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OTR: cancelled
A Wisconsin public radio troupe performed old radio scripts, reviving old stories for new audiences. It was popular for years, and you can imagine what fun the actors had – tearing into the chunks of ham on the page, or recapturing the timbres and slang of a previous era.
No more; it’s been cancelled. In the old and new senses of the word.
Wisconsin Public Radio is canceling its long-running weekend program “Old Time Radio Drama,” with station officials citing the “racist and sexist material” present in many of the plays of the Golden Age of Radio.
“Many of these plays and productions were produced more than 60 years ago,” Wisconsin Public Radio director Mike Crane said in a statement on Friday. “Despite significant effort over the years, it has been nearly impossible to find historic programs without offensive and outdated content.”
This is . . . remarkable.
The statement relies on the audience’s ignorance of the material. It depends on people thinking “well, yes, those are old shows; surely they’re shot through with racism and sexism,” without knowing anything about the subject. It’s the past! Ergo it’s gotta be offensive.
I’ve no idea what percentage of old radio shows survive in transcribed form, but we have a lot, mostly from the 40s and 50s. Yes, Amos ’n’ Andy was, well, Amos ’n Andy, but it was a rare show built around African Americans. For the most part they were invisible, aside from a few domestic servants – and we’ll get to that in a moment. You could say that the exclusion of Black voices from radio was racist, but that’s different than saying the material was racist.
“Life with Luigi” was an Italian immigrant comedy, complete with stereotypical characters who-a speak-a the cliched mama-mia lingo. But it loved its characters, and Luigi, for all his comic faults, was proud to be in American. But okay, it’s racist against Italians, so take that one off the table.
The Goldbergs: same thing. Fine, don’t do those, eliminate the most prominent Jewish sitcom, for reasons.
And that’s about all I got, at the moment. If some of the Hispanic accents in the 50s were a bit too broad, it might be because they were usually played by the same guy – it was his speciality – but the Latin cops with whom Johnny Dollar dealt were always smart and on the level. As I noted in another old radio thread, the 50s Westerns at their best were explicitly anti-racist when it came to the American Indians. If Tales of the Texas Rangers did a story about a murder that looked like the immigrant guy did it, the plot was guar-an-fargin’-teed to find blame with the jealous white rancher. Joe Friday, week after week, was pulling in white guys – I can’t think of a single ep in which the bad guy was a minority, and yes, I’ve listened to them all.
About those “domestics” – two of the most long-running series had prominent African-American actors as “servants,” and in neither case were they subservient. Eddie “Rochester” Anderson had Jack Benny’s number cold. Birdie, the maid on The Great Gildersleeve (played by Lillian Randolph) started out as a cliche, but in the hands of good writers – including John Wheedon, grandfather of Marvel writer-director Joss Wheedon – she became the de facto mother and wife of the household, and the only person who could tell the truth to Mis’t Gildersleeve. I’m not defending the fact that she was a servant – I’m saying that in the context of the times, in the late 40s and early 50s, an African-American character was consciously elevated to the role of the household’s indispensable pragmatist and emotionally centered adult, because the writers invested her cliche with humor, dignity, and humanity.
As for “sexism,” well, here’s a news flash: women in the old radio shows were unapologetically feminine, and occasionally confessed to silly desires for romance and marriage. But the medium also abounded with smart, canny sidekicks – detective shows, from Let George Do It to Mr. District Attorney to Micheal Shayne to Casey, Crime Photographer, were expected to have a clever, resourceful female assistants who helped solve the crime, and they were invariably more resourceful than the bullheaded Oirish cop who couldn’t tumble to what was really going on. In the anthology mystery shows like The Whistler, you were more likely to find razor-sharp women who cut their way through a man’s world to make their way. In the comedies, women were often the voice of reason – sardonic, knowing – in a way that makes the menfolk blustering fools.
There are literally hundreds of hours of mysteries and adventures and romances and sci-fi shows that still work today. And even if there’s an element that abraids modern sensibilities, isn’t it instructive to experience the tropes and conventions of a prior age, so one might know what the culture was like?
Or are we expected to assume that everything Old was Bad, and take their word for it, and nod as the Old and Bad is put in the vault, because the actual evidence would be so horrifying we couldn’t even? Are people today so fragile they cannot survive contact with examples of the old culture – but we’re supposed to believe them when they say they know exactly what the old culture was like?
I love this art form, and have been studying it for years. The idea that one can’t find enough scripts that aren’t racist and sexist is not only absolute nonsense, it’s a casual dismissal of vast swaths of American pop-culture history. It’s a libel, and its ignorance is matched only by its cowardice. You want to cancel the show, cancel the damn show. You want to quit your job at the Library of Congress, quit your job. Just don’t throw a lit match over your shoulder as you head for the exit.
Published in General
They’re going to eliminate the past so thoroughly that people are going to say:
“Legacy of racism? What are you talking about? Things have always been exactly the way they are now.”
Sounds like the decision makers are just a bunch of fargin’ iceholes.
