Radio Recap: Blair of the Mounties

Blair of the Mounties was a syndicated radio detective serial that ran from January to October of 1938. It was written by and starred Colonel Rhys Davies (a former Mountie) as Blair, the titular mounted policeman.

The series jumps around in time a bit; one episode, "the Case of Lieutenant Ralston," is set during World War I, when Blair was not in the Mounties; it seems to me it was written to indulge Rhys Davies, who served in real-life had served in army intelligence during the war, as Blair is shown to. Much later another episode - "The Most Famous Spy" - is a wartime story about Mata Hari.

In one story, "The Kittilak Lagoon Mystery," Blair goes off on a weird tirade in which he complains about the difficulties in prosecuting criminal cases. Here's a small snippet of his lengthy complaint:

"The trouble of the world today, and modern police work in particular is that everybody's trying to be too smart and technical. ... Look at modern police work in general - filing systems, scientific methods and all that sort of stuff and look at the criminals who get away. And look at modern trial systems! Expert witnesses! Psychiatrists! Murder trials lasting for weeks! In the old days it took a few hours."

So, that's a bit fascist, complaining that police are being restrained because they have to respect individual rights? Rights that help prevent against wrongful arrest and conviction? Rights that prevent the sort of lynching that Blair seems to prefer?

There's also a strange tirade that Blair goes on in "Star Ruby of Talangor" where he complains (for several minutes) about detective fiction and calls out authors of fiction for not being as clever in real-life, singling out Arthur Conan Doyle in particular. It's especially ill-judged because the kind of detective fiction Blair complains about is basically what Blair of the Mounties indulges in - it's always about Blair spotting some clever clue that everyone else overlooked.

Blair retired to married life in "Strange Case of Henry Peterson" but returned in the next episode, "the Return of Inspector Blair." At that point the series was set in England and revealed that Blair had originally been born there - so he's not even a Canadian hero? Sheesh. Blair then becomes a private detective in England who solves crimes so... the entire premise of the title is a little questionable, since he's no longer "of the Mounties."

Indigenous characters fare about as well as you'd expect from old-time radio - that is, they're portrayed by white people who speak in halting, "me-catch-um" dialects.

All in all, I wanted to like Blair of the Mounties as an early bit of Canadiana radio, but Blair's long, angry speeches did a lot to eliminate my enjoyment of this program. You can still feel that tiny thrill only a Canadian can understand when a place like Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan is name-checked, but that doesn't make up for the tedium surrounding this program.

The Old Time Radio Researchers have a YouTube playlist of Blair of the Mounties!

"Even if..." Rend Collective thoughts

Over a week ago, I went to see a live concert by the band Rend Collective.

In my teenage years I was fascinated by what was then called "Contemporary Christian Music." Particularly from the 1980s-90s there was effort to create a kind of Christian alternative to popular 'secular' music. I gradually lost interest in CCM after high school and by the early 21st century, CCM slowly faded away.

Of course, it faded away because something else had taken its place; the new vogue was for Christian musicians to create worship songs that could be replicated in churches worldwide, rather than supporting a parallel entertainment industry.

I came to enjoy the new wave of Christian worship songs, but I thought the days of me purchasing Christian song albums was well in the past. I felt the new songs were suitable for church worship but weren't the sort of thing I would listen to around the house.

Enter Rend Collective, an Irish worship band who fell neatly into the new wave of worship. My then-worship leader Rob brought them into my home church, principally through the song "My Lighthouse." That song on its own won me over-- it's a happy, toe-tapping ditty. I wound up getting into the band's albums largely on the strength of that tune (I chose it as the theme song of the Cursillo weekend I led).

But while I love the high-energy found in many of their songs, the concert helped me articulate what I really enjoy about Rend Collective - and what makes them different from the CCM of my teen years - is that they're real. At the concert, lead performer Chris Llewellyn noted that the Psalms found in the Bible aren't simply songs of joy - many of them are songs of lament and we need to have a place for lament in our contemporary worship.

