The day Ma Perkins died
On this date, November 25, in 1960, CBS canceled its last four soap operas: Ma Perkins, The Right to Happiness, Young Dr. Malone and The Second Mrs. Burton. They and more than a dozen other soap operas on all the networks were for decades a staple within a staple—radio itself—of American lives, and are a rich source of fascinating facts in pop-culture history. Ma Perkins, for instance, ran weekdays for 27 years—for seven of them simultaneously on two networks, NBC as well as CBS—and the title role was played throughout its entire run by actress Virginia Payne, beginning at age 23 (or possibly 21), who never missed a single performance.
Was radio—big-time, old-time radio—a lesser medium than television, a sort of stepping-stone to the form of mass communication that dominates our lives today? Hearken to these two anecdotes from Leonard Maltin’s The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio’s Golden Age:
¨ An episode of Arch Oboler’s famously creepy anthology series, Lights Out, focused on a bickering man and wife who suddenly find a monster in their apartment. Unable, in their fear, to take their eyes off the hideous creature, they stop arguing.
During the long night, they talk calmly, and in talking begin to understand each other’s bitterness. “As their voices, and their attitudes, soften,” Maltin writes, “the monster disappears; he was simply a personification of the hatred that had grown within them both.”
¨ On Jack Benny’s show, he and his troupe are arriving in New York by train. As they step off, the porter brushes off their coats. We hear the sound of his whiskbroom. First Jack : whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk. Then his wife, Mary Livingstone: whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk.
And then Jack’s rotund announcer, Don Wilson: whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk, whisk-whisk.…
Those two scenes could not be done effectively on television. To see what was being portrayed would utterly ruin the audience’s appreciation. Their effect depends entirely on sound.
More than that, the effect depends upon the use of the listener’s imagination. Over and over, the writers, actors, and directors interviewed for this book say what has been said before about radio: that its success was overwhelmingly due to the listeners’ involvement and imagination.
The lack of the dimension of vision did not make radio a lesser medium than television, simply a different one. Oboler says it was a more intimate medium. From an artistic and entertainment viewpoint, it stood on its own two feet and delivered the goods—and often live, not recorded.
My latest book: Audrey and Sharon: https://www.amazon.com/Audrey-Sharon-Roger-K-Miller/dp/B0CNH5GNKG/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2FC3S90O9KQ8J&keywords=audrey+and+sharon+roger+k.+miller&psr=EY17&qid=1700926815&s=cyber-monday&sprefix=audrey+and+sharon%2Ccyber-monday%2C84&sr=1-2