedent in the Théâtrophone, commercially introduced in Paris in 1890 and available as late as 1932. It allowed subscribers to eavesdrop on live stage performances and hear news reports by means of a network of telephone lines. The development of radio eliminated the wires and subscription charges from this concept. Between 1900 and 1920 the first technology for transmitting sound by radio was developed, AM (amplitude modulation), and AM broadcasting sprang up around 1920. On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden is said to have broadcast the first radio program, consisting of some violin playing and passages from the Bible. While Fessenden's role as an inventor and early radio experimenter is not in dispute, several contemporary radio researchers have questioned whether the Christmas Eve broadcast took place, or whether the date was, in fact, several weeks earlier. The first apparent published reference to the event was made in 1928 by H. P. Davis, Vice President of Westinghouse, in a lecture given at Harvard University. In 1932 Fessenden cited the Christmas Eve 1906 broadcast event in a letter he wrote to Vice President S. M. Kinter of Westinghouse. Fessenden's wife Helen recounts the broadcast in her book Fessenden: Builder of Tomorrows (1940), eight years after Fessenden's death. The issue of whether the 1906 Fessenden broadcast actually happened is discussed in Donna Halper's article "In Search of the Truth About Fessenden"[2] and also in James O'Neal's essays.[3][4] An annotated argument supporting Fessenden as the world's first radio broadcaster was offered in 2006 by Dr. John S. Belrose, Radioscientist Emeritus at the Communications Research Centre Canada, in his essay "Fessenden's 1906 Christmas Eve broadcast." It was not until after the Titanic catastrophe in 1912 that radio for mass communication came into vogue, inspired first by the work of amateur ("ham") radio operators. Radio was especially important during World War I as it was vital for air and naval operations. World War I brought about major developments in radio, superseding the Morse code of the wireless telegraph with the vocal communication of the wireless telephone, through advancements in vacuum tube technology and the introduction of the transceiver. After the war, numerous radio stations were born in the United States and set the standard for later radio programs. The first radio news program was broadcast on August 31, 1920, on the station 8MK in Detroit; owned by The Detroit News, the station covered local election results. This was followed in 1920 with the first commercial radio station in the United States, KDKA, being established in Pittsburgh. The first regular entertainment programs were broadcast in 1922, and on March 10, Variety carried the front-page headline: "Radio Sweeping Country: 1,000,000 Sets in Use." A highlight of this time was the first Rose Bowl being broadcast on January 1, 1923, on the Los Angeles station KHJ. Growth of radio Broadcast radio in the United States underwent a period of rapid change through the decade of the 1920s. Technology advances, better regulation, rapid consumer adoption, and the creation of broadcast networks transformed radio from a consumer curiosity into the mass media powerhouse that defined the Golden Age of Radio. Consumer adoption Through the decade of the 1920s, the purchase of radios by United States homes continued, and accelerated. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) released figures in 1925 stating that 19% of United States homes owned a radio. The triode and regenerative circuit made amplified, vacuum tube radios widely available to consumers by the second half of the 1920s. The advantage was obvious: several people at once in a home could now easily listen to their radio at the same time. In 1930, 40% of the nation's households owned a radio,[8] a figure that was much higher in suburban and large metropolitan areas. The superheterodyne receiver and other inventions refined radios even further in the next decade; even as the Great Depression ravaged the country in the 1930s, radio would stay at the centre of American life. 83% of American homes would own a radio by 1940. Government regulation Although radio was well established with United States consumers by the mid-1920s, regulation of the broadcast medium presented its own challenges. Until 1926, broadcast radio power and frequency use was regulated by the U.S. Department of Commerce, until a legal challenge rendered the agency powerless to do so. Congress responded by enacting the Radio Act of 1927, which included the formation of the Federal Radio Commission (FRC). One of the FRC's most important early actions was the adoption of General Order 40, which divided stations on the AM band into three power level categories, which became known as Local, Regional, and Clear Channel, and reorganized station assignments. Based on this plan, effective 3:00 a.m. Eastern time on November 11, 1928, most of the country's stations were assigned to new transmitting frequencies. Broadcast networks The final element needed to make the Golden Age of Radio possible focused on the question of distribution: the ability for multiple radio stations to simultaneously broadcast the same content, and this would be solved with the concept of a radio network. The earliest radio programs of the 1920s were largely unsponsored; radio stations were a service designed to sell radio receivers. In early 1922, American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) announced the beginning of advertisement-supported broadcasting on its owned stations, and plans for the development of the first radio network using its telephone lines to transmit the content. In July 1926, AT&T abruptly decided to exit the broadcasting field, and signed an agreement to sell its entire network operations to a group headed by RCA, which used the assets to form the National Broadcasting Company. Four radio networks had formed by 1934. These were: National Broadcasting Company Red Network (NBC Red), launched November 15, 1926. Originally founded as the National Broadcasting Company in late 1926, the company was almost immediately forced to split under antitrust laws to form NBC Red and NBC Blue. When, in 1942, NBC Blue was sold and renamed the Blue Network, this network would go back to calling itself simply the National Broadcasting Company Radio Network (NBC). National Broadcasting Company Blue Network (NBC Blue); launched January 10, 1927, split from NBC Red. NBC Blue was sold in 1942 and became the Blue Network, and it in turn transferred its assets to a new company, the American Broadcasting Company on June 15, 1945. That network identified itself as the American Broadcasting Company Radio Network (ABC). Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), launched September 18, 1927. After an initially struggling attempt to compete with the NBC networks, CBS gained new momentum when William S. Paley was installed as company president. Mutual Broadcasting System (Mutual), launched September 29, 1934. Mutual was initially run as a cooperative in which the flagship stations owned the network, not the other way around as was the case with the other three radio networks. Programming In the period before and after the advent of the broadcast network, new forms of entertainment needed to be created to fill the time of a station's broadcast day. Many of the formats born in this era continued into the television and digital eras. In the beginning of the Golden Age, network programs were almost exclusively broadcast live, as the national networks prohibited the airing of recorded programs until the late 1940s because of the inferior sound quality of phonograph discs, the only practical recording medium at that time. As a result, network prime-time shows would be performed twice, once for each coast. Rehearsal for the World War II radio show You Can't Do Business with Hitler with John Flynn and Virginia Moore. This series of programs, broadcast at least once weekly by more than 790 radio stations in the United States, was written and produced by the radio section of the Office of War Information (OWI). Live events Coverage of live events included musical concerts and play-by-play sports broadcasts. News The capability of the new medium to get information to people created the format of modern radio news: headlines, remote reporting, sidewalk interviews (such as Vox Pop), panel discussions, weather reports, and farm reports. The entry of radio into the realm of news triggered a feud between the radio and newspaper industries in the mid-1930s, eventually culminating in newspapers trumping up exaggerated [citation needed] reports of a mass hysteria from the (entirely fictional) radio presentation of The War of the Worlds, which had been presented as a faux newscast. Musical features The sponsored musical feature soon became one of the most popular program formats. Most early radio sponsorship came in the form of selling the naming rights to the program, as evidenced by such programs as The A&P Gypsies, Champion Spark Plug Hour, The Clicquot Club Eskimos, and King Biscuit Time; commercials, as they are known in the modern era, were still relatively uncommon and considered intrusive. During the 1930s and 1940s, the leading orchestras were heard often through big band remotes, and NBC's Monitor continued such remotes well into the 1950s by broadcasting live music from New York City jazz clubs to rural America. Singers such as Harriet Lee and Wendell Hall became popular fixtures on network radio beginning in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Local stations often had staff organists such as Jesse Crawford playing popular tunes. Classical music programs on the air included The Voice of Firestone and The Bell Telephone Hour. Texaco sponsored the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts; the