Radio and Who Makes It

by JOHN CROSBY

1

THE broadcasting industry today is in the intellectual purgatory from which the motion picture industry only recently escaped. It has become so fashionable to condemn radio in the most sweeping terms, that the broadcasters have become genuinely alarmed. Some of this scorn may be dismissed as intellectual dishonesty on the part of the critics, but a good deal of it is the direct fault of the broadcasters themselves.

The broadcasting industry has plenty of money which fails to satisfy its craving for respectability. Radio would like to worm its way into the high society of the arts, where it could rub elbows with literature and the theater. In pursuit of this aim, the broadcasters will spend a lot of money on, let us say, the New York Philharmonic. But these large and expensive gestures in the general direction of culture have only temporary effect. In spite of them, radio’s social position remains low — lower even than the movies, which is about as far down as the social ladder goes.

The reasons for radio’s comparative lack of standing among the arts are fairly simple. Broadcasting is partly an editorial, partly an educational, and partly an entertainment medium. Yet its key executives are not showmen or editors or educators. William S. Paley, chairman of the board of the Columbia Broadcasting System, was a young, talented, energetic, and rich promoter who parlayed nineteen second-rate stations into the second most formidable radio network in this country. Niles Trammell, president of the National Broadcasting Company, started his business career as a salesman of RCA radio equipment. He joined NBC as a salesman and he is still fundamentally a salesman. Mark Woods, president of the American Broadcasting Company, was an accountant with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company before he got into radio in the financial department of WEAF in New York. He was vice-president and treasurer of NBC before becoming president of ABC, and most of his experience has been in finance rather than show business. Edgar Kobak, president of the Mutual Broadcasting System, is a former vice-president in charge of sales at NBC and a former vice-president of the old Lord and Thomas advertising agency. He is primarily a salesman and advertising expert.

It was perhaps logical and possibly inevitable that these shrewd, high-powered businessmen should have wound up on top of a fledgling and highly competitive business which had few precedents to guide it. But it is neither logical nor inevitable that their policies and outlook should remain unchanged over so many years. The idea still is to land the account and never mind what sort of program the account brings in. Broadcasting, in fact, is a lot like the soap industry, where the manufacturing executives play second fiddle to the sales staff. There would be nothing intrinsically wrong with this if broadcasting had anything in common with the soap industry. But it hasn’t. Broadcasters operate in the public domain; they do not own the ether; they are merely allowed to use it by the public who are its rightful owners and should be its beneficiaries.

“I will not do anything that will reduce the value of radio as an advertising medium,” Niles Trammell remarked vehemently in a recent interview. He was speaking of the task of raising the cultural level of programs. It’s a significant remark and one that could not conceivably be made by a good editor or a good showman.

“The broadcasters are only interested in selling time,” Fred Allen, one of radio’s most biting critics, remarked once. “The advertisers are only interested in selling their products. No one is interested in the show or the actor.” Or, he might have added, the public.

The broadcasters have only the most remote connection with the programs they broadcast, almost all of which are handed to them intact by the advertising agency. The advertisers not only support broadcasting, they control it. The American public has become so thoroughly accustomed to this curious state of affairs that it no longer questions it.

Suppose newspapers or magazines, which are supported by advertising just like radio, were run in the same way. The editors would sell, let us say, to Procter and Gamble not only space to advertise but also several columns of white space to fill with any editorial matter they chose. Let’s assume P. and G. decided on Walter Lippmann to fill the space. If Mr. Lippmann failed to sell soap in sufficient quantities, he would be dropped forthwith and his place would be taken by some more popular feature— say, “Superman.”

If the advertisers took over the nation’s press in that way, there would be an immediate bellow of indignation from the public. Yet, curiously, there has never been much outcry over the advertisers’ control of the air waves, which are public property, not private property like a newspaper.

2

To GIVE the advertisers their due, American commercial broadcasting has a variety and sheer opulence found nowhere else in the world. There is virtually nothing you can’t hear on the air (except profanity). We have our choice of the world’s finest symphonies or Kay Kyser’s College of Musical Knowledge. We can listen to the nation’s deepest thinkers or to some of the world’s most inane masters of ceremonies. But the poor far outnumber the good. The emcees outnumber the thinkers by about fifty to one; the United Nations got only a grudging nod from the networks because it has nothing like the drawing powder of Portia facing life.

