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Frasier: Yes, you know this is KACL's fiftieth anniversary. I did a little research and found out they used to specialise in live radio dramas. So, I'm putting one on. Dad, surely you must remember those? Martin: Oh sure. Frasier: Yes, people of dad's generation would sit around at night, listening to the radio absolutely mesmerised. Martin: We were simple people. - Frasier, Episode 4.18 "Ham Radio" This will be a thread for audio drama and comedy, past and present. It can be tricky to define the medium along the edges- just about anything that creates a narrative with dialogue and sound and music and so on. Audiobooks sometimes stray into this territory with dialogue readings by different voice actors and sound effect enhancement, podcasts and talk radio can go in and out of scripted/fictionalized material, it's a vast tapestry. If you think it belongs here,  .Audio theater is a medium both restrictive and freeing. It can be a great challenge to convey a story using only sound, and common traps range from being incomprehensible to being reliant on clunky dialogue ("Look at that beat-up yellow taxi with a bent antenna slowly coming down the street towards us") or an overabundance of narration. But when it works it can convey an intimacy and atmosphere that's hard to top, and the fact that you can't see anything has been used by some of the best writers to convey things that simply wouldn't work if you had to visualize them. Audio theater has been considered a dead medium by many people for a long time. The narrative goes, in the 30s and 40s millions of people tuned into the radio to listen to everything from the Lone Ranger to Jack Benny to Amos 'N' Andy, occasionally being fooled into believing Martians were invading, and then TV came along and ruined everything. Often classic radio dramas and comedies are referred to as "Old Time Radio" and are packaged and sold basically as nostalgia, the remnants of a bygone age. This narrative is only partly true. For starters, if you lived in any country but America, public radio stations like the BBC kept producing original material because, well, they had to. (The BBC didn't stop charging for radio licenses until 1971, by which point the tradition of producing original radio material was well entrenched.) Even in the US, though, the medium lived on initially outside radio in some of the more elaborate comedy albums, and while American public radio hasn't been the most enthusiastic backer of comedy and drama, now and again they get involved. More importantly, the advent of easy streaming and downloadable audio over the Internet, plus the increased availability of audio recording and editing software, have contributed to what is, if not a boom, a healthy resurgence for the medium. It's still a niche which doesn't receive much public attention, but there's a LOT going on. Useful Threads Welcome to Night Vale has been getting some mainstream attention, and is one of a few shows that eases people into the whole "audio drama" concept by presenting itself as a radio news show which reports on weird poo poo happening. There's also buzz about The Thrilling Adventure Hour, a weekly stage show/podcast featuring a number of different stories performed in the style of Golden Age radio. The TVIV's Doctor Who discussion thread regularly talks about the licensed Doctor Who audio adventures produced by Big Finish Productions. These stories, featuring many of the original actors from the classic series, reflect a more modern approach to the medium- it's recorded in a number of blocks and edited together with sound effects and music, and released as CDs and downloads on Big Finish's website. (Someone remind me to update this when the thread gets closed/re-opened. It's very active so gets rebooted a lot.) Current Audio Theater Stuff Big Finish- In addition to Doctor Who these guys have managed to put out licensed material for Blake's 7, Dark Shadows, the Pathfinder RPG, Highlander, 2000 A.D.- basically a LOT. They started as a fan group, but there's a reason they've managed to hold onto the Who license even as a new series made the property hot again. ZBS- Starting in the 70s and continuing to this day, ZBS have produced for radio and CD a wide range of surreal sci-fi and fantasy plays with a New Age bent. Be warned that the hippie-dippiness can often threaten to overshadow the story (especially in their very first production, The Fourth Tower of Inverness, which not only features long digressions about past lives and tree-hugging but also excerpts from New Age lectures), but there's something fitting about using the audio medium for dreamy, meditative stories. Ruby: The Adventures of a Galactic Gumshoe by "Meatball" Fulton is one of their best works, with the delightful Laura Esterman as the sardonic detective. The original series, produced in short snippets for drive-time radio, won the Mark Time Award for science fiction. The BBC-  Good old Auntie Beeb still keeps audio theater going strong, though it often suffers the same cutbacks everyone else does. Because there's no more radio license fee, the audio material on iPlayer isn't region blocked and any foreigner can listen. Includes The Archers, the longest running soap/drama/farm education program in history (and yes it is all these things.) Audio Comics- Lance Roger Axt is a guy I've met before at the National Audio Theatre Workshops, and is the main driving force behind this company which primarily focuses on audio adaptations of comic books. They don't have any huge licenses, but have produced excellent versions of Elaine Lee's Starstruck and Jamal Igle's Molly Danger, and are currently running a kickstarter to finance a production based on Josh Finney's Utopiates. The Classics Archive.org- The good news is that most material from the Golden Age of Radio is public domain. The bad news is that it's spottily curated- the collections here are full of holes and it's really hard to find specific material. It doesn't help that most commercial releases of classic radio content are, as mentioned above, nostalgia fluff with random episodes of various familiar shows compiled together. Still, there's gold to be found, so happy hunting. The Firesign Theatre- This underground avant garde comedy troupe was a fixture of the 60s and 70s counterculture, even as they often mercilessly skewered it. The Firesign's comedy albums are dense, multilayered audio plays as absurdist as they are funny- the emphasis is on exploring weird conceptual spaces more than anything else, and you'll never catch everything on one listening. A vital, sometimes unrecognized link in the strained metaphorical chain of American comedy. The Goon Show. Another fine BBC offering, this showcase for the demented writing of Spike Milligan helped boost Peter Sellers into orbit and cemented the vitality of British audio comedy in the TV era. A kind of surreal commedia dell'arte in which a series of recurring characters are slotted into various kinds of misadventures, often ending in the demise of everyone involved. The site has complete episodes available to buy and the occasional freebie. Norman Corwin. This guy was basically God. A journalist, writer, producer, etc., this man's work in the Golden Age of Radio included everything from live remote news broadcasts around the world, to wartime propaganda, to comedy and light fantasy. Revered by audiophiles everywhere and the 10-CD set they offer is surprisingly inexpensive. Resources and Other Things The National Audio Theatre Festivals- America's one major organization promoting audio works, the NATF had until recently run a number of workshops centered around producing a live radio broadcast encompassing a number of short plays. Guests have included voice workers Bill Dufris, Robin Young, Barbara Rosenblatt, Simon Jones (the voice of Arthur Dent), and Phil Proctor and David Ossman of the Firesign Theater. Right now they're focused on the HEARNow listening festival, showcasing notable audio works present and past, but they're hoping to be eventually be big enough to hold both each year. There are great people here. iTunes, Amazon, and Audible carry a number of audio theatre downloads if you're willing to look. (Also check and see if your library is a part of Freegal, which does free audio downloads on a limited-per-week basis.) Still to Come: History! Closer looks at notable works! Whatever it is YOU decide to contribute! Yes, you! I see you hiding there!
