Radio, by contrast, as Scofield observed, leaves one free to feel the pleasant sense of being at one’s ease in one’s own home. “You’re really a prisoner when watching TV,” he recently explained in a genial telephone interview. To be “entertained through my ears and otherwise be free.” That is how noted British actor Paul Scofield has described the experience of listening to radio drama. Radio gives voice to words and energy to sound and then, because no scene is drawn, leaves the mind unfettered to envision not the things it must, but rather those it will. For what radio exploits, in full, is not the passive power of the eye to behold, but the versatile genius of the mind to create. But in radio, the craft is of a largely different sort. The stage, too, creates an impression of immediacy.
When the movies and TV exploit their own peculiar virtues, they invite the viewer not to use his own imagination, but to take for real the images he’s shown-to look through the eyes of the camera and see, as in life, the events that unfold. In radio, by contrast, a monster that appalls the mind might well induce the heart to stop, if ever he were met with in the flesh. A jagged scar that’s edged with blood, a twisted body cast in gloom, a claw or fang about to strike, all generate a hot suspense that slackens off perceptibly when once the monster’s seen in full, sized up, and known for what he is: an eyesore that it isn’t death to look upon. Thus the movies themselves, when they want to curdle blood, show monstrosities only in glimpses. None of Hollywood’s grim ogres can evoke delicious terror like the spectral shapes revealed to ardent children of the 40’s when the night was still, the room was dark, and the radio intoned the words, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.” What’s seen, and therefore known, is of necessity less threatening than what radio produces-a teasing apparition of the mind. Those who grew up thrilling to The Shadow understand. What this audience is seeking and is at a loss to find in any other medium, including movies and the stage, is an intimacy, a personal dimension, that makes every encounter with radio drama an encounter with one’s own imagination. Every week of the year, for example, BBC Radio’s Saturdaynight play, repeated on the Monday, attracts a combined audience of approximately one million listeners. But if numbers argue interest, radio drama must, in fact, be hale.
Radio drama in the 1980’s is as British as a thatched roof-and, many think, as outdated.