Thing is with the left, the goalposts are always on wheels, so what wasn’t racism today will be tomorrow, depending on what activist can get their crusade to go viral using the threat of cancel culture. Add to this being an NPR station, where sympathy to demonizing the past based on some imagined form of victimology is written into the charter, and the Wisconsin Public Radio show was doomed.
It’s the Cultural Revolution all over again. Dang!
Now they’re coming after old radio scripts? This insanity will not stand!
All behind you, Lileks.
Where does it stop?
Wherever we make fun of them.
Trading outrage for outrage does not work. We must point and laugh.
And when someone in charge of some media outlet finally has the nerve to say ‘no’ and not be more worried about being the next person in the cancel culture barrel (i.e. — which channel would SiriusXM eliminate first right now to appease the angry woke Twitter mobs demanding racial justice for past sins — the Howard Stern channel or Old Time Radio?)
Y’know, James, what I’m hearing here is that you’ve got a line on a bunch of out of work voice actors stuck at home during covid with nothing but a stack of public domain radio scripts and free Teamspeak.
Opportunity knocks.
Communists and socialists are the same everywhere.
American teachers cannot mention the book Huckleberry Finn anymore, which is the best book for teenagers growing up in rough circumstances that has ever been written.
How about a Pirandello-type deal with six stock radio characters in search of a radio play?
So now they have no programming able to lure the unsuspecting into their dystopic statist vision. Ah, well.
They seem to believe that it’s 30 years ago, and there are no other ways to create a platform.
Enough of that filth flarin’ filth flarin’ filth. I’m gonna have coke and a smile…
It’s filth flarn, etc.
No, no. Flarn is that Spanish dessert…also a Netherlandic dessert as I am sure Rob Long can tell you. Oh! Wait! That’s flan! And it has to be “flarin'” because it replaces another participial adjective which I will not utter here…
If the Democrats are successful in removing all traces of the Old South and slavery, we can claim those institutions never exited and the Dems are making the whole thing up to fool people into voting for them. Welcome to the brave new world of “Confederacy denial” . . .
Ya beat me to it.
Look it up.
Sirius XM radio still has the entire Radio Classics channel broadcasting programs. They’d better continue, because so many channels on that service broadcast utter garbage. And the College of DuPage (Illinois) radio station still offers Those Were the Days on Saturday afternoons. They stream at wdcb.org
Because of your white privilege you’re unable to deconstruct the radio scripts and find the intrinsic racism and bigotry hidden in the subterranean depths of their depraved middle-class morality. Where in those radio shows do we find representations of LGBTQ+ thought? Where is the concern for the incredible burden of oppression America lays on the backs its university students? What of the countless shows that portray law officers in a positive light while they simultaneously cast society’s victims as murderers, rapists, robbers, and thugs?
Stan Freberg nailed political correctness with “Elderly Man River.”
My biggest problem with the Left is that they are so damn humorless. Same with Islam. Where I come from, our motto is from Pogo: Don’t take life too serious, it ain’t nohow permanent.
The left’s idea of ‘funny’ is Stephen Colbert monologues, where the humor must be laughed at with uproarious glee not because it’s actually funny, but because it serves The Cause. Any other types of humor are to be silenced using the victimology card, as a show of power, and anyone who laughs at non-approved humor gets treated like the first person in the Politburo who stopped clapping after a Stalin speech….
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Once these remnants of the past are locked away because of the thoughtcrimes contained therein, who will dare to take them out again?
I assume you’ve heard that the Fawlty Towers episode The Germans was pulled for similar complaints? I rank it as the funniest episode of the entire show, but modern eyes and ears must be spared offense, apparently. John Cleese is incensed.
Every time someone brings up Amos’n’Andy I always ask, “Which one?” There were no less than 5 versions over its 30+ year run: a series of Columbia records in its infancy (known then as Sam and Henry), a “dramedy” serial, a sitcom, a television version, and a nightly disk jockey program.
There are very few surviving copies from its days as a stripped serial. Because of The Armed Forces Radio Service there is a pretty complete run of the sitcom days and these are way more objectionable than the serial which may have been the only program that portrayed blacks as professionals – entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, judges – you name it.
The strangest portrayal of that era may have been Beulah. If you’re unfamiliar with the character, you might know “her” catch phrase, “Love that man!” as it’s used in a lot of Looney Tunes shorts from the war years. I put “her” in quotation marks because the actor was a diminutive white man by the name of Marlon Hurt.
Hurt would spend the entire broadcast prior to his first line with his back to the audience. When Fibber McGee called out for the maid Hurt would spin around and, in a large voice that shocked the audience would ask, “Sum-body bawlin’ fo’ Beulah?!” The reaction never disappointed. The character was so popular that it was spun off on to its own show. You might call it Karma, but after one season Hurt dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 40. After that the role was briefly filled by another man but then by a succession of black actresses including Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers (Holiday Inn), Lillian Randolph and Ethel Waters. It transferred to television and lasted until 1953.
“Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.”
“It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God”