HIS PARODY IS A REAL ENIGMA. It was originally sent to me a several years ago from a friend who claimed he had heard it on a local radio station in Ohio, many years before. It occasionally winds up in CD-ROM collections of OTR shows, but with little or no attribution except its name, “Sherlock Holmes, 1965″, and the company that apparently produced it, Midnight Productions.

It’s difficult to deduce much about its origins. As as educated guess, I’d certainly say it was an American production –the jarring accents certainly give that away– and it was produced by an amateur-grade production company with decent studio access. The sound is clear, and while the show does have a few funny lines and situations, it’s far from top quality writing or acting. No web searches, ranging from Google to eBay to copyright databases, I’ve done have led me to any further information about the recording, nor the production company, which leads me to believe it is probably defunct. As for dating this, it does appear to be a recording from the sixties or seventies, but most shows produced from the late sixties to the early eighties do have a certain “sound” that is indicative of the equipment and effects common across that time period. Owing to the obvious, most people just assume the production date of this is 1965.

At any rate, this is a rare play that does have an interesting premise (pre- Austin Powers), wherein the very aged Holmes and Watson go searching for a new case in the mid-sixties. The jokes are no funnier nor worse than most other parodies, and so should fit nicely into the library of most Sherlockians who collect such things.

Download: Sherlock Holmes, 1965, by Midnight Productions

If you do know anything more about his recording, I’d love to hear from you.

NE OF THE GREATEST “FEUDS” OF OLD TIME RADIO was that between Jack Benny and Fred Allen, resulting in constant comedic jabs at each other on their respective shows for nearly a decade. Fans of the shows were often completely convinced that the two harboured deep resentment for each other, but the truth was far less interesting: they were the best of friends, and played up on the feud to get laughs, and –when one was guesting on the other’s show– would even pass along the best gags of the night to the “rival.”

Allen himself was quite a sharp wit, and was frequently embattled by the censors because of his political and social commentary, often ad-libbed to cover flubs in the program. (Most shows had to be carefully scripted before being approved by the overly nit-picky network censors.) Although his shows don’t today carry the timelessness of Benny’s, it’s usually because his references to American and world events were more frequent, and barely covered by a thin veneer of satire, unfortunately lost on most modern audiences.

Since we profiled a show of Benny as Sherlock, it seems only fitting that we offer his rival as yet another incarnation of the sleuth, this one named Fetlock Bones. This episode of the Texaco Star Theater certainly falls under the zany madcap category. (Those wanting to skip ahead to the parody can find it around the 18 minute mark, but will miss part of the set-up.)

Download: Texaco Star Theater - Fetlock Bones with Fred Allen, originally aired April 9th, 1944 (6.4 MB)

NE OF THE MOST BELOVED and long-lived of Old Time Radio performers was the incomparable Jack Benny. Among the thousands of other, often dismally-written, shows polluting the airwaves, audiences always knew that they could tune into Benny and lose themselves in the comedian’s sharp wit, his knack with timing, his many foibles (especially his propensity for clinging to his pennies), the memorable plots, and the more outré gags that slipped under the radar of the censors and his sponsors. (After all, words on paper often take on a whole new meaning when performed.)

Benny was also known for his trenchant parodies, often far more entertaining than the pieces he spoofed, and so, when the much-lauded Rathbone/Bruce film The Hound of the Baskervilles was filling the theatres in 1939, an obvious target was the master detective himself.

While I wouldn’t consider this a rare recording among OTR fans, it’s one that several Sherlockians of my Internet acquaintance haven’t yet heard. And, as always, Benny delivers where lesser comedic characters like Miss Sherlock fall flat on their deerstalkers.

Download: Jack Benny - The Hound of the Baskervilles, originally aired June 11, 1939 (6.6 MB)

HESE PAST FEW WEEKS, I’ve been wrestling with the age-old question, “How does one fit 20 boxes of books, three bookshelves, an audio/video suite, a large air exchanger, a men’s mountain bike, and a medieval arsenal into an office measuring 8 ft by 8 ft?” The teeter piles threatening to engulf me (and possibly impale me) any moment require my next posts to possess a certain urgency….

This next week, I’m doing something a little different on this blog. While my dead-tree Sherlockian library pales by most (just two of the aforementioned bookshelves), I do have quite a hefty audio library, mostly digital nowadays. I have to re-catalogue my collection fairly soon, but my recordings –including radio plays, audio books, interviews, and the like– number well over a thousand. For the next few days, I’m going to provide downloads of some of the more rare and unusual files, along with short introductions and source notes, whenever possible.