broadcasts, now sponsored by the Toll Brothers, continue to this day around the world, and are one of the few examples of live classical music still broadcast on radio. One of the most notable of all classical music radio programs of the Golden Age of Radio featured the celebrated Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra, which had been created especially for him. At that time, nearly all classical musicians and critics considered Toscanini the greatest living maestro. Popular songwriters such as George Gershwin were also featured on radio. (Gershwin, in addition to frequent appearances as a guest, had his own program in 1934.) The New York Philharmonic also had weekly concerts on radio. There was no dedicated classical music radio station like NPR at that time, so classical music programs had to share the network they were broadcast on with more popular ones, much as in the days of television before the creation of NET and PBS. Country music also enjoyed popularity. National Barn Dance, begun on Chicago's WLS in 1924, was picked up by NBC Radio in 1933. In 1925, WSM Barn Dance went on the air from Nashville. It was renamed the Grand Ole Opry in 1927 and NBC carried portions from 1944 to 1956. NBC also aired The Red Foley Show from 1951 to 1961, and ABC Radio carried Ozark Jubilee from 1953 to 1961. Comedy Radio attracted top comedy talents from vaudeville and Hollywood for many years: Bing Crosby, Abbott and Costello, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Victor Borge, Fanny Brice, Billie Burke, Bob Burns, Judy Canova, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Burns and Allen, Phil Harris, Edgar Bergen, Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Jean Shepherd, Red Skelton and Ed Wynn. Situational comedies also gained popularity, such as Amos 'n' Andy, Easy Aces, Ethel and Albert, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Goldbergs, The Great Gildersleeve, The Halls of Ivy (which featured screen star Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume), Meet Corliss Archer, Meet Millie, and Our Miss Brooks. Radio comedy ran the gamut from the small town humor of Lum and Abner, Herb Shriner and Minnie Pearl to the dialect characterizations of Mel Blanc and the caustic sarcasm of Henry Morgan. Gags galore were delivered weekly on Stop Me If You've Heard This One and Can You Top This?,[18] panel programs devoted to the art of telling jokes. Quiz shows were lampooned on It Pays to Be Ignorant, and other memorable parodies were presented by such satirists as Spike Jones, Stoopnagle and Budd, Stan Freberg and Bob and Ray. British comedy reached American shores in a major assault when NBC carried The Goon Show in the mid-1950s. Some shows originated as stage productions: Clifford Goldsmith's play What a Life was reworked into NBC's popular, long-running The Aldrich Family (1939–1953) with the familiar catchphrases "Henry! Henry Aldrich!," followed by Henry's answer, "Coming, Mother!" Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway hit, You Can't Take It with You (1936), became a weekly situation comedy heard on Mutual (1944) with Everett Sloane and later on NBC (1951) with Walter Brennan. Other shows were adapted from comic strips, such as Blondie, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, The Gumps, Li'l Abner, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye the Sailor, Red Ryder, Reg'lar Fellers, Terry and the Pirates and Tillie the Toiler. Bob Montana's redheaded teen of comic strips and comic books was heard on radio's Archie Andrews from 1943 to 1953. The Timid Soul was a 1941–1942 comedy based on cartoonist H. T. Webster's famed Caspar Milquetoast character, and Robert L. Ripley's Believe It or Not! was adapted to several different radio formats during the 1930s and 1940s. Conversely, some radio shows gave rise to spinoff comic strips, such as My Friend Irma starring Marie Wilson. Soap operas The first program generally considered to be a daytime serial drama by scholars of the genre is Painted Dreams, which premiered on WGN on October 20, 1930. The first networked daytime serial is Clara, Lu, 'n Em, which started in a daytime time slot on February 15, 1932. As daytime serials became popular in the early 1930s, they became known as soap operas because many were sponsored by soap products and detergents. On November 25, 1960, the last four daytime radio dramas—Young Dr. Malone, Right to Happiness, The Second Mrs. Burton and Ma Perkins, all broadcast on the CBS Radio Network—were brought to an end. Children's programming The line-up of late afternoon adventure serials included Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders, The Cisco Kid, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, Captain Midnight, and The Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters. Badges, rings, decoding devices and other radio premiums offered on these adventure shows were often allied with a sponsor's product, requiring the young listeners to mail in a boxtop from a breakfast cereal or other proof of purchase. Radio plays Radio plays were presented on such programs as 26 by Corwin, NBC Short Story, Arch Oboler's Plays, Quiet, Please, and CBS Radio Workshop. Orson Welles's The Mercury Theatre on the Air and The Campbell Playhouse were considered by many critics to be the finest radio drama anthologies ever presented. They usually starred Welles in the leading role, along with celebrity guest stars such as Margaret Sullavan or Helen Hayes, in adaptations from literature, Broadway, and/or films. They included such titles as Liliom, Oliver Twist (a title now feared lost), A Tale of Two Cities, Lost Horizon, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was on Mercury Theatre that Welles presented his celebrated-but-infamous 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, formatted to sound like a breaking news program. Theatre Guild on the Air presented adaptations of classical and Broadway plays. Their Shakespeare adaptations included a one-hour Macbeth starring Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson, and a 90-minute Hamlet, starring John Gielgud.[22] Recordings of many of these programs survive. During the 1940s, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, famous for playing Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in films, repeated their characterizations on radio on The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which featured both original stories and episodes directly adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. None of the episodes in which Rathbone and Bruce starred on the radio program were filmed with the two actors as Holmes and Watson, so radio became the only medium in which audiences were able to experience Rathbone and Bruce appearing in some of the more famous Holmes stories, such as "The Speckled Band". There were also many dramatizations of Sherlock Holmes stories on radio without Rathbone and Bruce. During the latter part of his career, celebrated actor John Barrymore starred in a radio program, Streamlined Shakespeare, which featured him in a series of one-hour adaptations of Shakespeare plays, many of which Barrymore never appeared in either on stage or in films, such as Twelfth Night (in which he played both Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch), and Macbeth. Lux Radio Theatre and The Screen Guild Theater presented adaptations of Hollywood movies, performed before a live audience, usually with cast members from the original films. Suspense, Escape, The Mysterious Traveler and Inner Sanctum Mystery were popular thriller anthology series. Leading writers who created original material for radio included Norman Corwin, Carlton E. Morse, David Goodis, Archibald MacLeish, Arthur Miller, Arch Oboler, Wyllis Cooper, Rod Serling, Jay Bennett, and Irwin Shaw. Game shows Game shows saw their beginnings in radio. One of the first was Information Please in 1938, and one of the first major successes was Dr. I.Q. in 1939. Winner Take All, which premiered in 1946, was the first to use lockout devices and feature returning champions. A relative of the game show, which would be called the giveaway show in contemporary media, typically involved giving sponsored products to studio audience members, people randomly called by telephone, or both. An early example of this show was the 1939 show Pot o' Gold, but the breakout hit of this type was ABC's Stop the Music in 1948. Winning a prize generally required knowledge of what was being aired on the show at that moment, which led to criticism of the giveaway show as a form of "buying an audience". Giveaway shows were extremely popular through 1948 and 1949. They were often panned as low-brow, and an unsuccessful attempt was even made by the FCC to ban them (as an illegal lottery) in August 1949.