The Drama of Radio Theater

virtually walk around them while I explain technology. We might do the occasional soundscaping for an episode, but that's about the extent of it. Where three D audio really shines is in dramatized audio fiction podcasts, or maybe the occasional re enact it for something like true crime podcasts. And that got me thinking about the old art form of radio theater or radio drama. I have a personal connection

with radio drama. I used to be a member of the board for the Atlanta Radio Theater Company or art c a r TC. I also wrote and performed with Artsy for several years, as did another Stuff host Stuff You Missed in History Classes Tracy Wilson did the same. My father still writes and performs with them. The Atlanta Radio Theater Company typically doesn't perform or record old radio

drama scripts, like existing ones from the forties or fifties. Rather, the company mainly focuses on original works and radio adaptations of existing works, and largely in the speculative fiction genres, so stuff like science fiction and horror and fantasy. When I was writing ups for them and performing in shows, it was really before podcasts had become a big thing. There wasn't much place for radio drama outside of a

niche market here in the United States. We might once in a while have a piece that would be broadcast on local public radio, but otherwise we were pretty much limited to doing live performances, typically at things like science fiction conventions, and making recordings. That was pretty much it. Flash forward just a few years and now radio drama or audio drama or audio theater or theater of the mind is back in full force. There are so many

podcasts that fall into that general category. Some do close to the old style of the original serials of the radio days. Some take the art form to really unusual places, freed from the concerns of broadcast standards, people can really ex floor of the medium. So today I thought we'd look a little bit at the history and evolution of radio theater. We can talk about how art and technology

combined to create an experience for the listener. And it's really cool stuff because it's not just the technology, it's how do you use that technology to do something specific? How do you create an outcome with that technology that involves not just tech but art and psychology. But let's

get a few basic ideas out of the way. Theater in general relies partly upon the imagination of the audience, and I referenced this in the three D audio episode in which I recited the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth. In that prologue, a member of the theater known as the chorus implores the audience to utilize their imaginations to fill out the action of the play. The actors can't bring up horses on stage or fill up the theater with an entire army, and yet the action of Henry

the Fifth references such things. Is talking about a war between England and France. So it's the audience's job to supply the show with those elements they have to imagine them to be. Thus, it's part of the willing suspension of disbelief. Yes, you know that in reality you are actually inside a theater, perhaps standing on the ground, looking at a stage, and you're watching actors in costumes pretending to be people who have been dead for more than

a century. But you suspend that disbelief to get lost in the story. Stories are powerful things. I mean, they connect us to our history and to each other. It's an ancient form of communication and one that still has incredible power today. Well, radio drama has no visuals whatsoever. So the challenge for a radio drama writer, as well as for perform and producers, is to create an audio experience that compels the audience to engage their imaginations and

supply everything that you cannot. The brilliant part of this is that an audience's imagination can always exceed anything you might manage to do were you to produce the show in some other medium. So Peter Jackson had a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars to make The Lord of the Rings movies, but a good radio production can make a comparable experience for a fraction of the price. As long as the audience goes along for the ride, your imagination is going to be far more spectacular than

any big budget special effects. But it also means that the audio production has to supply enough information for the audience to know what's going on so that they can imagine things. That is its own challenge. So how do you convey action in a way that seems natural to the list her? There's nothing like listening to say, a horror story on the radio, and here one character say to another, Oh, no, he's reaching into his coat and

pulling out what is it? It's a knife, a big, sharp, pointy knife, and now he is holding the knife in a threatening way and advancing upon us with malicious intent. I mean, that doesn't That doesn't really come across well, does it? Now? Granted I read that with you know, a tongue in cheek, goofy approach. But even if I had tried to read that like I was scared, it doesn't come across naturally at all. Right, So radio drama

has its own challenges. Balancing out elements like suspense or a comedy or action with keeping things sounding natural is tricky. So in the great history of radio drama. There are examples that are really fun and some that are real clunkers, which is no surprise there. It's the same with any

art form. Now, storytelling and theater are ancient forms, and so it should stand as no surprise that once clever humans figured out a way to transmit sounds over great distances, they would use that technology to tap into this very human activity. And arguably we can say that the birth

