The Radioplay Hour Streamed
The Fat Man in Murder is the Medium
30 March – 18 April
Listen or watch online here on The Drama Merchant website
Use your device to tune in to entertainment from days past
The Radioplay Hour’s second show of the year is “The Fat Man in Murder is the Medium”. In this episode, The Fat Man investigates a shady rug dealer & his psychic wife.
A Radio play, or Radio drama, is a dramatised, purely acoustic performance with no visual component. The Radio play depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story. The Radio play achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its initial development in the 1920s. By the 1940s, it was a leading international popular entertainment. With the advent of television in the 1950s, however, the radio play began losing its audience, but in most countries it remains popular.
Radio play serials were once the backbone of Australian radio broadcasting. Serials like Blue Hills, Dad & Dave, Biggles, The Caltex Theatre, Reach for the Sky and Tarzan amongst many other shows that the nation stopped for. In the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s and even ‘50s, sitting around the radio – or wireless as some called it – to take in a popular series, children’s drama, crime show or horror story as well as comedy and variety programs was a family ritual.
The Drama Merchant presents this experience in The Radioplay Hour – “radio actors” portray the characters in a “live” radio broadcast. Standing in front of a microphone and using voice, facial expressions, costumes, props and a little improv, with scripts in front of them, for reference, the team perform an old fashion radioplay, or audio story live… right before your eyes.
Please note this episode was staged/filmed before quarantine measures ramped up, and border closures between QLD & NSW started to take place. So unfortunately there are no live musical numbers or visual sound effects (but you will still hear them made live). It was a race against time to put this together, whilst still experimenting with this medium, in the safest way possible.
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