First, a note about copyrights. Most collectors of Old Time Radio shows (known simply as OTR) follow a general rule of thumb: shows publicly aired before 1978 are generally considered to be in the public domain, especially in the United States, as there was no copyright protection issued for such broadcasts under the then-extant copyright laws of 1909. The Berne Convention, which took effect January 1, 1978, officially accorded these rights to radio broadcasts, and retroactively accorded certain limited rights to recordings made within the five years previous, but only if official application was made, which was very rare. (It was not possible to make works in the public domain copyrighted ex-post-facto.) Now, I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television, so I’m walking this well-worn path, which is allegedly in accord with the staff of the U.S. Library of Congress. (For more information about OTR copyrights, please see the information on the RadioLovers.com copyright page.) Many other recordings (that weren’t publicly broadcast) have fallen into the public domain because there was never an application for copyright, the copyright has expired, or the copyright was never renewed. If you or your organisation have any copyright claim to the materials I present here, please contact me and I’ll rectify the situation and give due notice.

Whew.

Today, we have a true rarity, and what’s more, a blazing example of terrible OTR. It took me a few years to find the two episodes I know to exist, and once I finally found them, I chalked the effort up to completionist obsession. Wrote the radio expert Jack French, in an essay on Lady Crimefighters:

During World War II no more women sleuths arrived on the scene but 1946 was a banner year when three new ones debuted on network radio. One was as much comedienne as crime solver, Meet Miss Sherlock. This was a CBS summer sustainer that recounted the adventures of Jane Sherlock, a scatterbrained amateur detective, and her boyfriend, Peter Blossom, a civil attorney who occasionally fainted.

There were two separate versions of this show; the first ran from July 3, 1946 to September 26, 1946 while the second one ran from Sept 28, 1947 to Oct 26, 1947. Both series were produced and directed by David Vaile, with scripts by E. Jack Neuman and Don Thompson. The announcer was Murray Wagner and the live orchestra was headed by Milton Charles. Sondra Gair had the title lead in the 1946 version, Captain Dingle of the NYPD was a youthful Bill Conrad and Joe Petruzzi played Peter Blossom.

When the series resumed in the fall of 1947, Betty Moran did the first epiosde but her voice was not “dithery” enough so Monty Margetts was brought in and she played the lead until it went off the air two months later. Barney Phillips was the voice of Captain Dingle. This series was more comedy than adventure, although crimes were eventually solved. Only two episodes have survived; both feature Gair in the 1946 version.

The scripts are insipid, the acting mundane, the jokes lousy, and the political incorrectness worthy of a good burning in effigy. Still, I did promise you some unusual recordings. I promise that tomorrow’s entry will be less likely to affront your sensibilities. (It shouldn’t be that difficult.)

Download: Meet Miss Sherlock - Case of the Deadman’s Chest (MP3, 6.9 MB), originally aired July 7th, 1946

can’t believe I almost missed this: the BBC 7 Listen Again archive sports another week’s worth of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a set of non-canonical adventures dramatised by Bert Coules and starring Clive Merrison and Andrew Sachs. Jump into each weekday and look down the list to the 13:00 slot.

• Monday: The Abergavenny Murder
• Tuesday: The Shameful Betrayal of Miss Emily Smith
• Wednesday: The Tragedy of Hanbury Street
• Thursday: The Determined Client
• Friday: The Striking Success of Miss Franny Blossom

Better hurry: come Tuesday, the archived programs will start to be replaced by the new week. (Note: RealPlayer needed to listen.)

NE has to feel a healthy respect for writers of the Sherlock Holmes radio plays. On one hand, if you adapt a story from the Canon, you have plenty of Holmes fans who not only know the story, but have certain expectations of plot, charactisation, and so forth. With a mere twenty-odd minutes, this can be difficult enough. On the other hand, if you choose to create your own plot from scratch, the pressure is on to create a story that’s comparable to those of the Canon (which, granted, is not so great if one chooses The Mazarin Stone as a reference).

This is to say nothing of certain limitations of an audio-only medium, including what I can only refer to as the “Dear Lord, Holmes! He’s got a gun!” challenge: how does one create a visual experience with only dialogue and sound effects? Thankfully, the benefits help offset the difficulties. After all, one doesn’t need a huge budget to recreate, say, the Grimpen Mire and the ancient relics of civilisation upon the moors, but rather a good imagination and a small trunk of sound props.

Today’s Old Time Radio show is a good example of how Boucher and Green took one of the “unpublished” cases of Holmes and turned it into an interesting episode with the help of some clever writing and effects. It’s not perfect, by any means, but if you pay careful attention to how the characters, setting and plot are contructed, you can learn a lot about how things were done in the golden age of radio. There are also a few winks to Sherlockians and fans of detective literature, including Dr. Thorndyke.