of the radio drama goes back to our buddy Clement Otter. Now, if you listen to my episode about three D Audio, you heard me talk about how Otter or aider set up what was effectively a selection of telephone microphones at the Paris Opera and he ran lines to a suite of rooms in a building that was a couple of

kilometers from the opera house. So guests of the Paris Electrical Exhibition could go into one of these rooms and hold up a receiver to each year, so a telephone receiver, but one for each year left end right, and they could hear audio from those different microphones on the stage, which created a kind of primitive stereo effect. Otter's invention predated the age of radio by a couple of decades. Honors work formed the basis of a new type of

business called the teatro phone or the theater phone. The company Do Teatrophone was incorporated near the end of the nineteenth century and promoted the service They made honors demonstration

an ongoing business. They would get permission to set up microphones at various performance venues and then people would be able to listen in on those and you could either listen in by using a coin operated telephone, which were located in places like hotels and clubs and cafes, and you just pay a small fee to listen to about five minutes worth of transmission. Alternatively, you could subscribe to the service for a recurring fee and listen more frequently.

For those Parisians who were more important and rich enough to have a telephone installed in their own home, they could even subscribe to the service from home and listen in whenever they liked the perform Minses carried by the tatra phone weren't catered for audio. Rather, it was a way for tech savvy and trendy Parisians to take in

the latest opera or play in an innovative way. In some ways, it helped increase accessibility to art, since each theater house has a limited number of seats, and the theater phone created opportunities for someone to experience a show, even if it was only an audio and even if the show had sold out. But the shows were being performed in front of audiences as fully staged productions, so if you were in the audience, you were seeing a full play, So they weren't designed to be experienced just

through sound alone. And I'm sure there were cases of people wondering exactly what the heck was going on on stage while they were listening in the theater phone got started around eight ninety, which was well before what we would consider radio broadcasts. There were people experimenting with radio

around that time. It took a lot of work and a lot of convergence in the world of physics to get a deep enough understanding of what radio waves are, how they work, how you can generate them, how you can encode information onto them, and how you could receive and then decode the information to play those signals back and get audio to go through. All of that work would be way too much for this episode, and besides,

I've actually covered this a few times before. It's also a story that has some really big personalities in it, like Marconi and Tesla and Edison. It gets really complicated and really dramatic, but that's drama about radio, not drama performed on radio. So we're gonna move on now. You could argue that the first radio broadcast was in n six with Reginald Fessenden sending out a radio signal of him playing you know, Christmas songs on violin and reading

passages from the Bible. But that was a bit of a one off, and the only folks who really heard that broadcast were somewhat confused radio operators on ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Fessenden's broadcast used amplitude modulation or a M, and I suppose we should talk about modulation for a second, just to understand how it works. So with radio, you need to generate a signal of a specific frequency or hurts.

So when you look at a radio station, those numbers of the radio station relate to the frequency of the radio signal, and frequency refers to the number of cycles of a radio wave passing a given point per second. All radio waves travel at the same speed, which is the speed of light, but the actual length of those waves themselves are different. So a radio wave that has you know, that's really long is going to have fewer cycles per second than a radio wave that's really short.

Both are traveling at the speed of light, but the long waves are is going to be fewer of them per second. It So, let's say you have got a way to broadcast a radio wave of fifty killer hurts. That means fifty thousand radio waves will pass a given point in a second. This is the approximate frequency that