This unbalance of radio programming and the increasing unchecked commercialism brought a flood of criticism down on the heads of the broadcasters last year. Cartoonists, columnists, editorial writers, feature writers, suddenly and simultaneously discovered that radio presented an almost too easy target for ridicule. Recently the listening public, a vast and amorphous crew of incredibly divergent tastes and interests, have joined in the fun. Complaints directly from listeners have risen sharply in volume since the war, and these the broadcasters cannot afford to ignore. In March of last year, the broadcasters got the severest jolt of all when the Federal Communications Commission in its famed “Blue Book” warned broadcasters to serve the public as well as the advertisers’ interest or face revocation of their licenses.

This mounting chorus of criticism has put the broadcasters in a state of bewilderment. The industry has neither the precedent nor the quality of introspection necessary to clean its own house or even to determine where the place is dirty. Several broadcasters have charged that their detractors are an unholy alliance of left-wingers and advertising competitors, openly conspiring to destroy the commercial basis of broadcasting and supplant it with government-operated radio. This quaint theory has taken such root that both NBC and CBS are currently engaged in a propaganda campaign aimed at establishing the superiority of commercial over government broadcasting. Even Don Quixote’s windmills could hardly have been more astonished than radio’s critics at this campaign.

Apart from a few extreme left-wingers, none of them has suggested that commercial broadcasting is wrong or evil in itself. The FCC, at which much of this campaign is directed, emphatically defended commercial broadcasting in its “Blue Book” and stated unequivocally that it had no desire to alter it beyond curbing some of its excesses.

In a mood of extreme self-righteousness, the broadcasters are bringing forth some interesting arguments in their own defense. They claim, among other things, that the character and quality of broadcasting are determined by the public and that the public doesn’t want any changes made. To a limited extent this is true. Radio programs succeed or fail by their popularity or lack of it. In that respect radio is the most democratic of all entertainment media. The best paid and most respected comedians on the air are those who can summon the most listeners. But there are some serious flaws in the system.

During the last ten years, the criterion of pure popularity has resulted in a freezing of broadcast standards, a highly developed resistance to new ideas, a distaste amounting almost to revulsion against any form of experimentation, and a widespread and depressing imitativeness. In its craze for listeners, radio has become the most incestuous of all arts. There is hardly a successful radio program which has not provoked a dozen scrofulous little imitations, designed to look as nearly like the original as the laws of plagiarism will allow. The parentage of virtually every program can be directly traced to the few original minds who entered broadcasting in its formative years.

There is nothing wrong with catering to the public, but pandering to its worst and most easily gratified instincts is something else again. Radio does a good deal of the latter. Besides, the broadcasters’ contention that the public is satisfied with radio because it listens to it is seriously open to question. A listener may tune in Bob Hope or he may turn him off, but he can hardly be expected to improve on Hope’s jokes. A radio program attracts listeners not because it is the best program that might conceivably be on the air, but because it is the best one that actually is on the air.

One of the most enlightening statements on the responsibility of broadcasters was made not long ago by Sir William Haley, director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation. “The secret of leadership in broadcasting,” he said, “is that of always being ahead of the public, yet not so far ahead as to be out of touch. A broadcast has no purpose if it is not listened to. Our task is to draw more and more listeners to all that is worth while.”

This philosophy of leadership is seriously lacking in American broadcasting circles. A broadcaster would much rather imitate an old and proved idea than generate a new one. In only one field has radio successfully used its magnificent educational powers to lead the public to higher ground. That lone exception is the broadcasting of good music.

Although serious music was greeted at first with apathy and even outright hostility, the four networks have steadfastly put on the air the world’s great operas and symphonies. Over a period of years, millions of persons who never heard good music before have been taught to appreciate and ultimately to crave it. The educational process has been heartbreakingly slow, but gradually the audience has expanded until today some twelve million persons listen to the Saturday broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera alone. It is impossible to overpraise or overestimate this single contribution of radio. The impact of good music on American culture is something that cannot be measured by ordinary means, but it’s safe to assume that it has had a deep and permanent effect. America is a better place to live, and Americans are a more highly educated and more cultivated people, because of the presence on the air of good music.

