The Golden Age of Radio: June 26, 2015

Max Schmid's The Golden Age of Radio (WBAI, 99.5, 7-9 PM Sundays) this Sunday was a fund-raiser, but also had time for tributes to Peg Lynch, who died on July 24, and two important radio personalities who were born on July 26:  Gracie Allen (1895) and Jean Shepard ((1921).  WBAI does not have underwriters or corporate sponsors of any kind, raising money exclusively from their listeners.

Peg Lynch is sometimes credited with inventing the sitcom, by now a rather decadent format.  But her show, Ethel and Albert (it ran from 1944 to 1950) was not about nothing, but rather about  how important and symbolic even the smallest things can be.  Schmid played a later version of the show, The Couple Next Door, from 1957, script by Lynch (she wrote all her shows) in which the car keys are lost in the snow and then when they are found there is no car:  it had been brought in for repairs and no one had bothered to pick it up. As John Dunning wrote in The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford University Press,1998), "Entire episodes could be consumed with the principles standing at the kitchen sink, talking and doing the dishes." and the humor came from the interplay of the stars, Lynch and Alan Bunce, not from glib one-liners.

Then from Schmid, came George and Gracie, from 1940, in which George Burns tries to talk Gracie out of running for President (the symbol of her "Surprise Party" was going to be a kangaroo with a baby in its pouch, the slogan "it's in the bag.").  Burns and Allen had brought their vaudeville act to radio and even the addition of numerous bit players and singers did not keep the act from becoming rather tired, though Gracie, in the brilliant manner of Stepin Fetchit, used her daffy persona to deploy her underlying intelligence. 

I first encountered Jean Shepherd in Playboy, which ran his amusing stories on a regular basis when I was an adolescent.  Then when I came to New York for college I started to listen to his monologues on WOR, until he went off the air in 1977, coming on WBAI in the 90's to read his stories.  Many of these monologues are quite dated, though they are fascinating artifacts of the 60's and 70's.  But when he concentrated on stories of his childhood I find his monologues funny and moving, whether they actually happened or not (irrelevant, just as with Knausgaard's stories).  This Sunday Schmid played a program from July 15, 1966, in which Shep rides for the first time on the roller-coaster called, for some reason nobody knows, "The Bobs," in River View amusement park, with a wonderful evocation of the combination of bravado and fear felt by a teen-ager.

Scooby-Doo

The other animated show my daughter (who will be four in September) likes is Scooby-Doo.  The Boomerang channel shows two versions of this show, both from Hanna-Barbera, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969-86) and What's New, Scooby Doo? (2002-2006).  There is little difference between the shows except that in the later version there are cell phones and laptops and more (insipid) songs.  The plots of the shows -- or should I say the plot, since they are all the same and as rigid as a Noh drama (to which there are actually similarities, including humans masquerading as ghosts) --are how a bunch of kids exposes monsters who turn out to be crooks trying to scare people off so they can cash in one way or another. When the culprit or culprits are exposed they always blame "those meddling kids."  Fred, Velma, Daphne and Shaggy, with their dog Scooby-Doo always run from the monster until they figure out how to trap and expose him (or, less often, her).  I think what appeals to children about this show is the helpful and intelligent dog, who can "talk" to a limited extent, and the fact that a group of kids are not too scared to solve a mystery that baffles adults.  The group consists of the beatnik Shaggy, the all-American Fred, the glamorous Daphne and the nerd Velma, who is always losing her glasses.  In other words, most kids can identify with one or more of these characters.

The animation in these shows, like others from Hanna-Barbera, is cheap and crummy.  It is done by a process called limited animation, which means very limited and repetitious movement:  a good portion of each show consists of the same shots of the lead characters running to or from something, matted against slightly changing backgrounds,  Obviously most kids don't care much about the quality of the animation; my daughter loves to see which supernatural phenomenon the gang is going, in their van call The Mystery Machine, to solve.  The monsters are only moderately scary and I think my daughter always feel reassured that the kids will solve the mystery and the bad guys will be exposed, i.e, there is order and justice in the world.

Sofia the First

Sofia the First is a show on the Disney and Disney Junior channels that my three-year-old (soon to be four) daughter loves.  I think, as Susan and I watch the show with her each time, that the things that are most appealing to her about it are: 1) Sofia was a commoner whose mother married a king (so Sofia has to learn how to behave as a princess behaves) 2)Sofia has a magic amulet that allows her to converse with animals, her favorite being rabbit Clover and 3) Sofia learns on her own, often being wiser than her mother and stepfather. 