[23] Broadcast production methods The RCA Type 44-BX microphone had two live faces and two dead ones. Thus actors could face each other and react. An actor could give the effect of leaving the room by simply moving their head toward the dead face of the microphone. The scripts were paper-clipped together. It has been disputed whether or not actors and actresses would drop finished pages to the carpeted floor after use. Radio stations Despite a general ban on use of recordings on broadcasts by radio networks through the late 1940s, "reference recordings" on phonograph disc were made of many programs as they were being broadcast, for review by the sponsor and for the network's own archival purposes. With the development of high-fidelity magnetic wire and tape recording in the years following World War II, the networks became more open to airing recorded programs and the prerecording of shows became more common. Local stations, however, had always been free to use recordings and sometimes made substantial use of pre-recorded syndicated programs distributed on pressed (as opposed to individually recorded) transcription discs. Recording was done using a cutting lathe and acetate discs. Programs were normally recorded at 331⁄3 rpm on 16 inch discs, the standard format used for such "electrical transcriptions" from the early 1930s through the 1950s. Sometimes, the groove was cut starting at the inside of the disc and running to the outside. This was useful when the program to be recorded was longer than 15 minutes so required more than one disc side. By recording the first side outside in, the second inside out, and so on, the sound quality at the disc change-over points would match and result in a more seamless playback. An inside start also had the advantage that the thread of material cut from the disc's surface, which had to be kept out of the path of the cutting stylus, was naturally thrown toward the centre of the disc so was automatically out of the way. When cutting an outside start disc, a brush could be used to keep it out of the way by sweeping it toward the middle of the disc. Well-equipped recording lathes used the vacuum from a water aspirator to pick it up as it was cut and deposit it in a water-filled bottle. In addition to convenience, this served a safety purpose, as the cellulose nitrate thread was highly flammable and a loose accumulation of it combusted violently if ignited. Most recordings of radio broadcasts were made at a radio network's studios, or at the facilities of a network-owned or affiliated station, which might have four or more lathes. A small local station often had none. Two lathes were required to capture a program longer than 15 minutes without losing parts of it while discs were flipped over or changed, along with a trained technician to operate them and monitor the recording while it was being made. However, some surviving recordings were produced by local stations. When a substantial number of copies of an electrical transcription were required, as for the distribution of a syndicated program, they were produced by the same process used to make ordinary records. A master recording was cut, then electroplated to produce a stamper from which pressings in vinyl (or, in the case of transcription discs pressed before about 1935, shellac) were moulded in a record press. Armed Forces Radio Service Frank Sinatra and Alida Valli converse over Armed Forces Radio Service during World War II The Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) had its origins in the U.S. War Department's quest to improve troop morale. This quest began with short-wave broadcasts of educational and information programs to troops in 1940. In 1941, the War Department began issuing "Buddy Kits" (B-Kits) to departing troops, which consisted of radios, 78 rpm records and electrical transcription discs of radio shows. However, with the entrance of the United States into World War II, the War Department decided that it needed to improve the quality and quantity of its offerings. This began with the broadcasting of its own original variety programs. Command Performance was the first of these, produced for the first time on March 1, 1942. On May 26, 1942, the Armed Forces Radio Service was formally established. Originally, its programming comprised network radio shows with the commercials removed. However, it soon began producing original programming, such as Mail Call, G.I. Journal, Jubilee and GI Jive. At its peak in 1945, the Service produced around 20 hours of original programming each week. From 1943 until 1949 the AFRS also broadcast programs developed through the collaborative efforts of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Columbia Broadcasting System in support of America's cultural diplomacy initiatives and President Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbour policy. Included among the popular shows was Viva America which showcased leading musical artists from both North and South America for the entertainment of America's troops. Included among the regular performers were: Alfredo Antonini, Juan Arvizu, Nestor Mesta Chayres, Kate Smith,[26] and John Serry Sr. After the war, the AFRS continued providing programming to troops in Europe. During the 1950s and early 1960s it presented performances by the Army's only symphonic orchestra ensemble—the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. It also provided programming for future wars that the United States was involved in. It survives today as a component of the American Forces Network (AFN). All of the shows aired by the AFRS during the Golden Age were recorded as electrical transcription discs, vinyl copies of which were shipped to stations overseas to be broadcast to the troops. People in the United States rarely ever heard programming from the AFRS,[31] though AFRS recordings of Golden Age network shows were occasionally broadcast on some domestic stations beginning in the 1950s. In some cases, the AFRS disc is the only surviving recording of a program. Home radio recordings in the United States There was some home recording of radio broadcasts in the 1930s and 1940s. Examples from as early as 1930 have been documented. During these years, home recordings were made with disc recorders, most of which were only capable of storing about four minutes of a radio program on each side of a twelve-inch 78 rpm record. Most home recordings were made on even shorter-playing ten-inch or smaller discs. Some home disc recorders offered the option of the 331⁄3 rpm speed used for electrical transcriptions, allowing a recording more than twice as long to be made, although with reduced audio quality. Office dictation equipment was sometimes pressed into service for making recordings of radio broadcasts, but the audio quality of these devices was poor and the resulting recordings were in odd formats that had to be played back on similar equipment. Due to the expense of recorders and the limitations of the recording media, home recording of broadcasts was not common during this period and it was usually limited to brief excerpts. The lack of suitable home recording equipment was somewhat relieved in 1947 with the availability of magnetic wire recorders for domestic use. These were capable of recording an hour-long broadcast on a single small spool of wire, and if a high-quality radio's audio output was recorded directly, rather than by holding a microphone up to its speaker, the recorded sound quality was very good. However, because the wire cost money and, like magnetic tape, could be repeatedly re-used to make new recordings, only a few complete broadcasts appear to have survived on this medium. In fact, there was little home recording of complete radio programs until the early 1950s, when increasingly affordable reel-to-reel tape recorders for home use were introduced to the market. Recording media Electrical transcription discs The War of the Worlds radio broadcast by Orson Welles on electrical transcription disc Before the early 1950s, when radio networks and local stations wanted to preserve a live broadcast, they did so by means of special phonograph records known as "electrical transcriptions" (ETs), made by cutting a sound-modulated groove into a blank disc. At first, in the early 1930s, the blanks varied in both size and composition, but most often they were simply bare aluminum and the groove was indented rather than cut. Typically, these very early recordings were not made by the network or radio station, but by a private recording service contracted by the broadcast sponsor or one of the performers. The bare aluminum discs were typically 10 or 12 inches in diameter and recorded at the then-standard speed of 78 rpm, which meant that several disc sides were required to accommodate even a 15-minute program. By about 1936, 16-inch aluminum-based discs coated with cellulose nitrate lacquer, commonly known as acetates and recorded at a speed of 331⁄3 rpm, had been adopted by the networks and individual radio stations as the standard medium for recording broadcasts. The making of such recordings, at least for some purposes, then became routine. Some discs were recorded using a "hill and dale" vertically modulated groove, rather than the "lateral" side-to-side modulation found on the records being made for home use at that time. The large slow-speed discs could easily contain fifteen minutes on each side, allowing an hour-long program to be recorded on only two discs. The lacquer was softer than shellac or vinyl and wore more rapidly, allowing only a few playbacks with the heavy pickups and steel needles then in use before deterioration became audible. During World War II, aluminum became a necessary material for the war effort and was in short supply. This caused an alternative to be sought for the base on which to coat the lacquer. Glass, despite its obvious disadvantage of fragility, had occasionally been used in earlier years because it could provide a perfectly smooth and even supporting surface for mastering and other critical applications. Glass base recording blanks came into general use for the duration of the war. Magnetic wire recording In the late 1940s, wire recorders became a readily obtainable means of recording radio programs. On a per-minute basis, it was less expensive to record a broadcast on wire than on discs. The one-hour program that required the four sides of two 16-inch discs could be recorded intact on a single spool of wire less than three inches in diameter and about half an inch thick. The audio fidelity of a good wire recording was comparable to acetate discs and by comparison the wire was practically indestructible, but it was soon rendered obsolete by the more manageable and easily edited medium of magnetic tape. Reel-to-reel tape recording Bing Crosby became the first major proponent of magnetic tape recording for radio, and he was the first to use it on network radio, after he did a demonstration program in 1947. Tape had several