This brilliant exception only draws attention to some of radio’s glaring omissions. Radio could bring us the world’s great books, great dramas, and great minds. Instead, we get jokes about Petrillo, two-way stretch, and the letters, endlessly repeated, LS MFT, possibly the most inane combination of noises ever inflicted on a helpless public.

But radio’s immaturity is much less alarming than the fact that it doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Far from improving, the general level of programming has deteriorated until today a great many persons in radio will privately admit that radio programs are more painful than at any other period in previous history. The best radio programs are the oldest radio programs.

There aren’t very many different types of programs, and almost anyone with a radio set is familiar with all of them. In a recent nation-wide poll later summarized in book form under the title The People Look at Radio, programs were divided into the following classifications, listed in order of their popularity: news, radio plays, comedy, quiz, old familiar music, popular music, forums or discussions about public issues, classical music, sports events, audience-participation shows (not including quiz shows), religious broadcasts, serial dramas (more popularly known as soap opera), talks on farming, children’s programs, homemaking programs, and livestock and grain reports.

Soap opera ranks twelfth in popularity, and audience-participation shows rank tenth, trailing well behind such weighty audience-killers as classical music and forums. Yet soap opera and audienceparticipation shows monopolize virtually all daytime network broadcasting. Their only rivals are homemaking programs such as Mary Margaret McBride’s. Apparently the women don’t care much for the homemakers either, since they rank fifteenth. Clearly, the FCC knew what it was talking about when it charged that broadcasters were losing three quarters of their daytime audience because of the poor quality of the programs.

3

THE most popular and highly paid entertainers on the air today are the comedians such as Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Edgar Bergen. With the exception of Allen and Bergen, both of whom have minds of their own, all these comedians rely heavily on a formula invented almost fifteen years ago by Jack Benny. It’s a nice formula and, like Columbus’s egg trick, easy to imitate after someone shows you how.

Benny has always surrounded himself with diverse characters, each with his own personality and comic possibilities. The personalities have varied somewhat in the last fourteen years but the formula never changes. In the center is Mr. Benny, at whom all the jokes are directed—jokes about his tightfisted attitude toward money, his waistline, his hairline, his violin playing, his age. Mr. Benny bellows with pain at each gag and the audience roars.

It sounds effortless but it isn’t. Benny, a veteran of years of vaudeville, is a master of timing and inflection, possibly the greatest on the air. The characters who surround him have been selected and developed very shrewdly to exploit the Benny personality. Somehow Benny has contrived to teach each of them his own mastery of timing. In addition, Benny has whittled away at the classic formula of the joke until it has assumed an entirely new shape. A simple “hmm” takes the place of the punch line, which the home audience can fill in for itself. James Barrie once remarked that the most dramatic parts of his plays occurred when nothing at all was happening on the stage; similarly, the funniest parts of the Benny program occur when nobody is saying anything. The silence at these points is so pregnant with meaning that nothing needs to be said.

So deeply intrenched has the Benny formula become that the authors of The People Look at Radio remarked plaintively at one point: “Too many comedy programs follow the same pattern. The comedian, hero of the program, is the butt of all jokes either by self-derision or through his stooges. Is this a general function of humor or is it especially characteristic of the contemporaneous scene?”

The answer is “No” to both questions. The Benny formula just happened to work and consequently has been perpetuated and will continue to be perpetuated. Years ago, comedians new at radio cut records of Benny’s broadcasts and played them over and over again to find out what made him tick. They imitated his inflections, his minor characters, his pacing, and even his jokes. Today, where Benny has Rochester, Jack Carson till recently had Arthur Treacher, Bob Hope has Jerry Colonna, and Ed (Archie) Gardner has Eddie Green, each playing Sancho Panza to his master’s Don Quixote.

One radio comedian who has never imitated Benny, though he is a stanch defender and close friend of Benny, is Fred Allen. Allen has been in radio as long as Benny and boasts that he has outlasted three presidents of NBC and will probably outlast the present one. One of the most original and truly inexhaustible wits in radio or anywhere else, Allen has successfully resisted all attempts to make him conform to anyone’s formula except his own.

