Image in the Mind: CBC Radio Drama, 1944-1954

Jenifer Lepiano was a writer and drama teacher in Toronto.

Alice Frick is not a dispassionate observer of the early days of national radio drama; as National Script Editor and then “Allan’s girl” — Assistant Supervisor to Andrew Allan — she was in the thick of the fray. So she combines research with recollection, quotation with anecdote, to illuminate a time characterized by the extraordinary talent, vitality, and mutuality of respect of the writers, actors, and directors who made it their own. Beginning with the Sunday night series Stage 44 and ending with The Investigator, Reuben Ship’s play about McCarthyism produced in 1954 just after the advent of television, it was a time many consider the golden age of radio.

Drama was live in those days, and lively, often controversial. The war was ending, a new
day of nationalism was on the horizon, and writers, actors, and directors shared a sense of mission. According to Len Peterson, whom Frick quotes, the four big directors Esse Ljungh, Andrew Allan, Frank Willis, and Rupert Caplan “developed the art of radio drama so masterfully that it became a national voice, delighting, informing, inspiring, and uniting Canadians. They shattered the awful silence that characterizes Canada.” One might add they did it with the voices of such actors as John Drainie, Ruth Springford, Lorne Green, Eileen Seaten, and Robert Christie, not to mention the music of Lucio Agostini and the words of writers like Len Peterson.

Frick evokes the Canadian setting for recurring issues of cultural development such as the artist’s accountability and the nature of art and entertainment. Her presentation is even-handed though her views are clear. She recognizes the BBC as a significant model for the CBC but values the CBC’s more personal, less condescending voice. As for commercial radio, she lets the Americans speak for her. In a citation from the 1954 Ohio Awards which gave first prize to plays by each of Lister Sinclair, Len Peterson, and Mac Shoub, the judges state “that all the offerings by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation through these dramatic programs have shown courage and leadership in attacking vital, current, human problems. They were by far the finest programs submitted, in the opinion of the judges.”

Image in the Mind is an invaluable record of this achievement.