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Apr 12, 2014 22:06
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I own maybe 25 or 26 volumes of the Goon Show from the BBC. It never ceases to amaze that these programs are some 60-odd years old, considering how surreal and avant they are. If you haven't heard Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan carry on in these things - and tried to keep up with the stream of conscious and almost Dadaist gags - you're really missing an important precursor to modern comedy and improv.
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Apr 17, 2014 01:15
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So glad to see Thrilling Adventure Hour gaining some traction here on the forums. It's really great fun. My first (and favourite) proper radio drama was the original Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series. With a great cast, gorgeous music (Journey Of The Sorceror by the Eagles is truly iconic theme music) and a comedy legacy that lasts to this day, I think I've listened through the whole thing about a dozen times. "But wait, I thought Hitchhiker's was a book series?" Actually, the first book didn't come out until a year after the radio show was first broadcast! The second radio season (1980) diverges wildly from the second book, with bird people and a shoepocalypse. After that, the books continued to be published until 1992. A few years after Douglas Adams died in 2001, the BBC revived the radio series to adapt books 3, 4 and 5, using almost all the original cast. While getting off to a shaky start with book three (the Krikkit wars), the final season is as good as any of the original radio shows. The cast have recently been touring with a stage show loosely based on the radio scripts, and I can definitely recommend seeking it out!
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Apr 18, 2014 20:21
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I totally blew including H2G2 in the op. Of course it's hugely important to any discussion of the medium- not just in that it's funny and popular and a big influence in that way, but it also pushed the capabilities of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and what they could accomplish to match Adams' ideas. If you get your hands on the script book it describes some of the more elaborate sound tricks Paddy Kingsland and company had to accomplish. (My favorite is the discotheque scene, where they came up with the background music by taking sections of "Stayin' Alive", chopping them up and playing them backwards to make it nearly unrecognizable.) Douglas Adams broke so many rules it's amazing. He didn't plan out the series, many portions of the script were written on the day of recording, the plot keeps shifting, and it just works because he was That Good. Maxwell Lord fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Apr 19, 2014 |
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Apr 19, 2014 17:04
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I friggin' love the radio H2G2tG. The Shoe Event Horizon is my favourite joke from any version of the story. And the radio has the best version of Trillian by far. It's probably worth bringing up Dirk Maggs, who's done a crapload of radio play work for the Beeb, including the final 3 series of Hitchhikers, the corresponding Dirk Gently series with Harry Enfield as Dirk, and a bunch of really fun DC Comics adaptations. A lot of which are available via places like Audible. On the one hand, I realise that adaptation is a different matter than original material for the medium, and radio/audio gives a wide and amazing canvas for drama and comedy that would look cheap or be deemed 'too risky' on film, but well... I love these productions just as much as I enjoy Big Finish's work on Doctor Who and other licences. It's also likely worth noting that BF both do original works, and have more 'classical' productions like a Sherlock Holmes (Victorian flavour, not Cumberbatch Sherlock) series, and that some of their stuff is more like audiobooks with multiple narrators, compared with their bigger name work which is more along the full-cast radio play format.
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Apr 23, 2014 23:46
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The Big Broadcast, with Ed Walker on WAMU, NPR's Washington DC station, does four hours of Golden Age audio theater every Sunday night, and you can listen to the most recent archived show on the website. There's a lot of the classics: Gunsmoke, Johnny Dollar, Dragnet, but he'll throw in some wild cards, too, especially around holidays.