There have been two or three Allen formulas, each designed to give the maximum play to Allen’s satiric mind. His various formats —Town Hall Tonight and the current Allen’s Alley — give him an opportunity to comment acidly on the contemporary scene. Allen’s material comes out of the daily newspapers (he’s an omnivorous newspaper reader) or out of his experience, rarely out of a joke file. The sharp flavor of the Allen show is at least partly attributable also to his stubborn refusal to follow the crowd to Hollywood, where radio and the movies overshadow all else. Where Allen jokes about Gromyko or a best-selling novel or Senator Taft or a Midwest dust storm, the Hollywood comedians center their jokes on Duel in the Sun or Bing Crosby’s ball team or Jane Russell’s figure. Allen has a sense of proportion which no other topranking comedian shares, though a few of the new rising comedians are giving some indications of it.

Allen has not always been as popular as he is today. Although he has always had fans, he was never at the top of the Hooper rating until the beginning of the 1946-1947 season, his fifteenth in radio. Satire requires more understanding and intelligence from the audience than pratfalls. But, over the years, Allen has persistently brought his listeners to his level rather than descended to theirs. His integrity has paid him well. His audience is now not only one of the largest but easily the most loyal in radio.

In the field of satire, Allen has only one other serious competitor — that impudent little hedonist, Charlie McCarthy. Edgar Bergen, Charlie’s brain and tongue, conceals under a mantle of shyness a keen wit and a thorough mastery of showmanship. Week after week, the Bergen-McCarthy team provides an entertaining half hour. In many ways, Bergen is pure radio entertainment. He is three personalities all by himself. Yet so clearly has he defined the identities of McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, as well as himself, that they have become live people in the minds of millions of radio fans. McCarthy, in fact, has become a live person even to Bergen. Both Mr. and Mrs. Bergen discuss Charlie’s likes and dislikes, his weaknesses, and even his clothes, as if he were asleep in the next room.

Since the originals like Benny, Bergen, and Allen so far outstrip their competitors in popularity, why is it that a sponsor prefers an imitation Benny to a comedian with a new act? Possibly the best illustration is Henry Alorgan. Alorgan had his own fifteen-minute program for years on WJZ in New York, but not till September of 1946 did he get a full-scale, half-hour network program. The Alorgan show was largely composed of a savage and hilarious lampooning of advertising copy, the movies, soap opera, and the more pompous aspects of American life. The young comedian was immediately hailed as the freshest new voice to be heard on the air in years. Yet, in spite of a highly favorable press and fountains of free publicity, Morgan’s Hooper rating remained comparatively low, and he seems to be having sponsor trouble. Listeners have yet to become accustomed to the Morgan personality or the Morgan style of deadpan comedy. Some of his comedy is on such an elevated plane that listeners don’t know what he’s talking about.

Henry Morgan’s plight is largely the plight of all radio. The broadcasters are now saddled with about a dozen top stars who command audiences of from fifteen to twenty million persons. Many of them are well along in years. Allen and Benny are fiftythree. Eddie Cantor and Charles Correll (the Andy of “Amos ‘n’ Andy”) are fifty-five. James Jordan (Fibber McGee) is fifty-one. The similarity of their ages indicates that these comedians may all retire about the same time. There are few promising young stars to take their places and radio isn’t training any. Radio has always been a talent borrower. Its greatest names came from vaudeville, but that reservoir has long since dried up. In a few years, radio may find itself at the end of a blind alley.

Radio comedians are different from any other comedians in one important respect. In the theater or in the movies, comedy is the result of teamwork between an actor, a writer, and a director. The actor provides the personality, the writer gives him the jokes, and the director puts the whole thing together. The comedian is not expected to have any creative or critical brains.

This separation of function is missing in radio. While all comedians have writers, they are their own judges of the material the writers give them, and the level of humor in the program is an almost automatic reflection of the level of the critical judgment of the comedian. In the case of Benny, Allen, and Bergen, it’s high. In the case of Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Eddie Cantor, and Abbott and Costello, it’s low — sometimes painfully so.

4

RADIO drama, which is second in popularity with listeners, ranges in quality from the superb “Theatre Guild on the Air” to murder drama. Easily topping the list, the “Theatre Guild on the Air” presents brilliantly cast, full-hour adaptations of stage plays. They can hardly be improved on. The only weakness in the Theatre Guild program is a shortage of material. There just aren’t enough stage hits to go around, and sometimes the Guild is forced to broadcast some rather crumby plays. In one thirty-nine weeks’ season, the Guild could run through more good plays than it has presented on Broadway in the last twenty-five years.

