Escape and Suspense

I like listening to radio (see my shell script for streaming online radio, Whip Radio), and I like listening to old-time radio, which is radio before TV got big. The 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s were a golden age of American radio. I’ve mentioned this before: see some witty remarks from Oscar Levant on Information Please, this post about Information Please and my favourite radio comedies, and a post about an episode of Suspense titled “The Thirteenth Sound” that will be of interest to anyone who likes microtonal music. Over the past few years I’ve been listening to Escape and Suspense, both half-hour anthology shows on CBS Radio. Escape ran from 1947 to 1954 and had 228 episodes, most of which can be downloaded in one go at the Internet Archive: see Escape from the Old Time Radio Researchers Group. As the notes there say: Escape brings together everything that was good about old-time radio drama rolled into one. The title itself almost sums up the very essence of what radio drama…