Sherlock Holmes is having a friendly argument with a visiting French detective over which country has the most ingenous criminals when the agony column leads the two Detectives and Dr. Watson into the English countryside to rescue a man in distress and finds himself asked to investigate who wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
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Nero Wolfe is retained by the leader of a religious cult to save the life of the woman he loves. The woman is killed and now Wolfe’s client and two other men are accusing each other.
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A young woman comes to Nick Charles to ask her help to kill a man and get away with it. Nick and Nora then get notice that the potential victim “is dead.”
Original Air Date: December 1, 1944
Quote of the show: “I do wish people would get bumped off before we go to sleep.”-Nora
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The pure amount of old time radio available to the general public online is mind-blowing. Several sites boast of upwards of 100,000 separate programs. With my podcasts, I bring listeners shows that I’ve discovered searching online. However, every episode we play is here as the result of a lot of other people’s efforts.
Radio Preserved:
Most radio programs were not thought by the producer to have some intrinsic value after their first airing with the exception of syndicated programs. However, many episodes were preserved. Some were saved on transcription discs and others from recorded reel-to-reel tapes.
The details of this process can be quite involved. It’ll suffice to say that a working knowledge of how to actually play these discs is extremely rare. Equipment can be expensive with spare parts hard to come by.
In addition, before these tapes and transcription discs can reach us, someone has to carefully digitalize them and then make them available on the Internet. So, free old time radio comes to us with a lot of expense and effort from many folks who end up remaining anonymous for the most part.
The notable exception to this is the Old Time Radio Researcher’s certified sets include credits for folks who work on compiling their sets. There are also a couple interesting weblogs and podcasts that give us a peak into the world of radio preservation.
Rand’s Esoteric OTR gives us a great look into the world of digitalizing old radio. a wide variety of programs. Occasionally, the blog will feature a previously uncirculated episode of Suspense, but often times features weird, wonderful, and forgotten programs. Rand serves as a sort of cultural archaeologist. With each episode, he posts a picture of the Transcription he digitalized and sometimes a story of how he found it.
Grandpa’s IPOD is a unique website. Lisa inherited her grandfather’s collection of 250 transcriptions and is in the process of digitalizing them with some assistance from her audio engineer/husband.
We can mulitply the efforts on these blogs by several thousand and we have an idea of what it takes to get the transcriptions digitalized. And without these efforts, as well as a lot of trading and sharing, so much radio would not be available for
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Sherlock Holmes declines to work to exonerate a talented singer for treason, as he believes she’s unquestionably guilty. After she’s been executed, it appears that she’s haunting Holmes.
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George arrives in a small California gold rush town where the librarian suspects the brother of the town’s patriarch of trying to poison him for a newly discovered treasure.
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Nora is all out night, and breaks a mirror, and asks another man to marry her. Nick suspects she’s been drugged. Things get even more serious when they find a corpse.
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By the time the 1990s rolled out, Bill Cosby was huge. He’d had many great efforts in television and other forms entertainment. He was supercool superspy Alexander Scott in the groundbreaking I Spy series. He was producer and host of the award-winning Fat Albert Series. However, his greatest success was the Cosby Show, which provided 1980s family friendly comedies that had gone missing for so many years (and have since disappeared again.)
Cosby in the 1990s brought two classic TV concepts back to the American screen.
The first was Groucho Marx’s classic, You Bet Your Life. Cosby was a huge fan of Marx and considered him one of the four best comedians of all time along with Charlie Chaplain, Buster Keaton, and W.C. Fields. Unlike the other three, Cosby actually got to know Marx a bit. More than anything else, he’d admired Marx for You Bet Your Life. Cosby had even met the old producers of You Bet Your Life to get a chance to do it and been turned down. In the 1990s, on the heels of the Cosby show and becoming a $90 million man, Cosby could pretty much get any project he wanted and so he got to follow in the footsteps of one his heroes in the 1992-93 version of You Bet Your Life.
The show may have been a little too early. A revival of You Bet Your Life could have gone well in the reality TV era, but alas made it only one season in syndication, and was not widely viewed or known. The only video clips available are from those folks sharing appearances by their relatives on the show. These two clips from the show are priceless comedy, although they go on a little long, it’s worth a viewing:
Cosby wasn’t done bringing classic concepts to a new audience. In the late 1990s, he revived another vintage TV concept. Art Linkletter did his House Party show for 24 years over CBS radio and television, and had been best remembered for its Kids Say the Darnedst Things segment.
Cosby once again revived a classic concept as he took his turn questioning kids and hearing the surprising answers they gave.
The big difference between You Bet Your Life and Kids Say the Darnedst Things is that Art Linkletter was still alive and in fact Linkletter worked with Cosby on the program. When I watched Kids Say the Darnedst Things for the first time, I was very curious as to who Linkletter was. I had no idea, growing up.
Cosby introduced Linkletter to a new generation. Most episodes of Kids Say the Darnedst Things featured some footage of some of Linkletter’s most hilarious moments. Linkletter, in his mid-80s at the time, appeared frequently on the show. Cosby always showed a warm regard for Linkletter and never illustrated it better than with a touching surprise tribute to the man on CBS:
Those who saw Linkletter and Marx in their prime feel that Cosby’s efforts were not as good. There’s certainly something to it as both Linkletter and Marx performances were definitive.
I don’t think the point of Cosby’s effort was displace either of these two legends. Rather, Cosby did the shows because he enjoyed and loved the originals, and his efforts helped to bring awareness of the originals back into the public mind. And there’s nothing better for a top entertainer to do than that.
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Scotland Yard has a suspect in the murder of a wealthy man, but no murder weapon, and the case begins to look think when another murder done in the same way takes place while the alleged murder is in jail.
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George investigates the case of a boy who told his mother that he tended the wounds of an injured man, only to claim he later made the whole thing up. The boy has had a long series of unfortunate “accidents” that his mother alarmed.
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