As I’ve mentioned before I’ve been listening to old radio programs as I drive around in the car. For the last couple of months I’ve been listening to what I have no doubt is the second-best radio drama series ever made: Dragnet. In 1949 after his short run in the highly-rated Pat Novak for Hire Jack Webb had Dragnet greenlighted and the rest, to coin a cliché, is history.
If you only know Dragnet from its late 60s television revival, check out the radio series. Everything that’s campy in the TV series works on radio.
They tackled subjects which strike me as very frank and realistic for the time. Something like 5-10% of the cases are drug-dealing in one form or another. I’ve heard one case involving prostitution. They dealt with homicide, theft, fraud, and just about every other crime subject in a very low-key, factual, realistic fashion.
In 1951 Barton Yarborough, the radio staple who had played Joe Friday’s partner Ben Romero since the series’s inception, died suddenly of a heart attack. On December 27, 1951, in an episode titled “The Big Sorrow” dedicated to Yarborough’s memory, Joe Friday receives the news that Ben had died of a heart attack. Very affecting. For the first four years of the series they repeated the Christmas episode, “A .22 for Christmas”, in which a youngster who’d received a .22 rifle for Christmas accidentally kills a playmate with it. Also very affecting.
