Piloting into the Unknown

by Rick Kennett

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

On 4th December 1988, I made a triumphant, if temporary, return to the air waves.

Three weeks prior to this, a friend of mine, Sonja, had left Queensland with three others for a motorcycle tour of Victoria. Just before she left, I wrote her a letter: “Would you like to do a radio show while you’re in Melbourne?”

On the evening of the 4th, Sonja and one of her group, Kelly, rumbled up to my door on their big Yamahas. Records, tapes and books were loaded into Sonja’s top-box strapped on the back of her bike, and I loaded myself onto Kelly’s pillion seat — cast, crutches and all — and off we roared into the night.

We reached the station around 9:15. At 10:00 we went to air with the main titles music from Forbidden Planet. Since I hadn’t handled the panel in nearly three months, I tended to be a bit rusty and somehow managed to turn on the wrong microphone for the introductions. Fortunately, I noticed the needle on the VU meter wasn’t flickering to my voice and was able to rectify the mistake.

As I was doing all this, a little red sign which read “Log Tape” started flashing at me from the panel, indicating the tape on the reel-to-reel monitor had run out. All radio stations are legally required to record everything they broadcast and keep the tapes for at least one month.

I quickly explained what was happening with the show that night, starting with “The Body Snatchers” by Robert Louis Stevenson. I turned on the cassette player, then, with great awkwardness, levered myself out from behind the panel, hooked onto my crutches, and was about to make the long journey to the other end of the corridor to put a new spool onto the monitor when Sonja remarked, “Why is the story only coming out of one speaker?”

I looked up at the stereo speakers on the wall, then down at the panel — and went cold. The cassette was playing on “cue” rather than “to air” — the recording was going no further than the studio. We were transmitting the dreaded dead air.

Charging back on one leg, I rewound the tape, put the cassette player’s panel button into the “to air” position and started again. I was glad when I heard the soft Scottish bur of John Shedden’s reading coming out of both speakers this time. Still, it had put an embarrassing hole in the program.

Out the door again, down the corridor to where the reel-to-reel monitor lived

Balancing on one leg, I juggled with spools, screwed and unscrewed capstan hubs, put on a new reel, rethreaded tape through the heads and guides, then pushed buttons I hoped were the right ones to get it recording again.

While I was doing this, Kelly yelled out that there was a phone call for me. Hobbling back, I found it was Ashley, a regular listener to Pilots. I explained my earlier stuff-up, for which he forgave me, adding, “Welcome back,” which made me feel better.

I did a reading next and then Sonja did a reading, followed by Kelly. After that it was time for a Bribe to Subscribe. As I was detailing the list of goodies a subscriber would receive — a magazine, discount vouchers, etc — Sonja made ‘enthusiasm noises’ in the background: “Gosh! Wow! Great! Lovely!” And by God, we got a subscriber!

* * *

I returned to 3PBS on a more permanent basis in February 1989, complete with a limp and a walking stick. In the intervening time there’d been upheavals at the station. A year previous, a licence had finally been obtained for full-time transmission. No longer working on a Mickey Mouse output of 200 watts from an aerial atop the Royal Women’s Hospital, 3PBS now boomed out from a transmission tower in the mountains. Now in early ’89 there was a reshuffle of music categories. Pilots into the Unknown had been drastically reduced to a mere thirty minutes, playing at 7:30 pm Sunday evenings, following a revamped Wireless Playhouse reduced to ninety minutes and renamed Flaming Mouths.

Where two hours had felt oversized and hard to fill on my own, thirty minutes felt like I’d just got into the studio when I was being crowded out by the next shift. Suddenly I had the dubious honour of being the shortest show then airing on Melbourne public radio. This left a fair chunk of material in limbo: too long to fit the new format, too short to properly serialise over two weeks.

On the other hand, this compression of time taught me to be concise, to choose for brevity and move things along. The old two-hour format had had a certain meandering quality to it. Now I had to keep things tight.

My first thirty-minute Pilots touched on world mysteries like the dancing coffins of Barbados and the ghost ship Mary Celeste. I wrote up a script, came into the station a couple of hours before air-time and put it onto cassette in the recording studio. Come 7:30 I just banged the tape into the cassette deck and pressed “play,” a good way to avoid on-air blunders.

