Radio: Bests

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Like yesterday's newspaper, last night's radio program is usually dead as a duck by morning, and most radio programs live for just such transitory glory. But every now and again somebody stages a program that seems worth "clipping out." For would-be radio clippers, a young radioman named Max Wylie, script director at CBS, last week published a 576-page book, Best Broadcasts of 1938-39,* containing reprints or samples of 32 "bests" in as many fields of radio endeavor. To pick his bests, Wylie spent 16 months reading 6,000 scripts, squawked in his preface that he had to "eat so much stale popcorn before finding a prize." If radio and Wylie hold up, Best Broadcasts may be an annual, like Burns Mantle's Best Plays.

Some Wylie selections: best quiz show, Information Please; best human interest, We, the People; best variety, Kate Smith's hour; best fun, Fred Allen's; best melodrama, Gang Busters' dramatization of Bank Robber Eddie Doll's career; best children's shows, Ireene Wicker's musicked Alice in Wonderland, The Nuremberg Stove from the Let's Pretend series; best verse, Archibald MacLeish's Air Raid, Norman Corwin's Seems Radio Is Here to Stay; best news dramatization, THE MARCH OF TIME; best spot news reporting, Jack Knell's on the Squalus disaster; best news commentators, H. V. Kaltenborn, Raymond Gram Swing.