TV as radio or children’s game
Listening or playing Guess Who?
“Leftist broadcasters” (Project 2025)
It’s extraordinarily dishonest to assert that NPR and PBS are noneducational or virtually noneducational, unless of course you’ve already restricted “educational” to programming for the very young. So Sesame Street is educational, but All Things Considered, American Masters, Finding Your Roots, and Frontline are not.
Backstayges and Roys
I finally realized what the group trips of Succession remind me of: the group trips of Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife, the Bob and Ray radio-serial spoof.
“Anthony! Anthony!”
I remember “Anthony! Anthony!” not so much from the commercial as from Bob and Ray’s radio repurposing of it.
TV as radio
From Tight Spot (dir. Phil Karlson, 1955), spoken by prison inmate Sherry Conley (Ginger Rogers): “Television should be so good that when you close your eyes it sounds like a radio.”
“Anthony! Anthony!”
Mary Fiumara was the voice in the Prince Spaghetti commercial.
Any port in a storm
“Five-hour-energy-dot-com. This is NPR.”
Bob Wolff’s archive
Seventy-four years in sports broadcasting