Wed 16 Jun 2010
Adapted from an email from David Vineyard:
Just a heads up for hardboiled fans. BBC7 is currently reading Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town and beginning Sunday will air a full length (90 minute) dramatization of The Big Sleep (Ed Bishop of UFO as Marlowe).
A dramatic series of Father Brown with Andrew Jack is winding down and there are dramatizations of Poirot and Lord Peter (Ian Carmichael) on going. There is also a scheduled dramatization of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday coming up.
They recently completed two Dick Francis thrillers and a reading of Edmund Crispin’s Frequent Hearses. They are also concluding The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and about to start Casebook.
You can still catch the Hammett reading from the beginning for the next three days.
Editorial Comment: I used “Old Time Radio” as the category to put this post in, rather than create a new one, even though it’s not really correct. After checking out everything that’s available to listen on the BBC7 site, all I can do is wish that days were ten times longer, or if not that, perhaps I needn’t get seven or eight hours of sleep every night?
June 16th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
“Nightmare Town” is one of the masterpieces of pulp fiction.
Have no idea what it would sound like read out loud.
June 16th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
I listened for a few minutes, but like any book on tape, I just can’t enjoy one that’s read out loud. I have to concentrate too much, and it’s too difficult to go back and relisten to a point I missed.
Dramatizations, though, are another matter. They’re designed to put pictures into the listeners’ minds, if done well, and that my mind can handle, having grown up, I think, lying on the floor next to the radio.
When I wasn’t reading, that is.
June 16th, 2010 at 7:21 pm
I’ve found books on tape work best on long car trips (alone of course). I used to date a girl who lived 500 miles away. I could pretty much polish off WAR AND PEACE in that time, and driving across the wilds of West Texas books on tape are a God send — there is only so much country music and those 50,000 watt Mexican ‘Mariachi’ stations a guy can stand, and even they fade out like cell phone service in the badlands every time a mesa blocks the signal or you drop down through a cut that used to be a favorite Comanche ambush.
When every thing is three hundred plus miles away in all four directions you start to appreciate books on tape.
At home I prefer dramatizations, though there are exceptions — Stacy Keach reading Spillane, Darren McGavin or Kevin Conway reading Travis McGee, Ian Ogilvy reading Ian Fleming, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. reading THE PRISONER OF ZENDA, Elliot Gould reading Chandler (not that good in the movie, but great on tape), David Niven reading his books (the last one may be Rich Little though), and John Le Carre reading himself (he actually reads better this way).
BBC7 recently had Michael Palin reading Capt. W.E. Johns BIGGLES (BIGGLES GOES NORTH), which was a treat though.
But in general dramatizations are superior if you are at home. As Steve says you don’t have to pay as close attention and it has some of the cachet of listening to old radio.
Despite being of the TV generation I got turned onto radio when I was five and had the measles. My grandfather showed me The Lone Ranger and Green Hornet, Gunsmoke, and the Shadow, and for those days without the boob tube I lay in the darkened room and was swept away. I was lucky later to find Jim Harmon and he hooked me on I LOVE A MYSTERY, SUSPENSE, and several others — someday I may even get all my cassettes converted to CD — if I ever get all my 8 Tracks converted to cassette, and then there are those darn LP’s (speaking of which I really have to dub that record of Leonard Nimoy reading Henry Kuttner’s “Mimsey Were the Borogroves” to a cassette) …
Luckily I missed reel to reel tape by about five years.