My daughter likes to watch the same episodes again and again, her current favorites being "Substitute Cedric" and "The Enchanted Feast."  In the former some pranksters from Hexley Hall, the school for sorcerers, invade Royal Prep while the teachers, good fairies from Sleeping Beauty, are at a fairy convention and Cedric, the Royal Sorcerer, is the substitute teacher.  Cedric is immobilized by the pranksters but teaches the children "the sorcerer's secret" by singing a song about it.  The sorcerer's secret is never to give up and, with this in mind, the students stop the pranksters from filling Royal Prep with bubbles in order to float it away.  In "The Enchanted Feast" the bad fairy Miss Nettle disguises herself as the sorcerer Sasha and immobilizes Cedric and the royal family (King Roland II, Queen Miranda and Sofia's stepbrother and stepsister, James and Amber) and attempts to steal Sofia's magic amulet.  Sofia stops Miss Nettle with the help of Clover and the appearance of Snow White (Disney princesses appear regularly on the show to advise Sofia).

The show is didactic in a low-key way and encourages tolerance and understanding:  Sofia stays friends with commoners Jade and Ruby and brings the trolls out of exile (they were mistakenly banished to their caves by a previous king).  The computer-generated animation is, by my standards, rather primitive (minimal movement and facial expression) but the animation is carried off rather successfully by the voices, particularly Ariel Winter as the eight-year-old Sofia (Winter herself is 17) and the songs, written by John Kavanaugh and Erica Rothschild.  The shows are all directed by Disney TV veteran Jamie Mitchell.

I am particularly impressed by the power to talk to animals that Sofia's magic amulet gives her.  I read Hugh Lofting's Doctor Doolittle books (written in the 1920's) when I was a child and wished that I could talk to animals; I knew they would be more understanding and sympathetic than the adult humans I had to deal with.

The Golden Age of Radio, April 25, 2015

Max Schmid's The Golden Age of Radio, is on WBAI, 99.5, every Sunday night from 7-9 PM.
The show April 25,2015 started with the last episode of The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen and was followed by three shows written by Cathleeen Hite, from Gunsmoke, Escape and Night Beat.

The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen ran on the Mutual network from 1947-1948, was written by Gil Doud and Bob Talman and directed by the versatile Elliot Lewis, who also starred as Master Phillip Carney, captain of the cargo ship on its route through Asia.  The episode Schmid played on April 25 was 'The Winchester Rifle and the Ambitious Groom'", about the murder of the groom at a wedding on Singapore, where one "never goes to bed without them brass knuckles."  At the end, as usual, Carney and his crew are off again to the freedom of the ocean.

Nightbeat ran from 1950-1952 on NBC and the show Schmid played on this date was "The Bug Murders", broadcast on Sept. 25, 1952, directed by Warren Lewis and written by the prolific Cathleen Hite.  Frank Lovejoy plays a Chicago reporter covering the night shift and solves a series of murders that turn out to be perpetrated by the psychologist who had volunteered at the newspaper to help solve them. It is a show full of the sounds of the city and the people of the night.

Escape ran from 1947 to 1954 on CBS and this night's episode came near the end, "The Eye of Evil" from July 17, 1954.  The reliable John Dehner plays a man who goes to Burma to find a friend, the plot being quite similar to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The show was written by Hite and directed by Norman Macdonnel, and effectively captures the disorientation an American would feel in a Burmese jungle.

Gunsmoke ran on radio from 1952-1961, on CBS, and the star, William Conrad, was always bitter that the TV version replaced him with James Arness (some may remember that Conrad was a bit portly).  Gunsmoke was one of the first "adult Westerns," with its gritty realisn, and Schmid played the episode "Nelly Sitden", from May 1,1960, where Sheriff Matt Dillon gets injured by Indians and is taken in by an elderly woman, who had been around for many years and was friends with the Indians.  Cathleen Hite wrote the script and Norman Mcdonnel directed.

Up to this point there has been very little written on the aesthetics and auteurs of radio, a medium that had only begun to reach its artistic peak when it was eclipsed by television, where one did not need one's imagination so much (three of the four shows mentioned above did not take place in contemporary America).  If you are interested in learning more about radio you can listen to Schmid's show every week on WBAI and read John Dunning's excellent On the Air:  The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford University Press, 1998).  There are many shows that survive and they are readily available on the internet, some of them free and some quite inexpensively on MP3 disks.

A Prairie Home Companion May 10,2015

"That's the news from Lake Woebegone, where all the women are strong,all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average."

