RADIO DRAMA is the form of audio storytelling broadcast on radio. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music, and sound effects to help the listener imagine the story.

In the early 1940s, radio programs reflected America's involvement in World War II. As the number of news and human interest programs grew, evening quiz, variety, musical, and audience participation programs shrunk. During this time, evening radio drama programs exploded in number.

As a result of the country's involvement in the war, the number of hours per week devoted to news broadcasts nearly doubled. It was probably this abundance of war news that propelled the spectacular growth of evening dramatic programs. As listeners grew tired of war talk, they turned to other programs for escape. The forms that offered the most escape were comedy-variety, comedy drama, and thriller drama. As a matter of fact, one of the dramatic series created during this period was entitled Escape.

During the 1944-45 season, the networks scheduled eight hours of comedy variety, eight  hours of comedy drama programs, and 14 hours of thriller drama each week. By the end of this period, networks offered 47 hours a week of dramatic programs during the evening and on Sunday. Thriller drama programs counted for about 25 hours of these each week.

In the early years of television, not enough homes had a TV receiver, and national sponsors were hard to find. Production costs had to be controlled. It was too expensive to create new forms and take a chance on an unknown show, so the forms that existed at the time on radio were moved directly to television. In fact, many of the successful radio series went directly to television. Gunsmoke, an extremely successful western drama, was one among several that could be heard on radio and seen on TV. Suspense, radio's longest running thriller series, was another.

Radio drama achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its initial development in the 1920s. By the 1940s, it was a leading international popular entertainment. With the advent of television in the 1950s, however, radio drama lost some of its popularity, and in some countries, has never regained large audiences. However, old-time radio recordings survive today in the audio archives of collectors and museums.

The single best-known episode of radio drama is probably the Orson Welles-directed adaptation of The War of the Worlds (1938), which some listeners believed to be A real news broadcast about an invasion from Mars.

As of 2006, radio drama had a minimal presence in the United States. Much of American radio drama is now restricted to rebroadcasts or podcasts of programs from previous decades. However, other nations still have thriving traditions of radio drama. The BBC produces and broadcasts hundreds of new radio dramas per year on Radio 4, BBC 7 and Radio 3. Podcasting has also offered a means to create new radio dramas in addition to the distribution of vintage programs.

The terms "audio drama" or "audio theatre" are sometimes used synonymously with "radio drama" with one notable distinction -- audio drama or audio theatre is not intended specifically for broadcast on radio. Audio drama --whether newly produced or old-time-radio classics -- can be found on CDs, cassette tapes, podcasts, webcasts, and conventional broadcast radio.

Early years

English language radio drama seems to have started in the United States. A Rural Line on Education, a brief sketch specifically written for radio, aired on Pittsburgh's KDKA in 1921, according to historian Bill Jaker.

Newspaper accounts of the era report on a number of other drama experiments by America's commercial radio stations: KYW broadcast a season of complete operas from Chicago starting in November 1921. In February 1922, entire Broadway musical comedies with the original casts aired from WJZ's Newark studios. Actors Grace George and Herbert Hayes performed an entire play from a San Francisco station in the summer of 1922.

An important turning point in radio drama came when Schenectady, New York's WGY, after a successful tryout on August 3, 1922, began weekly studio broadcasts of full-length stage plays in September 1922, using music, sound effects and a regular troupe of actors, The WGY Players.

Aware of this series, the director of Cincinnati's WLW began regularly broadcasting one-acts (as well as excerpts from longer works) in November. The success of these projects led to imitators at other stations. By the spring of 1923, original dramatic pieces written especially for radio were airing on stations in Cincinnati (When Love Wakens by WLW's Fred Smith), Philadelphia (The Secret Wave by Clyde A. Criswell) and Los Angeles (At Home over KHJ). That same year, WLW (in May) and WGY (in September) sponsored scripting contests, inviting listeners to create original plays to be performed by those stations' dramatic troupes.

Listings in the New York Times and other sources for May 1923 reveal at least 20 dramatic offerings were scheduled (including one-acts, excerpts from longer dramas, complete three- and four-act plays, operettas, and a Moliére adaptation), either as in-studio productions or by remote broadcast from local theaters and opera houses.