The aforementioned Rob seemed to agree with that; Rend Collective's song "Weep with Me" - a melancholy song of lament - became a song he frequently performed at our church (and I think Rob performed it at every funeral I attended after he added it to his repertoire). Songs like "Weep with Me" give us a place to express our grief and sadness. That's contrary to so much of the old CCM, which didn't want to act as though tough times existed - if they did, they were all in the past, not in the present or the future.

And Llewellyn took time to talk about his own mental health struggles with depression. Given that the band was performing in an Alliance church - and among all churches, the Evangelicals are most offended by Christians talking about mental health - that was bold of him. The band is real about the troubles that exist in life, the troubles they themselves experience.

Recently, my favourite song of theirs has been "Hallelujah Anyway." Rend Collective performed it at the concert that night; I performed it myself last weekend. What draws me to the song is that it's a song about going through problems yet remaining optimistic. Maybe it's a small thing, but being able to sing lyrics like "Even if my daylight never dawns; even if my breakthrough never comes; even if I'll fight to bring you praise" has a different kind of power than the usual triumphalism I find in Christian worship.

So yeah, I have a lot of time for Rend Collective.

Radio Recap: Indictment

"Indictment; a formal written charge of crime as the basis for trial of the accused. If the balance scales of justice are to remain righted, there must be trials, there must be convictions; the vital step which leads inexorably to these is the accusation of guilt by the grand jury: the Indictment!

Indictment was a latter-day CBS program from 1956-1959. It starred Nat Polen as district attorney Edward McCormick and Jack Arthur as assistant district attorney Tom Russo. The series' content was based on the files of the real-life ADA Eleazer Lipsky.

Indictment is something of a variant on detective shows, where instead of detectives, you have district attorneys who are searching for the right kind of pressure to deploy against an arrested individual that will force a confession out of them - usually by getting them to turn on whoever their partner-in-crime was.

The only reason I became fascinated with Indictment was that I learned three latter episodes of Suspense - "Infanticide" (October 11, 1959) "The Thimble" (November 22, 1959) and "End of the Road" (January 31, 1960) - were recycled from scripts used on Indictment. And yet, no one seems to know which episodes of Indictment. I've yet to see a decent log of the series and with only 7 episodes known to exist, it's a barely-glimpsed corner of OTR, despite being linked to one of radio's greatest programs.

Unfortunately, outside of the link to Suspense, there's little to say about Indictment. For a CBS series, the production values are pretty low - all the music is canned (some it recycled from Harry Alan Towers programs!) and sound effects are very limited. The series is also hampered by poor audio mixing, as in the episode "The Grand Slam Heist" in which a baseball game is being played in the background of a scene but the game's audio is louder than the dialogue! Despite being transcribed, Indictment has a number of flubbed lines, suggesting they didn't have the resources (or the self-respect) to do retakes. Decades later, television's Law and Order proved you could wring good drama out of legal wrangling but for radio it's just not engaging enough.

You can hear Indictment's remaining 7 episodes at the Old Time Radio Researchers Library.

Radio Recap: The Radio Hall of Fame

The Radio Hall of Fame - also called Philco Radio Hall of Fame after the series' sponsor - was a variety program that aired over the Blue network, continuing with them even after the network changed its name to ABC. It started in 1943 as an hour-long program, then shifted to a half-hour in 1945 before completing its run in 1946 (the following fall, Philco continued on ABC with Philco Radio Time starring Bing Crosby). The series offered a chance for audiences to hear repeat performances of popular radio stars in their most famous roles. Music throughout the series was provided by bandleader Paul Whiteman.

I haven't posted many Radio Recaps of Blue network shows; NBC Blue seldom had big name stars - those were usually reserved for the primary NBC network. Radio Hall of Fame was obviously a very expensive show, considering the vast number of talents who made themselves available for it. Compare this extravaganza to Philco's modest Phyl Coe Radio Mysteries series from just 6 years earlier - clearly time had been very good to Philco's business!

