Variety shows

The variety program, a combination of comedy and music that almost always included a singing host and a guest star for the week, also dominated the period. Frequently, a comedy sketch would be included among the proceedings. The earliest examples of the form often featured a popular dance orchestra. For example, The Goodrich Silvertown Orchestra, named after its sponsor’s tires, was an hour-long program for NBC from 1926 to 1928, and it featured “the Silver-Masked Tenor,” a singer whose identity was kept secret. The real architect of the variety show was singer-saxophonist-bandleader Rudy Vallee, who starred in The Fleischmann Yeast Hour for a decade on NBC, beginning on October 24, 1929. The wavy-haired heartthrob not only crooned and provided dance music but also bantered with guest stars and introduced a lengthy dramatic sketch on each program.

Singer Al Jolson, self-billed as “the World’s Greatest Entertainer,” appeared on several variety series from 1932 through 1939, but he did not find his greatest radio success until he took over as host of The Kraft Music Hall from October 1947 through May 1949. That series, however, is indelibly associated with Bing Crosby, who hosted it for a decade beginning in 1936. Crosby had already become a top star of recordings and had made several successful movies, but his weekly visits into America’s homes via radio made him the nation’s most beloved entertainer. Crosby’s manner was easygoing yet elegant. He proved to be a fine light comedian, and he had a fondness for unusual and alliterative words which was further developed by his head writer, Carroll Carroll. After a dispute with the Kraft people (Crosby wanted to record his shows instead of doing them live), Crosby hosted successful shows for Philco radios, Chesterfield cigarettes, and General Electric until departing the medium in 1956. Many other popular singers hosted variety shows, among them Kate Smith, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, and Dick Haymes.

Anthology shows

Radio’s anthology shows featured casts and story lines that were entirely different from one week to the next. These shows provided a forum for some of radio’s brightest talents, whose abilities were too great to be confined to the more formulaic programs. Chief among them were Orson Welles and Norman Corwin.

By 1937 Welles was one of the busiest radio actors and was also creating a sensation on Broadway with his Mercury Theatre troupe. He was a regular performer on The March of Time and had the weekly starring role of The Shadow. His success in theatre led CBS to offer Welles an hour-long timeslot for a weekly show: The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Welles’s partner, John Houseman, wrote the scripts, and the Mercury company supplied the voices. Welles generally played several parts per show and sought innovative new ways of storytelling and directing.

Welles became a household name with a landmark broadcast of October 30, 1938: an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s fantasy story The War of the Worlds, about an invasion from Mars. Welles had decided to recast the story (originally set in England) as a contemporary American event, told over the air in news bulletins. The program was clearly announced as a dramatization at its outset. Many listeners, however, tuned in midway to what they thought was a succession of actual news bulletins. Affiliate stations began reporting the panicked reactions of listeners, which started in New Jersey (where writer Howard Koch had placed the start of the “invasion”) and spread to the rest of the nation. CBS executive Davidson Taylor ordered announcer Dan Seymour to state immediately that the broadcast was a work of fiction, but it was too little, too late. By the time Welles signed off by jovially likening this Halloween offering as “The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘boo,’ ” police were ready to storm the studio. Although it was feared that there had been many suicides or deaths in stampedes, there were no fatalities caused by the broadcast.

Corwin was perhaps the most creative and versatile talent in the history of radio. His programs were broadcast on a sustaining basis by CBS and were treated as prestige items. Corwin, a gentle man with a fierce intellect, wrote stories ranging from low comedy to high drama and from gentle whimsy to stark reality. The only constants were the intelligence of the writing, the creativity of the direction, and the impact of the finished shows. Such was his range that CBS gave him carte blanche to create whatever programs he wished; the resulting series, Twenty-six by Corwin (May–November 1941) and Columbia Presents Corwin (1944–45), remain towering achievements in radio. So too was his special broadcast commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, We Hold These Truths, and one marking V-E Day, On a Note of Triumph.

Film-based anthology shows

From the mid-1920s producers of motion pictures saw radio as a natural vehicle for advertising their product. In March 1925 the Warner Brothers studio set up its own radio station, KFWB, in Los Angeles as a means to promote its films and stars; other studios soon followed this example.

Radio’s relationship with the movies intensified with the premiere of The Lux Radio Theatre in 1934. By 1936 the program was hosted by Paramount’s famous director-producer Cecil B. DeMille. From this point on, almost all the stories used on Lux were drawn from movies, and most of the shows employed the stars who had appeared in the films. The writers of the Lux show quickly learned how to condense a movie running 90 minutes or longer into about 40 minutes of air time (the other 20 minutes being taken up with Lux soap commercials, DeMille’s introduction, and a closing chat with the guest stars). The Lux show soon became so popular that it inspired a number of imitators, including The Warner Brothers Academy Theater, The Screen Guild Theater, Academy Award Theater, Screen Director’s Playhouse, The MGM Theater of the Air, and many others.

Police and detective dramas

The police drama made its debut on radio with Calling All Cars, which was broadcast from November 1933 to September 1939 over the West Coast stations of CBS. The series was written and directed by William N. Robson, who would later become one of radio’s most renowned talents, and depicted actual crime stories, which were introduced by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. A final wrap-up related the fate met by the criminals at the hands of the legal system.

By June 1935 producer-writer-director Phillips H. Lord had conceived a series based on the exploits of FBI agents. His new show went on the air as G-Men, but, as FBI head J. Edgar Hoover showed increasing disapproval of the series, the show was revamped as Gangbusters. Like Calling All Cars, it used real events as the basis for its scripts. The program’s opening—an ear-splitting montage of police whistles, marching feet, breaking glass, machine-gun fire, sirens, and screeching tires—was so distinctive that it inspired the slang phrase “coming on like Gangbusters.”

The true-to-life police drama genre had new life breathed into it with Dragnet, which debuted on June 3, 1949, over NBC. The brainchild of a young writer-director-actor named Jack Webb, Dragnet employed essentially the same format as Calling All Cars, but it was much more realistic, focusing on the day-to-day, tedious grind of catching crooks. Webb starred as Sgt. Joe Friday, a bachelor cop whose grim determination to ferret out the bad guys made the tedium of the job bearable. The show had a stylized realism, with trademark musical bridges, extremely realistic sound effects, Webb’s flat-voiced narration, a staccato “stinger” line at the end of each scene, a tag sequence telling how the legal system dealt with the criminal, and, above all, the ominous theme music (“Dum-de-DUM-dum!”) written by Walter Schumann.

The fictitious detective was also well represented on radio. The Shadow began over CBS in July 1930 as an anthology series of unrelated crime dramas, with the title character serving merely as host. The series in its best-remembered form—with wealthy man-about-town Lamont Cranston using strange powers of hypnosis to become the Shadow, rendering himself invisible to criminals—began in September 1937, airing over the Mutual network and starring a 22-year-old Orson Welles.

Radio abounded with sleuths and gumshoes during the 1940s and early ’50s: Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Nick Carter, Bulldog Drummond, the Saint, Nero Wolfe, and Philo Vance were among the detectives who made the transition from print to the airwaves. Owing in part to the form’s literary origins, the detective drama transferred exceedingly well to radio; exciting action, colourful characters, and deft wordplay were inherent to the genre.