1932–1948
Live Comedy Before an Audience
Comedy performed once, live, with a house in the seats and no way to fix it afterwards.
NBC Red · CBS · BBC · NBC · …
21 recordings
Planet Vintage presents
The LiveWire
Before tape, a broadcast happened exactly once. These are the nights that could only happen once — comedy played to a house with no way to fix it, drama that existed for an hour and then was gone, and the bulletins that tore up the schedule. Nothing dramatised, nothing reconstructed. Only what was transmitted.
43
Recordings
3
Shelves
21h
Of audio
1932–1948
Years covered
The shelves
Three ways a broadcast became unrepeatable
1936–1945
Live Drama, One Night Only
The Mercury Theatre, the Columbia Workshop and Norman Corwin — plays that existed for an hour.
CBS · CBS · NBC · Mutual · Blue (combined networks)
12 recordings
1937–1945
When It Went Wrong On Air
Disaster, declaration and the sound of announcers working without a script.
WLS Chicago (recorded) · BBC · Network bulletin · CBS · …
10 recordings
Provenance
Every recording on these pages is a surviving transmission held by the Internet Archive and in the public domain. Dates, networks and durations are taken from the archives’ own metadata. Where a recording is an extract rather than a complete broadcast, we say so.