The Clock:
Reference Please(01/05/47)
Tales From The Morgue:
Elmer Versus The Mutant Mole Rats.
Vanishing Point:
Strange Child (12/22/86)
Whitehall 1212 :
The Heathrow Affair (12/23/51)
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The Clock: Reference Please (01/05/47).
Produced in Australia by Grace Gibson Productions The Clock was a thirty-minute series featuring stories of suspense and mystery . The introduction to each show was always the same; “Sunrise and sunset, promise and fulfillment, birth and death the whole drama of life is written in the sands of time”.
The show debuted on November the 3rd of 1946 and would run for a bit more than a year closing out on May the 23rd of 1948 for a total of 65 shows.
Although the series was produced in Australia the locales for the stories were rather generic.
The actors and actresses spoke without a perceptible Australian accent which caused the program to sound, “American”. This marked the program as a natural for export to the American market where it would be picked up by ABC.
The show must have been reasonably successful because ABC then continued for another 13 weeks with an All-American cast and crew producing 13 new scripts bringing the series to a total of 78 episodes.
This is a bit like Charles “Dickens Christmas Carol”. It is clearly some sort of derivative. I mean when an unpleasant rich old man, finds himself traveling in the company of a spirit to find out what people really think of him. Well suspicions should be aroused, don’t you think? But still, it’s rather fun.
Tales From The Morgue – Elmer Versus The Mutant Mole Rats.
Chet Chetter’s Tales from the Morgue is a series of short stories as told by an old obliging morgue attendant, licensed embalmer and resident story teller named Chet Chetter to a passing stranger of the night played by you the listener. The stories Chet relates to us are all quite fanciful. They deal with topics that would be classified supernatural and science fiction. They border on outrageous but that is how they are meant to be. Roughly half of the shows feature a nice, likable, rural southern manure hauler by the name of Elmer Korn who always finds himself involved in some inane predicament. The creators of the series themselves admit the show is rather off-beat but, you will find, not without it’s own charm which lies within the humorous writing and the recurring characters.
“Where-in Elmer Korn and other residents of Biloxi, Mississippi are troubled by Mole Rats the size of cats and dogs.
Soon enough Elmer goes down the rat hole to find that the trap has turned. It all turns out okay for Elmer.
Not so well for the rats though.
Vanishing Point – Strange Child (12/22/86).
Vanishing Point is a science fiction anthology series that ran on CBC Radio from 1984 until 1986. Declared by the shows introduction to be, “The point between reality and fantasy.
The series was produced by Bill Lane in the C.B.C.’s Toronto studios and produced some excellent radio.
In 1986 Vanishing Point produced a, what I guess you would have to call a miniseries of six programs, each featuring a story that was suggested by ideas found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notepad.Collectively these six episodes are known as, “Thrice Told Tales”.
This is one of those.
The story seems rather Bradberryian (with a dash of Stephen King thrown in for good measure) with it’s conception of the story of a Science Fiction writer and his family, who have taken, what is for the father, a working vacation to the beach.
The children spend their time playing with sand castles on the beach. Well the Girl calls them sand castles. The boy insists they are, “Space Castles”.
In the blink of an eye something terrible seems to happen. The boy shows up at the cabin screaming, and claiming they were visited by a space ship that his sister is dead! Almost as quickly the girl comes back. But in the coming back. She came back strange.
Whitehall 1212 – The Heathrow Affair (12/23/51)
NBC was the first network to capitalize in 1952 with it’s 44, or maybe it’s, 52 episodes of Whitehall 1212 (the exact number is in dispute. So far I have found 43. ). On what was at the time the recent opening of a raft of Scotland Yard’s files.
Whitehall 1212 was a thoroughly American production. Despite being both written and directed by the American Wyllis Cooper (Lights Out, Quiet, Please and a whole lot more). The production would be billed as if it were a completely British undertaking.
I suppose this was an attempt to underscore it’s authenticity.
Not that NBC was alone. By the time Whitehall 1212 was well under way the Orson Welles-narrated Black Museum had began airing. So,when I said that NBC was the first network to present crimes from the annals of Scotland Yard I did not mean to imply that they were the first radio show to do so. That was actually, The Secrets of Scotland Yard in 1950. But this was not a network program. In fact it was first broadcast from a pirate radio station in South-Eastern Africa, Mozambique to be exact. This was a production of Harry Alan Towers and the Towers of London syndication company.
Later (1952 to 1953) Harry Towers would produce, The Black Museum which he also, at first, aired out of a pirate station, Radio Luxembourg.
The three shows are very similar using so many of the same cases that the episodes are often conflated, intermixed, in the memory of even the most knowledgeable Golden Age Radio collectors. The main difference seems to be that Whitehall 1212 has a more police procedural take on the cases. Focusing mostly on the day-to-day events surrounding the crime as it affected the police. The other two are more heavily dramatized and usually involve a recreation of the crime itself, whereas Whitehall 1212 did not.
What made Whitehall 1212 stand out from the other two is the presents of the actual superintendent of the Black Museum (Chief Superintendent John Davidson) as the host. He may not have sounded as dramatic as Orson Welles or Clive Brook, but he didn’t have to pretend to know what he was talking about. He was, after all, a veteran of the force. Likewise, the researcher for the series was Percy Hoskins, the chief crime reporter for the Daily Express. Hoskins was sometimes the newspaperman who had initially reported on some of the crimes being dramatized by the show.
Like Joe Friday on Dragnet, Cooper tried to “stick to the facts”. Oh, there was still plenty of blood and guts, but, only eluded to as the detectives stepped over the bodies looking for clues. So, although all three series are similar, Whitehall 1212 was oriented toward mystery rather than horror with a more intellectual approach to each crime.
But still there is plenty of satisfaction in listening to the investigators as they gradually tighten the noose.
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