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Apr 27, 2014 00:10
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The Time Before Radio! Though we often think of "radio drama" or "radio plays" in terms of referring to this sort of thing, the first audio plays actually predate that particular invention.  The story goes like this (and I'm paraphrasing from a lecture given by a guy named Richard Fish, who's done a lot of work on the history of the medium.) When the wax cylinder phonograph was first marketed, the makers thought it would primarily be used as a tool for dictation and home use- it was recordable, so you'd take a blank cylinder and make a recording of yourself and play it back. But of course, what they didn't anticipate was that we hear our own voice differently from how others hear it, and tend not to recognize or like it when we hear it played back. So people were a little hesitant to jump into home recording. But they still loved the idea of playing recorded sounds, and so a huge market for prerecorded cylinders came into being. Concerts and music were an obvious sell, but another popular category was the recording of vaudeville shows. Of course, not all vaudeville and similar stage routines worked in an audio-only medium; you couldn't see any sets or physical gags. So eventually someone got the idea to adapt and write material specifically for the cylinders. For the most part these were silly comedy routines with little (if any) plot, with comic dialogue usually interlaced with song numbers. But in these works you can already hear the basic elements of any modern audio play, including sound effects. A typical example (though I can't find it streaming anywhere) is "Zeb Green's Airship", a silly play featuring Ada Jones and Len Spencer as lovebirds who wish to get married on the inaugural flight of the titular homemade balloon- Jones (the "First Lady of the Phonograph") sings a song, a reporter describes the airship ascending, and it then pops, depositing everyone in a nearby lake. Other plays were just plotless exchanges of jokes, a format that would survive to radio, but even these would sometimes throw in sound effects to create the illusion of a scene with characters. One bit that I know and can find is Bill Duprez' Desperate Desmond, a melodrama parody which plays around with mismatches of music and sound effects. (There's an unfortunate reference to a "buck dancer", but this was 1912.) Some of this stuff was even recorded without the benefit of electricity- speaking into a horn or tube would directly transmit those vibrations to a stylus etching onto the cylinder. A surprising number of wax cylinder recordings have survived, though obviously the sound quality has suffered. One good source is a CD called Before Radio, a selection of comedy sketches, songs, and various audio pieces from 1897-1923.
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May 1, 2014 07:00
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The Golden Age of Radio- An Introduction Experiments with radio transmission were being done off and on in the late 19th and early 20th century, and in the early twenties you started to have stations broadcasting news and music and so on to those who could afford a set. By 1922 Variety was claiming that a million sets were in operation around the United States, and the number kept growing. Entertainment for the masses! And it was all LIVE! There were two reasons for this, one cultural, one practical. People were still in awe of this strange magic box that brought you a constant stream of noise from far away, and it was felt to be somewhat dishonest, even lazy, for a network to play something prerecorded. It was a scrub move. The other reason was that recording quality suuuuuuuuuuucked. The recordings we get of Golden Age radio are full of hisses and pops and scratchiness, because that was simply the best you could hope to do. This was before high fidelity, let alone any substantial means of remixing or retouching audio- it was impossible to avoid generational loss. If a play on one of the various anthology shows was popular enough for people to want to hear it again, you got the script out, got together cast members (usually not the same ones) and performed it again. Major broadcasts in the U.S. would often be performed twice for the benefit of people in the Pacific time zone. Most radio broadcasts, then, had the cast gathered in a single room around one microphone with two "live" faces- that is, it received sound from two directions opposite each other. The actors would stand opposite each other, move off when not needed, and if they needed to sound distant or receding they would move to one of the "dead" faces. Scripts were held together with paperclips, with pages thrown on the floor as the broadcast progressed. And of course, you had the classic live sound shenanigans- sheet metal used for thunder, coconuts as horse hooves, elaborate creaking mechanisms for opening and closing doors, etc. (Most of this stuff still gets used today, because, well, it works.) You know the "old timey" broadcaster voice that you hear people do, the sharp nasal one? There's actually something behind this and it again goes to the technology. Most of the microphones used in this era were carbon microphones, with carbon granules separating metal plates and vibrating as sound waves hit them, translating into electrical current, etc. The big thing about them is that they catch a fairly narrow frequency range of sound, one that doesn't cover all of human speech- the low and high ends get flattened, and so everyone sounds just a little tinny. This technology was also in use for phone receivers for many decades. Among many things, this era of audio theater effectively gave birth to what we know as the modern situation comedy, or sitcom. As I said before, a lot of comedy recordings of the pre-radio era, and thus broadcast performances as well, were simply people telling jokes and exchanging banter. They'd have set characters, of course, doing broad dialects of various kinds (in addition to ethnic caricature, just about any "hayseed" or country bumpkin figure was popular) and telling jokes that were probably already ancient. However, 1926 saw the first broadcasts of the 15-minute comedy program Sam 'n' Henry, which you will probably know a little better if I call it what it was renamed two years later- Amos 'n' Andy. Of course the idea of comic characters in recurring situations goes back to medieval theater, but shows like Amos 'n' Andy and The Jack Benny Program started to really set in place the idea of a regularly performed, plot-driven comedy with recurring characters. Drama-wise, there were a few major directions radio went. One focused on serials aimed mostly at kids, genre programming featuring intrepid crimefighters, brave explorers, etc. getting caught in deadly cliffhangers designed to keep people tuning in. It was the same idea as the comic strips and movie serials which were popular at the time, and it makes up a fair chunk of the material that gets repackaged for release today. Some detective and mystery shows were aimed at a slightly older audience and tended towards self-contained stories; The Shadow, featuring the voice of Orson Welles, was a popular one, and there were tons of programs featuring plain old gumshoes getting involved with dangerous dames and being knocked over the head by hulking bodyguards. And then you had the anthology shows. Here the draw would not be recurring characters, or ongoing storylines, but simply material written and performed by trusted names. Hollywood actors frequently did radio on the side, and many anthology shows were focused on the work of a single writer. The horror show Lights Out! was a showcase for Arch Oboler, Norman Corwin had 26 by Corwin, and of course ol' Orson had The Mercury Theater on the Air. Even in shows without a set writer, like Suspense! or science fiction shows like X Minus One, there was a sense of prestige and an appeal to an adult listening audience. In short, a lot happened, and what had been a medium for hobbyists became one of the most slick and professional arenas for mass entertainment there was, dominated by large broadcasting companies making lots of money off of commercial revenue and direct sponsorship of shows. Still to come: Orson Welles Scares the Crap Out of People Maxwell Lord fucked around with this message at 06:25 on May 15, 2014 |
