Bored of podcasts? Try Old Time Radio.

To think kids would come home, and beg their parents
to be able to catch their favorite program before homework.

It's late at night. You can't sleep and your eyes hurt. You try scrolling through your phone in a desperate attempt to wear your brain out so you can sleep. Such plans fail to work however, and you find sleeping even harder than before. Eventually you give up and keep scrolling until you pass out two hours later.

Allow me to offer you a solution: Radio. Picture stars from the silver screen in living color from the comforts of your conscience, "Theater of the mind," They used to call it. imagine doing chores, writing correspondence, all while wild west epics or tension-filled crime dramas play about in your head. It might sound corny, but it's a surprisingly fulfilling pastime.

My first foray into radio from back there began with the old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies (Soon to be covered, I promise). Through sheer coincidence, I found out that they also made a series of radio programs in the 40s, at the same time as their movies. As a Sherlock Holmes fan, I was open-minded, and decided to check it out.

It's hard to imagine these two as just ordinary people reading a script and talking into a microphone.

I'm incredibly glad I did. Normally movies and TV keep you rooted to one spot, and any momentary lapse of your gaze would cause you to lose track. This is fine for moments when you aren't expected to be disturbed, but for moments when you're doing more menial tasks, and when you're not in the mood for music, old time radio is there.

 The modern day podcast owes alot to radio, the word podcast itself is a portmanteau word of "Ipod Broadcast," Radio revitalised and brought directly to the hi-fi set that fits in your pocket and the speakers which go in your ears that no one else can hear. If I told the average Joe from the 50s we'd be able to do all that he'd think I'd been drinking.

What an interesting time. Name a star from back there, 
and there's a picture out there of them holding a script
and standing in front of a branded microphone.

Anyway, I kept digging. What I found were decades of dramas, comedy shows, music broadcasts, educational broadcasts. You name it, 70 years ago, there were children sitting around a portable listening to it. There was a radio program for every mood. In need of a laugh? Check out the Jack Benny program or take a trip to Fred Allen's Alley. Want a film noir, action packed thriller? Check out Pat Novak For Hire down by the San Francisco Waterfront. Want to imagine yourself faster than a speeding bullet and leaping tall buildings in a single bound? Check out Bud Collyer's Superman program, a stark, but welcome contrast to the grimdark DC of today. You can find these anywhere, and you ought to, anyway you can. 

Orson Welles. "The Boy Wonder of Old Time Radio" 

In closing, when the shows and movies of today weigh heavily upon you, and you find yourself lost in a sea of predictability, look back there. You might find something that sparks an unknown curiosity, lighting a fire and shedding light on a dark alleyway in the deepest recesses of your soul that you may not have even known was there. The rest, I shall leave up to you. Will you venture down this road less travelled? Or will you stop, and go no further back there? Whichsoever you may choose is all the same to me.

I'm just glad you took the trip back there, however brief.

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