Radio drama
Radio drama is a dramatised, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story: "It is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension." Radio drama includes plays specifically written for radio, docudrama, dramatised works of fiction, as well as plays originally written for the theatre, including musical theatre, and opera.
The Roman playwright Seneca has claim as a forerunner of radio drama because "his plays were performed by readers as sound plays, not by actors as stage plays... In this respect Seneca had no significant successors until 20th-century technology made possible the widespread dissemination of sound plays."
1880–1930: early years
English-language radio drama seems to have started in the United States. A Rural Line on Education, a brief sketch specifically written for radio, aired on Pittsburgh's KDKA in 1921, according to historian Bill Jaker. Newspaper accounts of the era report on a number of other drama experiments by America's commercial radio stations: KYW broadcast a season of complete operas from Chicago starting in November 1921. In February 1922, entire Broadway musical comedies with the original casts aired from WJZ's Newark studios. Actors Grace George and Herbert Hayes performed an entire play from a San Francisco station in the summer of 1922. An important turning point in radio drama came when Schenectady, New York's WGY, after a successful tryout on 3 August 1922, began weekly studio broadcasts of full-length stage plays in September 1922, using music, sound effects and a regular troupe of actors, The WGY Players. Aware of this series, the director of Cincinnati's WLW began regularly broadcasting one-acts (as well as excerpts from longer works) in November. The success of these projects led to imitators at other stations. By early 1923, original dramatic pieces written specially for radio were airing on stations in Cincinnati (When Love Wakens by WLW's Fred Smith), Philadelphia (The Secret Wave by Clyde A. Criswell) and Los Angeles (At Home over KHJ). That same year, WLW (in May) and WGY (in September) sponsored scripting contests, inviting listeners to create original plays to be performed by those stations' dramatic troupes.
1930–1960s: widespread popularity
Perhaps America's most famous radio drama broadcast is Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds (a 1938 version of H. G. Wells' novel), which inspired stories of a mass panic that, though greatly exaggerated, signaled the power of the form. By the late 1930s, radio drama was widely popular in the United States (and also in other parts of the world). There were dozens of programs in many different genres, from mysteries and thrillers, to soap operas and comedies. Among American playwrights, screenwriters and novelists who got their start in radio drama are Rod Serling and Irwin Shaw. In Britain, however, during the 1930s BBC programming, tended to be more high brow, including the works of Shakespeare, Classical Greek drama, as well as the works of major modern playwrights, such as Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, and so forth. Novels and short stories were also frequently dramatised. In addition the plays of contemporary writers and original plays were produced, with, for example, a broadcast of T. S. Eliot's famous verse play Murder in the Cathedral in 1936. By 1930, the BBC was producing "twice as many plays as London's West End" and were producing over 400 plays a year by the mid-1940s.
1960–2000: decline in the United States
After the advent of television, radio drama never recovered its popularity in the United States. Most remaining CBS and NBC radio dramas were cancelled in 1960. The last network radio dramas to originate during American radio's "Golden Age", Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, ended on 30 September 1962. There have been some efforts at radio drama since then. In the 1960s, Dick Orkin created the popular syndicated comic adventure series Chicken Man. ABC Radio aired a daily dramatic anthology program, Theater Five, in 1964–65. Inspired by The Goon Show, "the four or five crazy guys" of the Firesign Theatre built a large following with their satirical plays on recordings exploring the dramatic possibilities inherent in stereo. A brief resurgence of production beginning in the early 1970s yielded Rod Serling's The Zero Hour for Mutual, National Public Radio's Earplay, and veteran Himan Brown's CBS Radio Mystery Theater and General Mills Radio Adventure Theater. These productions were later followed by the Sears/Mutual Radio Theater, The National Radio Theater of Chicago, NPR Playhouse, and a newly produced episode of the former 1950s series X Minus One. Works by a new generation of dramatists also emerged at this time, notably Yuri Rasovsky, Thomas Lopez of ZBS and the dramatic sketches heard on humourist Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion. Brian Daley's 1981 adaptation of the blockbuster space opera film Star Wars for NPR Playhouse was a notable success. Production costs on this serial were mitigated by the support of Lucasfilm, which sold the rights to NPR for a nominal $1 fee, and by the participation of the BBC in an international co-production deal. Star Wars was credited with generating a 40% rise in NPR's ratings and quadrupling the network's youth audience overnight. Radio adaptations of the sequels followed with The Empire Strikes Back in 1983 and Return of the Jedi in 1996.