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May 15, 2014 06:13
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The War of the Worlds: Orson Welles Trolls America It was October, 1938. Radios were in millions of homes across America, and one of the more recent arrivals onto the airwaves was the Mercury Theatre on the Air. The Mercury Theatre was a repertory company founded by producer John Houseman and actor/director/etc. Orson Welles. The troupe rose to prominence in 1937 with a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, staged in contemporary dress with echoes of the fascist movements in Germany and Italy. By 1938 Welles, well versed in radio (and already known as the voice of the Shadow), was invited to produce a show for CBS, originally called First Person Singular with the hook that Welles would be the lead in every production. Welles insisted on bringing the rest of the players with him, and the show was quickly retitled The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Early productions included Dracula, Treasure Island, and The Thirty-Nine Steps.  Everything was going fine but for one problem- they were getting creamed in the ratings by Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. But come October, Welles had a plan. Oh, yes. The program's Halloween offering for October 30 was to be an adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, adapted to modern times and presented in part as a series of news reports describing the landing of an invading force from Mars at a small farm in New Jersey. Howard Koch and Anne Froelick would do the writing duties, and Welles would direct. The Theatre knew that at a certain point in Bergen's show, the star's opening comic routine would end and a singer would come on, and listeners who didn't care for the musical part of the show would start turning the dial searching for what else was on. So for the first ten minutes or so, The War of the Worlds is low-key- first an opening monologue adapted from the book, then some music broadcasts interrupted by news reports of strange eruptions on the surface of Mars- here, a pretend "remote" to a local observatory introduces Professor Pearson, Welles' rendering of the book's protagonist. Once the music had started over on Bergen's show, people tuning in got hit with the whallop- "live reports" describing a meteor landing at a farm at Grover's Mill, the first attack of the Martians and their heat ray, military counteroperations, and then the full-fledged invasion of Earth by seemingly unstoppable tripod machines. People were now flipping out. The extent to which people were actually fooled by all of this is still hard to say. The program's ratings still weren't great, and anyone who actually kept paying attention to the program eventually was greeted with an intermission followed by the second half of the play- a more conventional narration by Welles as Pearson, seemingly a lone survivor of the attack scrabbling for food and signs of life in the aftermath of an alien apocalypse. Still, enough people were fooled at the time that reports were coming into the studio before the show was over. Newspapers liked to play up the deception and manipulation of this competing medium, and for his part, Welles was glad to play along- the publicity of the Martian hoax netted the Mercury Theatre a big sponsorship, and was no doubt part of what drew the attention of Hollywood movie studios, a surge of momentum that would lead to RKO Studios giving Welles carte blanche to make just about whatever movie he liked. Even apart from the legendary controversy, though, The War of the Worlds stands out as a masterpiece of audio theatre. The pacing of the first half is masterful, building from a few seemingly innocuous news items to increasingly tense and panicked live reports, eventually to relays from artillerymen and bombers. The timing is important to remember- though the opening monologue includes the line "the war scare was over", tension over the possibility of another global conflict was still building in Europe and Asia, and the clipped authenticity of the broadcast taps into the very real fears that were about to be realized. The first half culminates in a still unbelievably brutal scene of the Martians spraying poisonous black smoke over the city of New York, finally claiming the station itself, before a despairing ham radio operator calls out to ask if anyone is left at all. Inevitably the second half of the play is not quite as gripping, as the "radio verite" device is dropped in favor of something more obviously fictional. Orson Welles carries us through an abbreviated version of the second half of Wells' book, cutting out almost entirely the business with a mad parson. The encounter with the artilleryman, however, paints a very vivid portrait of Earth Under The Martians, as the half-sane soldier hypothesizes about what's going to happen next, with the Martians cultivating humans as food, pets, and even hunters of those left alive. The fear of fascism begins to creep through as the artilleryman describes his plan to build a new society underground, one with no room for weakness or compassion. The show closes with a short speech by Welles, which was thought to be a response to the panic but actually appeared in the original script. In any case, outcry over the "hoax" prompted the actor/director's apology to Congress, and has sparked many rules and practices designed to prevent such confusion happening again; as an example, a similarly themed TV movie called "Without Warning" had to not only have disclaimers bordering every commercial break, but also on screen during much of the climactic action (to make things doubly clear, the "news broadcast" in the TVM is from a network that doesn't exist.) Here is the Internet Archive's presentation of the show, which is also available in just about every Golden Age of Radio compilation known to mankind. There's also this site, Mercury Theatre on the Air, with more of the show's broadcasts though some are only available as Real Audio (which apparently still exists) and they go ahead and tell you to seek out torrents. If you haven't heard this one, you really should. Still to Come: TV Ruins Everything
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May 24, 2014 05:54
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People here are probably familiar with L.A. Theatre Works' radio productions. The NPR station here broadcasts them late on Friday nights when I'm usually in the car. The quality varies, and they pull off comedy better than drama, but I've heard some real gems. You can listen to the previous week's show on their Soundcloud page. I read Puckoon recently on a friend's recommendation and it was fantastic. I'm definitely going to check out The Goon Show.
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May 31, 2014 22:05
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Should have posted this earlier, but the Hear Now Festival is well underway in KC. It's mostly centered around the Plaza area with listening sessions at the Cinemark theater there, and some live performances at the Community Christian Church and other places. I'll be off in a little bit to attend a listening of Trans-Mars Tango, a play we put on at the National Audio Theater Workshop in 2012 from a script by Elaine Lee.
