For years I’ve listened to true crime podcasts to fall asleep.1 My favorite of these podcasts is the Australian show Casefile, which is, by and large, an extremely dry recitation of The Facts. Earlier this year, however, I found that I kind of hit a wall and these podcasts were not really working for me anymore. So I gave them up. I like true crime books for themselves but my interest in the podcasts is purely about sleeping. But I still needed something as part of my extremely elaborate distraction ritual.
I tried powering off my computer and phone a few hours before bedtime and putting on lectures from The Teaching Company that I had on CD. Those were unfortunately kind of too interesting. I tried a James Herriot audiobook. Those were too full of somebody’s beloved elderly dog being put down. True crime still wasn’t working. Then I decided to try some “Old Time Radio” podcasts, that is, podcasts of old radio shows. (“Old Time Radio” is the name used by enthusiasts.)
I am possibly a little more Old Time Radio–friendly than many people, not only because I enjoy antiquated pop culture but because, for reasons unknown to me, my family used to listen to tapes of The Stan Freberg Show on road trips.2 I haven’t really listened to The Stan Freberg Show since childhood but it’s honestly kind of an amazing product, particularly when it comes to the deranged fake advertising that peppers the show. There are fake ads for products that either nobody needs (like a sound system that takes over your entire house) or that simply do not need to be advertised (the general concept of food). Unfortunately, Freberg’s show had all the fake ads because he could not get a sponsor for real ads, and the show’s run was extremely brief.3
Here’s his parody of Dragnet.
Having now listened to actual Dragnet episodes, I will say that this is not only deadly accurate but frankly better than the actual show.4 When I was a kid I encountered a lot of things that were parodies of stuff I didn’t know was real. But then there’s also stuff like this, which I don’t think is a parody, just weird:
Something I like about old mass culture is that it’s often both dumber and smarter than its present day versions. The ways in which it is dumber are easy to describe. You don’t switch on a radio show for subtleties of characterization. Everybody is a type. While radio seems to have been somewhat freer than movies to allude to things like “the existence of sex outside marriage,” the general rule that bad guys cannot win prevails in most cases, so there is a certain amount of inevitability to any story’s conclusion.
The ways in which old mass culture can be smarter is harder to articulate. It’s not a question of being more plausible, or better produced. I think it has something to do with the idea that somebody would actually be listening or watching this thing, if not always consistently. Listening to classic radio while doing chores or falling asleep, you notice that these shows are actually designed with the idea that people are not always paying attention. They may be coming in late to the story. This episode might be the first episode of your program they ever hear.
Which means that there is a lot of reinforcement of what’s happened as it goes along; you’re always being reminded of who is who. These stories have to find a sweet spot between variation and repetition; too much variation and you lose the thread, too much repetition and your show’s just boring. Having stock types is useful—you can remember who is a tough and who is a dame—even if those stock types can also be grating stereotypes. Though “bad guys lose” is predetermined, bad guys can lose in lots of ways; for instance, they can take the good guys with them. Your knowledge that this story has to end a certain way is what actually makes it exciting to follow.5
For instance: Suspense, which I guess we could call a “prestige” radio drama, lives up to its name because you know this has to end with the bad guy unmasked… you just don’t know how it will happen. There’s one episode where a guy goes on a fishing trip with an old friend (played by Vincent Price) who definitely seems to be trying to murder him. The way this story ends is completely surprising, but it also follows the expectation that bad guys have to lose.
Anyway, the thing is, much narrative entertainment today is also written with the understanding people aren’t paying attention, but with very different results. What that kind of thing is more like extruded narrative product. It’s not just that they assume that you aren’t paying attention, but that you might be sorry if you try. Every time I watch a direct to streaming TV show and give it my undivided attention I feel punished for my mistakes.
Some thoughts on some specific shows, etc:
The main way I listen to these shows is through the podcasts Stars on Suspense, Down These Mean Streets, and The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society. You can also find individual shows on the Internet Archive and you can turn the RSS feed there into a podcast feed using this website (or there might already be a feed for you to follow). I personally kind of like having the commentary. You can also look. into The Old Time Radio Researchers. This website operates more like a radio if you want to have a bit of randomness injected into your listening.
The shows are also much more unabashedly commercial in shilling their sponsors’ products. There’s also a lot of shilling of patriotism. There is a level of straight-up propaganda surrounding these shows that it’s kind of impossible to imagine going over well now. War bonds, other war efforts the details of which I cannot remember, exhortations that our enemies want to see America weakened by prejudice, anti-Communist advertisements. I’m using the term “propaganda” neutrally. Can you imagine turning on NPR and they tell you to buy war bonds?
The absolute strangest radio show, to me, is The Lives of Harry Lime, starring Orson Welles as his character from The Third Man. If you haven’t seen The Third Man, well, first of all, you should. (It’s one of my favorite movies.) What is important to know is that Harry Lime is not just a “bad guy” in a generic noir bad guy way—“oh, he kills people, I guess”—but a “bad guy” in a very specific way. He sells diluted penicillin. Orson Welles cannot fail to be charming, no matter what role he plays, and Harry Lime is one of the great movie villains because Welles is so charming. He is also one of the great villains who is barely in his own movie, so you may think, sure, there is a way to expand here.
