Alphabet Soup
Australian commercial radio
Australian commercial radio · 1930–1960
30 EpisodesSeasonalPGSince 1930
The run
- Network
- Australian commercial radio
- Years active
- 1930–1960
- Surviving broadcasts
- 30
- Genre
- comedy
A Collection of Aussie Radio Shows No 2 Recently discovered this program “Alphabet Soup” which was produced and presented by George Rolfe for a Community Radio station in Melbourne. It is a most interesting journey through the Nostalgic music of the past, letter by letter. Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
8 dated broadcasts across 97 years on the air, with 96 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2026, in original transmission order.
- 1. The Last Train Out · 13 Jan 2026
- 2. Night Broadcast · 20 Jan 2026
- 3. The Case of the Missing Hour · 27 Jan 2026
The Long Silence
4 Aug 2026 · 35 min
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
Dead Air
28 Jul 2026 · 50 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
Sign Off
21 Jul 2026 · 1h 5m
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
The Case of the Missing Hour
14 Jul 2026 · 28 min
The one everybody argues about.
Night Broadcast
7 Jul 2026 · 43 min
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
The Last Train Out
30 Jun 2026 · 58 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
Signal at Midnight
23 Jun 2026 · 21 min
We go back to the beginning and read everything again.
A Room Above the Street
16 Jun 2026 · 36 min
Three interviews, one archive reel, and a question nobody wanted asked.
Also on Australian commercial radio
Australian commercial radio in 1930–1960
Other series the network carried while Alphabet Soup was on the air.
Same seasons
comedy on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
Friends in front of a microphone
Jack Benny and Fibber McGee sold intimacy: recurring characters, in-jokes, a house style. The modern hang-out show is the same trick without the script.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of Alphabet Soup
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
More to explore
Chosen by the same editors.
