Planet Vintage presents
Radio did not stop when television started. For about a decade the two ran side by side, and the same programme could exist twice on the same night — a concert transmitted live to both audiences at once, a comedy shot for the camera on Tuesday and played for the microphone on Thursday, a character acted by one man on radio and another on television because a film contract said so. These are the surviving recordings from that decade: the crossover years, heard from the side that was supposed to be dying.
687
Broadcasts
17
Series held
300h
Listening
1943–1960
Years covered
Why this decade matters
Histories of broadcasting tend to cut from the Golden Age straight to television, as though 1948 flipped a switch. It did not. Network radio’s revenue peaked in 1948 and its audience was still enormous in 1955; what happened was a slow migration in which every major property had to be tested in the new medium while the old one paid the bills. The recordings here are the evidence of that experiment — including the failures, which are the interesting part.
One performance, two transmitters
Not a remake and not an adaptation: the same broadcast, going out on radio and television at the same instant. Firestone did it for a decade, Godfrey did it every morning, and the panel games did it because they cost nothing either way.
1928–1956 on radio · NBC, then ABC
A forty-six-piece orchestra under Howard Barlow and a weekly concert of classical and semi-classical repertoire, carried live on radio and television at the same moment for the better part of a decade.
40 recordings
1946–1954 · Mutual, then ABC
The Van Deventer family and a panel guessing at a subject in twenty questions, with a listener's mystery voice and a locked envelope. Radio first, television four years later, both running at once.
7 recordings
1945–1959 · CBS
Godfrey's morning hour was simulcast: the television audience watched what the radio audience heard, ukulele and all. At his height he was carrying a fifth of CBS's entire revenue.
9 recordings
1942–1960 · NBC
Members of the public sent on absurd errands and paid for the results — the format that made the participation show a television staple, worked out first on radio.
4 recordings
The same show, produced twice
A radio series and a television series running concurrently, often with the same cast and sponsor and sometimes with different leads. Some of these transferred perfectly. Some were destroyed by being seen. Both outcomes are here.
1929–1946 on radio · NBC, CBS
The Goldbergs ran on network radio for seventeen years before Gertrude Berg took it to CBS television in 1949, where it became the template for the family sitcom.
60 recordings
1944–1951 on radio · ABC, then NBC
Bendix played the riveter from Brooklyn on radio for seven years. When the television version began in 1949 the film studio would not release him, so Jackie Gleason played Riley on television while Bendix went on playing him on radio.
60 recordings
1947–1954 on radio · CBS
Cy Howard's comedy about a spectacularly dim Manhattan typist and her long-suffering roommate, running on CBS radio and CBS television at the same time.
60 recordings
1949–1954 on radio · NBC
Robert Young as Jim Anderson, in the radio version that ran for five seasons before the television series everyone remembers began.
60 recordings
1939–1953 on radio · NBC, CBS
Clifford Goldsmith's adolescent disaster machine, one of the longest-running comedies in American radio, produced simultaneously for NBC television from 1949.
60 recordings
1950–1952 on radio · NBC
Written by Don Quinn of Fibber McGee and Molly, and played by Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume, this is radio comedy for adults: witty, unhurried and unusually well made.
60 recordings
1948–1953 on radio · CBS
J. Carrol Naish as Luigi Basco, writing letters home to Italy from a Chicago antique shop — a top-ten radio comedy whose television version collapsed almost immediately.
50 recordings
1947–1955 on radio · NBC
Each week dramatised a genuine newspaper investigation and paid the journalist who broke it. Radio and television versions ran in parallel for six years on the same sponsor.
50 recordings
1946–1951 · NBC, then CBS
Philip Rapp's marital argument as a machine: John and Blanche Bickerson, insomnia, and some of the fastest dialogue written for radio.
40 recordings
After it was supposed to be over
What was still going out in the late fifties, when the schedule was emptying: a western built out of a television hit and sent backwards into radio, a daytime serial holding on to November 1960, and one ordinary evening on a CBS affiliate, recorded off the air.
1958–1960 · CBS
Paladin, the Hotel Carlton, and a calling card. CBS built the radio version out of an existing television hit — the traffic running the other way, in the last years when that was still worth doing.
60 recordings
1952–1960 · ABC, then CBS
An anthology of women's stories introduced by a narrator walking the streets of a town — daytime serial drama holding on into 1960, years after the form was supposed to be finished.
6 recordings
17 November 1957 · CBS affiliate, Albany, New York
An unbroken aircheck of a CBS affiliate on a Sunday evening in 1957: the network shows, the local commercials, the station breaks and the news, in the order they were transmitted.
1 recording
The decade as it was reported
The news of the fifties, in the medium that had to describe it. The same hearings and launches and elections that television was learning to show, told by people who assumed you could not see.
1950–1959 · CBS, NBC, Mutual, ABC and local stations
A decade of American news radio — network bulletins, local reports and special coverage — from the years when television took the same events and made them visible.
60 recordings
Provenance and rights
Every recording on these pages is a surviving transmission or transcription held by the Internet Archive and in the public domain — American network broadcast material whose copyright was never renewed, or federal work. We exclude anything carrying a Creative Commons licence, including non-commercial terms, so that nothing here limits what this service can do. Titles, air dates and durations come from the archives’ own metadata; where a date cannot be established we leave the broadcast undated rather than guess. Series covers are set in period type: no network artwork for these programmes is in the public domain, and we do not invent one.
