The run
- Network
- CBC
- Years active
- 1947–1958
- Surviving broadcasts
- 6
- Genre
- theatre
Anti-American radio propaganda from 1954, written by Reuben Ship, a disgruntled Canadian who was deported from the USA due to his pro-communist sympathies. Broadcast on the CBC, it is a satire of Senator Joseph McCarthy's hearings on communist subversion in the U.S. government and military. Ship symbolizes liberals and Marxists via various great figures in world history (Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, etc.) ---whose words are associated with solemn and heroic music; while McCarthy is symbolized by various villains of history (Cotton Mather, The Hanging Judge, The Spanish Inquisition, etc.) It is all very wooden and one-sided, and fails to recognize the evils of the Marxist philosophy which Ship Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
3 dated broadcasts across 80 years on the air, with 79 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2026, in original transmission order.
- 1. The Last Train Out · 30 Jun 2026
- 2. Night Broadcast · 7 Jul 2026
- 3. The Case of the Missing Hour · 14 Jul 2026
The Long Silence
4 Aug 2026 · 27 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
Dead Air
28 Jul 2026 · 42 min
The one everybody argues about.
Sign Off
21 Jul 2026 · 57 min
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
The Case of the Missing Hour
14 Jul 2026 · 20 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
Night Broadcast
7 Jul 2026 · 35 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
The Last Train Out
30 Jun 2026 · 50 min
The one everybody argues about.
Also on CBC
CBC in 1947–1958
Other series the network carried while CBC: The Early Years was on the air.
Same seasons
theatre on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
Theatre of the mind
Full-cast drama with a live orchestra and a studio full of sound effects. Lux Radio Theater and the CBS Radio Workshop are the direct ancestors of scripted podcast fiction.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of CBC: The Early Years
Modern series carrying this form forward.
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