“LITERATURE” OF THE AIR

Southland Times, Issue 24153, 15 June 1940, Page 15

“LITERATURE” OF THE AIR

Radio's Perpetual Emotion

[By KATHERINE BEST in The Saturday Review of Literature (U.S.A.)]

A few months back, three delivery trucks drew up before the doors of the Columbia Broadcasting Building in New York. Inside the vans were packages of every size and shape from every corner of the United States. And inside the packages were items of every conceivable nature—ties, cufflinks, handkerchiefs, china, lingerie, an end table, house slippers, cigarette cases, floor lamps, a portable radio and even three carving sets. All were addressed to Dr John Wayne and Mrs Wayne. There are no such persons as Dr John Wayne and Mrs Wayne in the Columbia Broadcasting Building, or, for that matter, anywhere. Actually, they exist only in thin air, for they are the principals of a radio serial called “Big Sister, in which the physican hero, named John Wayne, recently married the heroine, Ruth. The three truckloads of packages consisted of wedding gifts sent by unknown admirers who evidently visualized the radio newlyweds as real persons. The Waynes are but two of 500 radio serial characters who experience this literal response to their fictional adventures every day. When Tiny Tim of the “Hilltop House” series became lost via a recent Thursday morning script, hundreds of letters were received by the broadcasting bompany, all giving minute clues to his whereabouts, one listener claiming to have seen him in the flesh on a certain wave-swept portion of Lake Michigan, bobbing about in a rowboat and in dire need of rescue. Hilltop House is the fictional name of a fictional refuge for fictional orphans, but to date there have been 40 requests from actual guardians of actual orphans for permission to place their charges within its kindly portals. When Ruth, heroine of “Just Plain Bill,” prolonged her indecision between suitors David and Carey for an indefinite period, the suspense evidently became more than a middle-Western town could bear. The radio company received a petition, I signed by every resident of the city, pleading with Ruth, to choose David.

“TRUE-TO-LIFE” PROBLEMS Eighty-one times a day, from 8.30 in the morning until 6 in the evening listening America is bombarded with the quivering adventures of radio’s daytime heroes and heroines. Eighty-four per cent, of all daylight time on the air is devoted to dramatizations of “true-to-life” problems. One big network carries 11 consecutive daytime serials, or two hours and 45 continuous minutes of “down-to-earth” drama every day of the week. Six times a day there are three serials running simultaneously on the major networks; three times a day there are four running simultaneously. By six o’clock on Friday evening, America’s serial fans are supercharged with crises in sex, selfpreservation, and family life. These 40,000,000 apparently insatiable listeners consist for the most part of women and they constitute the most loyal audience in public entertainment today. They are, in short, the dollar sign of the air. For them, radio script writers like Mr and Mrs F. Hummert, the most prolific of all serial writers, Ima Phillips, Elaine Stern Carrington, Mrs Gertrude Berg, and some two dozen others concoct daily dilemmadramas which ease drudgery at the drainboard and sell soap at the counter to the tune of a £7,500,000-a-year-business. But support of the radio serials is far from unanimous. In fact, letter files of the radio companies are shot through with complaints and threats of boycott by housewives who consider the daytime serial a shocking affront to their intelligence, a fearful waste of a mighty medium. The recent “I’m Not Listening” campaign, sponsored by 40 women’s clubs in Westchester County, New York, and the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, is a determined effort to stem the tide of daylight radio drivel. These women, estimated at 1,000,000 strong, have appointed a national radio committee to conduct a survey among the likely serial addicts and to amass sympathizers. They have jotted the names of offending programmes on postcards and mailed them in annoying overwhelming numbers to the radio stations carrying these programmes. They have upbraided publicly the sponsors for wilfully "underestimating the nation’s taste and intelligence,” for “stupidity,” and for “not knowing women.”

THEY PAY THE BILLS In rebuttal to the “I’m Not Listening,” the Radio companies point to their daytime “culture” programmes such as John T. Frederick’s “Of Men and Books” (Mr Frederick reviews and discusses current best sellers and introduces to his mid-afternoon audiences such writers and lecturers as Dr Mortimer Adler, Klaus Mann, Robert Nathan, Pearl Buck and H. L. Mencken); to Ted Malone’s “Between the Book Ends” (Mr Malone’s broadcast is devoted primarily to the reading of poems submitted by members of his radio audience. He has received as many as 2100 original poems in one day. His average is 300); to Joseph Henry Jackson’s “Reader’s Guide” (during Mr Jackson’s 15 years as an airwave book critic, he has reviewed more than 3500 books). The radio companies point, too, to the infinitely larger force of women who are listening to the serialized “drool,” and to the unassailable fact that the £7,500,000 income from sales of quarterhour daytime periods on the air amounts to one-third of all radio income. They point out, too, that programmes such as the Toscanini-N.B.C. Symphony Orchestra broadcasts, the Metropolitan Opera concerts —these and similar cultural—and non-cultural—-programmes are possible only because