That is, if the cassette deck worked. There were two in the on-air studio, and I didn’t trust either of them. Not that there was ever anything wrong with them mechanically. It was the way they were plugged into the panel that always raised my stress levels as air-time approached on shows that depended upon cassette recordings, which were nearly all of them.

Which plug went into which socket at the back of which machine? Which panel buttons to use: “Cassette 1” “Cassette 2” or “Cassette 3”? One night, with the studio clock ticking up to the 7:30 mark, I couldn’t get a signal through any of the panel’s cassette switches, despite the fact I was sure I had it wired up correctly. As desperation grew, I hit a button marked “Aux 1” and there was my cassette playing.

On another night, I couldn’t get a signal from either of the machines, no matter how I fiddled with the plugs and hit panel buttons. Fortunately a music category co-ordinator was in the station, and as co-ordinators are superior beings with a key to the record library I managed to save myself with an impromptu airing of a Lights Out episode.

The following week I introduced Pilots into the Unknown as “The show that lives in fear of a cassette deck failure.” From then on I always brought enough vinyl in case of similar emergencies. The turntables were completely reliable. But the cassette decks were always approached with a dash of apprehension.

A new beginning brought in a new cast of readers, three of them coming from the same household. A few weeks after the thirty-minute programs began, I dragooned a lady friend, Willy, into doing some readings often live to air, though occasionally taped on a Sunday morning in the recording studio.

The best of these Sunday morning recordings with Willy was “Pilots Looks at Australian Ghosts,” a thirty-minute spooky tour of the country’s supernatural history. This included “Fisher’s Ghost,” a story of murder and spectral revenge and the only ghost in the world accorded its own annual festival, and “The Princess Theatre Ghost,” about a famous Melbourne theatre haunted by an actor who died in the last moments of the opera Faust in 1888 while dressed as Mephistopheles.

Occasionally I recruited Willy’s housemate Martin when more than one reader was required or when Willy couldn’t make it. Both of them helped me with readings on a Lovecraft program where I pronounced “Necronomicon” several different ways, none of them right, and in which the show’s long-time listener, Ashley, also took part. They also participated on another evening when Pilots saluted that surreal TV series from 1968, The Prisoner, about a British secret agent who resigns and is immediately spirited away to The Village, a cross between a holiday resort and a prison camp.

Later in the year, Becky, another resident of Willy and Martin’s rental, asked to join the jolly crew of Pilots into the Unknown, and ended up in front of a 3PBS microphone on at least two occasions.

A group interested in producing radio drama adapted my Lovecraftian story “Dead Air” into a radio play. I heard some of what they’d recorded and was fascinated by the experience of hearing my words being spoken aloud in dramatic form. It’s one thing to see your words in cold print, quite another to hear them acted out.

I interviewed the organiser of the group on the show, and we talked about how they had produced “Dead Air” and about radio production in general. Noises were made about “Dead Air” being broadcast before too long on 3PBS, either as part of Pilots or in a special time slot of its own. Then, suddenly... nothing happened. The project disappeared, despite being all but finished. To this day, I have no idea why.

I replayed Robert Hardy’s reading of The Time Machine, though now I had to serialise it over four weeks instead of playing it in a single two-hour chunk. Even then, in order to make the last instalment fit, I had to edit out the Time Traveller’s journey to the far end of time and the dying Earth. Likewise Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast had to be trimmed of Welles’ closing explanation and apology.

Then there was Wilvirus, Mistress of the Dank.

In the late eighties Elvira, Mistress of the Dark hit Australian TV. This was a package of B-grade horror flicks from the United States hosted in a sassy and irreverent manner by Elvira, a campy vamp with long black hair, heavy eye make-up, a tight dress showing lots of leg, and generally busting out all over. I got to thinking that what worked on TV might work on radio, too.

A Weird Circle broadcast of Frankenstein served as the story. I wrote an Elvira-like script complete with wise-cracks which I called Wilvirus, Mistress of the Dank, asked Willy if she had a Sunday morning free, then booked an hour in the 3PBS recording studio, starting at 10:00 a.m. It took us all of that hour to get those few minutes of the Wilvirus intro and outro down on tape.

I found myself becoming a director, asking for emphasis here, a pause there. “Say it sideways!” I heard myself tell Willy at one point; at another, “Be more seductive,” which got the response, “Oh, don’t start, Rick. I’m too old to learn how to be seductive.”

