Radio: Cartoon Critic

Cartoonist Harold T. Webster doesn’t own a television set, has never seen a Milton Berle show, and would rather play bridge than watch Faye Emerson, plunging neckline and all. Yet his once-a-week cartoon, The Unseen Audience, has made him one of the nation’s best and best-known critics of radio & television.

Mostly, Webster pictures the radio & TV audience at its moments of greatest strain: clubbed senseless by commercials, drowned in the soap-opera flood, lacerated by thrillers, held slack-jawed and limp before the endless, banal assault on ear and eye and mind. When his characters are caught with their sets off, they exhibit every nuance of the Walter Mitty syndrome: grandmothers speak to one another with the accents of private eyes; moppets dry-gulch their parents from behind the furniture; housewives confront “their startled husbands with all the teary grandeur of John’s Other Wife.

From some of his readers, Webster draws blood instead of chuckles. An outraged network executive complained to the New York Herald Tribune, Webster’s employer, that The Unseen Audience is undermining the confidence of the American public. Says Webster: “The burden of his letter was that he wanted me muzzled.” Another wrote, more in sorrow than in anger, agreeing that the industry had its shortcomings and suggesting that Webster drop in some time and talk the whole thing over (“The burden of his letter was that the profits were so juicy they just couldn’t help themselves”).

Though a relentless foe of all commercials (“I’ve never knowingly bought anything I heard advertised on the air”), Webster is gentler in his handling of the programs themselves, and sometimes worries for fear one of his satires may make a performer unhappy. Last week he was cheered to get a letter from The Lonesome Gal (TIME, June 26, 1950), assuring him that she was delighted with a recent cartoon that showed an adolescent snarling “Mush!” at her honeyed comments.

A scholarly 66-year-old six-footer who mistakenly believes he looks like his own Caspar Milquetoast, Webster makes up for his lack of a TV set by having half a dozen radios in his Stamford, Conn, house. He is at his drawing board an average of six hours a day (“if you count the time I spend dreading the whole idea”), and usually has the radio on while he works. His favorite programs: Dragnet (“because it’s played with more restraint than most whodunits”) and Mary Margaret McBride (“because she’s usually interviewing someone I know”).