Radio Recap: This Is My Best

This Is My Best was a radio anthology series that ran from September 5, 1944 to May 28, 1946 on CBS. Less than half of the series' episodes are in existence now, and that's a real shame.

For This Is My Best was, for a time, produced by Orson Welles. Welles made a few appearances as a performer in the series' early months, but as of March 13, 1945 and a radio adaptation of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," Welles took control of the program. Under his guidance, the series basically became another Mercury Theater on the Air. In fact, as the first episode of the series I heard was "Heart of Darkness" I mistakenly thought it was the first episode of the series and that the program was (and had always been) Welles' program. It looks like Welles left the series at the 1945 summer break so he wasn't really involved for very long.

The series was sponsored by Cresta Blanca wines, who had an appealing commercial jingle. Post-This Is My Best they briefly teamed up with Roma Wines to sponsor Suspense, which is where I'm most familiar with their advertisements.

Looking at what remains of the series, what stands out? There's a terrific production of Norman Corwin's comedic "The Plot to Overthrow Christmas." We have most of an adaptation of James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" starring Thurber's fellow New Yorker author Robert Benchley - it's extremely funny. Welles crafted an odd adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" that doesn't really retain the easy humour of Fitzgerald's work nor is as faithful to the text as the Escape adaptations I've written about on this blog. Welles adapted Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Master of Ballentrae" but with just a half-hour the story can't really breathe. Jack Benny starred in a comedic program called "Babes in the Woods" but the style of comedy is quite different than what he perfected on his own show.

The series is, like most dramatic anthologies, inconsistent. But the best of the series ("Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty") really stand out and suggest that we old-time radio fans are poorer for the absence of so many other episodes in existing collections. Here's an incomplete collection at the Internet Archive.