CBS Radio Workshop

January 27, 1956 – September 22, 1957 · 86 broadcasts

"The theater of the mind, dedicated to man's imagination" -- that was the promise of the CBS Radio Workshop, an experimental dramatic anthology that ran weekly on CBS from January 27, 1956, to September 22, 1957. A late-era revival of the prestigious Columbia Workshop tradition, each half-hour was a fresh, ambitious, self-contained production: literary adaptations, sound-poems, satires, opera, and documentaries built by CBS's finest writers, directors, and engineers. All 86 broadcasts survive. It opened with a feat. The premiere adaptation of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World -- with Huxley narrating his own work -- featured a 30-second "manufacturing of babies" montage that took three sound men and five hours to assemble from metronome ticks, tom-toms, bubbling water, a cow's moo, oscillators, and clicking wine glasses, then played backward with echo. Produced by William N. Robson and William Froug, the sustaining series was a showcase: authors voiced their own stories (Ray Bradbury, Robert Nathan), and a young staff composer named Jerry Goldsmith scored episodes before his film fame. Among American radio's last great experimental anthologies, it gathered remarkable voices -- William Conrad, Vincent Price, Raymond Burr, even Edward R. Murrow and Senator John F. Kennedy -- in what retrospectives rightly call a last flowering of radio art.