advantages over earlier recording methods. Running at a sufficiently high speed, it could achieve higher fidelity than both electrical transcription discs and magnetic wire. Discs could be edited only by copying parts of them to a new disc, and the copying entailed a loss of audio quality. Wire could be divided up and the ends spliced together by knotting, but wire was difficult to handle and the crude splices were too noticeable. Tape could be edited by cutting it with a blade and neatly joining ends together with adhesive tape. By early 1949, the transition from live performances preserved on discs to performances pre-recorded on magnetic tape for later broadcast was complete for network radio programs. However, for the physical distribution of pre-recorded programming to individual stations, 16-inch 331⁄3 rpm vinyl pressings, less expensive to produce in quantities of identical copies than tapes, continued to be standard throughout the 1950s. Availability of recordings The great majority of pre-World War II live radio broadcasts are lost. Many were never recorded; few recordings antedate the early 1930s. Beginning then several of the longer-running radio dramas have their archives complete or nearly complete. The earlier the date, the less likely it is that a recording survives. However, a good number of syndicated programs from this period have survived because copies were distributed far and wide. Recordings of live network broadcasts from the World War II years were preserved in the form of pressed vinyl copies issued by the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) and survive in relative abundance. Syndicated programs from World War II and later years have nearly all survived. The survival of network programming from this time frame is more inconsistent; the networks started prerecording their formerly live shows on magnetic tape for subsequent network broadcast, but did not physically distribute copies, and the expensive tapes, unlike electrical transcription ("ET") discs, could be "wiped" and re-used (especially since, in the age of emerging trends such as television and music radio, such recordings were believed to have virtually no rerun or resale value). Thus, while some prime time network radio series from this era exist in full or almost in full, especially the most famous and longest-lived of them, less prominent or shorter-lived series (such as serials) may have only a handful of extant episodes. Airchecks, off-the-air recordings of complete shows made by, or at the behest of, individuals for their own private use, sometimes help to fill in such gaps. The contents of privately made recordings of live broadcasts from the first half of the 1930s can be of particular interest, as little live material from that period survives. Unfortunately, the sound quality of very early private recordings is often very poor, although in some cases this is largely due to the use of an incorrect playback stylus, which can also badly damage some unusual types of discs. Most of the Golden Age programs in circulation among collectors—whether on analogue tape, CD, or in the form of MP3s—originated from analogue 16-inch transcription disc, although some are off-the-air AM recordings. But in many cases, the circulating recordings are corrupted (decreased in quality), because lossless digital recording for the home market did not come until the very end of the twentieth century. Collectors made and shared recordings on analogue magnetic tapes, the only practical, relatively inexpensive medium, first on reels, then cassettes. "Sharing" usually meant making a duplicate tape. They connected two recorders, playing on one and recording on the other. Analog recordings are never perfect, and copying an analogue recording multiplies the imperfections. With the oldest recordings this can even mean it went out the speaker of one machine and in via the microphone of the other. The muffled sound, dropouts, sudden changes in sound quality, unsteady pitch, and other defects heard all too often are almost always accumulated tape copy defects. In addition, magnetic recordings, unless preserved archivally, are gradually damaged by the Earth's magnetic field. The audio quality of the source discs, when they have survived unscathed and are accessed and dubbed anew, is usually found to be reasonably clear and undistorted, sometimes startlingly good, although like all phonograph records they are vulnerable to wear and the effects of scuffs, scratches, and ground-in dust. Many shows from the 1940s have survived only in edited AFRS versions, although some exist in both the original and AFRS forms. As of 2020, the Old Time Radio collection at the Internet Archive contains 5,121 recordings. An active group of collectors makes digitally available, via CD or download, large collections of programs. RadioEchoes.com offers 98,949 episodes in their collection, but not all is old-time radio. Copyright status Unlike film, television, and print items from the era, the copyright status of most recordings from the Golden Age of Radio is unclear. This is because, prior to 1972, the United States delegated the copyrighting of sound recordings to the individual states, many of which offered more generous common law copyright protections than the federal government offered for other media (some offered perpetual copyright, which has since been abolished; under the Music Modernization Act of September 2018, any sound recording 95 years old or older will be thrust into the public domain regardless of state law). The only exceptions are AFRS original productions, which are considered work of the United States government and thus both ineligible for federal copyright and outside the jurisdiction of any state; these programs are firmly in the public domain (this does not apply to programs carried by AFRS but produced by commercial networks). In practice, most old-time radio recordings are treated as orphan works: although there may still be a valid copyright on the program, it is seldom enforced. The copyright on an individual sound recording is distinct from the federal copyright for the underlying material (such as a published script, music, or in the case of adaptations, the original film or television material), and in many cases it is impossible to determine where or when the original recording was made or if the recording was copyrighted in that state. The U.S. Copyright Office states "there are a variety of legal regimes governing protection of pre-1972 sound recordings in the various states, and the scope of protection and of exceptions and limitations to that protection is unclear."[39] For example, New York has issued contradicting rulings on whether or not common law exists in that state; the most recent ruling, 2016's Flo & Eddie, Inc. v. Sirius XM Radio, holds that there is no such copyright in New York in regard to public performance.[40] Further complicating matters is that certain examples in case law have implied that radio broadcasts (and faithful reproductions thereof), because they were distributed freely to the public over the air, may not be eligible for copyright in and of themselves. The Internet Archive and other organizations that distribute public domain and open-source audio recordings maintain extensive archives of old-time radio programs. Legacy United States Some old-time radio shows continued on the air, although in ever-dwindling numbers, throughout the 1950s, even after their television equivalents had conquered the general public. One factor which helped to kill off old-time radio entirely was the evolution of popular music (including the development of rock and roll), which led to the birth of the top 40 radio format. A top 40 show could be produced in a small studio in a local station with minimal staff. This displaced full-service network radio and hastened the end of the golden-age era of radio drama by 1962. (Radio as a broadcast medium would survive, thanks in part to the proliferation of the transistor radio, and permanent installation in vehicles, making the medium far more portable than television). Full-service stations that did not adopt either top 40 or the mellower beautiful music or MOR formats eventually developed all-news radio in the mid-1960s. Scripted radio comedy and drama in the vein of old-time radio has a limited presence on U.S. radio. Several radio theatre series are still in production in the United States, usually airing on Sunday nights. These include original series such as Imagination Theatre and a radio adaptation of The Twilight Zone TV series, as well as rerun compilations such as the popular daily series When Radio Was and USA Radio Network's Golden Age of Radio Theatre, and weekly programs such as The Big Broadcast on WAMU, hosted by Murray Horwitz. These shows usually air in late nights and/or on weekends on small AM stations. Carl Amari's nationally syndicated radio show Hollywood 360 features 5 old-time radio episodes each week during his 5-hour broadcast. Amari's show is heard on 100+ radio stations coast-to-coast and in 168 countries on American Forces Radio. Local rerun compilations are also heard, primarily on public radio stations. Sirius XM Radio maintains a full-time Radio Classics channel devoted to rebroadcasts of vintage radio shows. Starting in 1974, Garrison Keillor, through his syndicated two-hour-long program A Prairie Home Companion, has provided a living museum of the production, tone and listener's experience of this era of radio for several generations after its demise. Produced live in theatres throughout the country, using the same sound effects and techniques of the era, it ran through 2016 with Keillor as host. The program included segments that were close renditions (in the form of parody) of specific genres of this era, including Westerns ("Dusty and Lefty, The Lives of the Cowboys"), detective procedurals ("Guy Noir, Private Eye") and