Halloween Radio Recap #4: Quiet, Please

I've blogged many times about the supernatural anthology Quiet, Please, created by Wyllie Cooper (Lights Out); it was heard from June 8, 1947 to June 25, 1949 on Mutual and ABC; despite those being two of the worse networks in terms of preservation, most of Quiet, Please has managed to survive.

Ernest Chappell starred in each episode as "the man who spoke to you" and, indeed, each episode he would speak to you; episodes were nearly always narrated by Chappell's character to you, the audience. In time, music, sound effects and other actors would fade it, but it maintained the feel of a ghost story told by lamplight.

Most people come to Quiet, Please through the episode "The Thing on the Fourble Board" (August 9, 1948) - it was my introduction to the series. It's been called the greatest horror program in the history of radio by people like Stephen King and Harlan Ellison. Now, Quiet, Please didn't aim for horror of that sort every week, so if you want more episodes like this one... well, they do exist (try "My Son, John" or "Tanglefoot") but in general, Quiet, Please was a supernatural program; there wasn't always a menace to be faced; often the series aimed for melancholy, rather than scares.

Quiet, Please has some stories which are played for laughs; "Dark Grey Magic" concerns an inept spellcaster; "Kill Me Again" has a man entering into a deal with the Devil for another chance at life, but he doesn't get to enjoy it; "Presto Change-o, I'm Sure" features a spell to make people disappear and where exactly they disappear to; and "The Man Who Knew Everything" features a know-it-all and his complicated life.

Some stories are very gentle; look to the Christmas stories Cooper told like "Berlin, 1945" and "The Time of the Big Snow," which aren't the least bit scary or unsettling. His Easter story, "Shadow of the Wings," though, has a bit of menace inside it.

Cooper was often inspired by stories from the Bible, which is pretty unusual for a supernatural program; I wrote a blog post about these stories.

I already have a list of recommended episodes here on the blog. There are definitely episodes I love more than others but I treasure every episode of the series to some extent, even a far-out one like "The Hat, the Bed, and John J. Catherine" with its lengthy soliloquy. I came to Quiet, Please looking for some scares but I stuck around because of the quality of Cooper's writing and the spellbinding way Chappell's voice drew me into the stories.

You can hear the surviving episodes of Quiet, Please and recreations of missing shows at the fan page Quiet Please dot org. They also have scripts/transcriptions so you can follow along, just in case it's a little too quiet for you.

Next Thursday: Inner Sanctum Mysteries!