As Christmas approaches, we attain for our bookshelves and pull down Charles Dickens’ beloved story of hardship, revelation, and a miser’s redemption within the vacation season. I converse, in fact, of The Cricket on the Fireside, revealed in 1845 because the third of what can be Dickens’ 5 Christmas books. (The primary, of which you will have heard, was A Christmas Carol.) From the very 12 months of its publication, The Cricket on the Fireside discovered nice success as a stage manufacturing, and it continued to be tailored even within the age of radio. The story was a century outdated by the point it aired on NBC, within the broadcast that opens the five-and-a-half-hour compilation of Christmas old-time radio above.
That video is only one of three uploaded up to now few weeks by the Youtube channel An Night of Previous-Time Radio. It collects quite a lot of Christmas-themed specials and broadcasts from exhibits like Lux Radio Theatre, The Coronet Little Present, and CBS Ceiling Limitless (an aviation-promoting wartime effort created by Orson Welles).
The second quantity options greater than six hours of vacation episodes from the hit sequence of the Golden Age of Radio, together with sitcoms like Our Miss Brooks, The Lifetime of Riley, Fibber McGee and Molly, and its spinoff The Nice Gildersleeve. Their characters, very similar to their listeners, wrestle to do their procuring and arrange their events — and amid all of it, in fact, discover their approach to the true which means of Christmas.
The most recent video in An Night of Previous Time Radio’s “Yuletide OTR” sequence consists of radio diversifications of It’s a Fantastic Life, which now defines the style of the Christmas film, adopted by one in every of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Scheduled for launch this Christmas day, the fourth installment guarantees but extra seasonally acceptable tales — with the requisite gags, problems, and remaining swells of excellent cheer — from such mid-century home comedies as The Aldrich Household, Lum and Abner, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. However as you’ll hear, neither may thriller, thriller, and western exhibits like The Man Known as X, The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, and The Six Shooter resist telling a Christmas story — nor can we, all these many years later, resist listening to one.
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embrace the Substack publication Books on Cities, the guide The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