2000–present: radio drama's "new media" revival
Radio drama remains popular in much of the world, though most material is now available through Internet download rather than heard over terrestrial or satellite radio. Stations producing radio drama often commission a large number of scripts. The relatively low cost of producing a radio play enables them to take chances with works by unknown writers. Radio can be a good training ground for beginning drama writers as the words written form a much greater part of the finished product; bad lines cannot be obscured with stagecraft. The BBC's sole surviving radio soap is The Archers on BBC Radio 4: it is, with over 20,935 episodes to date, the world's longest-running such programme. Other radio soaps ("ongoing serials") produced by the BBC but no longer on air include:
Radio dramas began in Japan in 1925, and enjoyed a great level of popularity after the hit of Tankou no Naka. This resulted in the NHK hiring famous writers to write radio drama scripts for 500 yen in 1930, equivalent to 1 million yen today. Due to voice acting in Japan having its own distinct culture, audio dramas continue to be popular in Japan, where they are now primarily released on disc as "drama CDs" (ドラマCD). They are also referred to in Japanese as "voice dramas" (ボイスドラマ). Many such audio dramas are based on anime, manga, novels and video games, but there are also many that are completely original. Though most drama CDs are commercial products made by corporate entities, there has been a growing number of doujin audio dramas in recent years due to it being easier for hobbyists to obtain the equipment required to make recordings, and the Internet making distribution easier.[citation needed]
Australia
In Australia, as in most other developed countries, from the early years of the medium almost every radio network and station featured drama, serials, and soap operas as staples of their programming; during the so-called "Golden Years" of radio these were hugely popular. Many Australian serials and "soapies" were copies of American originals (e.g., the popular soap Portia Faces Life or the adventure series Superman, which featured future Australian TV star Leonard Teale in the title role), although these were typically locally produced and performed live to air, since the technology of the time did not permit high-quality pre-recording or duplication of programmes for import or export.
Cyprus
Since around the early sixties the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation (RIK) features radio plays in the Cypriot Greek dialect. They are called Cypriot (radio drama) sketches and they are mainly about Cyprus's rural life, traditions and customs, its history and its culture, and it continues until today. Also very popular in Cyprus during the sixties, seventies and early eighties Police drama was very popular. The series "Police Adventures" became associated with the name of Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation (CyBC) radio producer Mikis Nikitas, who was responsible for its production for many years. The *"Police Adventures"* series also attracted the interest of foreign radio stations, as a number of its episodes were sold to Bavarian Radio in 1970, according to information cited in an annual CyBC report.
Finland
In Finland radio dramas (in Finnish kuunnelma) by the Finnish national broadcasting company Yleisradio have been popular since 1930s, and have always used well-known theatre or movie actors. The dramas include books converted to audio dramas, versions of popular theatre productions, pulp novels adapted for radio, or drama explicitly written as radio dramas. One of the most well known series was Suomisen perhe (the "Family Suominen") about a middle-class family, it became so popular that later the originally written for radio drama was converted into a movie series. Popular radio drama from other countries, like the BBC radio drama The Men from the Ministry was translated as Knalli ja sateenvarjo ("Bowler hat and umbrella") and became very popular. J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit was converted to multi-part radio drama.
Germany
The first German radio drama was produced in 1923. Because of the external circumstances in postwar Germany in which most of the theatres were destroyed, radio drama boomed. Between 1945 and 1960 there were more than 500 radio plays every year. The German word for radio drama or audio play is Hörspiel. Today Germany is a major market for radio plays worldwide. In particular, audio plays on CD are very popular. A popular audio play serial of Germany and of the world is Die drei ??? [de] (Three Investigators). Berlin's Prix Europa includes a Radio Fiction category.[citation needed]
India
Vividh Bharati, a service of All India Radio, has a long running Hindi radio-drama program: Hawa Mahal. The Satyanweshi audio drama series created by actor Aneesh See Yay adapted twenty two Byomkesh Bakshi novels and eight original audio dramas in the Malayalam language.
Republic of Ireland
RTÉ Radio Drama is one of the oldest audio theatre departments in the radio world.
