What Happened to Radio Drama?

I'm on the road a lot, I have quite a collection of music CDs, but once you've heard Kenny G'sBreathless album eighty times it kind of tends to put you to sleep on the highway. So, I flip through the channels on my AM/FM radio and find nine out of ten stations playing the same rap/pop/R&B songs about what the singer would like to do to a certain woman, or group of woman, or what a female singer would like to have done to her, involving strange descriptions and analogies for female anatomy. Since I don't enjoy hearing of pop artists' sexual exploits, I keep flipping. Rush'sTom Sawyer again? Then there's the sports station. The only thing I can think of more boring than watching a golf tournament is listening to it on the radio. Finally I hear some political commentator linking Kate and John's breakup with the Democrats taking the Senate majority in the last election. I already knew that, so I'm not too interested.

What I'm trying to say is radio is boring. On road trips I constantly find myself wishing for a random hitchhiker to pick up to regale me with his half-crazed ramblings involving government conspiracies and how he is the reincarnation of Michael Landon. Anything to break the monotony.

What I need is a good story. Whatever happened to the golden age of radio? The Lone Ranger serials? The Shadow, The Whistler? You'd think I was eighty years old rather than shy of thirty by the way I'm reminiscing. (My parents had a lot of old records.) But, why can't you have stories on the radio anymore? I know Sirius and its underling XM have audio-book channels, comedy channels, radio drama channels and other forms of non-musical entertainment, but why can't that be broadcast over the free radio waves. That stuff got us through WWII for crying out loud!

Britain still knows how to tell a good story without pictures. BBC Radio 7 is solely dedicated to bringing drama and entertainment via radio waves to millions of people driving on the wrong side of the road. While I'm against government involving themselves in anything they don't need to, the Parliament subsidies British Broadcasting Corporation is spot on, old chap. They do classic comedy like The Navy Lark and more contemporary comedies like Douglas Adams' widely popular The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Then they range into thrilling drama's and science fiction thrillers like cult classic Doctor Who adventures. I'm talking new stuff, not just reruns. So I wonder why American's don't want to listen to a good radio version of Scrubs or Smallville. How about a James Patterson inspired noir series? Maybe we just don't have the imaginations it takes to put words into pictures anymore.
When I was a kid we used to listen to Adventures in Odyssey, a children's radio drama created by Focus on the Family. If our parents wanted peace and quiet on a twenty hour drive to Minnesota they might pick up a few cassettes of the series and pop them in to keep me and our Suburban full of kids entertained. The show's still on, and I imagine if I'm cruising down the streets and I run out of Shania Twain CDs and find that show playing on the radio, I bet it would help that half hour of pavement go by a little faster.

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