From Those Were the Days:

1940 - As a summer replacement for blind, piano virtuoso Alec Templeton, The Quiz Kids was first heard on radio. The show continued on NBC until 1953.

1943 - The Dreft Star Playhouse debuted on NBC Radio. Jane Wyman (the former Mrs. Ronald Reagan) starred in the first broadcast, titled Bachelor Mother.

1944 - The Alan Young Show debuted on NBC Radio. It was a summer replacement for the popular Eddie Cantor. The show became a regular in the fall NBC lineup. Young, incidentally, made the switch to TV in 1961. He became a CBS star with a talking horse, of course, of course, named Mister Ed.
10:43:45 PM    comment []  trackback []  

“As a reporter for the London Times, he writes his colorful and unusual accounts…”

I must apologize profusely for the rather spotty posting this week, which is due to a myriad of circumstances beyond my control. We’ve been busier than the proverbial one-armed paperhanger at the hotel and there were a couple of occasions where forces of nature robbed Casa del Ivan of the necessary electricity needed to power the computer. (Thunderstorms, you understand.) Last night was the first chance I’ve gotten all week to sit down and listen to some old-time radio.

I’ve talked about Frontier Gentleman before, but to briefly recap it’s a solid Western series (superior to many of its radio brethren...and many television oaters as well) featuring the exploits of reporter J.B. Kendall, who wrote detailed accounts of his misadventures out West for the London Times. Recently I obtained the entire run of this outstanding Western series (41 episodes plus audition from February 2-November 16, 1958) from Terry Salomonson and his indispensable Audio Classics Archive. I took along a CD with me to work last night; said disk containing the first episode, “The Shelton Brothers,” plus the audition version of same. In this entry, J.B. finds himself in South Sunday, a small hamlet whose law enforcement prohibits anyone in town from carrying a gun; in fact, the constabulary has an innate suspicion of strangers in general. Kendall learns that the sheriff and deputy are in actuality two of the notorious Shelton brothers, who are living on borrowed time as a result of killing one of William “Billy the Kid” Bonney’s men.

The star of Gentleman was veteran character actor John Dehner, but the audition show features Ben Wright as Kendall. It was very interesting to compare and contrast the two performances; Wright’s Kendall is most certainly more of a “gentleman” than Dehner’s, but Dehner is definitely the superior actor for the part—providing a necessary “oomph” or punch that Wright can’t quite deliver. (Another plus in Wright’s favor is that he sounds much more like an Englishman than Dehner—but Ben did have a little help in that area, seeing as how he was a native Brit.)

Ben Wright was quite an accomplished radio performer, with frequent parts on series like The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen, Escape and Crime Classics. He played the starring role of Inspector Black on the last season of Pursuit (1951-52), and his best known work is probably that of supporting John Dehner’s Paladin as Hey Boy in the radio version of Have Gun, Will Travel (1958-60), the series that replaced Frontier Gentleman (Wright is sensational in the part, proving to be an expert dialectician). As I listened to “The Shelton Brothers”—written, directed and produced by Antony Ellis (another Brit) and featuring Jack Kruschen, Stacy Harris, Barney Phillips and Virginia Gregg in the cast—I couldn’t help but think that Frontier Gentleman would make one heck of an interesting Western series for television today. Though with the state of TV Westerns at present, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with my man Kendall having to swear like the inhabitants of the popular HBO drama Deadwood (after all, he is supposed to be a “frontier gentleman.”)
10:40:43 PM    comment []  trackback []