Virtually all other radio drama can be divided into a few standard categories, each with its own fixed and unchanging formula. Once the formula is established, the product becomes as uniform as a Ford car. The various categories may be classified as murder drama, connubial comedy (Fibber McGee and Molly, Ozzie and Harriet, Blondie, Ethel and Albert, the Phil Harrises), the juvenile or “Coming, Mother!” comedy, the regional (Brooklyn or Pleasant ville) comedy, the bobby sox or “divinely, utterly” comedy, the lovable old rapscallion (Great Gildersleeve, Frank Morgan) comedy, and the nice young man or “Gee whiz!” school of comedy (Dennis Day, Kenny Baker, Alan Young, Eddie Bracken).

Most of them may be described as character comedy, which is more adaptable to radio than any other kind of comedy. In no other field in radio is there so much outright stealing of other people’s ideas. Once a character is established as a laugh provoker, a dozen imitators will bob up on the other networks under different names. The most extreme example of this standardization of personality is Dennis Day. Mr. Day’s personality (“Gee whiz, he stole my yoyo.”) was invented and perfected by Jack Benny. Many years ago, Mr. Benny affixed these dewy and lovable characterist ics to a young tenor named Kenny Baker. Later Mr. Baker left the Benny show and was given his own program, “The Kenny Baker Show,” on which he played the part of a wide-eyed male innocent five times a week. Benny hired Day, taught him the same tricks and the same way of saying “Yes, Mr. Benny.” Day now has his own program where he is young, eager, stupid, and excessively lovable. A couple of other sponsors employed Eddie Bracken of the movies and Alan Young, a talented newcomer, to work the same side of the street. All four of them sound so much alike they could change places without anyone outside the studio knowing the difference.

Each has a girl friend, generally named Barbara, who loves him through thick and thin though he is usually slow in recognizing it. They all have close friends who exploit them and try to abscond with either their money or their girl or both. They live in small towns named Weaverville or Pleasantville or Shadyville and they jerk sodas in the drugstore. Dennis — or Alan or whoever — gets the rat poison mixed up with old Mrs. Anderson’s cough medicine and there is hell to pay. The people who dream all this up all live in Hollywood, which is one reason everything in Weaverville sounds so remote from the main stream of American life.

The most widely imitated small-town program is “Fibber McGee and Molly.” It originated a character named Mr. Wimple, a druggist who sounds just like Calvin Coolidge. There is now a Mr. Wimple on “Great Gildersleeve,” where he is known as Mr. Peavey; another one called Mr. Willoughby on the Day program; and half a dozen other druggists on other programs. It has become as difficult to write a comedy program without a New England druggist as it once was to write an English drawingroom comedy without a duke. Since the United States is an immense and untapped reservoir of personality, it’s difficult to see why radio writers persist in imitating the characters on other radio programs rather than the originals that can be seen anywhere on the street.

One of the most popular types of radio drama, and one which is drawing increasing blasts of alarm from sociologists, is the murder mystery. Sponsors like such dramas because they are the least expensive of evening programs. They don’t require name stars, who automatically run costs sky-high, or even high-priced writers. Yet they’re enormously popular with listeners. Two of them, “Suspense” and “Mr. District Attorney,” boast Hoopers in the first fifteen.

While they aren’t literary masterpieces, the whodunits are reasonably intelligent. The dialogue in the better ones is literate and the plots are ingenious. Like the movie writers, radio writers do mystery stories just a little better than anything else, possibly because they are long on technical excellence and short on creative ability.

Actually, there is almost more variety among the whodunits than among all the other forms of radio drama put together. “Mr. and Mrs. North” usually get mixed up in jolly little murders in which everyone has a wonderful time except the corpse. The naturalist school of murder is presided over by Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and the Fat Man. In these, everyone is studiously indifferent to bloodshed, and the private dick is a very tough cookie indeed, who can break a man’s wrist without a quiver of distaste. He also likes blondes and may have a different one in each episode. There are half a dozen of them on the air now, all alike as two paper clips, and the public can’t seem to get enough.

