Quiet, Please

right|250px|thumb|[[Tom Kiesche (left) and Michael Lanahan in Corey Klemow's 2004 Quiet, Please! stage production at Hollywood's Sacred Fools Theater Company]]

Quiet, Please! was a radio fantasy and horror program created by Wyllis Cooper, also known for creating Lights Out. Ernest Chappell was the show's announcer and lead actor. Quiet, Please debuted June 8, 1947, on the Mutual Broadcasting System, and its last episode was broadcast June 25, 1949, on the ABC. A total of 106 shows were broadcast, with only a very few of them repeats.

Earning relatively little notice during its initial run, Quiet, Please has since been praised as one of the finest efforts of the golden age of American radio drama. Professor Richard J. Hand of the University of Glamorgan, in a detailed critical analysis of the series, argued that Cooper and Chappell "created works of astonishing originality"; he further describes the program as an "extraordinary body of work" which established Cooper "as one of the greatest auteurs of horror radio". while John Dunning describes the show as "a potent series bristling with rich imagination."

Broadcast history

Background

Quiet, Please had its roots in The Campbell Playhouse (1938–1940), the successor to Orson Welles's The Mercury Theatre on the Air, which achieved notoriety with its 1938 adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds. Cooper was a writer for The Campbell Playhouse, and Chappell was the announcer. They became friends, and though Chappell had little (if any) acting experience, Cooper imagined him as the star of a new radio program. Cooper's earlier Lights Out was famous for its gruesome stories and sound effects, but for Quiet, Please, Cooper would cultivate a subdued, slower-paced, and much quieter atmosphere that could still, at its best, match Lights Out for frights and thrills.

Chappell had ample experience in radio, but mostly as an announcer. As Hand writes, "With Quiet, Please, Cooper gave Ernest Chappell the chance to act, and the result was a revelation. Chappell proved himself to be versatile in accent and delivery." Ellison also describes Chappell as having "one of the great radio voices. A sound that combined urbanity with storytelling wisdom." J. Pat O'Malley, later a familiar TV character actor, was another frequent voice, heard in more than a dozen shows throughout the run, beginning with the first broadcast "Nothing Behind the Door". He played foreman Ted in "The Thing on the Fourbleboard" and was often used in parts requiring Irish or Scottish accents. Radio commentator and disc jockey Jack Lescoulie guest starred in the radio-themed "Twelve to Five".

At the end of each program, Cooper offered a teaser for the next show. These were usually unrehearsed, and often displayed Cooper's wry or morbid humor: "My story for you next week is called 'A Night to Forget'. It's about a man who wished he could – and couldn't." Cooper's teaser was always followed by Chappell's sign-off: "And so, until next week at this same time, I am quietly yours, Ernest Chappell."

Compared to other contemporary radio dramas, Quiet, Please used fewer sound effects and less dialogue, relying instead on first person narration to drive each play. As noted above, silence was often used masterfully; a 1949 Oakland Tribune article by John Crosby notes, "There are long, long pauses, so long sometimes you wonder if your radio has gone on the blink. Networks are horrified at the amount of dead air they purchase along with Cooper. (A half hour Cooper script played at ordinary tempo would run about 11 minutes.)" Though Crosby praised Quiet, Please, he thought the dramas sometimes employed confused, deus ex machina endings and characters were occasionally underdeveloped. He also wrote that Cooper "avoids clichés with such intensity that he's creating his own."

Most episodes had a strongly moralist tone: evildoers were nearly always punished, and good was typically rewarded. In 1949, Harriett Cannon wrote, "Although in no sense a

'religious' show, [Quiet, Please] has some of its strongest supporters among the clergy." In fact, Cooper often drew upon the Bible for inspiration, though he generally tweaked the stories and plots past the point of easy recognizability. Even the easily recognizable Bible stories are given a twist: "The Third Man's Story" (6 September 1948) retells the story of Cain and Abel, suggesting that Cain's act was motivated by Abel's arrogance and taunts. Cooper's scripts were, arguably, among the best of their era; Hand argues that "Cooper employs excellent structuring devices in creating 30-minute radio drama", even comparing one episode ("Three Sides to a Story") to Sartre's No Exit. Love triangles were another frequent plot device for Quiet, Please.

As with many radio programs to feature prominent organ accompaniment, Quiet, Please was a rather low-budget undertaking. The show's keyboardist (Albert Berman for most of the episodes), however, arguably utilized the instruments in a more innovative way than others—not only for punctuation of climactic moments, but also as an element of the scripts, as in the lazy, boogie woogie riffs in the clandestine casino scenes in "Good Ghost" (24 November 1948). The show's theme was used as a plot device in at least three episodes: as a post-hypnotic trigger in by a hypnotist in "Symphony in D Minor" (13 September 1948), "The Evening and the Morning" and in "Come In, Eddie".

