Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.
The end of an era?
Summer 2026 teeters in the Northern Hemisphere between elegiac and terrifying, as we swelter under heat domes, wildfire smoke and/or drone netting, waiting for the end of the world, or at least the end of the World Cup.
Now we must add the declaration of a minor apocalypse for producers who make programs and stories in audio form. “The End of an Era” is the headline from Bloomberg’s audio columnist Ashley Carman, who notes that longtime podcasts such as Slate’s Culture Gabfest and Mark Maron’s WTF, among others, have called it quits:
“The repercussions of podcasting’s generational shift are officially upon us. Audio is out. Visuals are in.”
Well, that sounds a little grim. But also, vintage.
A scheme to destroy
I wrote here about the bitterness and frustration that US radio’s first generation of producers felt as television rose to prominence the early 1950s. Like many others, I had assumed that the management of the large US networks, NBC and CBS, were more than happy to ditch radio.
It turns out that wasn’t quite true.
Broadcast TV was in the works for a long time, and its reputation vacillated between money pit and world-conquering technology (a pattern we can easily recognize today). If you owned a set and lived in the right part of the country, you could watch some television in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But it still wasn’t clear whether it was a passing fad or a true disruptor.
Meanwhile, radio had reached peak cultural influence. And the networks had entered a period of major competition for prestige, talent, ratings and ad dollars.
Early in 1950 the Columbia Broadcasting Company raided NBC's personnel. It made off with many of NBC's top artists and lashed them to long-term contracts. NBC had another worry.
TV, the brash infant, was making inroads on advertising revenue. NBC's executives didn't take these depredations lying down. In rebuttal they decided to group into a Sunday night show such an outlay of stars that no man, woman or child in the nation would be so foolish as to listen to anything else in the interval between 6:30 and 8:00 PM, Eastern Standard Time. It was schemed to destroy competition.
That quote is on page 291 of a lively autobiography by actress Tallulah Bankhead. She is a figure who still endures as the template for pencil-eyebrowed, cigarette-wielding cartoon characters from Cruella De Vil to Natasha Fatale.
Bankhead was notorious for her exhibitionism and raunchy quotes like, “My father warned me about men and booze, but he never said anything about women and cocaine.” That kind of stuff made her memoir a bestseller — so why did she interrupt it for a potted history of radio’s notorious talent raids?
It’s because at the time her book came out, Tallulah Bankhead was hosting the weekly extravaganza on NBC radio called The Big Show. The program that “schemed to destroy competition,” as she put it, was the network’s belated response to letting so many of its major stars walk out the door to CBS.
Glamorous and unpredictable
NBC launched The Big Show on radio in late 1950. Every Sunday, a new rotation of famous performers would sing, crack jokes, render dramatic readings, and banter for 90 minutes. Every script was sharp as a knife. There was a live orchestra and choir, and the show would go on to tour the UK, Europe, and the US.
At the center of it all was the hostess, introduced as “glamorous and unpredictable” by the announcer every week.
In her autobiography, Bankhead writes that decades earlier, when she first performed for radio on the BBC, she’d been overcome by mike fright. But she fought it down. She even went on to do condensed renditions of “great plays” on the radio from time to time, though she called these abridged versions “gruesome.”
In view of the revolting nature of these corruptions, a reader may logically inquire, "Why did you do them?"
For money, darlings. My tenure in plays was too erratic, my expenditures too frightening, to permit dawdling. Were I to survive, I must work, come hell, high water or moldy script.
Sure enough, when Bankhead showed up for The Big Show’s first rehearsal, she found the script disheartening — there wasn’t nearly enough Tallulah time. The director and scriptwriters seem to have fixed that in a hurry.
At six o'clock on the Sunday night of November 4, 1950, with some thirty million of the curious listening in, I submitted to the knife.
Guess what happened! Your heroine emerged from the fracas hailed as Queen of the Kilocycles. Authorities cried out Tallulah had redeemed radio. In shepherding my charges through "The Big Show," said the critics, I had snatched radio out of the grave. The autopsy was delayed.
She’s right — The Big Show indeed entered the discourse as radio’s potential savior. Which was a lot to put on a single program, even one with a budget of more than a million dollars (in today’s money) per episode.
Back in 2005, New Yorker critic Robert Gottlieb gave The Big Show a listen as he contemplated Bankhead’s enduring influence. “You rise to her generosity, her sense of fun, her self-deprecation, her giggle — and her unerring timing,” he wrote.
I’m afraid to say, though, most of the material of The Big Show is not my bag. It’s all camp and vamp, fully locked into network radio’s traditions of racial exclusion, corny humor and sentimental show tunes. Still, even I have to admit that the show had its moments.
Tallulah Bankhead and comedian Groucho Marx play especially well off one another. In one sequence from February 1951, Bankhead does an emotional rendition of Dorothy Parker’s monologue-story “The Telephone Call,” about a woman desperate for a call from the man she’s infatuated with.
Groucho Marx then follows with a surreal skit in which he plays the imaginary suitor on the other end of “The Telephone Call,” who turns out to be a ditzy guy who can’t find the piece of paper on which he wrote down the woman’s number.
