Showing results by author "Radio Shows of the Past!" in All Categories

Pulitzer. Tiffany. Vanderbilt. Westinghouse. All names you may recognize but what do they have in common? They were all late 19th and early 20th century business men who were very successful, most of them making millions.In the 1930s, as the United States and Canada were beginning the early stages of recovery from the Depression, Atlas Radio Corporation of Canada created the show Captains of Industry. The purpose of the show was to inspire people with the stories of these self-made men.

James Francis Durante (/dəˈrænti/ də-RAN-tee, Italian: [duˈrante]; February 10, 1893 – January 29, 1980) was an American comedian, actor, singer, and pianist. His distinctive gravelly speech, Lower East Side accent, comic language-butchery, jazz-influenced songs, and prominent nose helped make him one of the United States' most familiar and popular personalities of the 1920s through the 1970s. He often referred to his nose as the schnozzola (Italianization of the American Yiddish slang word schnoz, meaning "big nose"), and the word became his nickname.

Roosevelt also made extensive use of radio. She was not the first first lady to broadcast—her predecessor, Lou Henry Hoover, had done that already. But Hoover did not have a regular radio program, whereas Roosevelt did. She first broadcast her own programs of radio commentary beginning on July 9, 1934. On that first show, she talked about the effect of movies on children, the need for a censor who could make sure movies did not glorify crime and violence, and her opinion about the recent All-Star baseball game. She also read a commercial from a mattress company, which sponsored the ...

Set in Newcastle upon Tyne in north-east England, the show follows the friendship, resumed after five years apart, of two working-class young men, Bob Ferris (Rodney Bewes) and Terry Collier (James Bolam). The word "likely" in the title referred, in the 1960s series, to those showing promise, but also to those likely to get up to well-meaning mischief. The humour was based on the tension between Terry's firmly working-class outlook and Bob's aspirations to join the middle class, through his new white-collar job, suburban home and impending marriage to prissy librarian Thelma Chambers...

The General Mills Radio Adventure Theater was an anthology radio drama series with Tom Bosley as host, which aired on the CBS Radio Network in 1977. Himan Brown, already producing the CBS Radio Mystery Theater for the network, added this twice-weekly (Saturdays and Sundays) anthology radio drama series to his workload in 1977. It usually aired on weekends, beginning in February 1977 and continuing through the end of January 1978, on CBS radio affiliates which carried it.General Mills was looking for a means of reaching children that would be less expensive than television ...

Ripley's Believe It or Not! is an American franchise founded by Robert Ripley, which deals with bizarre events and items so strange and unusual that readers might question the claims. Originally a newspaper panel, the Believe It or Not feature proved popular and was later adapted into a wide variety of formats, including radio, television, comic books, a chain of museums, and a book series.The Ripley collection includes 20,000 photographs, 30,000 artifacts and more than 100,000 cartoon panels.With 80-plus attractions, the Orlando, Florida-based Ripley Entertainment, Inc. (a division of ...

Every year, thousands of tourists flock to the Lake District. But one place they never go to is Plum House - the former country home of terrible poet George Pudding (1779-1848). Now a crumbling museum, losing money hand over fist, it struggles to stay open under its eccentric curator Peter Knight (Simon Callow).Can anyone save Plum House from irreversible decline?Tom Collyer, sent from the Trust to do just that, seems to be the most likely candidate but the challenge is huge as he confronts the reality of winning round Peter Knight's handpicked team - the hopelessly out of touch deputy Julian ...

The Strange Dr. Weird is a radio program broadcast on Mutual from 1944 to 1945.Sponsored by Adam Hats, the drama is notable in part because it was a sister series to The Mysterious Traveler, both in theme and its narrator. Maurice Tarplin, who was also the creepy voice of The Mysterious Traveler. Many of the scripts were condensed 15-minute versions of scripts originally broadcast on The Mysterious Traveler.To the accompaniment of an organ's spooky strains, Tarplin introduced each episode:Good evening. Come in, won't you? Why, what's the matter?You seem a bit nervous. Perhaps the ...

Anthony Berkeley set in 1920s London in which a group of armchair detectives, who have founded the "Crimes Circle", formulate theories on a recent murder case Scotland Yard has been unable to solve. Each of the six members, including their president, Berkeley's amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham, arrives at an altogether different solution as to the motive and the identity of the perpetrator, and also applies different methods of detection (basically deductive or inductive or a combination of both). Completely devoid of brutality but containing a lot of subtle, tongue-in-cheek humour ...

The show is set in a dark, six-floor fictional tower with windows which, from the opening titles, is situated on a small island in the middle of the open sea. Every episode is introduced by "The Caretaker" (played by Simon Greenall), a male world traveller who only came there for one good night's sleep, but he was imprisoned there by "The Voice" (performed by Eve Karpf in series 1 and Faith Brown from series 2 onward). To eventually earn his freedom, the Caretaker must trap as many children (referred to in the programme as "Unfortunates") as the Voice personally deems worthy.[1]Six human...

