There Will Be No "Golden Age" Of Audio Drama, You'll Never Get It From A Zenith

Simels, here and at Duncan's Daycare for Doddering Duffers, accused me of "going on about the golden age of radio" last night.   Well, as everything I posted yesterday came from the late 1970s (you'd think that the title, "Afro-Western" would have been a clue, only he's clueless) and 1996 (the two episodes of The Mystery Project),  as always, Simps is a simpleton.

I seldom post anything from what is called "the golden age of radio" because  either the recordings I can find are too degraded, as in that Arch Oboler play he wrote for Peter Lorre * I mentioned a while ago, or too retrograde in their treatment of Women, Black People, Latinos, Jews, LGBT People, etc. as was not uncommon in the so-called "golden age of radio".  And a lot of the stuff from that period is not especially good, that's something I said last winter in about the only mention of said "golden age" I've ever made.

"A while back someone asked me why I hardly ever post stuff from the "golden age of radio".  No reason except a lot of what people post from that period isn't very good.  They really churned it out."

The one and only other time I posted the phrase "golden age of radio" was the very first time I posted one of them as Saturday Night Radio Drama when I said:

"The past few years I've come to really love audio drama, what used to be called radio drama back when radio aspired to be something other than a way to make money and spread propaganda.  I don't mean the "golden age of radio" stuff, though some of that was pretty good, or at least listenable."

I am not doing this as an exercise in nostalgia, I don't post anything based on that kind of stuff that keeps the pop music .... um.... "journalism" scam going and pop singers repeating their moldy oldies into their dotage.  Really, I think someday Mick and his old Stones are going to do the "Oxygen Tank Tour" as they'll all have to have one to get on stage.  The critics will declare it groovy.

I only post things if they're good or at least interesting.  And, as can be seen from what I post, most of that doesn't go into that "golden age" slot.

Simps and the Simpletons were only interesting in so far as they show what happens when people wallow in nostalgia and pat phrases and just a slightly different set of bromides than the ones George F. Babbitt was given.  Their discourse is something to be seen through, not something that carries any important revelation of reality.  It's an example of how pseudo-liberalism isn't qualitatively that different from its alleged opposite,** which, if presented theatrically, would probably need an Arch Oboler to mess with your set expectations, conventionalized categorizations and collection of pat phrases to do.   It wouldn't be in a movie, it wouldn't be on TV or, these days, on American radio.  It would be done as an audio-play or a skit.  The golden age of that wasn't when Arch Oboler, Norman Corwin and Orson Welles were working in radio.  I don't think any golden age of that has happened and the delivery system for that being decentralized, there won't ever be one.   You won't ever read about it in nostalgia pieces and magazines.  How many times have you ever heard them talking about Arch Oboler other than that silly "Chicken Heart" piece which isn't especially interesting compared with "An Exercise in Horror", linked to above.

*  If you listen to it it's worth it to either wait out the long degraded part of the recording or to skip it because this play is a good example of how Oboler could use your expectations to make a point.  I wonder if Peter Lorre ever wished he could go back to being a regular actor instead of playing a Hollywood type-cast creepy guy like the one spoofed in the play.   I'll bet he sometimes wished that he'd never been in "M".

**  Real liberalism is it's direct opposite because it is qualitatively different from both libertarian liberalism and degenerate conservatism.  There are evangelicals I trust more than I do the libertarian left.