Mystery…tadadadadadah!
I’ve been a great fan of radio drama for a long time, and if you were to look through my MP3 player and the burnt CDs in my car, you’d see BBC drama, old time radio and the like. I got a real love for it as a kid, and as it’s drifted in and out of my life, the real problems have been availability – of the programs and for time to listen to them!
One of my great faves in such matters, the 1950-1953 noir drama Night Beat, has been saved as MP3s at the Internet Archive, (better quality set here) and is very much worth listening to.
As to a mystery; while I was listening to Night Beat episodes, I’d hear something like ‘transcribed from Hollywood’, and I was totally puzzzled; my understanding of the term refers to ‘transcriptions of TV programs -> a written record of what the people said and did on the show’.
After a bit of digging, the answer was that it meant ‘pre-recorded in a studio on special vinyl-like disks and played on the network for the actual broadcast later’ – a system used in the days before audio tape was in common studio usage. Huh!
