An Englishman places an ad in the newspaper hoping to find a fellow countryman to drive from New York City to San Francisco. George Coulouris plays the down-on-his-luck gambler who answers the ad in the hopes of escaping the debts he’s piled up. Joe Kearns plays the boring Britisher who is constantly asking questions about London to keep the conversation going in all the hours of driving. Is that what he’s doing? Or is he prepping himself for his own escape to get away with his own problems or encounters with the law? Sorry for the mild spoiler, but the story is pretty arduous listening as you really start to hate Joe Kearns character as much as Coulouris does… which means Kearns is playing it quite well. Stick with the story, it has a better ending than one might expect.
The author is Harold Swanton, writer of many scripts, especially The Whistler.
The boring Britisher was offering $150 to drive from New York to San Francisco. That’s $2,500 in US$2023.
This was a missing episode for a very long time until an Armed Forces Radio Service transcription was found in the early 2000s. No network recording is available.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP460131
THE CAST
GEORGE COULOURIS (Kelly Raymond), Wally Maher (Detective Kelson), Jim Backus (First Detective / Highway patrol cop), Jerry Hausner (Paper boy / Tommy DeWitt), Gloria Gordon (Miss Andrews / Margaret Stoddard), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Walker Hendricks)
According to Keith Scott, the story was presented again on Murder by Experts 1950-12-04 and Hollywood Star Playhouse 1952-06-08. The story was presented again on Suspense in 1958.
Harold Swanton had a long career as a radio and TV writer. His papers were donated to University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). This is a link to the holdings https://www.library.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/pamss218.pdf
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