Harlan Ellison in his masterpiece essay on television, Revealed at last! What killed the dinosaurs! (And you don't look so good yourself)(from the intro to Strange Wine), praised radio drama as a superior form of story telling. I am a big fan of his and I am a big fan of radio drama. However, in the US it is very difficult to get hold of. Which radio station do you know that hosts anything remotely similar to drama? For that you would have to hop across the pond (or go down a “series of tubes”) to BBC radio.
One of the best places to go for all things radio is the BBC iPlayer. It offers practically everything. If you want current affairs, news, cultural programs, drama and comedy, you want Radio 4. For drama and comedy, you want radio 7. For news and world affairs, BBC World Service.
I say all this to show you how much I like non-visual audible storytelling. It is a world of its own and very distinct from storytelling we see on TV. Most of the time all we hear is the voice of the narrator and voices of actors playing various parts. The rest, the setting, the mise en scène is left for the listener's imagination.
Now if you are fond of your imagination, you would not mind it exercising its muscles, would you? Television has brought us many good things but it does make us impaired on being able to visualize characters and settings on our own. I have nothing against television and I am quite an avid watcher of television programs myself. What I am trying to say is that radio dramas are a wholly different not-so-new form of storytelling that everyone should experience for themselves.
It is fair to assume that since everyone's experiences are different, as are their emotional natures, their response to the same stimuli would also be varied. The same voice on the radio would conjure different images for you as it does for me. We have a way of multiplying the nature of the experience from the same text. The beauty of it is that for every listener the mise en scène becomes a different place of their own creation. The listener becomes an active participant in the creative process of storytelling.
This makes radio dramas the closest one can come to finding an equal of books. Books represent for us the gateway to a world of the mind. Stories told over the radio give us a stimulation that may rob us of our inner reading voice, but it keeps all other trappings and perks of reading nearly intact.
It could be that in the future the television industry would have to compete for viewers and ratings by making the programming as individualistic as possible. They could come up with the idea that each viewer could choose the setting and the actors. I want Huck Finn to be blond while my friend wants him to have brown hair and my uber feminist friend wants Huck to be a girl. One wants the story to take place in post-War pre-Civil Rights era while another wants it in a post-apocalyptic future. One wants the entire story in black and white film noir style while another wants a total explosion of rich colors. You can go on in this fashion and add any other kind of watching experience you can think of that would set you apart from the majority of the viewers.
At the moment, such a scenario, though not implausible is still prohibitively costly. The topic still resides in the realm of science fiction. We could see it as the future of our television experience and knowing how much a paying public likes to have a myriad of choice, would probably be a certainty.
But we have already been experiencing that for a long time! The greatest example of how individually terrifying a story could be is that of Orson Welles reading “War of the Worlds” on radio in 1937. Human credulity being the victim of that particular incident, it did also show us how ordinary people can share the dark imaginations of an author. How it becomes possible to share a vision without having to go through enormous expenditure and red tape. Not to mention toadying up to narcissistic showbiz executives.
Radio can set our imaginations free.
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