Festenden used. Well, if you just sent out a smooth radio wave of fifty killer hurts and you didn't do anything to it, someone with a radio receiver tuned to the frequency of fifty killer hurts would really only see if a signal was coming through or not. But no meaningful information is coming across. You have to transform that signal in some way. Now, the way a m works is by changing or modulating the amplitude of a radio signal. That is, changing the height of the peaks and the

depths of the valleys that the radio wave makes. And you've got your carrier wave of fifty killer hurts. You encode information on top of that carrier wave with modulating an amplitude, and a receiver picks up the fifty killer hurt signal and decodes those modulations, and that's how you get the playback of the audio. FM radio or frequency modulation works a little differently. Rather than changing the amplitude of a carrier wave, and you make slight changes to

the radio waves frequency. Now you don't change it a lot, because if you go too far outside the carrier waves home frequency, the receiving radio won't be able to stay tuned to it. But either way, you can modulate that wave to carry information with it, and the receiving radio tuned to that frequency can demodulate it and play the transmitted audio. It would take a decade and a half

for the first commercial radio stations to begin operations. One reason for that was a little thing called World War One, or what people back then referred to as the Great War, because you know, calling something world War one right from the start marks a level of pessimism we just don't need. Now, that's not to say people weren't experimenting and creating early

radio broadcast stations during this time. They were. There was the predecessor to San Jose's k CBS, there was Canada's x w A, which would evolve into c I in w A. Few colleges established their own small stations as well, like Union College, which had a station called to YU, which evolved into w r U c UH. Some people called Pittsburgh's k d K a station the first real

commercial radio station. It's hard to give a definitive first because many of these early stations were only broadcasting some of the time, like for a couple of hours a day, and sometimes to a relatively small service area, and there were very few people who could, you know, actually listen in on them. There were also radio stations that served

as wireless telegraph stations. In the United States, the military took control of those types of stations because they were part of a vital communications infrastructure during World War One, and at the conclusion of the war, the U. S. Government told the Navy, hey, you should return those stations to the original owners, which wasn't something that the Navy

was too terribly keen on doing. And part of the reason for that, you know, why the Navy was so reluctant was that a lot of those stations were owned by foreign companies, and the Navy viewed the radio communication system as critical to the national security of the United States, so there was a lot of pressure to move ownership of these radio stations to domestic companies, which again, these stations were mostly about sending wireless telegraphs rather than you know,

radio broadcasts as we would think of them. From this situation, the Radio Corporation of America or r c A was formed. The technology had reached a stage that allowed for the transmitting and receiving a radio signals, and companies like our CIA had the opportunity to sell radio sets to American consumers.

But these Americans would need stuff to listen to or else the radios wouldn't be very useful, and so our CI A was also in the business of creating radio station networks and producing content to air over the radio. When we come back, we'll look at how this gave birth to the art form of radio theater. But first let's take a quick break. So in the nineteen twenties, radio was starting to become a popular medium. Lots of

places began to establish real, honest to goodness radio stations. A. T and T began investing in radio stations and formed a network of stations in various cities before the company decided to exit the industry in nineteen six. At that point, our c A purchased a stake in the network that A. T and T had been running, and General Electric and Westinghouse divided up the other fifty percent of ownership, and together they formed the National Broadcasting Company or in BC.

R c A would later acquire full ownership of NBC in nineteen thirty. Over in the UK you had the foundation of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was the predecessor, was established in nineteen twenty two with a radio service called two l oh. It would become the BBC in

nineteen twenty seven. Companies like our c A began offering up consumer radios for sale, and r c A promoted radio by selling tickets to venues that had radios that could play a live broadcast a big events from across the country, such as a heavyweight championship boxing match in nineteen twenty one. It wasn't that dissimilar to the old theater phones when you think about it, but the whole point was to lure people in and convince them that getting a radio set for the home would be a

really great idea, and it proved to be a huge winner. This, by the way, was in the pre transistor days, so radio amplifiers relied on vacuum tubes, and so a radio set was a hefty piece of furniture. The typical radio looked a bit like a side table, and for many people in the US and the UK, it was considered a must have for the home. There's a bit of a debate about what the earliest audio drama was that

was produced for the radio. In nineteen two, w g Y station in Schenectady, New York, produced an adaptation of the stage play by Eugene Walter titled The Wolf. The original play had a three act structure, but w g Y program director Colin Hagar was concerned that audiences wouldn't have that kind of patience for a full length show, so the production team decided to edit the story down to a tight forty minutes script. Now, I have never seen a production of this play, nor have I heard