even advertising through fictional commercials. Keillor also wrote a novel, WLT: A Radio Romance based on a radio station of this era—including a personally narrated version for the ultimate in verisimilitude. Upon Keillor's retirement, replacement host Chris Thile chose to reboot the show (since renamed Live from Here after the syndicator cut ties with Keillor) and eliminate much of the old-time radio trappings of the format; the show was ultimately cancelled in 2020 due to financial and logistics problems. Vintage shows and new audio productions in America are accessible more widely from recordings or by satellite and web broadcasters, rather than over conventional AM and FM radio. The National Audio Theatre Festival is a national organization and yearly conference keeping the audio arts—especially audio drama—alive, and continues to involve long-time voice actors and OTR veterans in its ranks. Its predecessor, the Midwest Radio Theatre Workshop, was first hosted by Jim Jordan, of Fibber McGee and Molly fame, and Norman Corwin advised the organization. One of the longest running radio programs celebrating this era is The Golden Days of Radio, which was hosted on the Armed Forces Radio Service for more than 20 years and overall for more than 50 years by Frank Bresee, who also played "Little Beaver" on the Red Ryder program as a child actor. One of the very few still-running shows from the earlier era of radio is a Christian program entitled Unshackled! The weekly half-hour show, produced in Chicago by Pacific Garden Mission, has been continuously broadcast since 1950. The shows are created using techniques from the 1950s (including home-made sound effects) and are broadcast across the U.S. and around the world by thousands of radio stations. Today, radio performers of the past appear at conventions that feature re-creations of classic shows, as well as music, memorabilia and historical panels. The largest of these events was the Friends of Old Time Radio Convention, held in Newark, New Jersey, which held its final convention in October 2011 after 36 years. Others include REPS in Seattle (June), SPERDVAC in California, the Cincinnati OTR & Nostalgia Convention (April), and the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention (September). Veterans of the Friends of Old Time Radio Convention, including Chairperson Steven M. Lewis of The Gotham Radio Players, Maggie Thompson, publisher of the Comic Book Buyer's Guide, Craig Wichman of audio drama troupe Quicksilver Audio Theatre and long-time FOTR Publicist Sean Dougherty have launched a successor event, Celebrating Audio Theatre – Old & New, scheduled for October 12–13, 2012. Radio dramas from the golden age are sometimes recreated as live stage performances at such events. One such group, led by director Daniel Smith, has been performing re-creations of old-time radio dramas at Fairfield University's Regina A. Quick Centre for the Arts since the year 2000. The 40th anniversary of what is widely considered the end of the old time radio era (the final broadcasts of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense on September 30, 1962) was marked with a commentary on NPR's All Things Considered. A handful of radio programs from the old-time era remain in production, all from the genres of news, music, or religious broadcasting: the Grand Ole Opry (1925), Music and the Spoken Word (1929), The Lutheran Hour (1930), the CBS World News Roundup (1938), King Biscuit Time (1941) and the Renfro Valley Gatherin' (1943). Of those, all but the Opry maintain their original short-form length of 30 minutes or less. The Wheeling Jamboree counts an earlier program on a competing station as part of its history, tracing its lineage back to 1933. Western revival/comedy act Riders in the Sky produced a radio serial Riders Radio Theatre in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to provide sketch comedy on existing radio programs including the Grand Ole Opry, Midnite Jamboree and WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. Elsewhere Regular broadcasts of radio plays are also heard in—among other countries—Australia, Croatia, Estonia,[46] France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, and Sweden. In the United Kingdom, such scripted radio drama continues on BBC Radio 3 and (principally) BBC Radio 4, the second-most popular radio station in the country, as well as on the rerun channel BBC Radio 4 Extra, which is the seventh-most popular station there. Special thanks to Wikipedia. #starradio #totalstar #star1075 #heart #heartradio #lbc #bbc #bbcradio #bbcradio1 #bbcradio2 #bbcradio3 #bbcradio4 #radio4extra #absoluteradio #absolute #capital #capitalradio #greatesthitsradio #hitsradio #radio #adultcontemporary #spain #bristol #frenchay #colyton #lymeregis #seaton #beer #devon #eastdevon #brettorchard #brettsoldtimeradioshow fe2f4df62ffeeb8c30c04d3d3454779ca91a4871
02/05/25: Tyler Axness is filling in for Joel Heitkamp, and is joined by Linda Kenyon from CBS News. Linda is an Anchor and Reporter for CBS Radio. She has covered Congress, the White House and anchored the news for several radio networks before she came to CBS. Tyler brings her onto "News and Views" to talk about President Trump's plan to take over Gaza. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Good evening and a huge welcome back to the show, I hope you've had a great day and you're ready to kick back and relax with another episode of Brett's old time radio show. Hello, I'm Brett your host for this evening and welcome to my home in beautiful Lyme Bay where it's lovely winters night. I hope it's just as nice where you are. You'll find all of my links at www.linktr.ee/brettsoldtimeradioshow A huge thankyou for joining me once again for our regular late night visit to those dusty studio archives of Old Time radio shows right here at my home in the united kingdom. Don't forget I have an instagram page and youtube channel both called brett's old time radio show and I'd love it if you could follow me. Feel free to send me some feedback on this and the other shows if you get a moment, brett@tourdate.co.uk #sleep #insomnia #relax #chill #night #nighttime #bed #bedtime #oldtimeradio #drama #comedy #radio #talkradio #hancock #tonyhancock #hancockshalfhour #sherlock #sherlockholmes #radiodrama #popular #viral #viralpodcast #podcast #podcasting #podcasts #podtok #podcastclip #podcastclips #podcasttrailer #podcastteaser #newpodcastepisode #newpodcast #videopodcast #upcomingpodcast #audiogram #audiograms #truecrimepodcast #historypodcast #truecrime #podcaster #viral #popular #viralpodcast #number1 #instagram #youtube #facebook #johnnydollar #crime #fiction #unwind #devon #texas #texasranger #beer #seaton #seaside #smuggler #colyton #devon #seaton #beer #branscombe #lymebay #lymeregis #brett #brettorchard #orchard #greatdetectives #greatdetectivesofoldtimeradio #detectives #johnnydollar #thesaint #steptoe #texasrangers Suspense is a radio drama series broadcast on CBS Radio from 1940 through 1962. One of the premier drama programs of the Golden Age of Radio, was subtitled "radio's outstanding theatre of thrills" and focused on suspense thriller-type scripts, usually featuring leading Hollywood actors of the era. Approximately 945 episodes were broadcast during its long run, and more than 900 still exist. Suspense went through several major phases, characterized by different hosts, sponsors, and director/producers. Formula plot devices were followed for all but a handful of episodes: the protagonist was usually a normal person suddenly dropped into a threatening or bizarre situation; solutions were "withheld until the last possible second"; and evildoers were usually punished in the end. In its early years, the program made only occasional forays into science fiction and fantasy. Notable exceptions include adaptations of Curt Siodmak's Donovan's Brain and H. P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror", but by the late 1950s, such material was regularly featured. Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock directed its audition show (for the CBS summer series Forecast). This was an adaptation of The Lodger a story Hitchcock had filmed in 1926 with Ivor Novello. Martin Grams Jr., author of Suspense: Twenty Years of Thrills and Chills, described the Forecast origin of Suspense: On the second presentation of July 22, 1940, Forecast offered a mystery/horror show titled Suspense. With the co-operation of his producer, Walter Wanger, Alfred Hitchcock received the honor of directing his first radio show for the American public. The condition agreed upon for Hitchcock's appearance was that CBS make a pitch to the listening audience about his and Wanger's latest film, Foreign Correspondent. To add flavor to the deal, Wanger threw in Edmund Gwenn and Herbert Marshall as part of the package. All three men (including Hitch) would be seen in the upcoming film, which was due for a theatrical release the next month. Both Marshall and Hitchcock decided on the same story to bring to the airwaves, which happened to be a favorite of both of them: Marie Belloc Lowndes' "The Lodger." Alfred Hitchcock had filmed this story for Gainsborough in 1926, and since then it had remained as one of his favorites. Herbert Marshall portrayed the mysterious lodger, and co-starring with him were Edmund Gwenn and character actress Lurene Tuttle as the rooming-house keepers who start to suspect that their new boarder might be the notorious Jack-the-Ripper. [Gwenn was actually repeating the role taken in the 1926 film by his brother, Arthur Chesney. And Tuttle would work again with Hitchcock nearly 20 years later, playing Mrs. Al Chambers, the sheriff's wife, in Psycho.] Character actor Joseph Kearns also had a small part in the drama, and Wilbur Hatch, head musician for CBS Radio at the time, composed and conducted the music specially for the program. Adapting