The show was strongly connected to Variety magazine; the magazine's critic Deems Taylor was the show's original host. Apparently that caused a lot of problems for the series because most of the newspaper coverage of Radio Hall of Fame consisted of the series insisting it wasn't just a mouthpiece for Variety. As of the second season, Deems Taylor was gone and the series was led by a series of guest hosts, usually popular film and radio stars.

During the summer time the series became the Philco Summer Theater; Paul Whiteman stayed on to introduce the acts but it became almost entirely musical numbers (with a brief news break). But in every incarnation, the Radio Hall of Fame had a lot of music - sometimes the musical acts go on for about 10 minutes-- occasionally, longer than that!

Now, the repeated performances varied quite a bit. At the beginning of the show, they genuinely did offer fans a chance to hear a popular performance a second time, which was a novelty in the days when "re-runs" didn't exist. The show's fourth episode featured a recreation of a sketch heard two weeks earlier on the Texaco Star Theatre with Fred Allen's entire comedy cast appearing for the recreation - that's kind of a big deal for a Blue network series to be highlighting a popular CBS comedy! But many of the comedy sketches on Radio Fall of Fame weren't from the recent past of radio, instead comedy stars would turn up to repeat their most well-known performances.

Radio Hall of Fame had radio stars: Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Jimmy Durante, George Burns and Gracie Allen, George Jessel, Ed Wynn, Bing Crosby, Chico Marx, Oscar Levant, Eddie Cantor, Abbott and Costello; they had comedians who at the time were best-known for their stand-up acts: Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, Henny Youngman; they had popular singers: Ginny Sims, Lauritz Melchior, Mary Martin, Burl Ives, Dick Powell, Kenny Baker, Kate Smith, Victor Borge; they had movie stars: Joan Fontaine, Brian Aherne, Laird Cregar, Raymond Edward Johnson, Paul Muni, William Gargan, Mary Astor, Orson Welles, Judy Garland, Boris Karloff, Ingrid Bergman, Lionel Barrymore; heck, they had Terry and the Pirates cartoonist Milton Caniff!

But Radio Hall of Fame also featured the likes of Arch Oboler recreating his script "Alter Ego" (first heard on Texaco Star Theatre in 1938) which was being made into the film Bewitched that same year; they recreated "Sorry, Wrong Number" from Suspense with Agnes Moorehead in her famous role; they brought in the casts of Vic and Sade, Lum and Abner, It Pays to Be Ignorant, Mr. District Attorney; and a satire of Inner Sanctum Mysteries complete with Raymond Edward Johnson.

The music heard was of all varieties - there was opera, Broadway musical comedy, classical music - along with a variety of old jazz pieces led by Paul Whiteman. Often there's at least one musical number that had no vocalist, just orchestra. Much of the music wasn't typically heard on radio, which isn't exactly fitting with the "Hall of Fame" part of the series title. When you pair that with many of the nightclub comedians heard on the series, it really does sound like an attempt to put Variety on the radio.

The original content also included (for the 1st season only) a lot of dramatic plays written by Milton Geiger that were usually heard in the last quarter of the show. The series was produced relatively early in the USA's involvement in World War II and Geiger's plays were frequently about the conflict. In the 2nd season, the dramatic plays were usually familiar stories, such as Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (with Peter Lorre) and Maupassant's "A Piece of String" (with Claude Rains). By the show's last season, the runtime had been trimmed to 30 minutes and the dramatic parts almost entirely excised, leaving the series just another music-comedy variety show.

I can't quite recommend the Radio Hall of Fame despite its high production values and immense array of talents. If any of the famous names above pique your interest then by all means you should search out the episodes they appeared in -- but for me, the series has too much music. The occasional great comedy routine (and there are some great ones, especially the Jackie Gleason, Chico Marx and Victor Borge appearances) doesn't really make up for the lengthy musical numbers you have to listen to in order to discover them. There are better musical-comedy variety shows (Command Performance comes to mind).