the radio version. There's apparently a novelization out there, but I haven't read it. I did read a synopsis and it sounds like pure melodrama, and pretty dated mel of drama at that, But then the original play debuted around nineteen o eight. So in the play, there's a naive, young, innocent woman. There's a man who's intent on seeking revenge for the death of a step sister he never knew

he had. There's the villainous cad who was responsible for leading said step sister astray, and then there's the the young woman I mentioned earlier. Her her crusty old father is in it too. And it sounds terrible. At least, it sounds like I would hate it. But apparently it was a big hit for w g Y, and that was enough to convince the program director to commission more

adaptations of stage plays for broadcast. Between nineteen twenty two and nineteen twenty three, that station broadcast forty three different productions, and from what I gather, these were all just strictly readings of existing plays, rather than plays that were catering specific lead to audio. However, one thing to keep in mind is that these performances were all live. Nothing was

prerecorded unless it was very very short. Typically, a large station would produce a performance live in studio, and if it was a production that was shorter than fifteen minutes long, they might record that performance to aluminium discs and then send those aluminium discs to regional stations to play from there. But the disc can only hold fifteen minutes of audio, so anything longer than fifteen minutes absolutely had to be performed live because there just wasn't enough capacity to record

them at that time. That meant that, just as is the case with live stage theater, there was the opportunity for stuff to go wrong. An actor could drop a line or skip a queue, or a sound effect might come in too late or too early. The audience probably wouldn't be as aware of any problems as the cast crew would be unless it was something, you know, really spectacular, but it did create a type of energy to the performances. I mean, there's no take two and the show must

go on. It's generally believed that the first theatrical piece written specifically for radio was a play titled A Comedy of Danger, which aired in January fift nineteen twenty four in the UK. It was produced in the Savoy region and in London, and it was written by Richard Hughes, who later wrote the novel A High Wind in Jamaica. The story behind how A Comedy of Danger it came to be as pretty entertaining just by itself. Hughes was meeting with a director named Nigel Playfair on January eleven,

nineteen twenty four. Playfair had agreed to provide two hours of entertainment to broadcast on the radio by and he had planned to have some poetry readings and some readings of excerpts from Jane Austen works, but he hadn't quite found enough material to fill up the two hours, and he lamented that it sure would be nice to have something that was composed specifically for the medium of radio,

rather than just adapted from some other source. Hughes agreed with Playfair and said he wished that he could have written such a piece, and Playfair essentially set the hook, and Hughes, eager to try his hand at the task, agreed to try and write something for Playfair, and he stayed up all night in order to have a finished play in Playfair's hands by the following morning. And that's how the first radio play was written, in haste, behind deadline and in a desperate attempt to fill up air time.

It would not be the last time those criteria would apply to a piece that was written for radio, the play would also feature sound effects, something pretty novel at the time. While actors would read the lines, other performers would use a mishmash of various props and odds and ends to create the soundscape for the show. In the film world, these became known as Folly effects, named after a great artist in the field, Jack Effects. Wait, no,

I'm sorry, I meant Jack Foley. Whether for audio, theater or film, the folly effects artist has to have impeccable timing. The sound effects complete the scene and give the audience information that they normally would pick up with their eyes. If it were a standard play, characters in motion might be accompanied by the sound of crunching shoes on gravel, or maybe squishy sounds to represent walking through a muddy field.

A door opening might signal that someone has entered or left a room, and you know, a good sound effect can really lift the need for characters to have to say all that clunky stuff I mentioned earlier. In this episode, Hughes also wanted to avoid having a narrator. He felt that that would be a bit like cheating, and he wanted to convey all the necessary information through the action of the play and through the dialogue, and again this

is tricky stuff. When I was writing for the Atlanta Radio Theater Company, I frequently would use a narrator, mostly for comedic effect, but otherwise I tried to avoid it as much as I could, because I agree it does take the listener out of stuff. A comedy of Danger takes place deep below ground and a coal mine in Wales.