the script to radio was not a great technical challenge for Hitchcock, and he cleverly decided to hold back the ending of the story from the listening audience in order to keep them in suspense themselves. This way, if the audience's curiosity got the better of them, they would write in to the network to find out whether the mysterious lodger was in fact Jack the Ripper. For the next few weeks, hundreds of letters came in from faithful listeners asking how the story ended. Actually a few wrote threats claiming that it was "indecent" and "immoral" to present such a production without giving the solution 1942–1962 In the earliest years, the program was hosted by "The Man in Black" (played by Joseph Kearns or Ted Osborne) with many episodes written or adapted by the prominent mystery author John Dickson Carr. One of the series' earliest successes and its single most popular episode is Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry, Wrong Number", about a bedridden woman (Agnes Moorehead) who panics after overhearing a murder plot on a crossed telephone connection but is unable to persuade anyone to investigate. First broadcast on May 25, 1943, it was restaged seven times (last on February 14, 1960) – each time with Moorehead. The popularity of the episode led to a film adaptation in 1948. Another notable early episode was Fletcher's "The Hitch Hiker" (aired September 2, 1942), in which a motorist (Orson Welles) is stalked on a cross-country trip by a nondescript man who keeps appearing on the side of the road; however, the first performance of "The Hitch-Hiker" actually took place on The Orson Welles Show the previous year. "The Hitch-Hiker" was later adapted for television by Rod Serling as a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone. After the network sustained the program during its first two years, the sponsor became Roma Wines (1944–1947), and then (after another brief period of sustained hour-long episodes, initially featuring Robert Montgomery as host and "producer" in early 1948),[3] Autolite Spark Plugs (1948–1954); eventually Harlow Wilcox (of Fibber McGee and Molly) became the pitchman. William Spier, Norman Macdonnell and Anton M. Leader were among the producers and directors. Suspense received a Special Citation of Honor Peabody Award for 1946. Second issue of the 1946 magazine tie-in The program's heyday was in the early 1950s, when radio actor, producer and director Elliott Lewis took over (still during the Wilcox/Autolite run). Here the material reached new levels of sophistication.[opinion] The writing was taut,[opinion] and the casting, which had always been a strong point of the series (featuring such film stars as Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich, Eve McVeagh, Lena Horne, and Cary Grant), took an unexpected turn when Lewis expanded the repertory to include many of radio's famous drama and comedy stars – often playing against type – such as Jack Benny. Jim and Marian Jordan of Fibber McGee and Molly were heard in the episode "Backseat Driver", which originally aired February 3, 1949. The highest production values enhanced Suspense, and many of the shows retain their power to grip and entertain.[opinion] At the time he took over Suspense, Lewis was familiar to radio fans for playing Frankie Remley, the wastrel guitar-playing sidekick to Phil Harris in The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. On the May 10, 1951 Suspense, Lewis reversed the roles with "Death on My Hands": A bandleader (Harris) is horrified when an autograph-seeking fan accidentally shoots herself and dies in his hotel room, and a vocalist (Faye) tries to help him as the townfolk call for vigilante justice against him. With the rise of television and the departures of Lewis and Autolite, subsequent producers (Antony Ellis, William N. Robson and others) struggled to maintain the series due to shrinking budgets, the availability of fewer name actors, and listenership decline. To save money, the program frequently used scripts first broadcast by another noteworthy CBS anthology, Escape. In addition to these tales of exotic adventure, Suspense expanded its repertoire to include more science fiction and supernatural content. By the end of its run, the series was remaking scripts from the long-canceled program The Mysterious Traveler. A time travel tale like Robert Arthur's "The Man Who Went Back to Save Lincoln" or a thriller about a death ray-wielding mad scientist would alternate with more run-of-the-mill crime dramas. The series expanded to television with the Suspense series on CBS from 1949 to 1954, and again in 1962. The radio series had a tie-in with Suspense magazine which published four 1946–47 issues edited by Leslie Charteris. The final broadcasts of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense, ending at 7:00 pm Eastern Time on September 30, 1962, are often cited as the end of the Golden Age of Radio. The final episode of Suspense was Devilstone, starring Christopher Carey and Neal Fitzgerald. It was sponsored by Parliament cigarettes.[5] Opening introductions There were several variations of program introductions. A typical early opening is this from April 27, 1943: (MUSIC ... BERNARD HERRMANN'S SUSPENSE THEME ... CONTINUES IN BG) THE MAN IN BLACK: Suspense! This is The Man in Black, here again to introduce Columbia's program, Suspense. Our stars tonight are Miss Agnes Moorehead and Mr. Ray Collins. You've seen these two expert and resourceful players in "Citizen Kane" – "The Magnificent Ambersons" in which Miss Moorehead's performance won her the 1942 Film Critics' Award. Mr. Collins will soon be seen in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Technicolor film, "Salute to the Marines." Miss Moorehead and Mr. Collins return this evening to their first love, the CBS microphone, to appear in a study in terror by Lucille Fletcher called "The Diary of Sophronia Winters." The story told by this diary is tonight's tale of... suspense. If you've been with us on these Tuesday nights, you will know that Suspense is compounded of mystery and suspicion and dangerous adventure. In this series are tales calculated to intrigue you, to stir your nerves, to offer you a precarious situation and then withhold the solution... until the last possible moment. And so it is with "The Diary of Sophronia Winters" and the performances of Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins, we again hope to keep you in... (MUSIC: ... UP, DRAMATICALLY) THE MAN IN BLACK: ... Suspense! Recognition Suspense was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2011. Since 2007, Radio Classics, on Sirius XM channel 82, has been airing episodes of Suspense. The show is also streamed nightly at 7 pm Pacific time on kusaradio.com from the original masters. Satire The familiar opening phrase "tales well-calculated to..." was satirized by Mad as the cover blurb "Tales Calculated to Drive You... Mad" on its first issue (October–November 1952) and continuing until issue #23 (May 1955). Radio comedians Bob and Ray had a recurring routine lampooning the show called "Anxiety." Their character Commander Neville Putney told stories that were presented as dramatic but were intentionally mundane, with the opening line "A tale well designed to keep you in... Anxiety." In the “Chicken Heart” sketch on his Wonderfulness album Bill Cosby relates radio programs during his youth “that were scary.” One is Suspense. Theatre #sundaynightmystery For PowPAC, San Diego actor-director Robert Hitchcox mounted a 2006 stage production recreating two episodes of Suspense, complete with commercials, in a stage set designed like a CBS radio studio.
Staying ahead of HR trends is no easy feat, but embracing innovation can set organizations up for long-term success. To explore how HR leaders can navigate AI, leadership development, and talent challenges in 2025, we've called in HR expert Dan Kaplan, Senior Partner at Korn Ferry. Highlights [2:15] Why 2025 is the year of innovation for HR[4:00] AI's evolving role in HR and talent management[7:30] How CHROs can strategically adopt AI without the noise[10:45] The growing importance of HR technology ecosystems[15:20] CHRO compensation trends and increasing demand for top HR talent[18:50] Succession planning challenges for HR leadership[23:10] The need for stronger leadership development programs[29:35] Rebuilding trust and engagement between employees and leadership[34:50] HR's role in fostering a culture of accountability and innovation Guest Bio Dan Kaplan, Senior Partner, Korn Ferry Dan Kaplan is a trusted advisor to top executives, boards, and investors. As a Senior Partner at Korn Ferry, he specializes in recruiting leaders for private equity firms and human resources. Recognized by Business Week as one of the world's 50 most influential headhunters, Dan has been featured on CNN, CNBC, CBS Radio, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, and Bloomberg News. He is also a participant in the World Economic Forum's Talent Mobility Summit. Dan's expertise lies in leadership development, talent strategy, and helping businesses future-proof their workforce. Links HRMorning | HR News and Insights Dan Kaplan | LinkedIn Profile
(00:00) On the final hour of Fred’s Birthday Bash, A SPECIAL GUEST dials in to wish Fred a happy 50th! Who is it? Guess you’ll have to listen! (it’s Al Cole from CBS Radio) (29:29) It’s time for the segment everyone’s talking about—The Email Bit! Send an email to anyone on the show with the link below, and stay tuned as we dive into missed stories with The Stack! CONNECT WITH TOUCHER & HARDY: linktr.ee/ToucherandHardy For the latest updates, visit the show page on 985thesportshub.com. Follow 98.5 The Sports Hub on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Watch the show every morning on YouTube, and subscribe to stay up-to-date with all the best moments from Boston’s home for sports!