For money, darlings
Another moment caught my ear near the end of the very first episode (at about 1:15:00). It’s part of a meta-skit about the creation of The Big Show. A network executive named Pinch Penny is waiting for the cast to arrive, when a producer brings on a barbershop quartet to try out a commercial.
Mr. Penny protests that the show has no commercials — which was true at the time. Networks would sometimes launch shows in an effort to attract corporate sponsors, who would then offset most production costs. Until the network succeeded in selling the airtime, these shows were called “sustaining.”
In this skit, the quartet begins to hum, then launches into an incredible earworm of a jingle, a commercial for having no commercials:
S-U-S-T-A, I-N-I-N-G, we’re sustaining NBC!
S-U-S-T-A, I-N-I-N-G, who’s sustaining old TV?
S-U-S-T-A, I-N-I-N-G, all the stars are here you see —
There’s more, but it’s drowned out by the angry shouts of Pinch Penny.
The joke probably went over the heads of most listeners then, and it's only nerd-funny now, but it foreshadowed the bitterness that would later afflict radio’s diehards. Because profits from radio advertising did “sustain” television production for many years before the medium consumed its parent.
That was all yet to come. The Big Show did eventually find a few sponsors — dedicating much the first part this program from 1952, for instance, to tiresome ads for aluminum foil. But 90 minutes per week is a lot of airtime to sell. In May of that year, the New York Times reported that the show was coming to an end.
For reasons no one can quite fathom, the show, one of the most talked-about offerings on radio, just could not seem to acquire enough sponsors to make it a going concern. NBC, in a two-year experiment to vitalize its Sunday night radio schedule, is reported to have lost something over a million dollars.
A million dollars in 1952 is the equivalent of $12.7 million in losses today, according to my beloved CPI Inflation Calculator.
Meanwhile, critics had also tired of The Big Show. The plot-free hodgepodge of star-on-star banter and insult comedy, considered charming and edgy two years earlier, now felt repetitive.
This makes sense. Imagine if the Oscars — or better yet, the Las Culturistas annual Culture Awards show — decided to go weekly. It would be exhausting to contemplate, much less watch. Serving up a giant banquet of entertainment all the time defeats the purpose of giant banquets.
Goodbye to the big top
The folly at the heart of The Big Show was nostalgia for the live-spectacle model of broadcast entertainment, one that originally sprang from vaudeville and circuses. If the show was meant to “save” any aspect of radio, it was the type of superlative, complicated productions only the big networks could pull off.
But by 1950, radio’s creative vanguard had turned to newly-emerging recording technologies, which allowed for shaping work post-production. Every week, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall recorded their lines for Bold Venture, a drama that was then cobbled together by producers and sent out on disks. Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly featured field tape and newsmaker soundbites on Hear It Now. On WNYC radio and in popular albums, Tony Schwartz shared his recorded portraits of New Yorkers.
“The rise of television had a curious effect on the quality of radio programming in the early 1950s,” critic Leonard Maltin notes in Michael Keith’s Talking Radio:
On the one hand, the exciting upstart medium drained a lot of talent from the radio pool. But at the same time, the people who stayed behind — writers, directors, actors, producers — found themselves with a new degree of freedom, since they no longer "mattered" as much. The result is that network radio shows from the medium's twilight years are in many cases extraordinarily good; they represent the work of the top pros in the business working at the peak of their powers.
That feeling of no longer “mattering” is pretty familiar to audio-first producers today. And the same question remains: to whom should we matter, audiences or advertisers?
Podcasting hasn’t had the time or steady money to develop the kind of institutions that might throw a Hail Mary pass like The Big Show. That seems sad, but I consider it a good thing.
Back in 1950, Tallulah Bankhead and company were held up as the great hope of radio — but when their massive extravaganza ended, it only accelerated the notion that audio production was a hopeless cause. The true hopeless cause were network executives who clung to outdated ideas of what radio should be, and then expected advertisers to line up and pay for it.
Video pivots to Tallulah
Bankhead returned to the stage, but for the rest of her life, she also showed up as a delightful and, yes, unpredictable guest on TV. She could capture any camera, even the one used for Ed Murrow’s strange Zoom-like interview program Person to Person.
In 1957 she played herself as a magnetic and ridiculous rival to Lucille Ball. In 1968, she was a “seemingly inebriated” interrogator of John Lennon and Paul McCartney on The Tonight Show.
But my favorite turn is her final role, as the villainess Black Widow on the cheesy Batman series on ABC in the 1960s. It was still in reruns in my childhood, and I’m sure that’s where I first saw her. Most importantly, I heard her voice, chewing the scenery with such lines as “If you wish to live and thrive, let the spider run alive.”
That voice is slurred but unmistakeable. By this point, Tallulah has fully occupied her persona as someone with no fucks to give away. Her voice, wounded by childhood illnesses and an infinity-packs-per-day cigarette habit, was always the key to her staying power.
That’s the voice we need when times are weird: an enchanting wreck, original and shameless. Because what shame is there when faced with all the things we cannot control?
“Generational shift?” I hear Tallulah Bankhead guffaw on some distant frequency. “Oh darling, you just live in the United States! Everyone is supposed to be obsolete from the moment they’re born. Well, I refuse. Now go on and let me have this last drag.”