An early line in the play is the lights have gone out, something that Playfair had actually suggested, as he and Hughes were first musing about the possibility of radio play and an audience that might listen to the piece in total darkness. The studio they broadcast from was a padded room with a single microphone. So in order to create the effect of people in an underground gallery in a coal mine, Playfair had all the actors at play their parts with buckets on their head to create that

kind of echoe sound. I'm not making that up. According to Hughes himself, that's how they achieved the effect of being in an echoe chamber to to actually as a with a buckethead. The script is actually available online, as are recordings of various performances of the piece. You can listen to them. The YouTube has quite a few of them, and it features three main characters. There's Jack, Marie and Backs.

All three of these characters are touring the coal mine for some odd reason and the lights go out and soon the three characters are going through various stages of panic and resolution as they ponder their fate, which has made all the more chaotic upon the sound of some explosions and rushing water. It's a bit of an odd piece. Um. There are characters who vacillate between being resolute in the face of certain death and trying to negotiate with the hours that be so that they can live longer. But

it is an interesting one. Playfair, being a bit of a rogue, arranged for the press to hear the broadcast from a special room with a loudspeaker in it. And the loudspeaker had a lot more power behind it than a typical radio set would, and it would give the press the ability to actually hear what was going on

with the broadcast. In fact, Hugh said the average radio listener would probably have trouble distinguishing the various sounds, and to cap it off, Playfair allegedly arranged to set off the equivalent of firecrackers in the room next to the press to augment the explosion effect heard in the piece. The press, unaware that the boom they heard came not from the loudspeaker but from the room next door, were suitably impressed. Hughes was very clever to have set a

play in a completely dark setting. His characters couldn't see anything, so there was no need for them to describe their surroundings or even describe each other, or the voices would give all the clues to the audience. Jack and Marie are obviously young, they are played by young actors, and they have young voices. Backs is an older man, and the information the audience needed was all right there in the performance, and thus the era of radio drama was born.

Radio drama emerged largely because there was a need for content, just as Playfair had expressed that was universal. You had this new technology that allowed people to broadcast programming across wide regions. You had sponsors who are willing to pay to have advertisements read out over the air to the listeners.

But how do you fill up all that time. Most radio stations would balance out their programming with newscasts music and other forms of entertainment, and a lot of that came in the form of reading existing material out over the air, but the adaptation of dramatic works and more ordinally, the creation of works intended specifically for the medium position Radio for a transformation, and that meant there was a sudden demand for storytellers to create or adapt material and

for actors to perform it. Over the following years, tons of different radio programs began to take shape, hundreds of them. Our CIA had a real stranglehold on a lot of the radio in the United States, owning two NBC radio networks. Both of them were called NBC. One was designated NBC Red Network and the other was NBC Blue Network. They each independently had their own programming, so Red had its

own slate of programs and Blue head its. Occasionally one would end up airing content that that originated from the other, or they would both air the same live event, but that was pretty rare. They pretty much stayed distinct from each other, although our c A owned both of them. Now. The NBC Blue Network would eventually evolve into the American Broadcasting Company or ABC. The U s Government kind of stepped in and forced our c A to divest itself

of one of the NBC networks. In the late nineteen twenties, the CBS Radio network took shape, and there was really fierce competition between CBS and NBC for talent, with networks signing performers and writers to exclusive contracts that would last years. This was the time of Old Time Radio or o t R. You could find radio dramas across every genre, soap operas, police procedurals, westerns, science fiction, horror, children's shows,

superhero shows and more. Shows that would go on to become television programs got their start on the radio, like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, or Dragnet or the Jack Benny Program. And this was also era of sponsored programming. A lot of shows would feature prominent sponsor spots. Frequently they would actually weave sponsor bits into storylines or even into the titles of the shows. There was perhapst Blue

Ribbon Town, which was a comedy variety show. There was Oldsmobile Program which was another variety show, or the General Mills Radio Adventure Theater, for example. And there were some shows with titles that really made me wonder what the heck they were, like, for example, The Strange Doctor Weird. Now, based on what I've read, it sounds like it was kind of a Twilight Zone style show, but it was one that was frequently repurposing scripts that have been used

for a similar show titled The Mysterious Traveler. So apparently, uh, the Strange Doctor Weird would take scripts written for The Mysterious Traveler, condense them into shorter formats, and then broadcast them. Then there were other shows with great titles like I Was a Communist for the FBI, which was a crime series that ran in the nineteen fifties. There was The Goon Show, which was a British comedy radio program that would inspire the likes of Monty Python, and the Fire

