Quiet Please: Encyclopedia II - Quiet Please - Overview

Quiet Please - Overview

Though the general thrust of the stories were fantasy, horror and suspense, Cooper's scripts for Quiet Please often covered a large thematic range, including humor (some of it quite self-deprecating) romance, science fiction and crime and family drama. Cooper often drew upon the Bible for inspiration, though he generally tweaked the stories and plots past the point of easy recognizability. Regardless of content, most episodes had a dreamlike, surreal quality: Odd or paranormal events are related, but rarely explained.

Many listeners (and critics) were baffled by the show's many unusual features, but it is still regarded as one of the high points of American radio drama. Some episodes will seem dated to modern ears, but others are arguably still as effective as when they were first broadcast.

Each episode began (listen to intro) with Cooper intoning the show's title, follwed by a long pause (sometimes up to seven seconds), before repeating the title. Then, the show's theme music was played, a dirgey, funereal organ and piano version of a portion of the second movement of Cesar Franck's 1899 Symphony in D Minor. The introduction established the sparse, understated tone of the show, and has inspired collectors and reviewers to remark upon Cooper's use of the dramatic power of silence.

As with many radio programs to feature prominent organ accompaniment, Quiet Please was a rather low budget undertaking. The show's keyboardist, however, arguably utilized the instruments in a more innovative way than others--not only for punctuation of climactic moments, but also as an element of the scripts, as in the lazy, boogie woogie riffs in the clandestine casino scenes in "Good Ghost" (24 November 1948), or when the show's theme was used as a post-hypnotic trigger in by a hypnotist in "Symphony in D Minor" (13 September 1948)

Compared to other contemporary radio dramas, Quiet Please used fewer sound effects and less dialogue, depending instead on first person narration to drive each play. As noted above, silence was often used masterfully; a 1949 Oakland Tribune article by John Crosby notes "There are long, long pauses, so long sometimes you wonder if your radio has gone on the blink. Networks are horrified at the amount of dead air they purchase along with Cooper. (A half hour Cooper script played at ordinary tempo would run about 11 minutes.)"[1] Though overall Crosby had high praise for Quiet, Please, he thought there were too many confused, deus ex machina endings, that the characters were sometimes underdeveloped. He also wrote that Cooper "avoids cliches with such intensity that he's creating his own."

Most episodes featured no more than two or three actors, with Chappell taking the first person voice in all but a handful of episodes. At the end of each program, Cooper offered a teaser for the next show. These were usually unrehersed, and often displayed Cooper's wry or morbid humor: "My story for you next week is called 'A Night to Forget' – it's about a man who wished he could – and couldn't."[2] Cooper's teaser was always followed by Cooper's sign-off: "And so, until next week at this same time, I am quietly yours, Ernest Chappell."

Despite some positive reviews, the show never established itself and might have suffered from poor scheduling. During its first year, Quiet, Please was broadcast at 3.30pm, a time slot usually reserved for after-school programming aimed at juveniles. Its second season found the show at a more appropriate 9.30pm, but its third and final season the show was bumped again, this time to 5.30pm.

Probably the most highly regarded episode of Quiet Please is "The Thing on the Fourble Board" (August 8, 1949), about an oil-field worker who encounters a mysterious subterranean being hiding on the derrick's catwalk. The story's twist ending has led some fans to label the episode one of the best radio horror programs ever broadcast. Especially effective was Cecil Roy's vocal performance as the creature. Though he appears only very briefly, Roy's vocal (barely recognizable as human) is perhaps one of the creepiest vocal performaces in the history of radio, still startling and chill-inducing even after decades.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Overview", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki