picture from Old Time Radio Catalog
I have found a radio dramatisation of It’s a Wonderful Life starring the main cast of the film and
performed in front of an audience. Listening to something you know so well
means that of course you can picture the scenes in your head although I also
had visions of the actors standing in front of the microphones with scripts in
their hands. This being American commercial radio of old, we had to have a
break in proceedings to have a chat about Lux soap powder (the sponsors), from
my experience this is how they used to do it before someone had the idea of
pre-recorded adverts. I’ve heard this method before used in radio up until the
sixties and although effective it does derail the show a little.
It could have been because television wasn’t
as widespread and home video rental was not to be invented until the early 1980s,
but it still seems strange to imagine the need for a radio re-make of a film.
It goes to show that radio was once a far bigger deal than it is now. Obviously
radio is still important as far as music is concerned but a big country like
America with thousands of radio stations barely touch on such other
entertainments as comedy, drama, and documentary, at least as far as exposure
over on this side of the water is concerned. They send us television
programmes, films, fast food, and ridiculous events such as Halloween and Black
Friday, but radio never seems to travel.
I also have a recording of Miracle On 34th
Street to listen to, again part of a series called Lux Radio Theatre and again
starring members of the original film cast. To be honest I like the idea of
this. Encouraging an entire family to sit listening to something on the radio
with no visual images to focus on might be a difficult job in this day and age,
children and teenagers might of course react to a suggestion that everyone
listens to Radio 4 in the same way as if you’d suggested eating your own eyes,
(I didn’t fully embrace Radio 4 until my mid-twenties) but with the right
promotion it could work. It would be nice to see the radio making a comeback on
the scale of days gone by. You don’t even need to do it on the ‘proper’ radio
if you’ve got the wherewithal to record the whole thing yourself and release it
as a podcast/audio book for families to download in their own time. This will
take away the element of it being an event but at least it will go some way to
keeping everyone away from their phones for a while, I know sitting around a
computer isn’t as cosy an image as a big old radio in the corner of the room,
but you don’t have to look at it.
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