Sign Theater. Firesign Theater is another great example they made absurdist radio theater programs. Some of my favorite radio theater comedy came out of Fire Sign Theater, like Nick Danger Third Eye. When we come back, we'll talk about a few other standouts in radio theater and also where the

art form is now. But first let's take another quick break by radio drama made up about four percent of network programming in the US, much of the radio drama was short form and sketch based, so it was stuff that you could fit into more of a variety show format.

If you listen to programs like The Jack Benny Show, you'll hear several scenes that can more or less stand alone and serve as comedic vehicles for the various performers, and they do string together to make a full story, but it feels more like a program that could cater to people who just tune in for a short while, rather than necessarily hearing the whole thing. But there were artists who really wanted to push the boundaries of the established formats, some who wanted to take more of a

slow and methodical paste is storytelling. A lot of early radio drama is packaged as these really short, exciting bursts of activity, typically ending on some sort of cliffhanger in order to encourage people to tune into the next episode. I think of it as sort of the Dan Brown approach to writing, where every chapter has to be a cliffhanger to get you to go to the next chapter. And that's what a lot of early radio theater was

like too. But then we get to nineteen thirty eight and a famous or perhaps infamous radio broadcast that would have its own reputation, UH, which was largely unearned, as we will learn. So the production was a piece by the Mercury Theater on the Air, which was on CBS Radio. The star and host for this program was Orson Wells, who of course would go on to become a lauded actor and filmmaker. In October Night, the Mercury Theater Ensemble performed an adaptation of H. G. Wells is classic The

War of the World's Now. In the book, Martians invade Earth because the resources of Mars are running dangerously low, and the Martians are using giant machines and heat rays to wreak havoc on Earth, attacking towns. UH. The show is, or the novel rather said in Britain. So towns and Britain are just totally level. London is emptied because of these attacks, and the Martians essentially lay waste to the

towns and are seemingly unstoppable. But eventually the narrator of the novel discovers that the Martians are all dying off because they have no immunity to earthly pathogens, and so they essentially all caught a cold and died. In other words, Wells's theater group performed a dramatized adaptation of this story for the radio, and the first half of the program comes across like a newscast, and in fact, the show didn't have commercial breaks, so it felt like it was

kind of a genuine newscast approach. There's a famous myth that lots of people totally flipped out when they heard the broadcast, believing it to be a legitimate newscast rather than a radio play, and the story goes that huge groups of people panicked, believing Earth to have been invaded by Martians and that entire cities were being level as a result of it. However, the truth of the matter

is that there was no widespread panic. The streets were not filled with people trying to flee to the countryside. The press of the day made it sound as though Wells had really pulled a fast one on the American public and given everyone a real fright before Halloween, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence for that. There were a few isolated incidents of people being a little concerned about hearing this newscast and wondering what was going on,

but there was no like mass hysteria. However, the War of the World's broadcast helped put Wells on the cultural map, and it also elevated the art form of the radio play. Leaning on that newscast format, created new ways to tell stories, ways that leveraged how radio works and got around some of the awkward elements we've already talked about. And in fact, if you're a fan of shows like Welcome to night Vale, they owe a lot to the War. The War olds you listen to that show and you realize that it's

taking that sort of newscast approach. I often think of Welcome to night Vale as being a combination of Twilight Zone, UH, the Prairie Home Companion radio Show, and War of the World's and it does it extremely well. Generally speaking, in the United States, the years between nineteen twenty and nineteen fifty are considered the golden age of radio drama, but by the nineteen fifties television was starting to make up

ground and began sapping summer radio's talent and money. Stars who had made a name for themselves on the radio moved over to TV, and a lot of shows and people who worked on them weren't able to make the move. Now, what's really sad is that a lot of these shows of that era they were never recorded. They were always intended as live broadcasts, and you know, reruns weren't always a thing. So the radio drama began to fade from speakers and from minds. We've got, like, you know, scripts

of different shows, and there are lots of recordings. It's not like every show went unrecorded, but a lot of them did, so there are a lot of lost episodes. Radio would switch over to formats that were more like news and music and talk radio here in the US, but you didn't hear nearly as much dramatized fiction not here.

