Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Radio Greats: Another Point of View (CBS Radio Workshop)

A discussion in the comments for a post at "Shredded Cheddar" put me in mind of a very famous and fun episode of CBS Radio Workshop.

If you want original radio, testing the limits of the genre, CBS Radio Workshop is where you go. It ran in the waning years of the Golden Age of Radio (1956-1957). It was the last in an admirable tradition of experimental radio that really attempted to explore all the possibilities provided by radio as a medium.

Because it did experimental radio, CBS Radio Workshop has no typical episode, but probably its most famous episode, and arguably the best of a fairly good run, is an episode called "Another Point of View (or, Hamlet Revisited)", narrated by the great William Conrad. It is a bit funning with the Bard, a tongue-in-cheek argument that Hamlet is the villain of Shakespeare's play and that there is nothing rotten in Denmark but Hamlet makes it so. And being properly done, it's actually a good way to think through the play and its characters -- by taking another point of view, even as a joke, it sheds a new light on the play. It also sheds light on us. One of the things that makes the episode work is that the values by which it tries to make its case are the ordinary, everyday values of the modern world.

You can listen to "Another Point of View" online at the Internet Archive (episode 22). (You can also find it here.)