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Jun 21, 2014 15:47
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Maxwell Lord posted:As I said before, a lot of comedy recordings of the pre-radio era, and thus broadcast performances as well, were simply people telling jokes and exchanging banter. They'd have set characters, of course, doing broad dialects of various kinds (in addition to ethnic caricature, just about any "hayseed" or country bumpkin figure was popular) and telling jokes that were probably already ancient. And just look at how far entertainment has come since then. Now our ethnic caricatures and country bumpkins tell ancient jokes while standing in front of giant CGI robot fights!  This thread's great. I'm a Firesign nerd, so I'd feel remiss if I didn't recommend that everyone listen to Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers. It's not just one of the best comedy albums ever, it might be in the top five funny things mankind has ever produced.
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Jun 22, 2014 00:51
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TV Ruins Everything: Okay, I didn't have a lot prepared for this Turns out it's a lot harder to talk about things not happening in radio than it is to talk about things happening. This part of the historical narrative is pretty well-known, even if it's distorted by myth. When TV started to mushroom in popularity at the end of the forties and the beginning of the fifties, the major American radio networks briefly put up a fight and then joined in. Shows and talents were moved off of radio onto TV, basically by force- many writers, actors, etc. were unhappy about moving to a new medium which now required blocking, sets, costumes, etc. and which lacked radio's narrative freedom. Some writers were outright screwed. Arch Oboler had mostly become famous taking over the horror anthology Lights Out! from Wylie Cooper (his most famous story being the "giant chicken heart" episode that inspired a Bill Cosby routine), but he moved on to more serious drama. He gave television a go for six episodes in 1949, but his opinion on the medium can be seen in the film that gave us the image above- 1953's The Twonky, in which Hans Conreid tangles with a superintelligent TV that seeks to turn mankind into an unthinking slave race. With radio drama being slowly strangled around him, Oboler had really no choice but to move to film, and with uneven success. Officially, the "Golden Age of Radio" is considered to have died on September 30, 1962, with the last broadcast of "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar", the last full radio series on a network. In the preceding decade there were still stabs at anthology shows, adaptations of classic literature, etc., but TV was rapidly filling in all the gaps when it wasn't remaking radio shows outright. One of the reasons why it was such utter carnage in the US- and not elsewhere- was that at the time America didn't really have public broadcasting, for either medium. All that would come in the late sixties and early seventies, after which most everyone had gotten out of the audio theater game in this country. It's hard to start from square one all over again. Still to come: Comedy to the Rescue!
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Jul 15, 2014 23:34
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DoombatINC posted:This thread's great. I'm a Firesign nerd, so I'd feel remiss if I didn't recommend that everyone listen to Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers. It's not just one of the best comedy albums ever, it might be in the top five funny things mankind has ever produced.
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Jul 21, 2014 12:20
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FactsAreUseless posted:Everybody recommends Don't Crush That Dwarf, but How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All is both a better album and more accessible, so I recommend people start there. Vacancy No Vacancy / The Lonesome American Choo-Choo is loving brilliant and no less relevant today than it was in the 60s. Nick Danger never did much for me, though  And if anyone didn't know that Firesign kept going well into the 90's, check out Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death. It's one of the last albums they made and a major favorite of mine, though I might be biased since unlike most of their works I actually was alive for the stuff they're making fun of
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Jul 21, 2014 17:32
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DoombatINC posted:And if anyone didn't know that Firesign kept going well into the 90's, check out Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death. It's one of the last albums they made and a major favorite of mine, though I might be biased since unlike most of their works I actually was alive for the stuff they're making fun of
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Jul 21, 2014 22:28
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On A Note of Triumph Norman Corwin was one of the leading lights of the Golden Age of Radio. As writer and sometimes director and producer, he produced plays ranging from light fantasy to serious drama and semi-documentary works; he helped coordinate all-star productions and international remote brodcasts. Perhaps his single most famous work was a one-hour piece broadcast on May 8, 1945 to celebrate V-E Day- the end of World War II in Europe. "On A Note of Triumph" is a mix of celebration, autopsy, and grim reminder of the duties still ahead. Martin Gabel as the announcer guides listeners on a rhetorical survey of the end of the fight against Germany, one punctuated with a macabre square dance ("Round and around Hitler's grave"). The "little guy", the fighting man, the anonymous soldier of one of the united nations, asks the questions around which the play is structured: Who did we beat? How much did it cost? What have we learned? What do we do now? Will it happen again? So we go from a summary of the rise of fascism in Europe, voices in assent and in resistance, to a look back at the casualties of war and of the Nazi genocides, to statements of resolve, and most stunningly, a sequence wherein the announcer guides the listener away from Europe, to the Pacific, first to an Allied plane in flight to deliver the good news, then to a destroyer at sea, then to the bottom of the ocean and a sunken submarine, to pound without reply at the hatch and to shout "We've beaten them!" to a ship of men already dead fighting the other half of the war. It's an effective piece of propaganda which steers from naked jingoism (when mentioning a British soldier killed the script is careful to date his death to before the U.S. entered the War) to a more universal affirmation of opposition to the tyranny just defeated, throwing in a few boldly leftist statements about women's rights, the living wage, and the chance for the nations to work together for peace now- with the understanding that the broad struggle is never over. Eschewing plot and character it paints an incredible soundscape, full of images and ideas. Its sometimes amusing exuberance offers an interesting glimpse into this time period- a kind of disbelief that it is in fact almost over, that the seemingly unstoppable Nazi war machine was in fact routed. Most newsreels and propaganda pieces of the time broadcast a cheerful certainty intended to keep morale high- here we get just a touch of the uncertainty and fear people must have felt. I've been working my way through Norman Corwin Centennial, a 10-CD collection of the writer's works, which range from heady material like this and a December 1941 Bill of Rights special to lighter fare like "The Plot to Overthrow Christmas", a verse comedy in which various denizens of Hell get together to figure out how to stop Santa Claus. I highly recommend this collection- Corwin's material is notably NOT in public domain and this appears to be the first properly curated release of his work. Corwin, who lived to be 101, was in touch with the audio theater community in America up to his death, and the NATF has established the annual Norman Corwin Award to celebrate continued excellence in the medium. (Note that the American Pageant sequence in the Firesign Theater's "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All" is a dead-on homage to works like this, the techniques of patriotic propaganda turned brutally against the current wartime establishment.)
