The Development of Radio Drama

Radio drama became popular when it made its first appearance back in 1920.
One of the first radio drama ever written in the UK was ‘A Comedy of Danger’ by
Richard Hughes, it was maybe the world’s, first unique radio play. Radio was the
primary communicated medium to bring drama into one’s living room. It started
with a transmission by the British Broadcasting Company, on 16th of February
1923, of three distinct scenes from Shakespeare plays. However, it did not take
long to understand that radio likewise required another sort of show astonishing
composed for the medium. Since it lacks visual components, radio drama has
been characterised as a ‘theatre for the visually impaired’. The emotional
control unit, introduced in 1928, made a multi-studio system conceivable; the
voices of performances working from a few studios with numerous acoustics
could be adjusted and merged. Things like ‘fades’ and ‘superimposition’ were
taken from film. Later on, channels were used to alter amplifier qualities, creating
impacts like phone conversations. A noteworthy development took place in
Germany after War World II, which was the audio tape recorder.

Audio dramas accomplished wide-ranging popularity within a decade of its

initial development in the 1920s. Around the 1930s the Great Depression took
place, and it was also the time where many people didn’t have jobs and money
to support themselves and their families. Because of that radio drama had a
huge impact on the audience since it was uplifting and engaging, and people
didn’t have to pay to enjoy this kind of entertainment. Radio drama became a
mainstay of programming formats with the coming of networks in the mid-late
1920s. It was during the 1930s when radio drama gained a massive amount of
popularity worldwide, since it became more diverse, having several different
genres available from horror to thriller to comedies to romance. At that time
audio drama was about 14 per cent of network programming.

Mystery and detective series were well known by the majority of the audience,
an ever-increasing number of projects were monetarily supported so that the
audience’s interest in radio dramas would increase even more, but contentions
and experimentations were disliked. In any case, all through the 1930s
challenges, the old-time radio (OTR), also known as the Golden Age Radio, was
an influential era of radio programming in the US during which radio was the
predominant electronic home entertainment medium.

In 1938, ‘The War of the Worlds’ was aired and adapted by actor Orson Welles,
who was also known as the most skilled individual in American radio shows. He
was given an ordinary spot on CBS as ‘Mercury Theatre reporting in real time’,
where he coordinated ‘The War of the Worlds’, which happened to create a
mass hysteria among the Americans because of its credibility. The radio drama
was transmitted between programs, which made it seem like someone was
announcing the daily news instead of listening to a radio play. The story, which
describes 12 days where intruders from Mars assault the Earth, got the listeners
attention almost immediately with its quick paced narrative and images of
Martians and interplanetary travel. The characters in ‘The War of the World’, at
first treated the presumed attack with a lack of concern, but not long after that
everyone gets into a protective condition of war. The listeners confused it with a
genuine article and in their panic called the police, paper workplaces, and
radio stations persuaded different writers that the show had caused nationwide
hysteria. Due to the chaos that devoured the listeners, making them take
vulnerable decisions, some of them ending up killing themselves, as different
groups of people stated the fact, yet there weren’t any articles that would
determine that those individuals ended their lives. Comparing to nowadays, if
this kind of event would occur, the listeners would be more realistic and analyse
the circumstances instead of jumping to conclusions. After that they would
decide what could be done, the technology is further developed compared to
the past and the people will be more rational. Overall, ‘The War of the Worlds’
had a big impact in the radio drama world, due to the chaos provoked back in
1938 and the panic that surrounded over 1 million of listeners.

In the past most, radio dramas were live shows, sometimes having studio
audience, so recording devices were not required. Recording was usually part of
the process for one of four rehearsals; most shows would record their rehearsals
by using a transcription disc, prior of creating a live version as a part of the
broadcast itself. Some radio shows would use sound effects spun manually
during the broadcast as part of a transcription distribution system. Many local
stations would use shows already recorded or ‘time shift’ programs by buying
recorded-to-disc shows that would be aired to fill the gaps in their programming
or as part as a paid sponsorship. The type of microphones they used weren’t as
different compared to the ones we use nowadays in terms of design and pickup
pattern. Originally, to record radio dramas they used carbon-based
microphones, but by the 1940s, many started using condenser type microphones
and other used ribbon type microphone, which were also called velocity
microphones. Around 1947 many radio dramas and shows easily made their way
into transition into television.

In 1950 the longest ever running soap drama, ‘The Archers’ began which is still
broadcasted every week in the present. It initially was a pilot series comprising
five episodes. At first it was broadcasted to the English Midland, but once BBC
finally got hold of them, they decided to run it at a national level. ‘The Archers’
was mainly produced to educate the farmers and to increase the level of food
production after the war. In a really short time it became a key source of
entertainment for urban as well as rural audiences, appealing to more than 9
million of listeners by 1953.

Giles Cooper (unknown) states “as long as radio exists, drama will be written for
radio, because it can handle some plays better than any other medium- in
particular, plays in which the writer has to make the audience accept a world
other than the one they see around them.”
Giles Cooper is best known for his adaptation of George Simenon’s ‘Maigret’
novels for television, but he was also well known for being one of the most
original of all BBC radio dramatists. In a career from 1950 to his early death in
1966, he wrote 12 plays for the Third Programme, 31 for the Home Service and 7
for the Light Programme, a total of 50 different dramas. Giles Cooper is one of
the people that deserve a special place in the history of radio drama, not only
because of his significant output but because he probably did more than
anyone who developed the drama written speciality for radio with plays like
'Under the Loofah Tree' and 'Unman', 'Wittering and Zigo'.

During the 1960s, with more and more people obtaining television there was a
major decrease in the popularity of radio dramas. A large number of nations
from the Czech Republic to Canada, from Switzerland to Japan, have strived to
develop a remarkable amount of plays for broadcasting. The facts confirm that
the television had overwhelmed the radio drama productions, but it keeps being
a captivating, inadequately respected and compensated type of play-writing-
diverse in structure form, yet firmly associated to different types of drama and
writing as a rule.

In 1960s radio drama was considered a ‘dying art’, and that was because of
how fast its popularity started to decrease, as everyone thought that is going to
be the end of radio dramas and radio shows. BBC Radio’s had a hard time
finding a place in their schedules for dramatic writing that was too ‘weird’ or
unsettling to put on television or the stage. Since radio has been kicked out of its
prime spot in the sitting-room corner by television, was progressively listened to
alone rather than by whole families. It was liberated to serve more focussed
audience. Excluding the fact that is was cheap in general, it could simply take
more risks.

Since the introduction of the internet, radio drama has gained popularity again
with there being more dramas and radio stations than ever before. With the
radio drama ‘Welcome to the Night Vale’ being downloaded over 170 million
times since it was released in 2012.

The technology improved as well, as most people don’t actually listen to radio
dramas via radio anymore, since they use different apps like ‘Podcast’ or ‘Sound
Cloud’. It’s handier this way because compared to the past, you don’t have to
wait that long for an episode to air, since most series are already finished and
they also release a few episodes from different series on a weekly basic. Even
though radio drama wasn’t as popular for a few decades, people kept
producing new things, which are now enjoyed by many different kinds of
people.