Serious study of American radio drama of the 1920s and early 1930s is, at best, very limited. Unsung pioneers of the art include: WLW's Fred Smith; Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (who popularized the dramatic serial); The Eveready Hour creative team (which began with one-act plays but was soon experimenting with hour-long combinations of drama and music on its weekly variety program); the various acting troupes at stations like WLW, WGY, KGO and a number of others, frequently run by women like Helen Schuster Martin and Wilda Wilson Church; early network continuity writers like Henry Fisk Carlton, William Ford Manley and Don Clark; producers and directors like Clarence Menser and Gerald Stopp; and a long list of others who were credited at the time with any number of innovations but who are largely forgotten.

Another notable early radio drama, one of the first especially written for the medium in the UK, was Danger by Richard Hughes, broadcast by the BBC on January 15, 1924, about a group of people trapped in a Welsh coal mine.

In 1951, American writer and producer Arch Oboler suggested that Wyllis Cooper's Lights Out (1934-47) was the first true radio drama to make use of the unique qualities of radio.

Radio drama (as distinguished from theatre plays boiled down to kilocycle size) began at midnight, in the middle thirties, on one of the upper floors of Chicago's Merchandise Mart.

Though the series is often remembered solely for its gruesome stories and sound effects, Cooper's scripts for Lights Out were well-written and offered innovations seldom heard in early radio dramas, including multiple first person narrators, stream of consciousness monologues and scripts that contrasted a duplicitious character's internal monologue and his spoken words.

The question of who was the first to write stream-of-consciousness drama for radio is a difficult one to answer. By 1930, Tyrone Guthrie had written plays for the BBC like Matrimonial News (which consists entirely of the thoughts of a shopgirl awaiting a blind date) and The Flowers Are Not for You to Pick (which takes place inside the mind of a drowning man). After they were published in 1931, Guthrie's plays aired on the American networks. Around the same time, Guthrie himself also worked for the Canadian National Railway radio network, producing plays written by Merrill Denison that used similar techniques.

A 1940 article in Variety credited a 1932 NBC play, Drink Deep by Don Johnson, as the first stream-of-consciousness play written for American radio. The climax of Lawrence Holcomb's 1931 NBC play Skyscraper also uses a variation of the technique (so that the listener can hear the final thoughts and relived memories of a man falling to his death from the title building).

There were probably earlier examples of stream-of-consciousness drama on the radio. For example, in December 1924, actor Paul Robeson, then appearing in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, performed a scene from the play over New York's WGBS to critical acclaim. Some of the many storytellers and monologists on early 1920s American radio might be able to claim even earlier dates.

Widespread popularity

Perhaps America's most famous radio drama broadcast is Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds, a 1938 version of the H. G. Wells novel, which convinced large numbers of listeners that an actual invasion from Mars was taking place.

By the late 1930s, radio drama was widely popular in the United States (and also in other parts of the world). There were dozens of programs in many different genres, from mysteries and thrillers, to soap operas and comedies. There were occasional efforts at more "literary" works, such as Under Milk Wood (1954) and Play for Voices by Dylan Thomas. Many playwrights, screenwriters and novelists got their start in radio drama, including Caryl Churchill, Rod Serling, Irwin Shaw and Tom Stoppard.

Decline in the United States

By the mid-1950s in the United States, television had achieved massive popularity, and radio drama was on the decline. Some successful radio programs were able to make a successful transition to television (such as Gunsmoke, Dragnet, Guiding Light, and Jack Benny's program), but radio drama never recovered its popularity in the U.S.

There have been some efforts at radio drama since the late 1950s. In the 1960s, Dick Orkin created the hugely popular syndicated comic adventure series Chicken Man ("He's everywhere! He's everywhere!) Inspired by The Goon Show, "the four or five crazy guys" of the Firesign Theatre built a large following with their satirical plays on recordings exploring the dramatic possibilities inherent in stereo.

A brief resurgence of production beginning in the early 1970s yielded veteran Himan Brown's CBS Radio Mystery Theater and works by a new generation of dramatists, notably Yuri Rasovsky, Tom Lopez of ZBS and the dramatic sketches heard on humorist Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion.

Thanks in large part to the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, public radio continued to air a smattering of audio drama until the mid-1980s. From 1986 to 2002, National Public Radio's most consistent producer of radio drama was the idiosyncratic Joe Frank, working out of KCRW in Santa Monica.

Radio drama today

Radio drama remains popular in much of the world. Stations producing radio drama often commission a large number of scripts. The relatively low cost of producing a radio play enables them to take chances with works by unknown writers. Radio can be a good training ground for beginning drama writers as the words written form a much greater part of the finished product; bad lines cannot be obscured with stage business.