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Aug 19, 2014 07:09
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FactsAreUseless posted:Everybody recommends Don't Crush That Dwarf, but How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All is both a better album and more accessible, so I recommend people start there. How Can You Be... is one of their most accessible pieces, definitely. Especially as Nick Danger, on its own, is something easy to grok as a spoof of old detective serials. In terms of quality it's hard to say, that initial four-album run is all pretty classic stuff.
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Sep 19, 2014 00:04
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Back at the HearNow festival I listened to a really neat audio version of H. P. Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu, by a group called Dark Adventure Radio Theater with the involvement of some of the same people who made the silent movie version. Free to listen, and I especially like the framing device (and one twist that tweaks HPL's racism.)
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Oct 18, 2014 00:33
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Are there going to be recommendations in the OP? If so, I'd like to recommend We're alive ( http://www.werealive.com/ ), a zombie podcast, and The Gear Heart ( http://www.thegearheart.com/ ), which is more 1920's era magic and monsters fantasy stuff.
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Oct 19, 2014 18:09
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HanzoSchmanzo posted:We're alive ( http://www.werealive.com/ ), a zombie podcast I see this is now a complete series. How was the whole run?
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Oct 19, 2014 20:00
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Drunk Tomato posted:I see this is now a complete series. How was the whole run? Pretty good. The first couple of seasons are outstanding, in my opinion, then it kind of simmers down into melodrama. Still not bad, though. I really recommend it. I haven't been able to find anything else in the audio drama department that comes close.
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Oct 19, 2014 20:28
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HanzoSchmanzo posted:Pretty good. The first couple of seasons are outstanding, in my opinion, then it kind of simmers down into melodrama. Still not bad, though. I really recommend it. So far I've listened to the first few chapters, and I've liked it quite a bit. The voice acting is spotty at times (bordering on awful), but the production quality and sound effects are great. The story seems like a typical zombie survival thing, but in a new medium it is still exciting.
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Oct 29, 2014 21:08
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Comedy to the Rescue! So, in America, radio theater was basically dying a slow and painful death. Off radio, however, comedy albums were doing a healthy trade- stand-up comics made the transition from radio to TV pretty well, and got more exposure in the process. The late 50s and early 60s saw major releases for Bob Newhart, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, and Lenny Bruce- Bruce, of course, being too much for TV or radio, at least had a chance of getting his material out on records. Some of this stuff was close to audio theater already. Newhart's monologues, for example, tend to be one-man plays framed as hypothetical situations (the classic "I think it would go something like this" bit which would be beaten to death by inferior comics.) A great example here is his idea of Sir Walter Raleigh pitching the concept of tobacco to his bosses back in England- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1KbtLrBZ0k Other live presentations made for good audio playlets, such as Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner's legendary 2000 Year Old Man routine. Some comics saw more potential in the album format. One of them was Stan Freberg, a comedian who released a number of sketches and songs on vinyl through the fifties, his first big hit being John and Marsha- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkfwmB8jeSU in 1951. (Note: People actually tried to censor this album once for indecent lyrics.) After a brief run on radio where he ran into all kinds of network interference, Freberg started doing longer works such as "Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America" in 1961, a musical play narrated by Paul Frees. I honestly do not know as much about this guy as I should. And this brings us to The Firesign Theatre. I had an entire thread about these guys that I let die off, so I'm going to focus quite a few posts on them. In brief, the Firesigns actually had their start on radio- specifically early FM radio, which station owners in the 60s were failing to exploit despite clearer sound, potential for stereo broadcasting, etc. The FCC finally said that you couldn't just squat on FM frequencies and actually had to put something on the air, so a lot of stations were programmed pretty casually. On KPFK in Los Angeles, around 1967, Peter Bergman hosted a pretty freeform show called "Radio Free Oz" and had on a lot of guests, friends, and hangers-on. Eventually he, David Ossman, Philip Proctor, and Phil Austin cohered as a group, and realizing that they were all astrological fire signs, dubbed themselves the Oz Firesign Theatre. However, while the Firesigns started on radio (and apparently none of the original radio run has survived- the material they've released since was from 1970-1972), they attracted the attention of Columbia Records, and landed a deal to produce original albums for them. Rather than just recycle their on-air routines, the group scripted and created long, surreal absurdist pieces. They were the first to use multi-track recording technology on a comedy album, playing with sound and editing to create convincing aural landscapes and deceptive transitions. Their first album, "Waiting For The Electrician Or Someone Like Him", consisted of four sketches, the last taking up an entire side of the record. The second, "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once If You're Not Anywhere At All", was basically two pieces, one on each side, and from the third album on their albums tended to be entire single long-form works. So basically, audio theater didn't really die out in America in this period- it just moved, for the most part, off of radio and onto records. It wasn't really recognized as being the same thing as what we were listening to in the Golden Age of Radio- material that would basically receive the archival label of "Old Time Radio"- but the tradition was being kept alive. Eventually: NPR Sort of Comes To The Rescue But Doesn't Maxwell Lord fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Dec 9, 2014 |