Download: The Notorious Canary Trainer, episode 176 from Mutual’s The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, original aired 1945/04/23, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. (See the Jerry Haendiges Vintage Radio Log of the series.)

VER at The Glowing Dial, an Old Time Radio fan site offering free downloads, you can download and listen to a special tribute to the Master on radio. With nearly three and a half hours of Holmes culled from Mutual, ABC and the Beeb, as well as a short recording of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this makes a dandy little introduction to the various series that were so popular from the 1940’s to the 1960’s. Note that the sound quality of such old recordings can be quite variable, so be prepared for some static, pops and scratches.

The Glowing Dial tips its magnifying glass to the world’s premier detective, Sherlock Holmes in EPISODE NET 18 (first run between August 22, 2004 and September 11, 2004) of The Glowing Dial, in which we present five different actor pairings of Holmes and Watson plus a special commentary by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “William Fox has the honor to present the world famous author and scientist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” (soundtrack from a short film produced around 1930 or 31 in which Conan Doyle talks about his literary creation, Sherlock Holmes as well as his interest in spiritualism).

[Hear Episode 18]

The Holmes episodes in question are:

• The Case of the Limping Ghost, a 1945 Mutual production with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce
• The Adventure of the Haunted Bagpipes, a 1947 ABC production with Tom Conway (Rathbone’s immediate radio successor) and Nigel Bruce
• The Case of the Cradle That Rocked Itself, a 1947 Mutual production with John Stanley and Alfred Shirley
• The Case of the Six Napoleons, a 1954 BBC production with Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson
• The Adventure of Silver Blaze, a 1962 BBC production with Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley

Be prepared to wait an hour or so for the download, as it’s 47 Mb and server can be a little slow. (I topped out at 10K/s.) For those without high-speed or any patience, you can also listen to it via RealMedia streaming. See the bottom of the page.

For those Rathbone fans among us, you can also catch him reading four Poe stories in the Glowing Dial’s Tribute to Edgar Allan Poe.

ERIODICALLY, BBC 7 Radio will air a (semi-)new Sherlock Holmes adventure which you can listen to online in their “Listen Again” section, essentially a seven-day archive. So, while you can, visit the BBC 7 - Listen again page to hear Clive Merrison as Sherlock Holmes and Michael Williams as Dr. Waton in Bert Coules’ adaption of the last Holmes adventure:

Sherlock Holmes: His Last Bow
His Last Bow: 1914. The services of a certain bee-keeper are called upon to help his country in her darkest hour.

Link (almost half-way down the page, and in offered in RealAudio format). These adaptions are top-notch and generally quite faithful to the original stories by Conan Doyle, or as much as possible given the medium and time constraints.

(Thanks to Pauline in the WelcomeHolmes mailing list for the heads-up.)

ne of the many hobbies I’ve pursued over the years is collecting what are known as old time radio shows, or simply “OTR”. These are episodes of the many famous (and not-so-famous) shows that had their heyday from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, their death knell being sounded by the arrival of television into homes. Known affectionately as “the theatre of the mind,” these shows ranged from spine chillers to soap operas, from science fiction to quiz shows, from action/adventure to variety shows. And then, of course, were the mystery and detective shows, one of the most celebrated of which was Sherlock Holmes.

The series most firmly embedded in the North American psyche is the one starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, reprising their roles from the popular movie series. The scripts, mainly by Edith Meiser, Dennis Green, Bruce Taylor and Anthony Boucher, tended to be fairly sharp, well-written and somewhat faithful to the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. And when the producers ran out of stories taken from the Canon, they began to create their own, including many of the “unpublished tales” alluded to by Watson, such as those of Colonel Warburton’s madness, the notorious canary trainer Wilson, and the Tankerville Club scandal. Further refreshing is the fact that Nigel Bruce’s Watson is not quite the bumbling fool comic relief that he played in the movies (a.k.a, boobus Britannicus filmicus), although it is a little jarring to find him living in California and spinning a yarn to a Petri Wine spokesperson each week.

Each week we’ll be offering another episode from the archives, covering the many (out-of-copyright) series from both the U.S. and the U.K., along with a little bit of background on each one. For now, though, I can’t think of a better way to begin than with Rathbone and Bruce’s version of the first Sherlock Holmes short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia”, originally aired on December 10, 1945. Enjoy!

Listen to:
- New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 1945-12-10 - A Scandal in Bohemia (6.7 Mb).

For those interested, an excellent 3-CD collection of several hundred Sherlock Holmes radio shows in MP3 format can be found at OTR Cat for a mere $15. It’s possible to find many of these shows by trolling the net and watching forums and newsgroups, but with the time and bandwidth you’d save, this deal is a hard one to pass up.