But how exactly do you “expand” on the role of a guy like Harry Lime? You don’t really want to listen to a radio show about a guy who runs around killing sick people, do you? No, you don’t. You don’t even want to watch that show on HBO. So the answer is basically… that you turn him into one of those odd literary characters who is a gentleman con artist who kind of occupies the detective role without really being opposed to doing crimes. How you get from the Harry Lime of this show to the Harry Lime of the movie is unanswered and frankly unanswerable. They are different people.Another odd show is Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, which is narrated by an insurance investigator as a series of lines on his expense account. This is such a goofy idea but it actually really works for radio because it makes the structure so clear and easy to follow. I’m always happy when these pop up.
One pleasant surprise was The Saint, which stars Vincent Price as a relentlessly wise-cracking detective. (One example I wrote down—when somebody says to Price’s character that he’s made “a rationalization,” Price responds: “They’re rationing everything these days.”) It’s a fun role for Price, who gets to be a hero for once (but isn’t exactly playing against type here in that his character would be totally ghoulish if the show was even slightly realistic). The Saint is based on a series of books that was also turned into a TV show starring Roger Moore, but I haven’t read them or seen the show.
I’d always assumed that The Shadow was sort of a dark horror show about bad people, but it’s almost more of a superhero show. The Whistler, which you can imagine as a kind of cross between the cautionary tales of The Twilight Zone and the editorializing of Tales of the Crypt, is the show I thought The Shadow was. The narrator never acts, only observes and comments as his characters commit crimes and pay the price. This show is aggressively, abrasively cynical; I either only want to listen to Whistler episodes or I don’t want to hear them at all.
One radio show I do not like is The Adventures of Philip Marlowe. In truth, I basically don’t like Marlowe adaptations, ever.6 I’m sure that in some objective sense The Big Sleep is a great movie, but Humphrey Bogart plays Marlowe the same way he plays Sam Spade and it drives me crazy. I like the Altman Long Goodbye, because I think it does capture an important thing about Marlowe (which is that he’s sort of a loser), but recently a friend told me he thought it was better than the book so now it’s on my shit list too.7 If you’re totally able to detach the books from the radio show, it might be fine, but for me it both has nothing about the books that I like while not really giving me anything that distinguishes it from the other shows.
The one touch I do like is that at the beginning of each episode Marlowe recites a compressed version of the plot, like so: “Sounded good, real good. A weekend in Malibu, expenses paid with a cash bonus thrown in. But that was before I knew about the henchman, the redhead, and the corpse. These three, and a white Panama hat, ruined it all for me.” At the end of the episode he previews the next in a similar way: “When her will was read, everybody figured she’d been crazy when she wrote it. And that included me. But I changed my mind after spending the night on an island with a pig, a cat, and an ape. Because, in reality, they were people.” These are great and if I ever try to do “a year of hardboiled detective stories” I will steal this part.On the other hand, I adore the Nero Wolfe show starring Sydney Greenstreet, and this can probably be attributed to never having read much (any?) Nero Wolfe, as Rex Stout apparently hated this show. It is a lot of fun hearing Sydney Greenstreet play a role where he’s not the bad guy but is almost indistinguishable from a bad guy because he’s so petty, fussy, unconcerned with human life, and so on.
There’s a bunch of sci-fi and horror shows that I haven’t really touched yet, I think mostly because I am after all trying to fall asleep, and they are either too interesting or too creepy. I have listened a bit to both X Minus One and Dimension X and they are both pretty good, but the quality of the episodes depends a lot on the quality of the adapted story. (I am annoyed that what seems to be the only Fritz Leiber story between them, “A Pail of Air,” is one of his stories that I don’t really like.) One note is that “the bad guy loses” does not apply to science fiction or horror. The bad guy can absolutely win here.
My elaborate sleeping ritual goes like this: I put on about three hours’ worth of some podcast and do crosswords on my phone until I’ve distracted myself enough that I can start to fall asleep.
As far as I can tell, my issues with insomnia are mental and not tied to lifestyle; I’ve had them for a long time and they seem to mostly come from the sense that falling asleep is just extremely boring and I’d rather do something else. So I have to trick the surface of my thoughts into following along with something until it’s too late not to fall asleep. This can take a long time—over an hour. (I also take sleeping drugs but they will not do it on their own.) I have tried just about every “sleep hygiene” trick so… Do Not Give Me Advice.
If you want to listen to The Stan Freberg Show, I would skip the first episode… not because it’s bad but because it is an extended political satire that involves, among other things, the Gaza Strip. (Really.) So I would come back to it later, when you get the vibe, because otherwise I expect it will be very jarring.
He also wrote real ads:
Shows I have not warmed to include Dragnet and also I Was A Communist For The FBI (which makes me anxious) (and yes, that’s really what it’s called) (really).
This is also how a lot of romances work (as my friend
has pointed out to me)—you know that these two people will end up together but how they are going to work this out is the big question. While you can only be surprised by what you can’t expect and do not know, suspense works differently.
I think the best Marlowe adaptation is the seventies TV show The Rockford Files, but it’s not really an adaptation, more of a spiritual relative.
sorry to be this guy but the best Marlowe adaptation is The Big Lebowski
Love this topic. Looking forward to checking out the shows