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When you consider the history of the twentieth century, broadcasting skits or hoaxes are more associated with radio than with television. This is because radio was the first electronic medium of mass entertainment and radio is a more psychological medium. Its relationship with its audience is based on an emotional and imaginative bond. Today radio has not lost its importance as a huge and significant source for news and entertainment and the opportunity to hoodwink the audience is as strong as it has ever been.

There are few people who are unaware of the panic created by the Mercury Theatre on Halloween night 1938. The radio adaptation of H G Wells's novel The War of the Worlds had been transformed into a close representation of an American entertainment programme interrupted by urgent news bulletins. Orson Welles and Howard Koch are credited with the idea, and the outstanding, almost naturalistic acting of the cast is credited with convincing hundreds of thousands of people that the

Martians were invading New Jersey. I think we can now say that the panic that followed the broadcast was the result of: 1) determination to shock and confuse by Orson Welles; 2) the unusual circumstances of a mischievous period; 3) the actual day of the broadcast. I think the evidence available to us indicates quite strongly that Orson Welles deliberately sought to create alarm, although he did not anticipate the scale of the panic. CBS was aware of the risks of listeners being taken in by the realism of the writing and performance. Documentary evidence shows that producers insisted on changing real place names to fictitious ones, but the ersatz place names still had a ring of authenticity. Orson was conscious of the psychological impact of the Herbert Morrison's emotional ad-libbed radio description of the destruction of the Hindenburg just over a year before. In fact, the actor playing the reporter in the production was directed to listen to and study the broadcast in a CBS booth during.

the rehearsals. An attempt was made to mimic the voice of President Roosevelt, and the production pastiched the texture of contemporary networks which were continually interrupting music and soap opera broadcasts to bring the latest news developments from European crises such as Munich and the expansionist designs of the German, Italian and Japanese dictatorships.

The CBS Mercury Theatre series had intelligent listeners that could engage powerfully with the skilful imaginative and emotional manipulation of the Mercury company, but the audience was boosted on that particular night because the higher rated NBC Charlie McArthy Show began with an unusual operatic aria and its regular listeners twiddled the dial and found dance music on the CBS networked station frequencies. Listeners tuning in after the beginning of both programmes would have been unaware that the drama was a fictional copy of contemporary radio icon sounds.

The rest, as they say, is interesting history. The power of radio was established,

Orson Welles’s name reverberated around the world, “Campbells’ Soups” decided to sponsor the CBS Mercury Theatre’s programme, and Orson later readily acknowledged in the 1980s that his plan to “make a radio splash” got him to Hollywood to make Citizen Kane.

The hysteria and controversy surrounding the War of the Worlds broadcast was also accentuated by the hostility of the newspaper media which had seen the infant and now adolescent radio medium aggressively competing for advertising revenue and audience share. Here was an opportunity to exaggerate the degree of the panic. It does not appear that anyone died as a result, but listeners were treated for shock and hysteria. Somewhat suspiciously, there were more newspaper offices than police stations swamped with frantic queries: “What is happening? Where’s the nearest bomb shelter? What must we do?”

Attempts have been made to imitate the War of the Worlds scam within regulatory controls.

Notsurprisingly the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched an urgent enquiry andproduced a raft of laws for US broadcasters to guard against deception of this kind again.

Television has never been able to match up to radio for the force and terror of ‘broadcast panics’. Weknow that a BBC Television’s April Fool’s joke about spaghetti harvests in Switzerland had a fairnumber of people fooled in 1957, but television was a relatively new medium of mass communicationat the time and the authoritative introduction and endorsement by Richard Dimbleby helped embossthe item with credibility. Actually, how the audience’s reliance on experts and information icons can beused to deceive and panic had been tested by The War of the Worlds’ portrayal of an expert astronomer,Professor Pierson, as one of its leading voices and ‘eyes’.

Further research yields much richer examples of panic caused by radio spoofs and cock-ups. A littleknown

broadcast by the BBC from Edinburgh on January 17th 1926 convinced many listeners that a revolution in London had resulted in the destruction of the Houses of Parliament by trench mortars and the Minister of Transport being hanged from a tramway post.

