RADIO SHOWS ITS AGE

...WQXR, the New York Times station, aimed its pitch at the longhairs, playing classical records most of the day...

...He's pitching to the sponsor's representative sitting with folded arms in the client's booth, or worrying about the network v.p...

...Until the independents proved otherwise, network officials had a nervous feeling that too much music might scare the audience away...

...You're likely to find three or four of them suffering from hysterical blindness at the same time on different networks...

...It is apparent now that after putting up with this sort of fare for many years, large numbers of radio listeners have taken to twisting the dial and trying out sections of the radio band which are less familiar...

...As a result, his daytime shows are as slow-paced as anything in radio...

...The old Rudy Vallee variety show was a must for millions...

...All the personality has been bred out of them...

...Cott recently hired Gene Rayburn for an early morning show on WNBC...

...The radio programs that have continued for years don't stimulate any real response any more...

...At 8:30, three of them have hus-band-and-wife shows...

...Cott, who created programs at WNEW that gave the station much of its individuality and a large share of its revenue, has applied the formula to...

...Instead, WNEW will have to develop the new ideas...

...The odd result is that his relaxed commercials, which brought him loyal listeners and sponsors in droves, are often more fun than the rest of the show...

...There have been a few departures from routine programming in recent years — "Dragnet," NBC's recent documentary series, "The Challenge of Prisons," CBS's crime series, "The Nation's Nightmare," and some of CBS's house-built comedy shows...

...You can get Rayburn early in the morning, and music after midnight, but there's a long radio day in between which includes three - solid hours of soap opera, from 3 to 6 p.m...

...For one thing, the networks have lost their individuality...

...Miss Tut-tle...

...The ennui that the network stations have instilled in listeners is shown by the fine response to WOV, a New York station which offers Italian language programs ten hours a day...

...II NBC and CBS together offer six and a half hours of soap opera every day...

...WMCA aims much of its programming at serious-minded liberals who like discussions of controversial issues...

...they could hire actors and pay them well on sponsored shows...

...all four network stations have news...

...over each other's shoulders with glazed eyes, are not even pretending to communicate...

...Most of these shows—news, giveaways, situation comedy—are so similar one to another that the listener in time becomes almost incapable of any response to what he hears...

...Then when their vision clears up they all find they're losing their husbands to glamourous and unscrupulous other women...

...He has to...

...While the pace of Godfrey's morning shows may be too slow at times, the leisurely pace is a relief from the audience participation and giveaway shows run by frantic emcees engaged in a mad race with the studio clock...

...They had a tremendous advantage over local stations: money...

...People tuned in to hear their favorites and formed the habit of sticking with the big stations where they could get a variety of programs...

...At eleven, three of them have giveaway shows...

...The man at the microphone has forgotten that he's talking to people in homes...

...There are local stations which carry programs of special interest to Negroes...

...Audience participation shows ought'to be more interesting, simply because people are usually interesting in some way, given half a chance to relax and express themselves...

...In New York at 8 a.m...

...As a result, people are not only turning to the independents but some are even discovering the tiny local stations in small towns, where at least you can find out when the PTA is meeting...

...For while TV has brought enormous new revenues to the network, it is becoming so expensive that it's pricing itself out of the market...

...The "Amos 'n' Andy" show, when it was new, sent people scurrying home in the early evening to hear it...

...Except for some music and a few singers to help out, the man has to carry most of the nine hours alone...

...Ill The loss of audience to the independents has caused some concern at the networks, but they are preoccupied with TV...

...For some years now the scrappy little independents have been giving the big boys in the school yard something to worry about...

...The networks have been fortunate that this revolt did not take place long ago...

...Any creative people with new ideas who turn up are hurried into the TV side...

...And there are the foreign language stations which sometimes have so much vitality that you can feel it even without understanding the language...

...Soap opera heroines find each other's diseases and difficulties highly contagious...

...WOV bursts with vitality...

...Now you can enjoy three hours of uninterrupted misery on each network...

...Instead there is only forced laughter because he works for a diaper service, or applause because it's his 25th wedding anniversary...

...You can hear it in his voice, feel it in his delivery...

...The feeling of gratitude on the part of those who heard him made him lifelong friends in the radio audience...

...there is little except news and sports, and this pattern remains the same, year in and year out, five and six days a week...

...Network radio was fun in those days, and it garnered thousands of loyal listeners who were to stick with it for a couple of decades...