This time on Ron's Amazing Stories we delve into two stories from the OTR series Suspense. The first story, titled Slow Burn, stars Dick Powell as a boxer navigating the dangerous world of the sport. The second story, The Death of Alexander Jordan, explores the chilling tale of a man consumed by the fear of being buried alive. Suspense aired from 1942 to 1962, captivating audiences with its thrilling stories and unexpected twists. Originally broadcast on CBS Radio, the show was known for its high-quality production and was often described as "radio's outstanding theater of thrills." Initially orchestrated by the esteemed director William Spier, it featured a wide array of stories, usually focusing on characters in perilous or mysterious situations, often ending with a surprising or sinister twist. One of the most famous episodes, Sorry, Wrong Number, starred Agnes Moorehead and became so popular it was made into a film. Over its two-decade run, Suspense became a staple on radio, influencing future generations of storytelling both in radio and television. Ron's Amazing Stories Is Sponsored by: Audible - You can get a free audiobook and a 30 day free trial at . Your Stories: Do you have a story that you would like to share on the podcast or the blog? Head to the main website, click on Story Submission, leave your story, give it a title, and please tell me where you're from. I will read it if I can. Links are below. Music Used In This Podcast: Most of the music you hear on Ron's Amazing Stories has been composed by Kevin MacLeod () and is Licensed under . Other pieces are in the public domain. You can find great free music at which is a site owned by Kevin. Program Info: Ron's Amazing Stories is published each Thursday. You can download it from , stream it on or on the mobile version of . Do you prefer the radio? We are heard every Thursday at 10:00 pm and Sunday Night at 11:00 PM (EST) on . Check your local listing or find the station closest to you at this . Social Links: Contact Links:
01/16/25: Joel Heitkamp is joined by Linda Gradstein to talk about the Gaza ceasefire deal, while she comes live from Jerusalem. Linda teaches journalism at Hebrew University and NYU-Tel Aviv, and is also a freelance reporter for CBS Radio. For 20 years, she was the National Public Radio correspondent based in Jerusalem, and won several awards for her coverage.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this episode of Not Over, Just Different, I sit down with relationship experts Matthew and Orna Walters to explore the hidden blocks that can keep us from finding meaningful love. If you've ever felt stuck in your dating life or wondered why certain patterns keep repeating, this conversation will give you powerful insights into the emotional imprints and limiting beliefs that may be holding you back.We'll talk about their proven three-step process—Awareness, Transformation, and Manifestation—and how it can help you clear the way for deeper connections. Plus, they'll share practical tips on how to date intentionally and build emotional intimacy that lasts.Whether you're seeking love or looking to strengthen your current partnership, this episode offers actionable insights to help you break free from old patterns and embrace lasting love. Tune in and start your journey to meaningful connection!Take my Free 30 second quiz to discover your Financial Freedom Personality Type! http://www.mindmovies.com/careerquizDownload FeelWise, our new app for inner-connectedness and personal transformation: https://feelwiseapp.com/ Connect with Natalie: Instagram: www.instagram.com/notoverjustdifferent/ Website: https://natalieledwell.com/About Orna and Matthew Walters:Orna and Matthew Walters are world-renowned dating coaches and founders of Creating Love On Purpose with a holistic approach to transforming hidden blocks to love, and the authors Getting It Right This Time: Break Free from Your Hidden Blocks to Lasting Love (Penguin Random House 2025).Orna and Matthew have been featured on countless television, radio, and print outlets including: NBC, Fox News, MSN, USA Networks, KPFK Radio, and with Les Brown on CBS Radio and featured as guest experts on Bravo's The Millionaire Matchmaker.They have helped thousands of singles around the globe to bring in a beloved life partner. Orna and Matthew are dedicated to spreading the message that having love is an inside job, and that it's never too late to find the love of your life.Connect with Orna and Matthew Walters:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OrnaAndMatthew/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ornaandmatthew/X: https://x.com/OrnaAndMatthewVisit https://www.loveonpurpose.com/ to purchase their book - Getting It Right This TimeKey Timestamps: [00:00] Introduction [00:04:39] Hidden blocks to love.[00:11:15] The hope to disappointment roller coaster.[00:16:36] Awareness in finding love.[00:18:01] Navigating conflict in relationships.[00:22:12] Emotional intimacy without agreement.[00:25:18] Lasting love through self-discovery.Memorable Quotes:"We call it dating burnout because you wear yourself out hoping that this next person is going to be the one instead of taking your time, evaluating them and being more discerning before you jump into The Mindmovies FREE career quiz is the 30 second answer to finding out what your next career move is for 2025. Release imposter syndrome and the fear of making a “wrong” decision. Lean in to the power of your own inner voice and lead a life fully aligned with your purpose, with power and certainty. Subscribe to Not Over, Just Different for more clarity, community and confidence through the next stage of your life.
If you're enjoying the content, please like, subscribe, and comment! Please consider supporting the show! https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/worldxppodcast/support Julian's Links: https://pointspath.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-kheel-a50a0b18b Julian Kheel is the founder and CEO of Points Path, a company that helps people utilize their travel rewards. The company's browser extension not only shows travelers the cost in points and miles of every flight directly in Google Flights, but also indicates whether using points or miles for each flight is the better deal. In just 8 months, Points Path has grown to over 40,000 users, and has been lauded by numerous travel publications. Kheel has appeared regularly as an analyst to discuss finance, travel and loyalty programs on national television segments for CNN, Bloomberg News, CNBC's “Squawk Box,” Yahoo Finance and Cheddar TV, as well as on ABC and CBS Radio. ______________________ Follow us! @worldxppodcast Instagram - https://bit.ly/3eoBwyr @worldxppodcast Twitter - https://bit.ly/2Oa7Bzm Spotify - http://spoti.fi/3sZAUTG YouTube - http://bit.ly/3rxDvUL #media #writer #hollywood #cnn #movie #producer #director #production #wwe #wweraw #travel #travelvlog #points #travelpoints #explore #explorepage #podcastshow #longformpodcast #longformpodcast #podcasts #podcaster #newpodcast #podcastshow #podcasting #newshow #worldxppodcast
https://itsvucamax.com/ FB: https://www.facebook.com/schindler1 INSTA: https://www.instagram.com/opmilfam TWITTER: https://twitter.com/itsvuca LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjschindler/ WEBSITES: https://www.opmilfam.com & https://www.itsvuca.com What if today's AI world is just a mere fraction of the earth-shattering technologies that will shake up your future world? What if every major industry on earth were on the verge of reinvention, and those changes are coming at you at warp speed? What if there were a program to take you beyond the cloak of chaos, uncertainty, and fear so that you thrive, achieve and lead in the 21st century? Edward O. Wilson wrote, “The real problem of humanity now is – we have paleolithic brains, medieval systems, and godlike technology.” Mike Schindler is a renowned keynote speaker, US Navy veteran, the national podcast host of The Military Wire and author of three top books. His new co-authored book titled, The Rise of Humanness, The VUCA MAX system for expanding Human Value in the Age of AI, takes readers through the gateway of doubt to doing, and failure to flourishing in the 21st century. As CEO of Operation Military Family, Mike is an expert on leadership development, negotiation secrets, and veteran transition issues. He is also the Co-Executive Producer with 3 times Emmy Award winning recipient Chris Nolan of IT'S VUCA: The Secret to Living in the 21st Century. This full-length documentary film highlights 17 of our nation's top experts on how to navigate and flourish in a chaotic and changing world. Mike has been featured on USA Today, CBS Radio, Entrepreneur Radio, the Lars Larson Show, and others. Since 2012, he has collaborated with large companies, training employees on conscious leadership, antifragile resilience and confidence coaching to flip the script on their old life story. Mike has helped over 10,000 individuals realize their true mission, purpose, and identity in life.
