| Title | What episode is this guy talking about? |
| Message Text | I read the following excerpt of the book "An Edge in My Voice" by Harlan Ellison, on google books. (link below) I enjoyed it, thought you might to.. but there's just one problem.. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ...If it had not been for listening to radio drama, I would never have been able to write motion pictures: and the stories I've written would not be quiet so clearly veiwable on the screen of your mind. Imagination is served wonderfully by sound. One can create in the theater of thoughts sets and artifcats that would cost Hollywood billions to actualize. And I was a child of radio dreams. See then: this kid Harlan and Mom and Dad, driving down Mentor Avenue, on a Sunday afternoon early in the forties. And the radio spoke: "Quiet, Please." A pause, heavy with expectation. Then again, "Quiet Please." The voice of Ernest Chappell. One of the great radio voices. A sound combined urbanity with storytelling wisdom. And the show was on Mutual Network; it was, of course, the legendary Quiet, Please, created by Willis Cooper. I begged my mother to leave it on, not to change over to one of the more popular Sunday comedy shows; and they left the dial where it was, and I heard something that I have never forgotten, something I will share with you now. Ernest Chappel narrated Wyllis Cooper's scripts. The programs were backed up by sound effects and music (the theme was the 2nd movement of Franck's Symphony in D minor, a work I cannot listen to, even today, without being thrilled to my toenails), but essentially it was Chappell, just speaking softly. Quietly. Terrifyingly. What I heard that Sunday afternoon, so long ago, that has never left my thoughts for even one week, through all these years, was this: "There is a place just five miles from where you now stand that no human eye has ever seen. It is...five miles down!" When I heard that, and even now when I say it at college lectures, even when I simply type it on a page, a chill takes possession of my spine. And the story was wonderful. (I'm sure if I were to hear it now, forty years later, it might be woefully thin and unworthy of the weight I have put on it...but I've managed to obtain recordings of the five or six shows that are still extant, and they are superb...so memory, this once, probably serves me well.).... It concerned a group of men working in the deepest coal mine in the world. (Coal mine? It's been forty years; it may have been a tin mine, or a diamond mine.) And they break through the floor of the mine and it turns out to be the ceiling, the roof, of the biggest cave in the world. I mean big! So gigantic that even the most powerful searchlights can't pentrate the darkness through that hole. Nothing can be seen down there. It just goes down and down. A stone dropped through the hole, keeps falling...there is no sound of its having landed. So they rig up something like a bathyshpere, and a couple of guys are lowere in it... they're attacked by pterodactyls before they can reach the bottom! Now that's all I remember of the plot; but I tell you something, troops: how many stories you heard or saw or read fifteen years ago, ten years ago, even five years ago...do you remember that clearly today? And I heard "Five Miles Down" at least forty years ago. And it's still with me. books.google.com/books?id=K...20radio%20chappell&f=false --------------------------------------------------------------------- Now I haven't heard that episode yet, but decided to listen to it next.. but the problem is.. as I'm sure you already know, there is no such episode! - What?? |
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| Submission Date | Jun 20, 2014 |