In recent decades, radio has been effective in developing a 'skit genre' which engages the listeners in ironic entertainment rather than fooling them. This is the realm of the spoof broadcaster who uses mimicry and verisimilitude to deceive ordinary people, politicians and public figures into making fools of themselves. 'Candid Camera' is the television equivalent. It is copied across the world and provides huge entertainment. It also has the capacity to satirise and play a subversive role. In Britain, Chris Morris has developed the technique on Radio One. He has achieved a sophisticated level of entertainment as well as exposing the cynicism of the media's relationship with politicians and pressure groups. He has

tricked Tory MPs into offering obituaries about Michael Heseltine and persuaded public figures to wax vacantly about the dangers of a fictitious drug menace. The radio spoofer of the century award should probably go to Montréal's Pierre Brassard whose show on station CKOI has successfully duped his holiness the Pope, Her Majesty the Queen and Brigitte Bardot. In October 1995, Brassard convinced the Queen that he was Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien. He was able to persuade her in a 17 minute telephone conversation that it would be a good idea if she could broadcast an appeal to the French-speaking province of Québec not to break away from Canada. The broadcast had political impact because it exposed an element of bias in the Queen's attitude to the Canadian debate over Québec's independence. The development of phone-in and talk-back programming in the last 30 years has provided the opportunity for audience interactivity so that listeners cannow turn the tables against the broadcasters themselves. The limited amount of time and resources available to check phone-in contributors provides an environment 'ripe for the picking'. The spoof potential of radio lies in the willing desire to suspend disbelief. If this can be described as a human weakness, then it is present in all of us. In radio, both listener and broadcaster can now find ways of exposing the medium's vulnerability. GLOSSARY skit /sk t/ noun ~(on sth) a short piece of humorous writing or a performance that makes fun of sb/sth by copying them: a skit on daytime TV programmes hoax /h ks; AmE ho ks/ noun, verb noun an act intended to make sb believe sth that is not true, especially sth unpleasant: a bomb hoax hoax calls The emergency call turned out to be a hoax. // verb to trick sb by making them believe sth that is not true, especially sth unpleasant hoodwink / h dw k/ verb ~ sb (into doing sth) to trick sb: I feel as if I've been

hoodwinked.mischievous

adj. enjoying playing tricks and annoying people: a mischievous boy, a mischievous grin/smile/look

adj. (formal) (of an action or a statement) causing trouble, such as damaging someone's reputation: mischievous lies/gossip

DERIVATIVES: mischievously (adverb)

take sb in - to allow someone to stay in your home: He was homeless, so we took him in.

take sb in - [often passive] to make someone believe something that is not true: She took me in completely with her story. DECEIVED. Don't be taken in by his charm - he's ruthless.

ersatz

adj. artificial and not as good as the real thing or product: ersatz coffee

ad-lib

verb. Perform without preparation.

adj. extemporary, EXTEMPORANEOUS

booth

noun - a small enclosed place where you can do something privately, for example make a telephone call, or vote: a phone booth, a polling/voting booth

rehearsal

noun - time that is spent

practising a play or piece of music in preparation for a public performance: to have / hold a rehearsal

Our new production of 'Hamlet' is currently in rehearsal.

boost /bu st/ verb, noun

verb to make sth increase, or become better or more successful: to boost exports/ profits

The movie helped boost her screen career.

to boost sb's confidence / morale

Getting that job did a lot to boost his ego (= make him feel more confident).

twiddle / tw dl/ verb (BrE)

~ (with) sth to twist or turn sth with your fingers often because you are nervous or bored: He twiddled with the radio knob until he found the right programme.

swamp /sw mp; AmE verb [often passive]

~ sb/sth (with sth) to make sb have more of sth than they can deal with: The department was swamped with job applications. In summer visitors swamp the islands

cam /skæm/ noun (informal)

a clever and dishonest plan for making money: an insurance scam

spoof /spu f/ noun (informal)

a humorous copy of a film/movie

television programme, etc. that exaggerates its main features: It's a spoof on horror movies.
a spoof game show / a game show spoof
cock-up noun (BrE, informal, spoken) a mistake that spoils people's arrangements; sth that has been spoilt because it was badly organized: There's been a bit of a cock-up over the travel arrangements.
dupe /djuːp; AmE duːp/ verb ~ sb (into doing sth) to trick or cheat sb: They soon realized they had been duped. He was duped into giving them his credit card.
make / cause, etc. a splash (informal) to do sth in a way that attracts a lot of attention, or causes a lot of excitement: Her first book made a big splash.
COMPREHENSION
Exercise 2: Decide if the following sentences are true or false:
1) As an 'old' medium, radio has completely lost its power to attract and deceive the audience
2) The War of the Worlds is an original play written for radio
3) Orson Welles didn't mean to appal the masses when he conceived the play
4) The fictionalwork misleadingly merged and imitated different radio products, such as music, news,