03-24-2014, 12:00 AM
Radio dramas to me are sort of the midpoint between watching television and reading a book. Books give the imagination a workout and require a lot of concentration. Television requires far less effort and can tell a story faster since it uses pictures to replace all the descriptions books require. It is in this sense that I find radio dramas to be a midpoint. They do require use of the imagination and thus more effort than television, however less concentration is needed to listen to a story than to read a book.
They do have one appealling quality that neither books nor television offer. They don't require your eyes to be looking at them! This means you can enjoy them in ways that are just not possible with TV or reading. You can listen to them while driving, jogging, gardening, bike riding, cleaning your bathroom, etc. You can even listen to them at work for many different jobs; truck driving, janitorial work, painting, basically anything that doesn't require a lot of thinking or interacting with customers. You can also listen to them while playing computer games that don't require sound such as mmorpgs or strategy games like Civilization. I've found that radio dramas make all of these things, (especially household chores), much more enjoyable.
I recommend radio dramas for those reasons but especially as a fun, easy practice for strengthening the imagination. Unfortunately for the beginner many of the recordings available online are of an unlistenable quality. Additionally, like books and television shows a lot of the radio dramas out there are just plain bad. To that end, I offer the following guide to help you find some quality shows. Next time you've got a long drive ahead of you or some chores to do and you don't feel like listening to music, you might try loading one of these onto a mp3 player and giving it a try.
"X-1" - The best I've found to date. In it's first season this series was titled "Dimension X". Think Twilight Zone in space and you'll have a pretty good idea. Although not quite all of the shows are space-themed, the large majority are."Escape" - The other best series I've found to date, Escape, like a couple other shows, turned classic short stories into radio plays. Most of the stories would be categorized in the suspense genre. Another good series similar to this one and slightly more famous was "Suspense", but I prefer the former."Night Beat" - Frank Lovejoy is perfect as the voice actor for Randy Stone, (Lucky Stone in the first episode), a hard-boiled reporter for the Chicago Star who patrols the mean streets of the city each night looking for a story. If you're a fan of the hard-boiled detective genre or have never really explored it, its worth checking out. If you don't like the genre, than it probably isn't."The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" - This series does a pretty good job capturing the feel of the original stories written by Doyle. The stories are light entertainment, not crafty mystery puzzles which require all your concentration to try to solve as you're listening or anything like that. They portray a version of Holmes and Watson akin to the earliest of Doyle's works on them, (pre-drug habit, etc.).
"You Bet Your Life" - A comedic game show hosted by Groucho Marx. Good for when you want to listen to something but know you're going to keep getting interrupted because there's no story to try to keep track of.
"Frontier Gentleman" - I didn't want to complete the list without at least one western. This one's about a sophisticated British reporter for the London Times travelling and finding adventures among the cowboys, natives, and outlaws of America's wild west. I say, yeehaw old chap.
They do have one appealling quality that neither books nor television offer. They don't require your eyes to be looking at them! This means you can enjoy them in ways that are just not possible with TV or reading. You can listen to them while driving, jogging, gardening, bike riding, cleaning your bathroom, etc. You can even listen to them at work for many different jobs; truck driving, janitorial work, painting, basically anything that doesn't require a lot of thinking or interacting with customers. You can also listen to them while playing computer games that don't require sound such as mmorpgs or strategy games like Civilization. I've found that radio dramas make all of these things, (especially household chores), much more enjoyable.
I recommend radio dramas for those reasons but especially as a fun, easy practice for strengthening the imagination. Unfortunately for the beginner many of the recordings available online are of an unlistenable quality. Additionally, like books and television shows a lot of the radio dramas out there are just plain bad. To that end, I offer the following guide to help you find some quality shows. Next time you've got a long drive ahead of you or some chores to do and you don't feel like listening to music, you might try loading one of these onto a mp3 player and giving it a try.
"X-1" - The best I've found to date. In it's first season this series was titled "Dimension X". Think Twilight Zone in space and you'll have a pretty good idea. Although not quite all of the shows are space-themed, the large majority are."Escape" - The other best series I've found to date, Escape, like a couple other shows, turned classic short stories into radio plays. Most of the stories would be categorized in the suspense genre. Another good series similar to this one and slightly more famous was "Suspense", but I prefer the former."Night Beat" - Frank Lovejoy is perfect as the voice actor for Randy Stone, (Lucky Stone in the first episode), a hard-boiled reporter for the Chicago Star who patrols the mean streets of the city each night looking for a story. If you're a fan of the hard-boiled detective genre or have never really explored it, its worth checking out. If you don't like the genre, than it probably isn't."The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" - This series does a pretty good job capturing the feel of the original stories written by Doyle. The stories are light entertainment, not crafty mystery puzzles which require all your concentration to try to solve as you're listening or anything like that. They portray a version of Holmes and Watson akin to the earliest of Doyle's works on them, (pre-drug habit, etc.).
"You Bet Your Life" - A comedic game show hosted by Groucho Marx. Good for when you want to listen to something but know you're going to keep getting interrupted because there's no story to try to keep track of.
"Frontier Gentleman" - I didn't want to complete the list without at least one western. This one's about a sophisticated British reporter for the London Times travelling and finding adventures among the cowboys, natives, and outlaws of America's wild west. I say, yeehaw old chap.