But in the UK it was a different story. The British Broadcasting Corporation is a state run corporation, not a private company, and while radio drama effectively went into hibernation here in the States, the UK would continue producing radio dramas well beyond nineteen Some radio programs would later make the leap from radio to TV, even as late as

the two thousand's. For example, The Mighty Boush, which is a truly weird comedy series, originally debuted on the radio in two thousand one, It grew out of little comedy shows that the creators were doing in pubs and small theaters in in the UK, so they got a radio series in two thousand one, and later The Mighty Bush became a TV series in two thousand four. And if you know what I'm talking about, then lift the old shoe and drink your Bailey's because I'm old Greg. And

then there's The Archers Man The Archers. Okay, So The Archers is a radio drama that originally aired in the UK back in nine. It's still going today. There have been more than nineteen thousand, four hundred episodes of the Darned Thing, which makes my fift hundred episodes seem like nothing in comparison. I mean Lowsers. The Archers is set in a fictional small village in England and it follows the lives of you know, simple country folk as it were.

I don't mean that as like an insult or anything. It's literally kind of the focus of the show. And episodes were on about twelve minutes each these days. So while radio theater had an unbroken history in the UK, over here in the US we didn't really see a return to it until we started getting these dramatic audio podcasts.

You did have organizations like the Atlanta Radio Theater Company that kept the art form alive, kept on generating new works using the techniques and the uh the approaches of old time radio with some flare of new time technologies to throw in there, like we could throw in digital effects if we wanted to, which was kind of cool. But outside of those small groups, you didn't really see much radio theater. Maybe once in a while it's kind of a special performance, but other than that, not so much.

But then in podcasts we started to see it take off. There are a lot of shows that are all about narrative fiction, radio drama style stuff. I mean, there's The God's Head, Incidental, the Pnumbra podcast, the Magnus Archives. You know, we've got the Thirteen Days of Halloween. Like, there are lots of programs that tap into this now and it's

really an exciting time for storytellers. Soundscaping and three D audio have opened up new opportunities to create rich audio experiences for listeners, and it is important for us to remember that cool effects don't necessarily mean that you will have a good show, but when they're used properly, with the right material, they can really elevate a piece into something special. I really love radio theater. I love theater in general, but radio theater has a special place in

my heart. When it has done well, when it's written well and performed well, it can be incredibly entertaining or unsettling or really make you think it is hard to do well. I have been in lots of different radio productions that, not necessarily through the fault of anyone in particular, maybe didn't go as planned. You know, maybe there were technical issues, maybe someone had a script that was missing a page. Those sort of things do happen. It's just

like with live theater. As I said, things can go wrong. Um, but when things are going really well, it it just it clicks and you get something special. In fact, my co host of large Nerdron Colleider Aerial Cast, and she and I have performed in numerous radio theater productions um at least, and several of them were on based on Heineland stories, which was kind of interesting. So if you are interested in more radio theater, go check out the various audio drama podcasts that are out there. We have

some on I Heart Radio. They are phenomenal. I highly recommend them. But there's no shortage of radio drama style shows out there, and I'm sure there's something out there for you. If this is the kind of thing you're into. You can even look up the Atlanta Radio Theater Company. A lot of their recordings are available to listen to right now. They've recorded many of them in podcast form,

including stuff that I wrote back in the day. Um and they also have a catalog of recordings that you can order if you want to listen to specific shows. They do great work. Make sure you check those out. And that's it for this episode. A little bit of a shorter one today, but it was a fun thing to talk about. We'll be getting back to more technologically oriented episodes. This one was sort of the merger of art and tech, and I love talking about that as well.

I'm sure i'll revisit that in the future. But if you have suggestions for things I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out let me know. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle we use is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I heart radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.