You can hear nearly 100 episodes of the Radio Hall of Fame at the Old Time Radio Researchers' Library.

RIP: Val Kilmer

Actor Val Kilmer passed away this week, aged only 65.

I'm sure every film buff out there has a favourite Val Kilmer movie, but mine is his first film - Top Secret! (1984), the ridiculous comedy film in which he portrayed the Elvis-like singing sensation Nick Rivers, who journeys behind the Iron Curtain and gets involved in a spy plot that is very much like the 1944 movie the Conspirators. As Kilmer himself noted, being that he was a young actor, it was a huge challenge to take on such a wacky comedy role; Kilmer succeeded because he portrayed Nick earnestly, a straight man in a very, very wacky movie.

But I'm sure most film buffs are going to point to Tombstone (1993). And yes, even I - a man who does not especially like westerns - point to Kilmer's performance as Doc Holliday as a terrific piece of acting. Perhaps Tombstone is the western movie for people who don't like westerns? Anyway, go watch Tombstone if you haven't already.

Obviously, there's much more I could mention; I have one friend who loves the Ghost and the Darkness (1996); my sister loved Willow (1988); my wife really likes the Saint (1997).

Rest in peace, Mr. Kilmer.

Columbia Workshop: The Recommended Listening List

With more than 300 episodes of the Columbia Workshop still in existence, it's pretty difficult to know what someone might like from the series. Everything I've learned about Columbia Workshop has confirmed how John Dunning summed it up in his encyclopedia:

"That this was not a show for the masses is especially true today. Some of these shows, on first listening, seem to move at a glacial pace; some seem quite old and date. The techniques they pioneered have become so routine, their high-tech counterparts bombarding people in radio commericals around the clock, that a listener seldom gives a thought to a time when they didn't exist."

Columbia Workshop was a pioneering, groundbreaking series, but people prefer to hear radio shows that implemented their solutions rather than listen to those early experiments. But if you're willing to dig through Columbia Workshop you'll find a massive vault full of compelling dramas, great performances and unusual uses of sound.

Here's what I consider to be the most worthwhile episodes:

• "The Gods of the Mountain" (December 19, 1936) an adaptation of Lord Dunsany's tale of beggars who masquerade as gods and the horrible fate they suffer.
• "Split Seconds" (March 14, 1937) a man struggles to swim to shore as scenes from his life echo in his ears.
• "Danse Macabre" (March 21, 1937) Death itself sets out to find companionship, killing everyone who refuses to dance to his fiddle.
• "The Fall of the City" (April 11, 1937 and again September 28, 1939) the drama of a great city's destruction, notable for the 1st version's cast of 200 voices and the 2nd version's 500+ cast!
• "R.U.R." (April 18, 1937) an adaptation of Karel Capek's play which introduced the word "robot."
• "S. S. San Pedro" (September 5, 1937) a story with heavy supernatural overtones as a ship at sea nears a disaster it can't survive.
• "The Killers" (October 17, 1937) a good adaptation of Ernest Hemmingway's short story of two gunmen and their willing victim.
• "The Horla" (November 7, 1937) an adaptation of the Guy de Maupassant story (although poor Alfred Shirley can't compare to Peter Lorre's majestic Mystery in the Air performance).
• "Night Patrol" (February 26, 1938) an Irish cop on the beat has various encounters with neighborhood folk one evening (at the time, an innovative use of footstep sound effects).
• "Seven Waves Away" (April 2, 1938) men on a lifeboat decide to sacrifice some of their fellow survivors believing it will better their odds for rescue.
• "The Fisherman and His Soul" (May 7, 1938) an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's fairy tale of a fisherman who sacrificed his soul so that he could love a mermaid, which proves to be a fatal error.
• "Bury the Dead" (May 28, 1938) an anti-war story in which the dead slain in war rise and society wonders how to make them rest again.
• "Mr. Whipple Is Worried" (January 16, 1939) a comedic episode in which a meek little man discovers he can hear statues talk.
• "Nine Prisoners" (February 20, 1939) an anti-war story in which nine soldiers are told to execute their prisoners and how each of the nine copes with their orders.
• "Jury Trial" (February 27, 1939) a look at members of a jury and how their personal prejudices and preferences interfere with justice.
• "The Law Beaters" (May 15, 1939) in which two criminals swap stories about their greatest triumphs- with a great twist ending.
• "The Man with the One Track Mind" (June 30, 1940) a whimsical story about a man who becomes a train and the unusual culture among other living train engines.
• "Carmilla" (July 28, 1940) an adaptation of Sheridan le Fanu's famous vampire story.
• "The Pussy Cat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man" (September 29, 1940) Arthur Miller(!)'s humorous tale of a talking cat who decides to run for public office.
• "The Plot to Overthrow Christmas (December 22, 1940) Norman Corwin's humorous bit of verse in which the fiends of Hades (ladies) attempt to snuff out Santa Claus.
• "Miracle in Manhattan" (December 21, 1941) a Christmas story of a cynical taxi driver who ferries around a mysterious man who might just be Jesus (this one was repeated several times as an episode of Duffy's Tavern).
• "Someone Else" (July 20, 1942) an offbeat supernatural tale about a man who is haunted by relics of the past.
• "Remodeled Brownstone" (October 19, 1942) a horror story in which new homeowners find their home haunted by a ghostly infant.
• "The Trial" (May 19, 1946) an adaptation of Kafka's most famous novel.
• "The Parade" (December 7, 1946) on the anniverary of the Pearl Harbor attack, a tale in which dead soldiers march silently through the city streets.

Here are some of the more "weird" episodes:

• "Maker of Dreams" (September 26, 1936) opens with a comedic drama about the spirits who give people dreams; it's followed by a discussion of how sound effects are created to give people the impression that ghosts exist.
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" (July 11, 1937) a very unusual adaptation that's less-faithful than most radio adaptations; the content of the story is the same but there's none of Edgar Allan Poe's prose - all the dialogue is unique to this production.
• "Surrealism" (June 11, 1938) a celebration of surrealism, with a variety of odd poems and songs with unusual musical accompaniment and sound effects.
• "So This Is Radio" (September 7, 1939) an explanation of how music is utilized in radio and the different means by which music is used in drama.
• "Double Exposure" (February 15, 1940) an adaptation of a Grand Guignol play; it's not what you'd expect, given the theatre's reputation for gore; it's definitely a horror play but it's very restrained and the horror doesn't really come until the climax.

Here's again is a massive collection of the Columbia Workshop at the Internet Archive.

Radio Recap: Columbia Workshop

Columbia Workshop is a piece of old-time radio history; it was a CBS program that they ran from 1936-42 and again 1944-1947. CBS paid for the program all the way through with no real remit for the series other than using it as a program for experimenting with radio storytelling.

(I won't be covering the contents of Twenty-Six by Corwin which was technically a 26-episode run of the Columbia Workshop - if I ever do cover it as a radio recap, it'll appear as its own entry; the 1956-1957 series CBS Radio Workshop was a latter-day revival of this series.)

Columbia Workshop was an anthology series; it featured episodes of every conceivable type of genre - not just comedy, fantasy, mystery, drama, musical... some episodes were structured like a revue, some featured multiple sketches. And the purpose of the series changed depending on the creators involved; some were experimenting with sound effects, others were simply utilizing unorthodox scripts. There are plenty of anthology shows on radio, but there's no other I can think of that was a sandbox for testing out new or unusual ideas.

