History of radio play 8-02-10

Radio plays were first performed in the 1927, when networks began adapting short stories for broadcast and larger stations began to develop programs using announcers or narrators.

Before the 1920's most broadcasts were one time events consisting mainly of talk and music.

In the late 1920's many network sponsored programs with the duration of one hour were performed. During this period the most popular radio performances were musical varieties and concert music programs.

Song-and-patter teams, two people talking between songs, became popular during this period; later it became an only-patter comedy act. The Amos 'n' Andy show was one of the first of these comedy sows, and it was presented five nights a week for 15 minutes each.

In the early 1930's national advertisement started buying air-time and sponsor programs for radio advertising and the consequence was the development of many new program forms. Among the new program types were: dramatized news programs, daytime "soap opera" serialized drama, after school juvenile serialized adventure drama, and many others.

In the early 1940's radio programs reflected America's involvement in the war and the number of hours per week devoted to news broadcast nearly doubled.

During the 1944-45 season networks offered 47 hours a week of dramatic programs during the evening and on Sunday and 25 of these hours were offered from thriller drama programs.

In the early years of television it was too expensive to create new programs, so the forms that existed as radio plays were moved to television, so it was possible to see on TV what was heard on radio.