Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

Then he talks till 5 A.M., rambling, filling in, not always aware of what he is saying, or even if the program is still on the air, but using his voice because he still has it, because it’s still his —uniquely inflected, Gibson-timbreed, a sum of private frequencies and personal resonances, as marked as his thumbs — because the show must go on and he must be on it. As he speaks, it occurs to him that Behr- Bleibtreau could never have taken it, that poor Dick Gibson had nothing to confess; like Behr-Bleibtreau, his own slate is clean, his character unmarked, his history uneventful. But he has had a close call.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “there is no astrology, there’s no black magic and no white, no ESP, no UFO’s. Mars is uninhabited. The dead are dead and buried. Meat won’t kill you and Krebiozen won’t cure you and we’ll all be out of the picture before the forests disappear or the water dries up. Your handwriting doesn’t indicate your character and there is no God. All there is—” He looks over at Pepper Steep’s sister asleep in her chair and wants to cry. He wishes he had something with which to cover her to keep her warm, something to put over her shoulders. Somehow Jack Patterson’s fart still hangs in the air—“are the strange displacements of the ordinary.”

From an address at the annual “Annals of Broadcasting” Dinner:

Mr. Irwin Schlueter, Chief of the American Radio Institute’s Division of Research and Development, suggested that the technological development which most influenced the character of radio broadcasting in the United States in the decades of the fifties and sixties was television, that it produced an impact on the medium at least as powerful as the impact of the talkies on the silent films of the twenties, but that after television the next most powerful influence, and in the long run an influence which could outstrip even the influence of television, had been a series of “gadgets” developed in the sixties — none of them, from an engineering standpoint, spectacular in themselves, and some of which were merely the application of principles known for years.

It’s almost [Mr. Schlueter said] like observing the piecemeal development of the wheel. I say “development” because almost certainly the wheel was never “invented,” but was instead a slow, cumulative serendipity.

Tape, of course, has liberated the radio man from his studio and given him a mobility he never had before. Miniaturization has contributed further to this process. The ongoing evolution of the cassette with its terrific convenience has provided additional acceleration of the trend, and “solid-state,” or the so-called instant-on, because of the reporter’s new ability to begin his on- the-spot broadcast without waiting for tubes to warm up, has had even more far-reaching effects on field radio, and has given the radio man not only mobility but time, and not only time but the potential to make of himself a peripatetic broadcasting station.

But if these gadgets have exercised an influence on the broadcaster, think of the enormous consequences for the listener. Consider instant-on itself. In the thirty-five to forty-three seconds it used to take to “build a sound,” the listener’s mood — this has been repeatedly demonstrated in psychological testing— becomes one of honed impatience. He wishes, say, to hear a particular program and turns on his radio. There is solid scientific evidence that by the time the radio has warmed up, a small antipathy has developed in the listener, an aggression which has first to be overcome before receptivity can be properly exploited. Thus the broadcaster’s burden is a double one: he must sell his listener before he sells him. By eliminating “dead time,” solid- state obviates this. Indeed, further studies have shown that by instantly responding to his will, solid-state actually predisposes a listener to accept a program. The average listener is not a scientist, of course, but even if he understands the basic principles of electronics he does not consciously think of them when he turns on his radio. For him there is only the subliminal impression — solid-state increases this — that there is a continuous entertainment or dialogue going on in the world which he may bring in or exclude instantly, as though by magic. This gives him a sense of power. It is no accident that the operating manuals accompanying new radios designate the various knobs and dials under the pseudo-generic label “controls.”

Where solid-state has thus far had its greatest effect is in the area of car radio, where, depending upon the time of day, the listenership may sometimes be as high as 84 percent. Try to imagine what conflict there could be in a driver’s mind when, on the one hand, he was pushed along through space at a mile a minute while on the other he was stymied by a cold car radio. He might have traveled as much as a mile, or even further, before bringing in the first clear signal of a broadcast. Was he in time or wasn’t he? For the listener in the car the time lag meant not impatience or hostility, but confusion — an emotion more difficult of placation than even those others, and more dangerous, too, when you consider that this man was “at the controls” of a murderous, powerful machine. With the highway development program what it is today, and with cars every year given greater and greater horsepower, the discrepancy between speed and its tube-radio opposite could only have become greater, and the burden of the programmers — who have to keep all sorts of audiences in mind — heavier. Undoubtedly, highway safety would suffer. Nor do I make a callous joke when I say that it is not the radio man’s first duty to kill off his market. Radio is a business dependent upon revenues from advertising. Advertising is dependent upon sales. Humanitarian considerations aside, when a man dies in a crash you have not lost simply a good customer — and make no mistake; he is a good customer; he’s driving a car, advertised on radio, for which he buys gas, advertised on radio, to or from a home which he has bought with a bank loan, advertised on radio, and furnished with a thousand things, all advertised on radio —but the good customer’s family as well. There is inevitably a period of mourning, and mourning — I don’t care what religion you’re talking about — means one thing and one thing only: abstinence. And abstinence, humanitarian considerations aside, is bad for business. Solid-state does away with all this.

Yet it is one of the peculiar paradoxes of our age that while reducing the time lag between broadcast and reception has had an unparalleled effect in shaping broadcasting, there has been, collaterally, a development which goes in an opposite direction altogether, and is, as of this moment, the single most important event in the entire history of radio.

I am speaking, of course, of the so-called tape delay, the small, inexpensive instrument which by utilizing extra gears and blind- alley loopings forces the recording tape through false waystations so that by the time it is played a six-second interval has been created in which the broadcaster can cut or, in more sophisticated models, edit offensive statements before they go out over the air. What this has meant for programming is only now beginning to be realized. Unquestionably, however, its greatest effect has been in the area of the audience- participation principle— specifically the telephone talk show. Without the six-second delay tape, or something very much like it, this kind of programming would be impossible. Most of the American public, of course, is decent and responsible and have no need of instrumentation to monitor them. Nevertheless fail-safe equipment will be a necessary adjunct of the telephone talk landscape as long as we live in a society part of whose vocal instincts, emboldened by the cloak of anonymity, are vicious and disturbed and exhibitionist. It’s inconceivable that a sponsor could continue to support a show which did not have the safety valve provided by a system like tape delay. This despite the fact that advertisers have known — known from the beginning — the incredible attractiveness of audience-participation programming.