...From seven to 8:30 EST on Sunday night, NBC and CBS have solid blocks of comedy...

...But there is a need for an overhaul of the whole programming structure, which is old and threadbare...

...But their loyalty is being tested by the old network formula of taking a fresh and suddenly successful personality and spreading it all over the network...

...But it was not the advent of TV that first showed the handwriting on the wall for big-time radio...

...Music Through the Night," a program of music from midnight to 6 a.m., has a large and devoted following in the New York area and in places far outside New York where it is heard after other stations sign off for the night...

...Godfrey is now heard on radio alone nine hours a week...

...In recent years the pattern has been broken by Groucho Marx and Herb Shriner, who have demonstrated that you can get an emcee and a contestant together without making idiots of both of them...

...He can milk a joke, with chuckles and pauses, more than any man in the business...

...But the terrified giveaway contestant and the harassed emcee, looking DIANE SHIPLER is associated with John Crosby, widely syndicated radio and television columnist for the New York Herald-Tribune...

...He's heard it too often...

...They could hire stars that people wanted to hear...

...WNBC with considerable success...

...Or maybe it was going on all the time, and they were just too blind to see it...

...There is a feeling of apathy about most of the programming that comes right out of the loud speaker and puts a pall over the listener...

...When NBC finally faced the fact, it hired Ted Cott away from WNEW so that the programming at WNBC, the network's powerful flagship station, might be revamped along the lines of an independent station...

...There has been one change in the soap opera line-up...

...WNEW in New York, a highly successful operation, threw in its lot with the people who like popular music, and Martin Block, one of the early disc jockeys, has earned a mint of money for the station in 18 years by playing popular records...

...There are emcees in the business whose only audible attribute is an ability to talk fast without fluffing...

...Most of them have been running for years without any change in formula...

...O'Brien, who has already explained that she's from his home town of Seattle, "Wliere are you from...

...While this sort of thing is highly flattering to an independent, it indicates that the networks are still avoiding the idea that they ought to develop some ideas of their own instead of buying out someone else's...

...You can't expect NBC to refuse to sell them the time...

...The network officials who might overhaul it are much more concerned at the moment with the future of TV...

...Any real warmth or humor which might be extracted from the contestant is frightened off...

...They have too many other problems to think about...

...From six to seven p.m...

...When the habit was forming, network radio did have both variety and vitality...

...Rayburn and Finch, WNEW's zany early-morning team, had a huge local following for years...

...And ABC has signed Martin Block who has been almost as much a part of WNEW as its call letters for nearly two decades...

...As long as the soap companies are afraid to try anything else at this time of day, we'll probably have soaps...

...One is fundamentally bored and listening out of habit or loyalty, or both...

...The networks can't be blamed for this entirely...

...In order to keep alive, the independent stations had to offer something different...

...They have had to slant their programs toward groups and group interests, something network radio rarely dares do...

...Along came Arthur Godfrey some years back with the temerity to kid a commercial...

...How many times have you heard an emcee, his mind on other matters, ask Mrs...

...To add to their worries, network officials, who were able to ignore independent radio stations for many years, are at last aware that they are losing great chunks of radio audience to their busy little brothers...

...Lorenzo Jones," a comedy for years, has changed its theme to fit the life-can-be-un-bearable pattern...

...who's listening at home...

...You can still have Ma Perkins meddling in somebody's marital affairs for three months, then tune her in again and find her still meddling in somebody's marital affairs, very possibly the same ones...

...Even the big advertisers who were entrenched in the medium—like the Texas Company, which has cancelled the Berle show after five years — are rebelling against costs...

...It has several live dramas and a couple transcribed each day, featuring top actors from the New York Italian theater circuit (including Dino De Luca who is currently playing on Broadway opposite Shirley Booth in Time of the Cuckoo), a funny soap opera, taped interviews from Italy, and even an Italian Arthur Godfrey, Aldo Aldi, who invites people in, not to sit in a studio audience, but to drink coffee and chatter with him around a table...

...In raiding WNEW, though, WNBC has not changed its own face much...

...It's not surprising...

...When a fresh, new personality crops up in network radio, the response of surprised listeners is tremendous...

...The big difference between the independent stations and the nets is that the networks have lost touch with their audiences...

...In many important cities, they have been luring more and more of the audience away from the network outlets...