1 "Ma Perkins,” “The Goldbergs,” “Myrt and Marge,” and radio entertainments | of like ilk are paying the bills. These sagas of the saccharine, called “soap operas” in the trade, first saw the blight of day in Chicago 10 years ago, sired by economy and dammed by the newspaper serial and comic strip. “The Goldbergs,” “Ma Perkins,” “Little Orphan Annie”—these serialized cheapies were tried out almost simultaneously over local Chicago stations to ease the economic strain of morning musical shows. At best, they were considered fillers-in; at worst, experiments. Public response was instantaneous and terrific. Letters, telephone calls, gifts poured into the local stations. Every former newspaperman who considered himself a decent candidate for writer’s cramp poured out reams of “little people” copy. Articulate women whose minds whirled with homey detail and “wish-fulfillment” melodramatics tried to capitalize on this new found appetite for two-penny catastrophe and pseudoglamour. The daytime serial spread from local station to local network, from local network to national network. Today four national networks blanket the nation-- with serials. Thus was bom a new group of writers whose productiveness makes the Dickens and the Thackerays and the Dumases look like word-sissies. Thus was born, too, a serialized “art form” that is unique in the world today.

“SOAP OPERA” Forty years ago there was the pennydreadful. Thirty years ago there were ten-twent-thirts. Twenty years ago the to-be-continued-next-week movie thriller. Today there is soap opera and where it will all lead nobody knows, for the soap opera’s claim to fame is its never-ending complications in the lives of characters just-like-the-folks-next-door. “Woe” is the least common denominator, enveloping the characters in an eternal procession of burnt biscuits, missed trains, splinter wounds, and backporch misunderstandings. Philosophy of the cracker-barrel variety, hysteria, and physical danger are the infallible ingredients. Smalltown family life, passion, and melodrama—these were the labels under which a manufacturer would profitably dispose’ of more soap. “The Goldbergs” and “Ma Perkins” set the pace for the "advice” perennials. “Myrt and Marge” introduced the formula for two-bit glamour and distaff hysteria. “Little Orphan Annie” started a trend in puny melodramatics. It is a long airlane that has no turning. The beginning of each year since 1930 has seen the number of daytime dramatic serials increase in exact ration to audience insatiability. In 1929 there was only “Amos 'n’ Andy,” a comedy. In 1940 there are 81 dramatic serials, the highest number in the history of radio. With the exception of a few fad subjects such as internes and glamour girls, and the most recent of dramatic transcriptions, “Light of the World,” an “uptodate,” modernized version of that best seller of all time, the

Bible—the serials today are siimlar to those of 1930. i The most dependable method of estimating a programme’s year-in, yearout audience is the Crosley Rating, a computation based on telephone calls made in sample towns. The most popular serials, such as “The Goldbergs,’ “David Harum,” “Road to Life,” "Myrt and Marge,” have a daily audience of 10,000,000 each. No broadcast serial has less than 2,000,000 and 5,000,000 is the number generally accepted as an average.

VAST AUDIENCE Ordinarily it takes a serial from one to two years to hit its audience stride, all the early and most popular ones having required that length of time to reach their potential listening group of 10,000,000. This means that a sponsor must spend about half a million dollars—or one dollar a word—before he can be certain that his show is competing favourably with similar programmes. Few serial writers develop their story to its logical conclusion. On-ae an insoluble conflict has been established, they create a daily crisis which will tease the listeners over night and a Friday super-crisis that will hold them quivering until Monday. The Friday full-Nelson is powerful with promise and drenched in passion. Witness this week-end tease for “Amanda of Honeymoon Hill.” How will Amanda, endearing, trustful but Ignorant of all modern ways of life, get along with Edward's rich, sophisticated family? Is Sylvia, Edward's fiancee, jealous? What will happen if Edward discovers that Amanda means more to him than all the world?

Methods of stirring the emotions of listeners run in cycles. For a while, smuggling and kidnapping were parts of every daytime serial worth its sugar; then came motor-car accidents, then operating rooms, then the birth of babies. One week last December six babies were born. Frank Hummert initiated one of his characters into “hysterical blindness,” a grisly but exotic affliction which so hypnotized the listeners that four competitive scripts embodied the identical ailment within a week. There is a tendency at the present moment to treat psychoses and neuroses with more than passing script interest. Once in a while a serial will touch on war or racial prejudice, but these are considered “controversial” and “unwise.”

READERS COMPLAINTS The prolongation of a crisis is to some listeners the serial’s most irritating feature, to some its most ecstatic. The serious illness of a character always brings a flood of solicitous letters to the studio, sometimes even threatening ones, like this one to “Life Can Be Beautiful”: “If you let Papa David die we will never buy another package of Ivory Flakes.” And this: “For goodness sake, bring ‘Road of Life’ to a climax or you will have everyone hating Chipso!” And this one to “Our Gal Sunday”: “Please don’t drag this suspense of Anne’s disappearance any more nights. My little girl is weak worrying about her.” Returns on the “I’m Not Listening” survey, so earnestly conducted by America’s clubwomen (called the WeGirls by irked broadcasting executives), are not yet in. Unless they show some startling and illuminating facts concerning the “average” American housewife and her fictional tastes, radio will undoubtedly continue to gorge the airlanes with serials. From 8.30 in the morning until 6 o’clock in the evening, every day of the week from Monday through Friday. And why shouldn’t it? Nothing, evidently, succeeds like excess.