 I have enjoyed the radio show A Prairie Home Companion for about 25 years, almost as long as it has been on the air in its present form.  Host Garrison Keillor turns 73 this year and occasionally threatens retirement but so far has been unwilling to go through with it.  The May 10th show was a typical combination of dry humor and American music, including an effective parody of "The Times They Are A' Changing" that emphasized how we are changing: "my daughter doesn't dare leave me alone ..."  There was an episode of Guy Noir, private eye (a tribute to film noir that I'm sure many people don't get) and "commercials" from Bebop-A-Rebop Rhubarb Pie and The Ketchup Advisory Board.  Ricky Skaggs, Sharon White and Kentucky Thunder performed some country rock ("Home is Wherever You Are"), Stuart Duncan performed a bluegrass version of a Waylon Jennings song and Keb'  Mo' played the blues.

The highlights of the show for me were the sketch about Dwayne and his mother, who always tells Dwayne everything is okay when it isn't, and the news from Lake Woebegone, this week about a dog that died, a cafeteria lady at the elementary school who retired, and what happened at Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, as well as the sermon at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility.  As always, Fred Newman did wonderfully effective sound effects.

I grew up in a small town and I am not one who thinks that Keillor condescends to the people in small towns such as Lake Woebgone; rather, it is an attempt to understand those people and what goes on there, even if one doesn't want to continue living in a town that doesn't have a public library.  And there is no question that Keillor has wide-ranging taste in music, having musical guests in just about every genre, from classical to country, as well as local guests wherever in the country he takes his show.

Mad Men

The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and often incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the direction is unimaginative.
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Mad Men Account, The New York Review of Books, Feb.24, 2011

Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better.
Mark Grief, London Review of Books, 23 October 2008

I largely agree with these comments (even if they sound like John Simon film reviews) but I still like and enjoy the show.  Mendelsohn thinks that the show may appeal to those too young to have lived through it (it takes place mostly in the sixties) who are interested in what their parents lives were like.  I lived through that period myself and find it quite accurate in its portrayal of the things and attitudes of that period, though I think "realism" is a fallacy when applied to any art.  Certainly the show is not like a nineteenth century novel (though many of the characters are Dickensian in their resistance to change) but it is somewhat like the eighteenth century novels of Smollett and others in its episodic and comic qualities.

My take on the show is that Matthew Weiner, its creator and writer, is not trying to say that today we are superior in so many ways but rather we are very much the same:  some people may smoke and drink less but attitudes toward women, gay men and lesbians, and people of color have not changed as much as we think they have:  there are still many Don Drapers in the world and many women such as Peggy Olson and Joan Harris who are trying to find their way in the business world using whatever combination of sex and accomplishment they can find that works.

The show is something of a soap opera indeed, but so are the films of Vincente Minnelli and Douglas Sirk.  Over a period of seven years Mad Men has consistently delighted and surprised one, as Draper's children have started to grow up and question things, just as their parents did and their parents before them.  The attitudes in Mad Men are centered in the advertising world, where the desire and ability to flimflam the public continues, sometimes more sophisticated than previously, but by no means always.

Secrets and Lies; David Letterman

Making a child die in a picture is a rather ticklish matter; it come close to an abuse of cinematic power.
Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (Simon and Schuster 1967)

Secrets and Lies had its season finale Sunday with an episode directed by Timothy Busfield and written by Barbie Kligman (who created the show, based on an Australian series) and Judy McCreary  A series about seeking the murderer of a young child makes one a little queasy, though it is becoming more common these days (Gracepoint is another recent example). This series was helped immensely by the presence of  thirtysomething veteran Timothy Busfield, who produced and directed, as well as acting in the series.  I did not find the mystery of who killed the young boy particularly interesting but everyone was a suspect at one time or another and the fragility of neighborhood bonds was convincingly demonstrated.  What I did find also well evoked were the authority issues among the lower-middle class and how little understanding there was between husband and wife and parents and children:  spouses routinely cheated on one another and fought constantly, fueled by alcohol,  and the most important thing for children is to obey their parents and other authority figures.  Violence was never far away and Juliette Lewis, the intimidating lead police investigator on the murder, was everywhere. Lewis was tough and no-nonsense (even sending her own child to jail for drugs), though at the very end she literally let down her hair as a father confessed to a murder his 12-year-old daughter committed.

There's not much to say about David Letterman.  After watching last night's special about his thirty-three years in late-night television it is clearer than ever that, like his idol Johnny Carson, he had little to contribute that will last or be remembered.  The special spent most of its time on the same celebrity guests that visit all these shows, though he did include an occasional hero, such as someone who rescued somebody from the subway tracks.  Letterman's tricks and stunts were all done before, and better, by Steve Allen, the original and best Tonight Show host (1954-57).  Letterman did hire some good writers and  I enjoyed Letterman up to a point when he was on at 12:30 in the 80's, but once he moved to an 11:30 spot (in 1993) he was not much different than Carson and no longer had guests such as Pee Wee Herman telling jokes.