Only occasionally does radio rise above its tested formulas. Last year at least one sponsor, Lever Brothers, a soap company, experimented briefly and courageously with a dramatic series called “Fighting Senator.” The Senator was a young, recently discharged Army officer who tried to reform Congress all by himself. He sounded like Jimmy Stewart, and his adventures had a celluloid smell about them. Nevertheless, the series grappled with problems right out of the day’s headlines, which was a refreshing change in radio drama. Another notable series is “New World A-Coming” presented by WMCA in New York. One of the dramas in this series was a vivid biographical sketch of Senator Theodore G. Bilbo, which left the gentleman from Mississippi with hardly a veil to cover his naked past. Those are the exceptions, however.

5

THE typical radio drama has been borrowed from the movies, the theater, or a popular novel, has been on the air for years, and has been worn threadbare by repetition. Possibly the most typical example is Henry Aldrich. Henry Aldrich first came to public attention in 1938 in a very funny play called “What a Life.” After making his bow in the movies, Henry landed in radio, where he has operated very successfully ever since and will probably remain until Doomsday. Ezra Stone, who originated the part on Broadway, is still playing Henry on the radio. He’s thirty years old and has a wife and two children and, except for a spell in the Army, has been yelling “Coming, Mother!” for nine years. In the theater or even in the movies bright new ideas come along to push out the bright old ideas, but nothing ever changes in radio as long as it draws an audience.

Radio presents its sorriest spectacle in the daytime. The listener has his choice of soap opera, give-away shows, or quizzes, which means he may listen to the heart-rending sobs of Helen Trent or squeals of rapture from the studio audience. NBC has four straight hours of soap opera and CBS two and a half, a form of torture known as block listening. People who like soap operas like a lot of them. By lining them up on two networks instead of spreading them around all four, the soap people have fixed things so that, without turning the dial, the fans may listen successively to the misadventures of Stella Dallas, Lorenzo Jones, Young Widder Brown, and Portia facing life.

The People Look at Radio revealed that 50 per cent of American women are soap opera fans and the other 50 per cent are so violently opposed they keep their radios turned off in soap opera hours. While this indicates the networks are turning their backs on about 50 per cent of their audience, neither network plans to do anything about it. Taken as a lump, the soaps represent a far larger slice of income than any number of Jack Bennys. The torrent of criticism directed against the soaps resulted only in a number of conferences between the networks and the sponsors. Nothing ever came of them because no one could think of a substitute for soap opera that would be as cheap or would sell as much soap. Even if the conferences had produced any bright ideas, it’s doubtful whether the soap companies would have the courage to try them. The dominating philosophy in radio is to let well enough alone.

Yet soap opera is no joking matter. Many a psychiatrist has traced his patient’s neurosis back to a love of soap opera. An even worse result is the day-by-day debasing of the cultural tastes of a large proportion of the nation’s housewives. Naturally, the broadcasters continue to defend them. Niles Trammell once stated in a speech that soap opera gave the housewife courage to face her own daily problems. It’s a fantastic argument. The ordinary problems of soap opera heroines are murder, suicide, illegitimacy, and bankruptcy, none of which a housewife is likely to run up against in a lifetime.

The broadcasters are also inclined to murmur apologetically that, after all, radio is a mass medium and you can’t expect the tastes of the masses to be on too high a level. One broadcaster even held up the popularity of comic books as a parallel, feeling no apparent incongruity at putting his $400,000,000 a year industry on a cultural level with comic books. The argument that radio has too large an audience to aim higher than the knees is a dubious one at best.

No social history of the forties would be complete without a mention of give-away radio programs which may well rank with dance marathons, gangster funerals, and midget golf as one of the dizzier phenomena of our age. Everything from four-motor bombers to streetcars has been given away on them, and the masters of ceremonies will rack their brains for bigger gifts and wackier stunts.

One of the easiest ways to pick up a load of loot on these shows is to be engaged or married. On “Married for Life” a newly engaged couple was given cutlery, watches, radios, the wedding dress, the wedding ring, and the honeymoon in exchange for telling the audience just how thorny was the path of true love. Young couples are actually married during the broadcast of “Bride and Groom,” though the microphone is mercifully absent from the actual ceremony.

On the rowdier give-away shows the emphasis is on the stunt rather than the gifts. Husbands paste one another with lemon meringue pies, and housewives race each other around the stage on a confection called “Ladies Be Seated.” On a show called “Take It from There,” audience participants drenched each other with seltzer water if the emcee demanded it. Why this should appeal to a radio audience which can’t see any of it is one of the inscrutable mysteries of popular taste.

