But there have been many such programs — everything from “man on the street” shows and quiz programs to good old Mr. Anthony, where people with problems could come to seek help. There was Candid Microphone, and most of you will remember Bride and Groom, where real couples actually got married on the air. Nor should I omit from this list the famous Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club, which when it recently went off the air at Don’s retirement was the longest continuous program in the history of broadcasting, not just in America but in the entire world! There was Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, a hit on radio long before it ever went on television, and there was and still is Art Linkletter’s House Party, the very name of which conveys my theme. Further, the dominance of daytime TV’s popular game shows must seek its origins in radio programs like Art’s. Many of these programs have been responsible for some of the biggest billings in the industry.
I am not here tonight to stir up nostalgic memories or to enunciate glorious names from the putative Golden Age of Radio, however. Suffice it to say that industry executives and advertisers have always been aware of the rich possibilities of participation programming. The development of magnetic tape — and before that of wire — led naturally to news interviews, press conferences and the like, the whole “voices in the news” syndrome being still another instance of audience participation. With McLuhan and his celebrated “global village” concept we get only the articulation of a principle which the industry has understood instinctively — that the listener needs to become a communicant. The elaborate production radio of the thirties and forties — your “Big Broadcasts,” et cetera — were never the natural function of radio, but arose merely as substitute, pro tern arrangements, groping and expensive, a settling for less by shoveling on more. And isn’t it a fact that in the so-called Golden Age of Radio your biggest shows—Amos ’n’ ‘Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, Henry Aldrich, Jack Benny, and every single soap opera that was ever on the radio — by attempting to portray the ordinary lives of ordinary people with whom listeners could identify, was making an effort to get around the audience-participation principle? Is it too far-fetched to suggest that Allen’s Alley was the comic prototype of today’s telephone talk program?
I think we ought not to proceed — in a deeper sense this is not a digression — without first acknowledging that we in radio owe much to a great engineer with a great idea. Probably, shamefully, most of us do not even know his name — I know I didn’t — despite the fact that many of us here tonight owe our professional lives to him. I refer, of course, to Brandon Sline, the developer of the tape delay. When I knew I was to address you I cast about in my mind for a suitable topic. When I looked around me at the not inconsiderable achievements of radio in our own age, I naturally came in the course of my deliberations to consider the tape delay, and determined to have on the dais with me the man chiefly responsible for it. It wasn’t easy tracking him down; indeed, it took considerable research just to discover his name. Thus our debts go often unpaid because we are simply unaware of them. Working in his own spare time in his own home on a means of providing the broadcaster with what he thought of as a margin for error, this man, unaffiliated with any network, a staff engineer — I had almost said an ordinary staff engineer — at WSNO, Rutledge, Vermont, invented a simple device which has become a contribution more sweeping and more telling than any since Marconi’s. Yes, since Marconi’s. For with just this device and the ordinary house telephone, he has made every home in America its own potential broadcasting station, and every American his own potential star. I’m going to ask him to stand. Brandon? That’s right. That’s right. Applaud him you well may. Brandon Sline, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Brandon. You know, ladies and gentlemen, as we were all applauding Brandon it occurred to me that he, the tinkerer engineer, though a professional, working on his equipment in his own workshop as he did, encompasses the best principles of amateurism, and that it is fitting indeed that his device gives voice to amateurs.
It isn’t for me so much as for psychologists to explain the public’s urge to communicate directly. Be that as it may, the instinct seems to be the deepest one in entertainment; I don’t think I need point out to you that “ham” radio existed before commercial radio. At the same time that this urge is basic, however, it is also dangerous. Just as an agency like the FCC must regulate and oversee our industry, so must there be machinery to regulate and oversee the public when it is given its voice. It would be instructive, but depressing, I’m afraid, to play for you some of the excisions that have been recorded and preserved from even a single program. You would think we lived in Pandora’s box. A friend of mine who works one of these shows has said that if he had a dollar for each time he has had to black out the word “kike” or “nigger” or some even less fragrant obscenity, he wouldn’t have to work again for the rest of his life. He claims to have heard more filth than any member of the vice squad in the wickedest streets of New York City. It seems a pity that a minority should have it in its power to distress and frustrate the good listener for even the few seconds of silence that follows an unacceptable remark. Have we developed solid-state and instant-on only to have our radios go dead on us in the middle of what is often the most interesting part of a conversation? Aren’t we likely to re- create the same psychological blocks we have been at such great pains to propitiate?
It is for this reason that we are currently working on a tape delay that does all that present tape delays do but then accelerates the tape so that the next decent conversation may be heard immediately — creating, in effect, if not in fact, an apparently seamless conversation. We’re close to a breakthrough on this one. And when it occurs we will truly have pulled time’s teeth at last. Indeed, as the entire industry now gears itself to the telephone talk show, the fabulous “two-way radio” concept seems a fullfilment of what radio has always promised — a means of open discourse, of people-to-people priorities. Of course there is always room for improvement. One area that must be explored is the area of sound itself. If two-way radio is to take its rightful place on the American air something must be done to soften the sibilant “tunnel effect” of telephone sound and bring it closer to studio standards. We’re working on that too. In the meanwhile, so much has already been accomplished that I think we may say with as much accuracy as pride that only now is the real Golden Age of Radio upon us. …
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The Golden Age is upon me. Heavy. I think it really is Pandora’s box. “Dick Gibson, WBOX, and all I know is what you tell me.” (I live in a box.)