Word: soaps
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...telling effect by letting radio speak for itself-on the theory that there is enough rope lying around any broadcasting studio to hang most of the people responsible for radio. A good deal is accomplished, too, by the unemphatic statement of some familiar but appalling statistics: the suds of soap opera drown out 48% of daylight broadcasting time, and some 20 million U.S. housewives love that suds...
...episode. Comfortable, florid ABC Vice President Ed Borroff was among the listeners that day. A longtime critic of such programs, he decided that the cliff-hang ending had gone quite far enough. Last week Borroff gave orders which may chip away dangerously at the foundations of all soap operas, as well as kid-chillers. Jack Armstrong and his running mate, Sky King, he ruled, need more time, less suspense. After Aug. 25 the shows will be heard on alternate days and stretched to a full half hour. Each day there will be a complete episode-and no more cliff-hangs...
...some areas," said Barber Bert Oakley, "my new shop would scare the trade away." But not in fashionable Westwood, a Cadillac's spurt away from Hollywood. With searchlights, clouds of soap bubbles, and a few cinemactor customers (Allan Jones and Pat O'Brien) to give it atmosphere, the grand opening of "the world's swankiest tonsorial parlor" last week drew thousands of spectators...
Bell often plays the villain in as many as 16 shows a week; his record is seven in one day. Last week, on "a sort of summer vacation," he did the dirty work in nine, including one soap opera. All this crime pays Bell about $30,000 a year, but he sweats like a stool pigeon for it-twelve hours a day, six days a week.* Even off the air, Bell sounds and looks like a hood just back from escort duty on a one-way ride. With his sneering voice goes a curling lip (with black, headwaiter mustache...
...case of death, call us." Washington, D.C.'s WQQW (TIME, Jan. 20) had refused to air this inviting sales talk by a local undertaker. It had also banned soap operas, chill-the-children shows and (with a few sheepish exceptions) singing commercials. Instead, the station had gone heavy on good music, local news, literary, scientific and medical discussion...