Radio as Theatre.
Some of my earliest fascination with radio as a medium came courtesy of classic radio play productions like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC series (1978-1980) and the 1938 broadcast by Orson Welles of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds that notoriously caused a public panic.
While none of my own radio programs ever caused a real riot to take place (as far as I know), the theatrical influence can be felt across the board in everything I did, from full-length radio programs and podcasts to shorter columns produced for the FM4 Morning Show, where I staged, among other things, a Zombie Apocalypse at the Vancouver Winter Olympics and a sea monster sighting at Vienna’s Danube Canal.
Below are just a few examples of some of my more… theatrical broadcasts.
Johnny Bliss and the Space Zeppelin
Starting from the premise that “no, honestly, this is just a really out there travel journalism show,” each episode of the Space Zeppelin moved farther and farther away from reportage, culminating in a series of space battles, betrayals, and merry singalongs that had nary to do with any real-world context.
Unfortunately for most English readers out there, half of the dialogue is in Austrian German, so if you don’t speak that language, it probably won’t make all that much sense.
For a complete list of cast and credits (and there are many), I encourage you to check out the web stories.
The Truth, the Myth, and the Cuddly
Presented in the format of a surrealist game show, this one was an outlier among my regular Johnny’s Journeys special programs, unique for being the first—and last—of my programs to ever not actually include me as a character. The entire cast, from the manic game show host and all of the contestants, were written to feel both very contemporary to the 2013-2014 period, and separate, possibly as if they were all taking part in a shared dream. As dadaist as any of my programs ever came, I felt this one merits inclusion in this list for its experimental storytelling structure.
There is, of course, an accompanying article.
Johnny’s Journals
Another variation on the Johnny’s Journeys program, this one was unique for also being somewhat of a confessional, rather more honest about my personal life than I’d normally be on-air. At the time (2014), I was recovering from a broken heart and wanted to travel in India and Bangladesh privately rather than as a journalist. I made recordings, more soundscapes than interviews, while I was also keeping a written journal of my thoughts, with no intention of ever sharing them.
Later, I decided all of this material could make for an interesting exercise in personal narrative, so I turned it into a minimalist radio play, and wrote an accompanying article.
Johnny’s Journeys: the Original Program
After my first year (2009-2010) working as an international travel journalist, I returned to Vienna to host a special program about the experience. My colleague Albert Farkas had the bright idea of having me tell the story of my year whilst taking listeners on a trip around multicultural Vienna, visiting local places that would be a good match for the global stories I was telling. Joyfully chaotic in every way, this was the first program I’d ever broadcast that could justifiably be called a radio play, and it was the beginning of an era.
“The Johnny Bliss Show” (Original Pilot)
Never broadcast in any form, this extremely blasphemous—for a Catholic country like Austria—half hour of comedy poking fun at theological notions of Heaven and Hell certainly got the attention of some influential people at radio FM4! It almost certainly was responsible for my being able to stay in the country, let alone work professionally in a creative, storytelling field. As the only radio I’d really bothered interacting with up to that point had been in the form of the aforementioned classic radio plays, this pilot too was essentially a radio play, albeit one conducted almost entirely in spoken word.
(Produced in 2006.)