This is a curious drama-only recording that has an interesting
backstory. The recording has been in circulation for many years, and
it seems like a broadcast. Decades ago, a collector patched the
opening of the 1957-10-06 recording onto it, editing out the mention
of that episode’s guest, Jack Carson. That patch led into a
marvelous production with William Conrad as narrator. It’s not that
Jack Carson did a bad job, it’s that William Conrad was an
exceptional talent, whether it be acting or narration.
Collectors were confused about the recording. The “patch” was an
innocuous attempt at restoration that seemed to be appropriate in its
time. We have much more information today that allows richer
historical context. We know that the Robson era was using separate
recordings of drama as its main practice, and recording other
broadcast elements separately. Only the drama portion of this episode
was finished, but the recording never had the other components, such
as the George Walsh introductions and the William N. Robson
monologue, were likely never done.
Because it was never broadcast, it still appropriate that it has a
date. It is a good assumption that the episode was actually planned
for 1958-09-28. It is believed that this broadcast was to be a
“victory lap” and offer of congratulations for sound effects
artist Tom Hanley, author of the script. It was his first, and won an
award from the Writer’s Guild. Fellow practitioners Gus Bayz and
Ross Murray wrote many scripts, but Hanley’s rookie outing earned a
recognition they did not have.
For more details about the 1957 broadcast, resources are available at
These are the details about this production and how became a Suspense
curiosity:
1) There was no Suspense broadcast on
September 28, 1958.
2) The series was in process of temporarily shifting to Saturdays
to allow for NFL Football. Sunday, September 28 was opening day;
today it is 3 weeks earlier. CBS did not have a national football
broadcast, but many of their affiliates were stations that carried
games of their city's teams or the teams had a regional following.
3) Because Suspense was early in the Sunday
schedule, it was the one to be moved because NFL games
might not be finished in time for Suspense to be
heard. The other shows like Indictment and Yours Truly,
Johnny Dollar, and others, remained in their Sunday slots.
4) September 28 would have been the final show of the 1957-1958.
Newspaper publicity for the episode The
Wait on Saturday, October 4, identified it as the
beginning of the new season.
5) On Saturdays, in the East Coast schedule, Suspense
was a 7:30pm show. It was preceded by a sports news shows and
followed by national news program The World Tonight. That was
followed by a New York Philharmonic program.
6) It was likely that Misfire was in the original plans to be
the September 28 program. We have the drama-only recording which has
a different cast and it has a slightly revised script. Hanley’s
Writers Guild recognition was officially awarded
sometime between September 21 and 25 at a
Guild dinner event.
7) Newspapers and other listings may include
Suspense in their timetables for Sunday
September 28. Timetables were often out of date.
They did not have the same update urgency or editorial scrutint that
other sections of newspapers had. It was common for the timetable and
the TV-radio columns on the very same page to disagree if there was
late-breaking news. Few newspapers picked up the date change as a
news item. The CBS publicity seems to have read “Suspense,
CBS radio’s award-winning mystery series which as been heard on
Sunday afternoons, will be broadcast at a new time – Saturdays from
7:35 to 8:00pm – effective this week… [and] will not be heard
this afternoon due to the professional football broadcast.”
8) Some stations may have run a repeat Suspense
broadcast of some type in the slot if they were not impacted by the
football schedule. It was not Misfire. Many stations were
recording their Suspense feed and playing it at another time.
Others were picking up whatever CBS had on the feed or used some
other program, perhaps locally produced, to fill in “the Suspense
gap” on that day.
9) We know that the decision to move Suspense to Saturday was
not made in haste, because the hard copy script for The Wait
does not have any date revision markings that a last-minute change
would indicate. It clearly shows a Saturday broadcast date. The
Wait was recorded on September 24, meaning that the script hard
copy was prepped a few days before that.
10) The 1958-09-21 No Hiding Place had a closing announcement
that told the audience to listen "next week." Since that
show was pre-recorded on September 17, the decision was likely made
official shortly after that date. If they had known by
that date, it is likely the closing announcement would have reflected
the change in some way. This timing would place the CBS scheduling
decision about 10 days before September 28.
Collectors did not know what to do with this recording in their
Suspense collections. No hard copy script has been found.
There is no script in the KNX Collection or at the Pacific Pioneers
records at University of California at Santa Barbara. Because there
was little reliable documentation available to collectors in the
1970s and 1980s, the recording “fell” or “backed into” the
date because not much was known about the CBS schedule change. In
fact, many of the shows that we now know as Saturday broadcasts were
assigned Sunday dates by those collectors. These relatively innocent
errors have been corrected over the years as scripts and other
resources have become available and accessed more easily.
The surviving recording is in excellent sound. The patch of the 1957
broadcast has been removed as the recording is not contemporary to
the drama recording or its originally intended broadcast date.
Now that we know this was never broadcast, it should not be
numbered as a broadcast. Some collectors have a preference for
numbering the episodes. There is precedent: the surviving recording
of “Murder is a Twist” with Howard Duff that was not broadcast is
not numbered by collectors. That episode later became A Murderous
Revision, which was broadcast. Forecast had an audition of
“Suspense” with a different concept than the series would come to
have, and was a failure. That should not be included in the Suspense
broadcast numbering, either, because the series was significantly
reconstituted to earn CBS approval and capture the attention of
sponsors. The Suspense Project log numbers Forecast as
“000” and identifies this 1958 Misfire as “not
applicable” (N/A). It is proper to sequence the recording with the
date of 1958-09-28 because that was the original intent before the
“football decision” and all of the elements of the program fit
into the techniques and performers of that particular time.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP580928
THE CAST
WILLIAM CONRAD (Narrator), John Dehner (Leigh Thurston), Barney
Phillips (John Grant), Sam Pierce (Pierce, the reporter), others
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