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Nov 26, 2014 08:59
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Reposting this from the defunct Firesign thread: The Firesign Theatre's first album is mostly about politics- about nations and societies. Even though it's divided up into four sketches, they were definitely thinking along certain lines and the four flow into each other quite well. Though the Firesigns are generally a counterculture group, that didn't stop them from lampooning hippies as viciously as the "straight" culture. "Temporarily Humboldt County" "That's not a well. It's the eye of the Holy Serpent Mound on which you're standing." "It's a butte." "No, it's a mound." "And right purty, too. Can you move it?" "But why?" "Railroad's comin' through! Right now!" Sound of a train roaring into the station The first sketch tells the story of the conquering of the American West, as seen from the perspective of two Indians who, over generations, are pushed back further by colonists, their own dream of meeting the "True White Brother" turned against them until they're reduced to playing savages in a Western movie. Heavy stuff, but lightened with lots of wordplay and broad comedy from the colonists. It's also a great example of how the audio medium can "cheat"- we're taken across hundreds of years and hundreds of miles through simple transitions while still retaining the feel of a single coherent scene. In one particularly funny aside, Bergman plays a hippie who assures the Indians that soon "we're all gonna be livin' like Indians and dressin' like Indians, and doing all the things you simple beautiful people do, man." It's a nice zing on the movement, and it leads us nicely to… "W. C. Fields Forever" This is a riff on hippie commune life, taking the form of a visit to the Lazy O Magic Circle Dude Ranch and Collective Love Farm. A lot of jokes center on the collision of hippie and Western culture, with grub consisting of actual grubs (grumble grumble), a rinky-tink saloon, and a psychedelic version of the Lone Ranger who rides a horse named Electric Blue and has a sidekick named Tantric. Eventually we meet the guru, Dr. Tim, and you know who he's supposed to be. Of course he's a hypocrite who's gotten tired of the groovy life, but still performs his daily summoning of the sun while his followers chant, zombielike. The encroachment of hippie hordes takes us to the first side's third and final sketch- "Le Trente-Huit de Cunegonde" We're in a hippie-ruled world now, where cops patrol the streets looking for people who aren't holding, and mothers worry about their sons going to schools and late-night study groups. As the sketch continues we see some of the darker side of this new utopia- a man is jailed for giving food to a woman who lost her free food card ("She was starving!" "Young man, that's her trip!"), and though there's no war anymore, the US, Russia, and Hippie Republic of China are planning to carve up their pieces of Nigeria, home of the last remnants of unhip resistance, about to be buried under thousands of copies of Naked Lunch. We end on the National Anthem- "Oh say are you hip / to the dawn's daily flash" "Waiting For the Electrician (or Someone Like Him)" The title track takes up all of the second side, which is introduced as side 5 with several words in Turkish ("bath", "towel", "border"- it actually took me a while to get the joke.) The story follows a tourist visiting an Iron Curtain country, just in time to witness the death of its beloved dictator. He gets swept up in the resistance, leads the resistance, and is arrested for it. He falls into sickness, as rendered by a game show, "Beat the Reaper!" He fails to identify that he has the plague, but this gets him spirited out of prison and back to the border, hundreds of people in pursuit wanting to die, but at the end- he's at side six, about to go through the whole business all over again. It's very much a riff on Kafka, with touches of Burroughs and Vonnegut- the kind of broad social satire that was popular at the time, with a strong dark touch to it despite the absurdity. (One of the best gags involves a fellow prisoner who is writing the great prison novel, "Leather Thighs".) On the CD, this comes with a bonus track- "The Mantras and the Chakras", a spoof on the brief rage for sitar music. It's a silly piece and the exaggerated accents are kinda problematic, but it's a nice dose of light nonsense after the heaviness of "Waiting". This is definitely an album whose pieces take some repeated listening to appreciate. (This was really true of all the Firesign work, though.) The group was really interested in creating consistent worlds more than stringing gags together- David Ossman has called it less "comedy" than "absurdism". It was really unlike any other comedy records being released at the time, and with the subsequent Columbia albums the group would further refine their approach to the format.
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Dec 27, 2014 02:32
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I appreciate your posts, and this thread. I want you to know that.
