Night Transmissions is a 120 minute show featuring vintage radio shows. In this show... The CBS Radio Workshop,"Cops and Robbers" 3/3/56. Light's Out,"Valse Triste" 12/29/42 or 1938. X Minus One,"End as a World" 8/1/57. Sleep No More 12/5/56, "Over the Hill".
Music:
Arlo Guthrie - Alice's Restaurant Massacree (1967)
Notes: This is a weekly program which began on a now defunct low power FM station (KSOW) in Cottage Grove, OR. Since there seems to be some interest in the show I have decided to continue it. In this connection I will post a new show by Tuesday or Wednesday of each week. There is also a 64 bit version.
In the main, each episode consists of four approximately 30-minute long programs (not always, as sometimes I use a longer form show, so it may be 3 or fewer) and some filler to bring them in at 120 minutes. .
Broadcast Advisories
Use these programs in any way that suits you, commercial, non-commercial (well,don't sell it). Use them on your low power FM station or your AM station. Stream it on your internet station or stream. Whatever. Edit them if you want to, however you want to! I'm easy. In a few cases commercials have been left in but in those cases there is disclaimer stating that they are there for "historical perspective" only. I have edited out any underwriter spots that once existed. There is no comment about run times ( i.e. "It's Sunday night at 10 pm and this is Night Transmissions.") Also I have edited out any mention of the town I live in. In other words I have endeavored to make make these programs as "Evergreen" and global as possible. I would even consider making (at some point) shows that are tailored to some degree for specific locations. In most cases the mp3 file runs a little longer than 120 minutes. However, in all cases the main show comes in at under 120 minutes; anything in excess of 120 minutes is just music that can safely be faded out.
As of show 21 there are 30 second musical interludes at 30,60 and 90 minutes. with the last 5 to 10 minutes or so of the show uninterrupted music that can be faded out on without too much ado, Exact times will be in the mp3 comment tag
If you do broadcast or stream these I'd really be grateful if you dropped me a note.
This episode contains the following segments..
Segment One:
Is from The CBS Radio Workshop which began its run on Jan 27, 1956 and ended that run on September 22, 1957.
Featuring stories by major authors, and starring well known actors. It was one of the few corners of commercial radio to frequently offer a place for producers and writers to try novel things. Today, many of the 87 shows produced are considered classic representations of the very best of Golden Age radio drama.
Todays offering is, "Cops and Robbers" from March the 3rd of 1956.
The show features one of those novel things I mentioned. It's a mix of actors and real, retired, New York City cops. Everyone involved knows it's a radio show, but only the actors have seen the "treatment". They know who did it. They know how it happened. So do we because the crime is dramatized in the first few minutes. Then, in come the cops. But the police haven't read or heard the opening scene played out. They do have the sort of information they could expect to have by talking to the victims and "Witnesses" of the crime, but that's all. From there on no-one, not even the actors, have a real script... just a part to play. No-one knows how the story will end or how it will get there.
Segment Two:
Is an episode of Light's Out, one of the most famous radio shows of all time. Pretty much everyone has heard of Lights Out. Although sometimes, I admit, this awareness is limited to Bill Cosby's Chicken Heart routine.
Created by Willis Cooper in 1934, and passed on to Arch Oboler in 1936. Lights Out as a radio series would finally succumb to its own mortality in 1947. The franchise did not end with the demise of the radio show. Lights Out would turn up as a TV series from 1949 to 1952. There have been occasional attempts to revive the series that never had any notable success.
The episode on offer today,"Valse Triste" opens as two women vacationing on a lake manage to strand themselves on an unfamiliar shore as the boat they rented manages to float away. Striking out to find their way back to camp, the women soon discover a cabin deep in the woods. Do I need to tell you that there is a somewhat peculiar man living there? I expect not. You know how these things go.
Not well, never well.
I haven't mentioned when this program originally aired. That's because this is a matter of uncertainty on my part. The information that accompanies the file, the MP3 tag, the file name. These lead me to believe that the date for this program is December 29, 1942. On the other hand, my research inclines me to believe that it is more likely to be sometime in 1938.
It was not unheard of for Lights Out to recycle existing scripts with new casts. (This practice has led to considerable confusion for collectors.) There is no doubt that a version of "Valse Triste" was performed in 1938 starring Boris Karloff as the main male character. However as you listen to the program you'll notice that any mention of the cast is absent. To my ear, this guy doesn't sound like Karloff. If this is not Boris Karloff, then it is not 1938.
You figure it out!
Segment Three:
X Minus One is considered the finest science fiction drama ever produced for radio. It was not the first. That honor belongs to 2000+. It wasn't the second, That would be Dimension X. In fact the first 15 episodes of it's 1955 to 1958 run on NBC were new versions of Dimension X episodes. The remainder were all most entirely adaptations of recently published science fiction stories (Mostly from Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine) written by the leading writers of the time, including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon.
For all of us who were weaned on The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone and for the Trekkies (er,Trekers) among us, you should know that X Minus One is the forefather of the science fiction you grew up on. You will find that it still is some of the best Science Fiction ever aired.
Today's story is from August 1, 1957 and is called, End as a World. This story was adapted from a short story by F.L. Wallace that was published in Galaxy magazine for September of 1955.
"When Pete got up that Saturday morning it was smeared all across the headlines of the morning paper: THIS IS THE DAY THAT THE WORLD ENDS. His Mom called him to breakfast, she didn't care if it was the end of the world, life goes on."
Segment Four:
A different kind of radio show, Sleep No More was the second radio horror series of spoken word to be hosted by Nelson Olmsted (The first one was Black Night in 1937). Sleep No More would present dramatic readings of thrillers rather than full cast dramatizations. The only voice you hear it in is Omstead who reads classic short stories with a compliment of spooky music and not to subtle sound effects.
This series ran from 1952 to Nov 1956
This episode, is from December 5, 1956. Olmsted reads a short story by Michael Fessier, Over the Hill which was originally published in Esquire magazine for September of 1935.
Music:
Arlo Guthrie - Alice's Restaurant Massacree (1967)
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