Unusually for episodic radio drama, several episodes were sequels of earlier broadcasts, or at least recycled the same ideas: A character and setting from the very first episode "Nothing Behind the Door" (8 June 1947) are referenced in one of the last episodes, "The Other Side of the Stars"; in "The Man Who Knew Everything" (6 March 1949) the titular character seems to die at the episode's end, only to return in "The Venetian Blind Man" (3 April 1949). Another pair of episodes, though not directly sequels, both feature an enchanted watch that allows its bearer to time travel: ("It's Later Than You Think" (8 February 1948) and "Not Responsible After Thirty Years" (14 June 1948)

Despite some positive reviews (and a loyal audience that might be classified as a cult following, based on Crosby's claim the network received more requests from fans for Quiet, Please scripts than for any other radio program) the show never established itself and never attracted a sponsor. Quiet, Please might have suffered from poor scheduling, which was often dependent upon a regular sponsor. During its first year, Quiet, Please was broadcast at 3.30 pm, a time slot usually reserved for after-school programming aimed at juveniles. Its second season found the show at a more appropriate 9.30 pm, but its third and final season the show was bumped again, this time to 5.30pm (noted times are Eastern Standard Time)

"The Thing on the Fourble Board"

Probably the most highly regarded episode of Quiet, Please is "The Thing on the Fourble Board" (August 9, 1948), about an oil-field worker who encounters a mysterious subterranean being hiding on the derrick's catwalk. The unusual title is a bit of oil worker argot: the "fourble board" of an oil derrick is a narrow catwalk that is as high up as four lengths of drilling pipe placed vertically (two lengths of pipe are a "double", three are a "thribble" and four are a "fourble".)

The story's effectiveness has led some fans to label the episode one of the best radio horror programs ever broadcast. Richard J. Hand of the University of Glamorgan notes that "The Thing on the Fourble Board" is not only cited as the finest example of radio horror, but occasionally cited as one of the best examples of radio drama as a whole. Especially effective was Cecil Roy's vocal performance as the creature. Though she performs only very briefly, Roy's vocal (barely recognizable as human) was cited by Dunning as still startling and chill-inducing even after decades.

According to Hand, Cooper's script for the episode was dizzyingly multilayered, blending authentic details of oil rig workers' daily activities, with elements of what might be termed "subterranea" or Hollow Earth lore, yet managing to faintly invoke nautical stories like the kraken.

In other media

Cooper and Chappell remained friends after Quiet, Please went off the air, and even founded a production company, mainly to support their unsuccessful efforts to interest adapting Quiet, Please to television.

In 2004, at the Sacred Fools Theater Company in Los Angeles, Corey Klemow directed stage adaptations of two of the best-regarded Cooper scripts, The Thing on the Fourble Board and Whence Came You?

A film version of the episode "The Evening & The Morning" appears on YouTube.

Since 2020, the Quietly Yours podcast has featured discussions of each episode of the series (in order of original broadcast).

Meta-fiction

right|thumb|200px|Wyllis Cooper

Though many radio programs used various meta-fictional ploys, Quiet, Please arguably offered some of the most effective and intriguing examples. Hand writes that Cooper "enjoys creating roles for the audience: passive listener, surreptitious eavesdropper, or even someone implicated in the action of the story itself."

Ellison goes on to relate the plot (at least as he remembers it after several decades, admitting that time might have altered some of the details), and asks, "[H]ow many stories you heard or saw or read fifteen years ago, ten years ago, even five years ago...do you remember that clearly today? And I heard 'Five Miles Down' at least forty years ago. And it's still with me."

Ellison's recollection is a little inaccurate: he relates the story being broadcast "early in the Forties" on Quiet, Please when it was in fact a late-1940s episode of another series, The Mysterious Traveler. In 2004, Ellison took part in a recreation of the "Five Miles Down" script (by Robert Arthur and David Kogan, not Wyllis Cooper) at a convention of the Society to Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety and Comedy. He "acted and helped direct the show" and recalled hearing the episode when he was growing up.

Episode influences

In the October 17, 1948 episode titled "And Jeannie Dreams of Me" the Stephen Foster song "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" figured prominently. The episode uses the song throughout and its title is a reversal of the song title which acts as a foreshadowing to the theme of the episode.

Broadcast history

Background

"The Thing on the Fourble Board"

In other media

Meta-fiction

Episode influences

References

External links

Audio