Radio: How Real Can It Get?

Husband: “Officers, that’s what I have to put up with. I say one word to the boys and she jumps on my throat . . . I’m just a dog around here, but by God, I’m a dog no longer.”

Wife: “Please, I can’t go on like this . . . He called me a parasite and a paranoiac parasite and everything. Just because he’s working hard . . . How can I go on?”

This hysterical exchange, heard last week over CBS Radio, sounded too real to have been spoken by actors in a studio. It was, in fact, a tape-recording of a couple quarreling after the police had come to question them about their runaway son. It was part of a remarkable new crime show, Night Watch (Mon. 10 p.m.), which CBS Radio has launched as an answer to NBC-TV’s fabulously successful crime series, Dragnet. For Jack Webb’s skillfully re-created police episodes, Night Watch substitutes the real event; the script is replaced by the police blotter.

When to Duck. Radio Actor Donn Reed, who originated the show, spends his nights riding a Culver City, Calif, prowl car to make on-the-spot recordings of police investigations, arrests and interrogations. The voices used are those of the people actually involved. In getting his material, Reed has been slugged, beaten with handcuffs, shot at. Says he: “It’s important to know just when to duck.”

Usually, the 30-minute show covers two contrasting cases. Says Reed: “For example, we’ll have a razor fight, fast and bloody—a major case. Then there’ll be one about a little boy who steals newspapers, a quiet thing.” But this week Reed devoted his entire show to the capture of a teen-age burglar. Hearing that a prowler had been spotted in a gas station, Reed and Police Sergeant Ron Perkins raced to the spot and caught the thief in action. Reed was showered with glass as the boy made a break for it through the window, but had his microphone ready as the thief struggled with Perkins, then cried and whimpered (“My mother’11 kill me, I wasn’t doin’ nothin’.”). At the station house, Reed was again ready with his recording equipment as the boy’s mother wailed for minutes and then, in subdued tones, told of the anguish of sitting at home, waiting for her son’s return: “I’ve been up almost 15 hours on the clock . . . watching that bed of yours …”

At show’s end, Police Chief William Hildebrand gives the disposition of each case (the boy burglar went to reform school) and adds a few pious words to the effect that Night Watch is presented “in the interests of public security.” The show’s sensationalism is likely to win it a large audience and an eager sponsor.

No Two Alike. Using a small, 14-lb. recorder sensitive enough to handle sounds ranging from a footfall to a shotgun blast, Reed has been riding with the Culver City police for nearly a year. Some nights he gets nothing, on others, enough material for three shows.

Radio and TV have made a fetish of getting close to reality, watching real-life marriage and divorce, sickness and sorrow, prayer and death. But few people seem to mind such invasion of privacy. For his show, Reporter Reed has found it easy to get legal releases to use the voices of prisoners and witnesses. Reed explains to them: “Look, you or your son or your husband are in trouble. We want to help keep others from making the same mistake.” Reed thinks his show can run forever on radio: “None of the cases are ever alike. Even two drunks differ so much that they each make fascinating listening.” The program’s principal drawback is Reed’s own overdramatic commentary. He could, with profit, borrow Jack Webb’s matter-of-fact delivery.