Old Time Radio for the 21st Century

By Ned Norris

Back in the 1930s, 40s and 50s there was an abundance of classic thrillers on the radio. Almost every night you could huddle around the fire and be thrilled by shows such as Suspense, Escape, Inner Sanctum, and The Whistler, to name just a handful.

In the early 1960s this wonderful form of entertainment died out completely. It wasn’t so much a sudden death. It was more a slow, but inevitable decline that lasted from the early 1950s through to 1962 when the last episode of Yours Truly Johnny Dollar was broadcast.

In the 1970s and early 80s there was a brief renaissance when Himan Brown produced CBS Radio Mystery Theatre, which ran from January 6th, 1974 through to December 31st 1982. Since then there has been very little in the way of mainstream radio thrillers.

One series that has bucked the trend is “Tales from the Morgue”.

Chet Chetter's Tales from the Morgue is a series of short stories as told by an elderly morgue attendant, licensed embalmer and resident story teller named Chet Chetter to a passing stranger of the night played by you, the listener.

The stories Chet relates are all quite fanciful. They deal with topics that could be classified supernatural and science fiction. They border on outrageous but that is how they are meant to be.

Roughly half of the shows feature a nice, likeable, rural southern manure hauler by the name of Elmer Korn who always finds himself involved in some inane predicament.

The creators of the series themselves admit the show is rather off-beat, but it’s not without it’s very own charm, which lies within the humorous writing and the recurring characters.

This series was created and produced by M&J Audio Theater. The M stands for Mark Sawyer and the J is for Jay Reel.

Mark and Jay are childhood friends who met in the sixth-grade in 1977. Thanks to old time radio shows such as X Minus One, Lum and Abner, and Gunsmoke, they had a mutual interest in radio drama. One can hear these influences in every story from the subject matter and the character voices, to the plots. The creaking door opening, the host’s oddly humorous manner and the “pleasant dreams” ending. These are an undeniable salute to “The Inner Sanctum” and Himan Brown.

Between the two of them, Mark and Jay collaborated on over twenty characters in these stories. Jay is the voice of Chet Chetter, Elmer Korn, the Sherrif, Roland, and Gale Headrush Taylor. Mark only admits to being the voice of Cecil Farris and various incidental characters.

Mark and Jay produced the first Chet Chetter story, "The Highway of Death" in 1989. It was born from a series of ninety-five episodes, which they recorded between 1980 to 1995. They call it "The Conofrof Saga".

They submitted "The Highway of Death" to National Public Radio and were amazed when NPR responded with an order for three more stories. The four episodes were accepted and broadcast on NPR Playhouse in 1990. The following year NPR ordered nine more instalments of “Tales From the Morgue” to be broadcast as a complete thirteen show series in 1992.

Since then a number of small production houses have sprung-up and are now finding an audience for their own spoken word audio recordings on the Internet.

Isn’t it strange how sometimes things can go full circle. From the days of old time radio right through to the high tech world of the Internet today.

It just goes to show that there’s still a demand for high quality audio thrillers, just like there was over half a century ago. The medium might have changed, but maybe the entertainment people enjoy hasn’t changed quite as much as we might sometimes think.