I like outdated media. Radio plays or text-only computer games, that kind of thing.
Radio plays are particularly addictive to me, especially as a horror fan. An audio-only story has one big advantage over other media like print or film: you can turn all the lights out and listen to it in the dark. It makes the scary things scarier.
It was comedy that originally drew me to the medium though, in particular the brilliant British series The Goon Show - younger people are not exposed to this particular virus early enough. Written by Spike Milligan (who gets my vote as the greatest comedy genius of the 20th century and probably beyond) and starring Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe (early episodes also featured Michael Bentine, who left early, and jazz singer Ray Ellington often played a role as well as providing a song every episode), this was the greatest and most surreal of all radio comedy series.
Milligan took delight in exploding reality on a minute by minute basis, in ways that are impossible to describe. I'm probably preaching to the converted here, but if you've never heard of the Goons I'd highly recommend that next time you're at the public library you ransack their CD collection, there should be a few episodes available for hire.
My other favourite radio comedy is the hugely popular Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a wonderfully cynical science fiction satire that was spun off into books, computer games, towels, tv shows etc and a soon to be released big-budget movie. As good as most of those spin-offs were, the radio show is by far the best, largely because of Adams's deft touch with audio "sight gags".
In horror the best series I've found is the American show Quiet Please, created by Willis Cooper and starring radio announcer Ernest Chapel in his only acting roles. Chapel's steady voice was perfect for narrating these outlandish tales. The anthology show wasn't exclusively horror, but the lingering memories are of episodes like the unforgettably creepy The Thing On the Fourble Board.
Cooper had previously created the legendary Lights Out, before handing the reins to the talented and visionary, though undisciplined, Arch Obler. It was Obler who made the legenary Chicken Heart episode memorialized by an hilarious Bill Cosby routine in the '60s.
A lot of these shows have fallen through the cracks over the years, and probably wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for deranged enthusiasts archiving them. MP3 has made this hobby all the easier, and now many merchants sell CDs containing bulk lots of old-time radio shows in this format.
There have been some good recent audio-only dramas of various sorts. Dennis Etchison has been scripting Twilight Zone episodes for CD release; Doctor Who was kept alive in recent years partly through some very good audio adventures, which were able to use several previous incarnations of the Doctor because you couldn't see how much they'd aged; the Sci-Fi channel's sadly discontinued Seeing Ear Theatre produced some good ones.
Here's some places you can find radio-type drama online.
Seeing Ear Theatre offers some good recent-ish science fiction, fantasy & horror stories - everything from Neil Gaiman's Snow Glass Apples to adaptations of Tales from the Crypt comics. Unfortunately it's streaming only, in the evil Real format, but if you can bear that it's worth a listen. The anthology series City of Dreams is good.
The Mercury Theatre On the Air has most of the surviving shows from Orson Welles's groundbreaking series, including the legendary War of the Worlds show. Essential, though the file sizes are rather large.
Radio Lovers offers many free MP3 downloads of old-style radio shows.
Posted by pearce at March 26, 2005 3:54 PM