Initially the series was produced by Irving Reis, who also wrote a few of the earlier scripts. Some of the most noted authors who wrote plays for the series were Stephen Vincent Benet, Archibald MacLeish, Lucille Fletcher and Norman Corwin. After Reis moved on, William Spier became the producer/director; William N. Robson was another director on the series; Bernard Herrmann was one of the musical contributors, prior even to his work on Mercury Theater on the Air.

As I noted in my recap, CBS' Forecast came from similar cloth as it experimented with different types of radio drama, although it was presenting its dramas as pilots for prospective new programs. Columbia Workshop sometimes helped set up new shows, but I'd hesitate to call any of the episodes a "pilot" in the traditional sense.

Still, I have to observe that Ed Gardner appeared in a number of Columbia Workshop comedic stories where he portrayed a wiseguy who told seemingly tall tales; they clearly led to Gardner's Forecast pilot for Duffy's Tavern; similarly, William Spier Columbia Workshop worked alongside writer Lucille Fletcher and music composer Bernard Herrmann - and not only would they all work together again on Suspense (which had its pilot on Forecast) but one episode of Columbia Workshop - "Double Ugly" (November 30, 1941) - was repeated on Suspense.

Lucille Fletcher's Columbia Workshop scripts are an interesting mix - two of her plays had heavy supernatural overtones - "Someone Else" (July 20, 1942) and "Remodeled Brownstone" (October 19, 1942) - and could have been rebroadcast on Suspense. Yet she also penned comedy/fantasy tales like "My Client Curley" (March 7, 1940) about a dancing caterpillar and "The Man with the One Track Mind" (June 30, 1940) in which a man decides to become a locomotive; if you only know her for her Suspense work, Columbia Workshop will change how you view her writing.

The series adapted Euripides' "The Trojan Women" (December 8, 1940), not so much because they wanted to honour classic Greek drama as to note that the play's views on war were applicable at the present time; certainly many plays on Columbia Workshop were concerned with the past trauma of World War I (ie, "Nine Prisoners," February 20, 1939) and the present trauma of World War II (ie, "The Parade," December 7, 1946).

Orson Welles appeared very early on in "Hamlet" (September 19 and November 14, 1936); this was before Orson's Mercury Theatre had come to radio and it's interesting to hear Orson in a production where he wasn't in charge (for one thing, he didn't narrate or m.c.). Given Welles and Herrmann's work on this program, I'd say it helped pave the way for the Mercury Theater on the Air.

The "Dramatization of the San Quentin Prison Break" (September 5, 1936) featured William N. Robson dramatizing how he crafted an episode of Calling All Cars so that they could adapt a jailbreak on the very day it had occurred. It's a neat look behind the curtain, demonstrating how radio scripts were assembled and performed.

There were notable episodes with Black casts including "Drums of Conscience" (May 2, 1937) about a Black man who believes he's haunted by the ghosts of slaving ships; "Tranga Man, Fine Gah" (June 4, 1938) set in Sierra Leone; "The Creation" (March 30, 1941) with a musical interpretation of the creation of life; and "Jason Was a Man" (April 27, 1941) a musical based on Jason's quest for the golden fleece.

Many years before he formally established himself as the leader in children's fiction, Dr. Seuss' first two hit children's books were adapted on Columbia Workshop- "The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins" (August 18, 1940) and "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" (December 1, 1940).

A lot of the steam behind Columbia Workshop seemed to peter out after the war; the show disappeared for all of 1943, then returned as Columbia Presents Corwin. But after the completion of that run, most of the old guard on Columbia Workshop had moved on (such as to Suspense). The post-war Columbia Workshop episodes are still interesting, but I don't find them as arresting or innovative as earlier productions, even though the technology behind radio was becoming stronger and stronger post-war.

I think there's plenty of episodes that are worth recommending but I'll save that for a separate post this Wednesday.

Here's a massive collection 333 episodes of the Columbia Workshop at the Internet Archive.