The Black Museum:
The Champagne Glass (09/30/’51).
The Haunting Hour:
A Corpse There Was (Unknown).
X-Minus One:
The Lifeboat Mutiny (09//11/56).
Darkness :
Trust Me Darling, I Love You (I979).
Right Click here to download
Segment One:
The Black Museum – The Champagne Glass (September 30, 1951).
The Black Museum was a 1951 radio crime drama produced for the BBC by Harry Alan Towers. Each story was based on a real-life case from the files of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum.
Ira Marion wrote the scripts. Music was composed and conducted by Sidney Torch.
Orson Wells was the host and narrator for mysteries based on Scotland Yard’s collection of murder weapons, usually ordinary objects associated with historical cases.
The show’s opening:
“The Black Museum, a repository of death. Here in a grim, stone structure on the Thames which houses Scotland Yard is a warehouse of homicide, a very strange room where everyday objects… a woman’s shoe, a tiny white box, a quilted robe… all are touched by murder.”
In this episode Col. Harry Reid has a Bit of a problem, a sticky kind of situation. To start off with his wife, Elizabeth is not well. Then there is his other wife Annie. Yes, his other wife. A situation few in 1910 England would approve of.
Then there is his real estate business, which seems to be teetering on the edge of some sort of precipice. That’s if it exists at all.
There is his friend and real estate investor, John Davis, who has become rather a pest about money he invested with Col. Harry.
And then, sadly, people around him began to die.
Want’s a Colonel to do!
The Black Museum did always base its stories on true events. More or less. This story undergoes a number of mutations along the way. It is actually based on a real murder and an attempted murder but committed by Herbert Rowse Armstrong solicitor and magistrates’ clerk, of Cusop Dingle, Herefordshire, England who has The distinction of being the only solicitor in Britain to have been hanged for murder. He practiced in Hay-on-Wye, on the border of England and Wales, from 1906 until his arrest on 31 December 1921 for the attempted murder of a professional rival by Arsenic poisoning. He was later also charged with the murder of his wife.
Segment Two:
The Haunting Hour – A Corpse There Was
(Air date unknown).
The Haunting Hour was made. in 1945 by local talent at the then Philadelphia NBC affiliate, KYW.
Fairly successful, the series went into syndication for the following thirty years over the Armed Forces Radio service. It is often featured in 1940s Radio retrospectives over various FM Radio stations.
And has found a new generation, as it is popular with podcasters.
It is, nonetheless, like so many other old-time radio programs, a show with a very shallow history. That is, there exists no credits for the show, or the folks who labored, both in front of and behind the microphones. They are now entirely unknown…taken up into the ether of Old-Time radio without a trace.
This is the story of three people, Steven, Martin and their housekeeper Kathy. When Martin dies suddenly just as he by coincidence completes his own gravestone. (Not as strange as it sounds, you see Martin made his living as a stone-cutter. He just believed in being prepared).
Soon he is followed by Steven and only Kathy is left.
Well, Kathy and a pile of questions about murder.
Segment Three:
X-Minus One – The Lifeboat Mutiny
(September 11 1956).
X Minus One is considered the finest science fiction drama ever produced for radio. It was not the first. That honor belongs to 2000+. It wasn’t the second, That would be Dimension X. In fact the first 15 episodes of it’s 1955 to 1958 run on NBC were new versions of Dimension X episodes. The remainder were all most entirely adaptations of recently published science fiction stories (Mostly from Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine) usually written by the leading writers of the time, including Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, J.T. McIntosh, Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon.
The Lifeboat Mutiny was first published in Galaxy’s April 1955 issue. It is one of Robert Sheckley’s “AAA Ace’s planetary decontamination Service” series of stories. Each of which revolves around two partners, who encounter unusual problems, that need to be solved in an entertaining manner.
In this one the guys buy a second-hand lifeboat to survey a water planet not knowing that the ship contains a very helpful artificial intelligence who was created for a five hundred year old war.
To be truthful, I find X-Minus One shows to be somewhat hit or miss, but this Robert Sheckley story completely works. It is one of several adaptations of Mr. Shackley’s works for Galaxy magazine in the early to mid-50s most of which seem to work very well on radio.
Segment Four:
Darkness - Trust Me Darling, I Love You
(I979).
There really are quite a number of old-time radio series that have survived only as recordings. Often found in the attics and basements of old radio stations years after their original run. Sometimes these shows have no surviving credits, sometimes no documentation. Just a collection of discs resembling old 78 rpm records or perhaps a few spools of wires or tapes. And many now exist as mp3 files in the various nooks and crannies of the Internet.
This is the situation for this show, despite the efforts of devoted old-time radio fans who spend a considerable amount of time organizing, documenting and collating these old shows.
If you know anything, anything at all about Darkness please drop a line .
Links For Robert Sheckley:
E-texts from the Gutenberg project:
From Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1953.
“Only a race as incredibly elastic as the Grom could have a single rule of war:”
From Science Fiction Stories #1 1953.
“It’s well established now that the way you put a question often determines not only the answer you’ll get, but the type of answer possible. So … a mechanical answerer, geared to produce the ultimate revelations in reference to anything you want to know, might have unsuspected limitations.”
A novel from 1960.
(Wikipedia page for Novel)
“Omega: prison planet
life expectancy: three years
maximum
most people are
luckier than that….”
Audio from LibriVox :
Right click title to download the file.
From Science Fiction Stories issue #1 1953.
Ask a Foolish Question
From Amazing Stories Oct. – Nov. 1953.
Beside Still Waters
From Galaxy Science Fiction December 1952.
