Cecil and Sally - Undated Episode
Recently on the OTR Digest, the subject of Cecil and Sally has come up. I first heard of this series from Dr. Randy Spurlock at an FOTR convention some years ago; he told me he had a number of the syndication transcriptions, and was going to slowly have them transfered. He gave me a disc of episodes which, unfortunately, was damaged, although I was able to recover two episodes from this disc albeit with considerable recovery noise.
Fred Berney, he of OldieTV.com, after hearing about the damaged disc, later gave me some episodes to hear without the damage; it’s one of the episodes supplied by Fred taken from transcription discs supplied by Dr. Spurlock that is posted here. Written by John Patrick, and starring Patrick and Helen Troy, Cecil and Sally was one of the first nationally-syndicated-by-transcription programs; released by a San Francisco company, MacGregor & Sollie in the late 1920s…for an example of the cost to local stations for running this program, WKAV in Laconia, New Hampshire in 1931 was under contract to pay MacGregor & Sollie $17.50 for each episode over a 26 week run, according to Doug as posted on the Internet OTR Digest. Cecil and Sally was later picked up by NBC, but the episode here is from the syndicated run. There’s no open or close, presumably that and the sponsoring commercials would have been the responsibility of the local station who played the show.
Compared to radio programs of the 40’s and 50’s, it’s somewhat minimal, with few sound effects to get in the way of the dialog. But as an example of early dramatic radio, it’s an important historical document, so I hope you’ll enjoy this undated episode of Cecil and Sally.
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August 3rd, 2009 at 5:12 pm
[…] Let me give you an example. A while back on this podcast, I posted an episode of Cecil and Sally provided to me by Fred Berney. Naturally, someone took my 32kbps file, “cleaned” it (probably by converting to WAV file and running it through open-source noise-reduction software), then re-encoded it to 96kbps and posted it on the newsgroups as an “improvement.” Of course, the only thing that person could accomplish without having access to the source file (which was/is on CD) is remove more information, making it sound worse, not better. This is why we have so much garbage sound out there…people who either don’t give a rat’s patoots about the sound quality in the first place, or people who are foolish enough to think they can “improve” a low-bandwidth file by transcoding to a higher bandwidth. […]