Exploring Tomorrow is an American old-time radio series which ran on the Mutual Broadcasting System from December 4, 1957, until June 13, 1958. An advertisement described it as "the first science-fiction show of science-fictioneers, by science-fictioneers and for science-fictioneers - real science fiction for a change!"[3]Exploring Tomorrow was narrated by John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Magazine. Campbell guided the career of many of the great science fiction writers of the era.

It Pays to Be Ignorant is a 1942–51 radio comedy show which maintained its popularity during a nine-year run on three networks for such sponsors as Philip Morris, Chrysler, and DeSoto. The series was a spoof on the academic discourse on such authoritative panel series as Quiz Kids and Information Please. At the same time, the beginning of the program parodied the popular quiz show Doctor I.Q. The show featured announcers Ken Roberts and Dick Stark. The program was broadcast on Mutual from June 25, 1942 to February 28, 1944, on CBS from February 25, 1944 to September 27, 1950 ...

Dick Barton – Special Agent is a radio thriller serial that was broadcast in the BBC Light Programme between 7 October 1946 and 30 March 1951. Produced and directed by Raymond Raikes, Neil Tuson, and Charles Lefaux, it was aired in 15-minute episodes at 6.45 (later 6.15) each weekday evening. From 11 January 1947 an additional "omnibus" edition repeated all of the week's programmes each Saturday morning between 11.00 and 12.00. In all, 711 episodes were produced and the serial achieved a peak audience of 20 million. Its end was marked by a leading article in The Times.The serial ...

Dr Evadne Hinge and Dame Hilda Bracket were characters devised by George Logan and Patrick Fyffe for their comedy and musical act. Hinge and Bracket were elderly, intellectual female musicians; in these personae, the male Logan and Fyffe played and sang songs to comic effect. They made many appearances on television and radio. The two generally performed together but, on rare occasions, appeared separately.The partnership ended when Patrick Fyffe died of cancer on 11 May 2002, at the age of 60. George Logan died on 21 May 2023, at the age of 78.Patrick Fyffe and George Logan devised the ...

President Thomas Jefferson made an incredible gamble early in the history of the American Republic: The Louisiana Purchase.Although the commitment had been made, there was no way to know the full extent of the Purchase. Soon after the Purchase was made Jefferson convinced the Congress to appropriate $2500 to fund an expedition to survey "The river Missouri, the Indians inhabiting it... the whole line, even to the Western Ocean."Jefferson chose a protege of his, a Virginian Army Captain, Meriwether Lewis, to lead the expedition.Lewis chose his friend William Clark as co-leader of the expedition...

Just a Minute is a BBC Radio 4 radio comedy panel game. For more than 50 years, with a few exceptions, it was hosted by Nicholas Parsons. Following Parsons' death in 2020, Sue Perkins became the permanent host, starting with the 87th series. Just a Minute was first transmitted on Radio 4 on 22 December 1967, three months after the station's launch. The programme won a Gold Sony Radio Academy Award in 2003.The object of the game is for panellists to talk for sixty seconds on a given subject, "without hesitation, repetition or deviation". The comedy comes from attempts to keep within ...

K.C. Smith, a man who is trained to handle any fiend in the Middle East, is also very fluent in all the Easternydialects and is familiar with the customs there. Everyday, he ventures out into the streets, while shrouded in the Middle Eastern garbs, in order to get the scoop on any foul play that might arise in these ancient cities full of mosques, bazaars, and oriental palaces. Smith will do whatever it takes to get all the information needed to bring down the local warlords, all in the name of the Ghost Corps.

Much of the humour of the show springs from the characters' varying views on death and their contrasting beliefs about the relative importance of their work. The show often derives humour from the fact that the characters are not primarily forensic pathologists. Davison's character, Anthony Webster, is frequently at pains to explain that he is a histopathologist, for example. Their case load therefore infrequently verges into the more "exciting" area of crime-related death. Nevertheless, one of the running gags of the programme was that the character originally played by Tracy-Ann ...

While not every episode is frightening, this series contains some of the most unsettling radio plays I've ever listened to. Nor is every episode a horror story; there are some clever satirical episodes as well.While I'm very glad to see these posted here, as I've apparently lost my other set of episodes, there are some mistakes in the naming of some of the files. For example, episode 11, Teenage Catalogue Model is missing, and the episode that is labeled "VP_841207_11_Teenage_Catalogue_Model" is another episode altogether. Hopefully someone (like the great OTR Researchers Group, whose ...

The Hermit's Cave was a syndicated radio horror series. The syndication was done via scripts, so that stations could broadcast the program with their own casts.[1]The program began in September 1937[2] and continued into the mid-1940s on WJR AM in Detroit, Michigan. In 1942, WJR's broadcasts of the show were recorded and broadcast a week later on WBBM in Chicago, Illinois. By 1943, transcriptions of the WJR version of the program were also being broadcast in eight additional cities. KMPC AM in Los Angeles, California, broadcast it from 1940 to 1944, with William Conrad as ...