Greg Wasserman found himself in a state of depression. Thankfully, he found a program of support which helped him understand and challenge his core beliefs, leading to his healing. Come and join us to find out how Greg healed himself and learn how you can too. 00:00 Introduction 01:10 Greg´s background 05:22 Program of support 11:47 Core beliefs 15:03 What is normal? 17:14 Just listen without responding 21:12 Tip for healing depression Bio and links for Greg Guided by the motto "Life is about Time & Relationships; you never know where a conversation today will take you in the future," Greg uniquely connects with people, fostering growth and creating lasting bonds. This talent has been instrumental in his success in business and making him the go-to person for introductions and partnerships. Greg's career began in advertising sales with notable tenures at well-known companies before discovering a passion for the startup world. A series of chance opportunities led him to the field of partnerships—a role he was ideal for—where he excelled in building long-term relationships and crafting win-win scenarios. Leveraging his experience selling podcast ads for CBS Radio led him to run 3 podcast listening platforms, forging partnerships with technology platforms, and working closely with podcasters to enhance distribution, audience growth, and monetization. Most recently, Greg served as the head of relationships at Castmagic, a SaaS AI platform that helps podcasters turn their recordings into repurposable content while also continuing to consult them on how to build successful businesses. Greg has now established himself as a sought-after consultant with a few niche focuses. His work with startups to build their community flywheel program, his ability to leverage his relationship skills to build partnerships for companies, and his knack for helping podcasters become not only better hosts but also build themselves into brands all underscore his expertise, value, and diverse skillsets and knowledge. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, where he consistently posts about podcasting, partnerships, community, mental health, and business—the best place to learn more or see if his services could be a fit for you. Make sure you add a note letting him know you found him through this show. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregwasserman/
Support Breaking Walls at https://www.patreon.com/thewallbreakers At a CBS radio meeting in September 1955 at 485 Madison Avenue, John Karole VP of Sales, predicted CBS's time sold would be more than the other three networks combined. Radio affiliates were given a Segmented Selling Plan. The plan offered a five-minute segment for twenty-one hundred dollars. Frank Stanton, President of CBS, boasted that since the birth of radio advertising, more than eight billion dollars had been spent on commercials. Network radio advertising in 1955 was up and year-over-year revenue would finish four million dollars ahead of 1954, but privately, many of the local stations grumbled. CBS had recently instituted income-slashing one-year contracts and added a standard six-month cancellation clause, while cutting compensation by twenty percent. Eight million new radios were manufactured in 1955—forty-five percent more the previous year. Car radios were now standard and transistor sets were on the rise. It was estimated that mobile listening added anywhere from thirty to seventy percent to overall radio ratings. On-the-go ratings polls were still rudimentary, but Richard M. Mall in The Journal of Broadcasting speculated that the days of families listening together in the parlor were over. Five-minute newscasts now dominate the tops of most hours. CBS was selling news advertising at its highest rate in history and New York was CBS' major news hub. CBS announced new evening radio programs with name-brand talent and The $64,000 Question would now be simulcast on both radio and TV. They were also increasing dramatic production. This included two evening strips at 8PM that would air five nights per week for fifteen minutes each night. One was a reboot of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. It was to star Gerald Mohr, who had just finished a successful run as Christopher Storm on TV's Foreign Intrigue. Mohr recorded an audition on August 29th, 1955. Veteran radio director Jack Johnstone was brought in, but Mohr didn't take the part. New auditions were held the next month. Each actor had twenty minutes to pitch themselves and audition with actress Lillian Buyeff. Amongst those who read were radio mainstays Paul Dubev, Larry Thor, Jack Moyes, Tony Barrett, Vic Perrin, and the man they selected, Bob Bailey. The rebooted Yours Truly Johnny Dollar debuted over CBS airwaves at 8:15PM eastern time on October 3rd, 1955. The new format offered seventy-five minutes of weekly time, allowing tremendous character development. It wasn't long before letters were pouring into CBS. While the CBS sales team looked for national sponsorship, in early 1956 a new case took Johnny Dollar to New York City. Dollar would be in town between January 9th and 13th. Tonight, we'll focus on Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, stolen goods, and what was happening in New York that week in January, 1956.
Old-Time Radio Essentials' fourth season continues with our annual Christmas Special, which is Paul's pick, an episode of "The Mel Blanc Show", a CBS Radio sitcom that aired in the 1946-47 season. Will co-hosts Patte and Pete love Mel's characterization? Or will they charge CBS with gross dereliction of Zookie? TUNE IN AND FIND OUT! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Do journalists ever regret the way they cover events? This week, veteran YouTube journalist and political commentator Ana Kasparian discusses her journey from the progressive left to finding herself politically unaligned, the regrets she still harbors, and the complexities of navigating controversial issues with nuance. She also discusses her thoughts on the election and on Biden's mental decline, the appeal of Trump, and how cultural shifts within the Democratic party affected the election. Meghan and Ana also discuss motherhood (or in their cases, non-motherhood) and new discourse surrounding the trad movement, pro-natalism and the dark side of the pressure campaign to get people to have more children. GUEST BIO Ana Kasparian is a political journalist and media personality with nearly two decades of experience in news and analysis. Beginning her career as an assistant producer at CBS Radio in Los Angeles, she later became Executive Producer and co-host of The Young Turks. She now writes a Substack newsletter chronicling her political realignment journey and exploring key political and cultural issues. Follow her on Substack here. Want to hear the whole conversation? Upgrade your subscription here. HOUSEKEEPING
In this week's episode, both of our storytellers share tales about birds that had a big impact in their lives. Part 1: Paula Croxson uses her neuroscience background to get rid of the pigeon family that has taken up residence on her window sill. Part 2: As a new urban park ranger, Tim Lopez gets a call to capture a swan on the loose. Paula Croxson is a neuroscientist, science communicator, musician and open water swimmer. She received an M.A. from the University of Cambridge and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford before moving to New York to run a neuroscience lab. She changed career direction around 5 years ago to focus on public engagement with science, first at Columbia University and then at the Dana Foundation. She is also the flautist in alternative rock band Marlowe Grey and nerdy rock band Pavlov's Dogz. The swimming is apparently for “fun”. Tim Lopez is a storyteller and educator born and raised in Los Angeles. His stories have been featured on the Moth Radio Hour, KCRW in Los Angeles, and CBS Radio nationwide. He is currently an Interpretive Park Ranger at Channel Islands National Park, where he brings the stories of the natural environment and the history of California to life. He is also a Jeopardy! champion and is legally obligated to mention that fact as often as possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We're taking a few days off this week, but we'll be back with a brand new edition of TV Confidential next week. In the meantime, please enjoy this "Blast from the Past," featuring an excerpt from our December 2012 conversation with actor, author and CBS Radio commentator Charles Grodin (Rosemary's Baby, Catch-22, Midnight Run, The Heartbreak Kid, Seems Like Old Times, Beethoven).
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