Back home I edited it all into shape, inserting snippets from the Frankenstein record for — I hoped — comic effect:

Wilvirus: “Did you know this was written by Mary Shelley when she was just eighteen? What a godawful adolescence she must’ve had! Zits would’ve been the least of her problems. Anyway, Mary wrote this in 1816 while she was staying with her boyfriend Percy Shelley and the poet Byron in Switzerland. Byron suggested they all write a ghost story, so little Mary quite contrary wrote Frankenstein while Percy and Byron went off to collaborate on Abbot & Costello Meet the Wolfman.”

Insert from Frankenstein: “I’ll be so glad, Victor, darling, when all this is over.”

Wilvirus: “You and me both, sister!”

At the station that night, I mixed the show as it went live to air. The sinister Elvira harpsichord theme playing on one cassette deck, the Wilvirus intro on the other, fading them both out as I started Frankenstein on the turntable, pushing up its volume slide from zero. At the end of the story, I faded out the record, brought up the music cassette and started the Wilvirus outro tape: “There you have it: Frankenstein, a classic horror story and a classic love story. Girl meets boy, boy makes monster, monster wants to meet monsterette, boy makes monsterette, boy kills monsterette, monster kills girl, boy goes quietly gah-gah.”

Seven months later Willy and I produced another “Wilvirus, Mistress of the Dank,” using another Weird Circle episode, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Updating Poe’s story to contemporary times (1940s), Weird Circle made effective use of a man and a woman speaking as if through a telephone, representing the voices in the protagonist’s head goading him on to murder.

In 1990 a local science fiction bookshop offered Pilots three book vouchers as a contest prize in exchange for a bit of on-air exposure. I announced the contest over two Sundays. On the third Sunday all the entries went into a hat with barrel girl “Princess Debby” doing the honours. There were seven entries, including long-time listener Ashley.

Round about mid-1990, Debby finished up. She was my last link to the early days when she and Greg and Glen and I had formed the Drama Category, an odd backwater among the progressive music thrust of the station. Greg had left Wireless Playhouse, and Glen had left Pilots. Now Debby was going too. Nothing was the same anymore.

There was, as far as I was concerned, too much change going on. Also, I was really feeling constrained in the thirty-minute format, and the guy who’d been appointed Drama Supervisor at the time of the big shake-up was no support at all. The writing was on the wall. A few weeks after Debby left, I too quit 3PBS.

In the five years the show was on the air, there were some good times, such as when the program gave the feeling of everything falling into place such as “Australian Ghosts” and the two Elvira parodies. There were strained times, too, when my ongoing battle with the cassette decks or my losing track of what I was doing caused embarrassing patches of dead air.

And there were occasional odd times.

Three policemen came to the front door one midnight to tell us there’d been a bomb threat against the building, though I noticed they all looked somewhat bemused about it and didn’t appear to be taking the threat seriously. As it was, nothing went either bump or bang in the night.

Another visitor to our front door was a teenage boy lost and strung-out. “I’m a subscriber,” he cried to us over the intercom. I went down to the door and brought him upstairs where he promptly crashed out on the sofa in the reception area.

A brothel rang during one show to say they were listening. I invited a couple of the ladies over. They arrived about an hour later with their minder, a late middle-aged fellow who looked like he’d seen a lot of life, particularly from the underside. Glen and I showed them round the station, and they sat in on part of a broadcast.

A teenage girl, Isabel, would ring each week during the late night shows and stay on the line talking to me till after midnight. Isabel and Ashley were Pilots’ two stalwart fans throughout the years.

All I have left of my radio days are memories, a few tapes and a lasting friendship with one of our very first story contributors, Helen Patrice. Except for Helen and Willy, all the others have drifted off over my mental horizon.

In its time, Pilots into the Unknown was unique in Melbourne, perhaps in Australia. To the best of my knowledge, no one else was presenting genre-related material in both dramatic form and as commentary. There were, and still are, genre review programs and, in the eighties, there were a couple of horror and ghost story readings broadcast on a regular basis.

But Pilots did it all: readings live and recorded, productions, old radio shows, poetry, reviews, interviews, music and talk. Our audience would never have been very large, particularly if seven entries to our contest was anything to judge by. Ultimately we were an experiment that failed because nothing like us was ever attempted again. Yet, despite all the stuff-ups and stress and pressure, I enjoyed my time on air. It was an experience I’m glad to have had.