Two Thanks

Two of the blogosphere have bathed your chronicler in kindness in recent weeks, and the return favour is slightly overdue.

Bather number one is Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. the author-proprietor of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, in which he affords equal shrift to vintage radio and television with equivalent affection and wit. He is also adept at culling genuinely forgotten veins, sifting between what deserved forgetting and what deserved remembering but deploying verve and not vitriol:

(The Doris Day Show)'s fourth season attempted to copy the single working gal concept popularized the year before by The Mary Tyler Moore Show--—so in order to do the same for Doris they had to make her single, too . . . and did so by rubbing out both of her kids and then administering a series of mind control experiments in which she forgot she had them. (You think I’m making this up, don’t you? It’s true—--those damn kids were never mentioned or heard from again. They’re probably pictures on milk cartons now, for all I know.) Poor Doris…season by season, her father . . . her kids . . . her friends…all of them disappeared.

---From "What a Difference a Day Makes," 4 December 2006.

Mr. Shreve did what some Happy Days fans (himself included, perhaps) might have thought impossible: with one swell foop (thank you, Mrs. Ace) he found that which out-grotesques Happy Days's whacking and disappearing eldest son Chuck Cunningham without even a DNA print to trace him. (Mr. Shreve has yet to exhume any suggestion that Chuck Cunningham ran secretly in circles squared by Jimmy Hoffa, but this is television, of course . . . )

He is no less affectionate to classic radio and strains to kindness toward the oftentimes horrible takes given some radio vintages on film. "Darkness, death, and dementia!", 3 December 2006, is a genteel re-examination of films derived from The Inner Sanctum, some of which actually prove on fresh viewings to have afforded more respect to their radio root than critics over time have allowed.

Mr. Shreve and I have had an occasional point of dispute but he is, on the evidence, one of those gentlemen to whom the occasional dispute enhances rather than emaciates the fellowship. Enough to the point that it would probably be some enchanted evening to break out the bourbon, light up, and swap good talk, soundtracked perhaps by Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman as any one of their vintage radio performances presented them---spiked with Fred Allen.

Which turns me to my second bather in kindness, a British gentleman naming himself after the Sage of Summerfield Himself and exercising a pleasant stream of commentary running the spread from British media today to British broadcasting from era to age and back, with sprinklings enough that it isn't just we Americans who savour our vintage radio. (And, in fairness, it isn't just he and his fellow Britons who savour England's vintages, too.)

Exactly why he chose the URL name of "ragtag" escapes, because Random Jottings of Gildersleeve is as anti-ragtag as a niche blog can become. He instructs, he delights, and he thinks aloud in unpretentious terms. He ponders the prospective mischief and majesty alike in such developments as British radio making room for "Smooth FM" (8 December 2006) while not entirely certain what does or doesn't constitute "easy listening"; he laments whether listeners today would get Fred Allen's topicality. (Hint: They would, if you consider that the topic isn't necessarily the thing above and beyond what it inspires. Especially when the topic is the reductionism toward which classic radio seemed to turn, heavily enough, during Mr. Allen's final three or four years as a host in his own right.)

Radio will tell you and pay tribute to many artists alongside today's performers and say about their place in musical history but then rarely play anything by them. Of course you have to promote and bring on new talent but there has to be room to appreciate the great performances of the past.

---From "Like a Virgin," 4 December 2006.

If you can argue with such as that, you're a better manperson than I, Gunga Din.

I really do believe that radio entertainment could've survived alongside television if the broadcasters and commercial companies could've stayed with the medium and had looked further ahead, he writes in his 9 December entry. Big "if," bearing in mind a few admonitions from the period in which classic radio's burial was no longer a question of "if" but "when."

[B]e mediocre . . . safe, routine, unspectacular . . . be willing to curb your imagination. [Radio now] is a trade outlet, not an art; it's a living.

---Norman Corwin, in The Writer, 1951.

---By 1948, critics had begun to despair of the creeping grayness that pervaded much of radio, and left it ripe for television's takeover. Suddenly it seemed that everybody was piling on. John Crosby expressed a growing exasperation when he wrote, "Radio's social position remains low---lower even than the movies, which is about as far down as the social ladder goes." James T. Farrell accused radio of producing a "counterfeit" mass culture and of siphoning off "a large portion of the literary talent in America" to produce soaps and sitcoms, a charge long leveled against movies and TV. Ring Lardner's radio columns in The New Yorker, often written from a hospital bed, regularly ridiculed radio's worst excesses.

---Gerald S. Nachman, Raised on Radio.

Radio is no longer guided by research; it's enslaved by it . . . It has always seemed to me an imposition on the listeners to determine what is broadcast. The responsibility of providing good radio programs belongs to the professionals in the industry, not the amateurs outside it. No amount of slavish obesiance to public taste and no amount of complicated machinery will produce a good radio program or even a popular radio program.

---John Crosby, "Research and Hysteria," New York Herald-Tribune, 16 December 1947.

Now take the rating system. That's the stupidest thing I ever heard of. What do you think would happen if a drama critic said Finian's Rainbow was a good, solid 10.4?

---Goodman Ace, to Time, 8 September 1947.

I hope the fine won't be too expensive . . .