Slap-happiest of all give-away shows is Ralph Edwards’s “Truth or Consequences.” As a gag for Mr. Edwards, a veteran lived for three weeks on a traffic-intersection safety island to win $1500. Later, the same man carried a pie tin of Atlantic Ocean water across the country in a taxicab to win another $500. Art Linkletter, another of the more imaginative masters of ceremonies, sent a young married couple into the Oregon woods in a covered wagon to search for $1000.

The last successful new idea to invade radio, it is frequently said, was “Information Please.” One of the first of the quiz shows, it is still the best of them. The questions on “Information Please” are thoughtprovoking, the conversation is literate, and the answers are usually educational. But, all in all, “Information Please” has done more harm than good. Since its arrival ten years ago, the air has resounded with questions, many of which would insult the intelligence of a ten-year-old schoolboy. A housewife can win an award now by remembering her own name. If she can’t remember it, there is usually a consolation prize.

Here are a few samples of the questions actually asked on quiz shows: In what profession does a man wear rubber gloves? That’s from a quiz show called “Detect and Collect” and, believe it or not, the woman got it wrong. Is a diphthong an element of nature, ashes from the grate, or the sound of combined vowels? That’s from “Quiz of Two Cities” and the lady got it wrong. Was Washington born in Massachusetts or Virginia? The man got it right (“Give and Take”). What is aqua pura another name for? With a little coaching from the audience the girl got it right (“Dr. I.Q.”).

6

ALL in all, radio presents a dreary picture but not necessarily a hopeless one. Broadcasting is only twenty-seven years old. The stale formulas of its dramas are no more rigid than the formulas used in most popular magazines up until a few years ago. In fact, radio uses the same ones. The broadcasters are frightened by new ideas, but so was Hollywood for its first twenty-six years (in many respects, it still is).

Also, to give the broadcasters their due, they have a problem which neither Hollywood nor magazines nor newspapers nor anything else ever had. Broadcasting stations operate from eighteen to twentyfour hours a day. One half-hour comedy script runs to about thirty double-spaced pages, which is a fearful amount of white space to fill intelligently once a week and an intolerable amount to fill once a day. John F. Royal, NBC vice-president in charge of television, and one of the few real showmen in radio, thinks there aren’t enough creative brains in the country to provide topflight entertainment to the nation’s 1025 radio stations sixteen hours a day. Even if there were, radio couldn’t afford them.

Despite any impressions to the contrary, radio has attracted some extraordinarily creative, intelligent, and energetic young men who struggle valiantly against almost hopeless odds to make radio realize its own potentialities. Davidson Taylor, executive vice-president of the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Robert Shayon, also of CBS, have produced some notable documentaries in the last year, the groundwork for which was laid in the experimental Columbia Workshop. Ed Murrow, recently resigned executive vice-president of CBS, introduced “CBS Views the Press,” a lively, critical analysis of New York journalism. The aggressive spirit of this program is an important milestone in radio.

Bob Saudek, director of public service broadcasts for the American Broadcasting Company, is another sincere, able, and imaginative craftsman who has succeeded more than once in combining high purpose with excellent showmanship. Saudek recently summed up radio’s chief defect in one succinct sentence: “There should be only one prize in radio — and it should be given for courage.”

Perhaps the most heartening sign of all is the fact that some of radio’s severest critics are in radio, not outside it. The violence of their dissatisfaction cannot help doing some good.

But before much progress can be made, the broadcasters will have to loosen the grips the advertisers now hold on programs and exercise some editorial supervision over the shows they broadcast. It won’t be easy. Ten years ago, CBS laid dowm a code of standards governing children’s programs, designed to meet the complaints of mothers and parent-teacher societies. Within a year, CBS had lost all its sponsored children’s programs and it hasn’t got any of them back yet. The advertisers brook no interference in their control of programming.

Before the broadcasters get around to solving any of their problems, the problems themselves may be academic. Television took giant technical strides during the war. The manufacturers expect to produce 100,000 television sets this year and a million next year. After that, they will spill out like radios. “My future is entirely wrapped up in sound broadcasting,” Niles Trammell said not long ago, “but I’m the first to admit that when television comes in, sound broadcasting is finished.”

Whether television will repeat all the errors made by the sound broadcasters is a question which, from this distance, no one can possibly answer.