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Dec 28, 2014 04:49
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Public Radio In America- The Really Short Version This is complicated. When you think of public radio in the US, you think of NPR. There are actually at least four groups involved in the production and distribution of public radio- NPR, Public Radio International, American Public Media, and Public Radio Exchange- all of which create and syndicate programs for public radio stations. However many public radio stations are NPR affiliates. In 1967 Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act, which among other things established NPR as the replacement for the National Educational Radio Network. (NPR wouldn't start having member stations and being the face of public radio in America until later, though.) The upshot of all this was that there was more funding and support for radio programming that wasn't strictly commercial. In theory this should have been a boon for radio drama and comedy, and in practice- well, it wasn't awful. Certainly it meant there were more places to sell radio theater and comedy, and as an organization NPR has definitely dipped its toes into big productions like extended adaptations of the original Star Wars trilogy, or restagings of the classic War of the Worlds broadcast, etc. But frankly they've never done as much as they could, and it's for a number of reasons. One of them is that they were created with an emphasis towards informational and educational programming, news being a priority. NPR's first broadcasts were Senate hearings on Vietnam, and its first major original program was All Things Considered. There's room for entertainment programming but it's not their core mission. Second, this being the US, public media of any kind is under constant attack by the right wing, who like to paint PBS and NPR as bastions of liberal propaganda and government brainwashing, which leads to frequent funding cutbacks. PBS at least can drag out Elmo and Big Bird to defend their existence, but things are tough all over- and again, keeping NPR's news apparatus going is a big priority. Right now both public television and radio in America not only receive minimal taxpayer funding, but are openly allowed to have for-profit sponsorships and even mention sponsors' specific products on air. It's basically pretty drat close to commercial broadcasting already. Third, like PBS, public radio in America is very decentralized. Local stations depend on local support to survive and program their schedules based on what local listeners want. There's very little consistency from one station to the next, and this makes it tough to launch big programs of any kind. Not that radio theater has to be done with a lot of money, let alone publicity, but it means that it's rare for much of anything they do to command mainstream attention. Which brings me to the point that we're just not USED to radio theater as a thing anymore. It disappeared thoroughly enough from the American landscape that sheer inertia makes it hard to reintroduce. NPR stations tend to have more niche content than commercial radio, but the actual formats aren't really much different- there's a lot of news, a lot of talk, and a lot of music. That's what people are used to listening to and that's what tends to do well- call-in shows, local music, and the familiar news programs. This is the big advantage places like Britain and Europe and well, the rest of the world have- their radio never stopped having dramas and comedy shows on it, they just became a little scarce. (Not to mention in a lot of countries, public entities like the BBC were originally the only game in town, so entertainment was part of their remit from the start.) But we do still have public radio and it still occasionally dips into this sort of thing. Indeed it's one of those places where the line becomes a little blurry- A Prairie Home Companion, structured like an old-timey variety show, often throws in short comedy sketches (including the recurring adventures of detective Guy Noir), and getting a lot of attention now is Serial, which people listen to like it's a drama even though it's actually a documentary. Like many government programs in the US, we bitch and moan because it doesn't do a lot but it's better than nothing. Still to Come: A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy, etc.
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Jan 28, 2015 07:27
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The biggest barrier to long-form radio shows, as in a single continuous hour or even half-hour episode, is that people don't listen to the radio that way anymore. It's why NPR's show clocks have moved more and more to self-contained segments. People mostly listen to radio in the car or office, and you can't count on anyone tuning in at the beginning of an hour. Podcasts like Serial are successful because they're on-demand. There's plenty of room for audio plays and dramas, just not on actual radio broadcasts anymore.
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Feb 4, 2015 02:34
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I was late sharing this, but for a few more days you can download Ruby, The Adventures of a Galactic Gumshoe FREE from ZBS here: Ruby Refreshed: The Complete Series It's "Ruby Refreshed" because the music has been recreated and enhanced by the original composer, Tim Clark. The rest is the same as was broadcast in 1981. It's a really fun, nifty little series- a few rough patches but still the best thing I've heard from ZBS so far.
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Feb 17, 2015 16:50
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I listened to a lot of old time radio as a kid, my dad had some stuff on vinyl and cassette, and a local oldies station used to play hours of the stuff every Sunday. I mostly listened to Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Dragnet, Green Hornet, Lights Out Everyone, stuff like that. Plus I had some good stuff on vinyl for kids, like The Rescuers (much darker to hear than to watch the movie), some other Disney stuff. This thread's great, is what I'm saying. I'm sure Hitchiker's floating around out there on some torrent (or available legitimately at a price I'm probably going to choke and sputter at), I'll get to that someday, but this Ruby thing is right here and free, I'm going there first. edit: to slightly contribute, as this probably doesn't count as "theater," here is the spoken word album by Steve Allen, "How to Think." In my mind, it oozes 60's era audio work and science-y optimism, like a trip through Spaceship Earth at Epcot. http://eggcityradio.com/2008/steve-allen/ doctorfrog fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Feb 17, 2015 |
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Feb 17, 2015 19:51
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So, I'm finding it kind of hard to believe that no one's yet mentioned Cabin Pressure It's a very traditional sitcom, with broad gags, cliche plots, and characters you'd probably seen a thousand times. What sets it apart, other than the charm, is the talent on display. It boasts international celebrity otter Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivier award winner Roger Allam, Stephanie Cole (OBE) of Waiting for God, and the guy who wrote all of the actually funny sketches David Mitchell was in. It follows the staff of a small air charter firm while they deal with difficult passengers, play the kind of fun word games you'll wind up bullying your friends into playing, and get into the kind of scrapes that'd seem really hackneyed on television. It ended late last year with a two-part finale, the taping of which broke BBC ticket application records. It's a fun throwback, and you can catch old episodes on BBC Radio iPlayer (now available internationally) on its weird rerun schedule, or buy it on Audible. The complete box set is due out in the US in April.
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Mar 4, 2015 12:36
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I'm in constant need of new audio plays to get me through my commutes, and this thread has been a great help in finding new stuff to add to the rotation. Thanks a ton! And a great big special thanks for mentioning Cabin Pressure, I'm up to the last series now and it's been a lot of fun. If I had to describe in a word, I think I'd call it... brilliant.
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Mar 24, 2015 18:41
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It is my sad duty to report that Philip Austin has died.
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Jun 21, 2015 02:24
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Maxwell Lord posted:It is my sad duty to report that Philip Austin has died. Firesign Theatre posted:Nick Danger has left the office.
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Jun 21, 2015 02:37
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