W.O. Mitchell's Jake & the Kid: The Popular Radio Play As Art & Social Comment

by Yates, Alan J.

• ISBN13: 9781426933622
• ISBN10: 1426933622
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-06-07
• Publisher: Author Solutions

Summary

W.O. Mitchell's Jake & the Kid captivated radio audiences in the days before television and enjoyed ratings that rivalled those for the radio broadcasts of the CBC's Hockey Night in Canada. These homespun tales about the hired hand, Jake Trumper and his sidekick, the Kid, explored very human stories about life on the often cruel Prairies of Saskatchewan in a humorous vein that made a household name for the series across the breadth of Canada. Although he wrote many novels, most notably Who Has Seen the Wind, featured during the ceremonies at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Mitchell was as well known for these folksy plays. They enabled him to hone his writing craft in a mass medium, when few other outlets were available; to tackle social issues of the day with a light hand, and to develop many of the themes he would explore in his later novels. This study analyzes these popular radio plays, their Prairie and literary roots, the production process and their contribution and critical reception.

Excerpts

The late William Ormond Mitchell, or "W.O." as he is familiarly called, was best known as a novelist, writer of stage and screenplays and a raconteur both on and off stage. Yet, he is still indelibly associated with a series of radio plays first broadcast thirty years ago, more than two-hundred Jake and the Kid broadcasts over a period of about twenty years; highly popular radio plays that are long gone but whose broadcast legend lives on.
This study analyzes the Jake plays from the factors leading to their conception up to present day perceptions of their legend. The result is intended to be not just an examination of the Jake plays, but a total approach to one writer's use of the popular radio play as a vehicle for his art and social comment—all that went into Mitchell in his prairie time and milieu and all that came out in Jake and the Kid as a reflection of that time and milieu. It is also a study of the characteristics of the popular radio play as vehicle, and of the production process which translates the writer's script or blueprint into the broadcast dramatic illusion. Jake & the Kid was a highly successful and popular radio series that commanded faithful audiences of over half-a-million. It was more than simply popular and entertaining but presented a reflection of a time, a region and their social and moral concerns and characteristics. The Jake plays not only reflected and introduced a region to a nation but raised basic questions about the human condition and human nature.
They did so through a medium and with a comedy genre that reached a larger and more receptive audience than could have been reached with any other Canadian medium of that day.The plays happened at the right time for both Mitchell and his audience, due to a unique set of conditions that could never be repeated. Mitchell wrote for radio because that was where the opportunities and money were. Jake reached enthusiastic millions because radio drama was one of the rare and nationally accessible cultural outlets with no real competition. Both these facts are difficult to appreciate in today's terms. Mitchell felt writers today would not dream of concentrating on radio writing, but would rather tend to diversify and work their material for several different media. More glamour attaches itself to writing or acting for the visual media.
Radio and its audiences have radically changed since the so-called "Golden Age of Radio Drama." Radio, probably because of its information orientation and mobile listenership, can no longer hold a large yet captivated and concentrating audience. Rendered blase and insensitive by instant satellite TV relays from around the world or the solar system, today's audiences have largely lost their sense of wonder about radio as a drama medium and their ability to lend it their imaginations.