On the BBC there are two ongoing radio soap operas: The Archers on BBC Radio Four and Silver Street on the Asian Network. A third soap, Westway, on the World Service was cancelled in October 2000 but continues in re-runs on BBC7.

The audio drama format exists side-by-side with books presented on radio, read by actors or by the author. In Britain and other countries there is also a quite a bit of radio comedy (both stand-up and sitcom). Together, these programs provide entertainment where television is either not wanted or would be distracting (such as while driving or operating machinery).

The lack of visuals also enable fantastical settings and effects to be used in radio plays where the cost would be prohibitive for movies or television. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was first produced as radio drama, and was not adapted for television until much later, when its popularity would ensure an appropriate return for the high cost of the futuristic setting.

On occasion television series can be revived as radio series. For example, a long-running but no longer popular television series can be continued as a radio series because the reduced production costs make it cost-effective with a much smaller audience. When an organization owns both television and radio channels, such as the BBC, the fact that no royalties have to be paid makes this even more attractive. Radio revivals can also use actors reprising their television roles, even after decades as they still sound roughly the same. Series that have had this treatment include Doctor Who, Dad's Army, Sapphire & Steel, The Tomorrow People, and Thunderbirds.

Regular broadcasts of radio drama in English can be heard on the BBC's Radio 3, Radio 4 and BBC 7, on Radio 1 from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and on RTÉ Radio 1 in Ireland. BBC Radio 4 in particular is noted for its radio drama, broadcasting hundreds of one-off plays per year in strands such as The Afternoon Play, in addition to serials and soap operas. The British commercial station Oneword, though broadcasting mostly book readings, also transmits a number of radio plays in installments.

In the U.S., radio drama can be found on ACB-radio produced by the American Council of the Blind and on XM Radio. The networks sometime sell transcripts of their shows on cassette tapes or CDs or make the shows available for listening or downloading over the Internet. Transcription recordings of many pre-television shows have been preserved. They are collected, re-recorded onto audio CDs and/or MP3 files and traded by hobbyists today as old-time radio programs.

Meanwhile, veterans such as Rasovsky and Lopez have gained new listeners on cassettes, CDs and downloads. In the mid-1980s, the non-profit L.A. Theatre Works launched its radio series recorded before live audience, which continues a tenuous hold in public radio, while marketing its productions on compact disk.

With 21st-century technology, modern radio drama, also known as audio theater, has begun an exciting new movement. Local radio drama groups have kept the spirit of radio drama alive. The advent of inexpensive computerized production technology brought an explosion of activity. Not From Space (2003) on XM Satellite Radio was the first national radio play recorded exclusively through the Internet in which the voice actors were all in separate locations. As the podcasting phenomenon continues to grow, radio drama has found a new lease of life on the Internet. Podcasting provides a good alternative to mainstream television and radio because it has no restrictions regarding content.

Programs/series

2000X
Adventures in Odyssey
The Adventures of Superman
Afghanada
Amos 'n' Andy
The Archers
The Black Mass
CBS Radio Mystery Theater
Canadia 2056
Caves of Steel
City of Dreams (Internet stream at Scifi.com)
Deathlands
Deathstalker
The Destroyer
Dimension X; later X Minus One
Down Gilead Lane
Earplay
Escape
The Executioner
Focus on the Family Radio Theatre
The Fat Man
The General Mills Radio Adventure Theater; later CBS Radio Adventure Theater
The Goon Show
The Green Hornet
Gunsmoke
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Inner Sanctum Mysteries
Jane Arden
Johnny Swank
Just South of Normal
The Life of Riley
Land of the Lost
Lights Out
The Lone Ranger
The Lord of the Rings (BBC radio version)
Lum and Abner
Lux Radio Theater
Mack Bolan
Mercury Theatre On The Air
The National Radio Theater of Chicago
The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Nick Danger; see also Firesign Theatre, Dear Friends
Not From Space
NPR Playhouse
Outlanders
Paul Temple
Paws and Tales
The Pond
Quiet Please
The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd
Red Rock Mysteries
Sears Radio Theater; later Mutual Radio Theater
Star Wars
Steve, The First
Steve, The Second
The Shadow
Shadow Falls
Stony Man
Suspense
The Twilight Zone
Unshackled
A Work in Progress
X Minus One
Yes, What?
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar

This guide was assembled by booksuncommon.  Any errors are mine. For those I apologize.

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