Researched and Written by Tina Kakuske

The Golden Age of Radio

Radio was the “dominant electronic home entertainment medium” from the early 1920s to late 1950s in the United States, known as the Golden Age of Radio. Just as folks in the 21^st century have their favorite visual series on Netflix, Amazon or Hulu, people in the first half of the 20^th century had their favorite audio series/programs. Programs like The Shadow, Gunsmoke, and Little Orphan Annie had faithful listeners eagerly anticipating weekly episodes. Actors, musicians, announcers, radio and sound engineers, advertisers and others were part of a phenomena that lives on nowadays as nostalgic entertainment. Old-time radio can now be found on dedicated radio stations, podcasts, online streaming, satellite radio like SiriusXM, and in The Internet Archive.

Vintage Commercials

One entertaining feature of old-time radio shows were the commercials. In today’s production of A Christmas Carol we hear about Olde London Extra Fancy Fruitcake and the Lady Fanny Happy Tot Baby Doll. Nostalgia for old commercials is popular and can be found at several sources online including the Internet Archive and Old Radio World.

Radio Commercials Day is observed annually on August 28, the date in 1922 when the first radio commercial was broadcast from New York. So, celebrate the next Radio Commercials Day by checking out some old-time commercials like Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Doublemint Gum, or Mr. Clean!

Foley – Artistry in Sound

This theatrical radio show includes sound design and foley expertly accomplished by Brian Grimm. Foley is the part of sound design where sound effects are added to enhance media like film and videos and in this case, theatre.

Grimm has an extensive background in music, which inspired them to “perform with sounds or sound making objects just like you would with music instruments.” This led to doing live foley mixed with music scores for theatre. The skills needed to succeed as a foley artist are many and deep including music composition, audio engineering with live and studio sound skills, “ear training, understanding how acoustics work, creativity, script literacy, ability to collaborate and communicate, and personal experience in live performance.”

Concerning this production of A Christmas Carol, Grimm states that “the audience should be listening for some very fun sound effects such as doors, … footsteps, and chains” in addition to one of their favorite effects, wind, accomplished with “TAP’s custom built wind machine.” Grimm points out that, “There is also a lot of fun, playful collaboration between the actors and director in how we are using the foley objects in this specific production!”

A Ghost Story for Christmas?

Ghost stories at Christmas may seem strange to Americans, but the genre has developed in England from a long tradition of oral storytelling around the winter solstice, when there is a change in the weather to a darker and colder time of year. Perhaps, a spooky time of year. The oral tradition eventually became a written tradition in Victorian times, and many British writers, in addition to Dickens, provided ghost stories to read around Christmastime.

Sara Cleto, a folklorist specializing in British literature says that Dickens, “wrote a bunch of different Christmas novellas, several of which involved ghosts, specifically, and then started editing more and more Christmas ghost stories from other people, and working those into the magazines he was already editing. And that just caught like wildfire.” Cleto says that the result is that “Dickens played a huge part” in popularizing the genre in England.”

Adaptations Abound

The production you are experiencing today is an adaptation of the beloved Christmas story, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, published in 1843. As early as 1844, when an unauthorized two-act production by C.Z. Barnett was produced at the Surrey Theatre, adaptations of A Christmas Carol have been and continue to be numerous, existing in various forms including theater, opera, ballet, books, magazines, radio, film, television, podcasts, and video games.

Of unique interest are:

• The earliest surviving film of the story titled, Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (silent, 1901)
• A 1990 start of a tradition on NPR with Jonathan Winters, voicing all of the characters and reading from the original script that Dickens used on his tours
• A theatrical version of A Christmas Carol written and spoken in Klingon (2010, Chicago)
• A CD recording performed by the great-great-grandson of Charles Dickens, Gerald Charles Dickens, in which he plays all 26 characters from the original reading tour script
• Even Hallmark jumped on the A Christmas Carol bandwagon with the 2025 film, “Christmas Above the Clouds,” with CEO Ella Neezer being the Scrooge of the story.

Click here for an extensive list of adaptations.

(BONUS) A Christmas Carol Almost Wasn’t

Charles Dickens was concerned about issues and the state of the poor in England, especially the condition of children who were forced to work to live and support their families, as he had been in childhood. He thought about producing a pamphlet with the title, “An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child” but instead changed his mind and wrote a story about Christmas, appealing to the best in humankind’s nature at a blessed time of year. Thus, A Christmas Carol became an allegory, a “story, play, poem, picture, or other work in which the characters and events represent particular qualities or ideas that relate to morals, religion, or politics.”

Scrooge represents greed, selfishness, and an unfeeling nature from the upper class towards others; Jacob Marley symbolizes the weight of a life spent on selfish pursuits; the three spirits represent Past-memory, Present-charity, empathy, the Christmas Spirit, and Future-fear of death, consequences, legacy. The messages/lessons found in A Christmas Carol are still relevant today as evidenced in the continuing popularity of the much-loved story of Ebenezer Scrooge’s redemption.

Did You Know?

The original title of A Christmas Carol is A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.

A Christmas Carol is in the public domain, although some adaptations may be covered by copyright. Gutenberg.org has free downloads of the book and LibriVox.org has free audio.

Dickens nickname was Boz.

The word scrooge was added to the English Oxford Dictionary in 1982 as a noun defined as a mean miserly person.

A Christmas Carol was broadcast many times on the radio and one performance of note was by Lionel Barrymore and Orson Welles in 1939.

Foley was named after Jack Foley, (1891-1967) a pioneering sound effects artist who helped in the transition from silent to talking film, adding post-production sound effects and music.

(BONUS) In-Depth Dickens, the 19^th Century Rock Star

Charles Dickens Museum

Currently celebrating its 100^th anniversary.  The museum is situated at 48 Doughty Street which was Dickens’s London home from 1837-1839.

The Charles Dickens Page

_{“Marley’s Ghost” original illustration from the 1843 edition. By  Leech – This file has been provided by the British Library from its digital collections. Catalogue entry., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31452749}

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