Piloting into the Unknown

by Rick Kennett

part 1

It was 1985, and Glen Matthews, whom I’d met the year before at a science fiction writers’ workshop, had this bee in his bonnet about bringing out a science fiction fanzine. I was unenthusiastic.

Never daunted, he said, “All right then, how about a radio show?”

Almost before I could say, “Wot?” we were down at the offices of public radio station 3PBS FM, situated at 171 Fitzroy Street in the Melbourne beachside suburb of St. Kilda. We pitched them the idea of doing a spoken-word program of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Though a station dedicated mainly to new and under-represented music — the P in PBS stands for “Progressive” — they nevertheless agreed to our odd proposal. We duly paid our studio fees and station subscriptions.

As with most public broadcasters, listener subscriptions, along with some basic sponsorship, were 3PBS’s only form of income. In return, a subscriber’s card gave discounts at the station’s sponsors: bookshops, record shops, cafes, cinemas, etc.

Before long, we were doing studio training: learning how to cue records on the duel turntables and working out what the various knobs and switches and slides on the control panel were supposed to do. We learnt terms like “promo,” “sponsorship cart,” “cross fade” and “pop shield.” Glen and I had to become studio-savvy before we’d be allowed on air.

These training sessions were conducted in the station’s only working studio during weekday afternoons while the station was not transmitting. At that time they were broadcasting from 4:30 pm till 2:00 a.m. weekdays and all through the weekend. It would be another two or three years before 3PBS, always the Cinderella of the FM band in Melbourne, went 24/7.

Eventually, we were deemed competent enough to go on air. So that our goofs and greenness wouldn’t damage the reputation of the station too much, we were given a 4:00-7:00 Saturday morning time slot; the traditional graveyard shift.

Around 3:30 a.m., with Fitzroy Street all still and dark, Glen and I would arrive at the glass front doors of number 171, a four-storey building constructed in the 30s as a block of flats, converted in the 70s to small business units. We’d press the intercom button, announce ourselves to the shift already in the studio. The front door’s electric lock would buzz, and in we’d go.

Up the stairs to the third floor we went, through the door marked 3PBS, past the darkened office door on the left, the locked record library to the right, down the end of the passage, then left to the door of the on air studio adjacent to where the transmitter lived, its heat-exhaust fan rumbling.

3PBS had been in the building only a few months at that time, and there was always a lingering smell of wood glue around the studios with their wooden partitions and panels. It’s a smell that even now has the power to take me back.

There’s an air of unreality about a radio studio in the very early morning: the darkness outside the double-glazed windows, the studio dim but for one ceiling light shining directly over the panel, the often ambient music coming out of the monitor speakers, the slightly hyped-up nerves as we switch shifts with the previous presenter. Then suddenly there we were: on air.

For the next three hours Glen and I would take turns at the panel, playing records brought from our own collections or drawn from the studio’s “drive box.” The record library was open only during business hours, and only the librarian, the station manager and the music category coordinators had a key.

We were kept busy during those three hours, making sure there was always another record ready on the turntable, filling in the playlist: the who, what, when, Australian content yes/no; back-announcing what was played, doing on air pleadings for subscribers — the Bribe to Subscribe — and generally trying to sound coherent. A hundred and one things can go wrong during a program, all of which reflect badly on the presenter and, ultimately, on the station.

Glen and I were ecstatic the morning we got our first subscriber. There were people listening and, sometimes, so it seemed, what we said could make them reach into their pockets for thirty-five dollars. We noted this first subscriber in the studio log as if it were a great event, which it was to us.

Just before 7:00 a.m., the fellow doing Saturday Morning Jazz — the beginning of the day’s real programming — would turn up. Glen and I would stumble out into the daylight and wander off to catch up on missed sleep.

One morning, I found myself doing the graveyard shift alone. When I got to the station I found a category coordinator working in the record library. Taking this opportunity, I raided what little spoken word 3PBS had, and, for three glorious hours that morning, aired an old-time-radio marathon: Escape, X-Minus One, Quiet Please, Inner Sanctum, etc. It was the shape of sounds to come.

During this period of early morning programming, I was making preparations for producing our own science fiction and fantasy drama program. Glen had a marvellous reading voice and, for the most part, his contributions would consist of live readings. I, however, have a reading voice I wouldn’t inflict on anyone, so I’d be relying on recorded work.

To this end, I scrounged though various second-hand record shops looking for spoken word recordings and old radio plays in the science fiction and horror genres, while at the same time joining libraries that had interesting audio material in their catalogues. I’d also book studio time at 3PBS and, over the weeks, dub all their spoken word records onto cassette. Before long I had a wealth of apt material. We even recorded an interview with a practising mage or witch, Bev Lane, for a program we later aired on the subject of magic and those who use it.

Our show needed a name. I was all for “Unknown,” in honour of the short-lived, much-loved fantasy magazine of the early forties. Glen, with a more artistic bent, wanted to call us “Pilots into the Purple Twilight.” We compromised and called it Pilots into the Unknown.

At that time, radio drama on 3PBS consisted solely of a two-hour program Sunday at 10:00 pm called Wireless Playhouse, featuring talks on the entertainment scene, interviews and movie reviews. Airing of actual radio drama was a rarity.

The show’s presenters were Greg, a big, bluff, bewhiskered fellow who doubled as a technician about the station, and Debby, a young media student and almost stereotypical radical Marxist feminist. As it turned out, Greg and Debby welcomed the idea of alternating with Pilots into the Unknown every other week, thus giving themselves a break. Within this schedule, Glen and I would alternate presenting Pilots for that particular fortnight, which usually worked out as one show each per month.

To demonstrate what Pilots into the Unknown would be about, Glen and I put together a fifteen-minute montage comprising snippets of radio plays and recordings, brief live readings and short pieces of music. This was played on Wireless Playhouse the week prior to our first show, along with Glen and me doing a promotional spiel. The public couldn’t say they hadn’t been warned.

In mid-1985, Pilots into the Unknown hit the airwaves, and it fell to me to present the initial broadcast. I remember my extreme feeling of nervousness as the studio clock hit 10:00 that Sunday night. This was no graveyard shift in the wee hours, but almost prime time, and maybe several hundred listeners rather than just several.

With me seated at the panel and Glen at the “guest mic,” with cassettes ready in the cassette decks, records lined up on the turntables either side, and with earphones clamped to our heads, I gave the warning, “Standby! Going on air!” and a second later pushed the mic switches into the “on” position.

I have no clear memory of what readings we did and what recorded material we played, though doubtless the montage was given another airing. Later, playing back a recording of that first show, I was embarrassed at how stilted I sounded, at least in the beginning. Whereas Glen was always so cool, with nary a stumble, I had to learn not to be afraid of the microphone. It took a while.

Studio Three was where we transmitted from in the first two or three years. Studio Two was the long room next door, reserved mainly for bands going live-to-air. Studio One, down the other end was, in those early days, an incomplete copy of Studio Three, but would take over from it as the on air studio when 3PBS eventually went 24/7.

Over the following three years, Glen and I presented our two hours of radio SF, fantasy and horror regularly each fortnight, missing only one week each year for the station’s annual drive for subscribers, the SubscriberThon Week. Drama was considered to have too small a profile to take part. The ritual of arriving at the station around 9:30 every second Sunday night with our records and books never lost that special event feeling. Nor did walking into the studio at 10:00 ever lose its edge of nerves.

Glen’s shows tended to have a thoughtfulness about them: the spiritualism of Stonehenge; a tour of the outer planets of the solar system, complete with a recording of the hiss and crackle of Jupiter’s radiation; the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; dolphins; the possibilities of meeting ETs in space; The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; a homage to Theodore Sturgeon that included Sturgeon’s LP reading of “The Hurkle is a Happy Beast.”

Mine were a bit more rumbustious: “Off the Rails” (trains in spooky fiction); Dennis Wheatley’s “The Devil Rides Out”; The Ghost Stories of MR James; The Poe Show; HP Lovecraft with studio guest Leigh Blackmore, Australia’s leading Lovecraft scholar; “Twilight Zone: The Radio Show”; “Star Trek: The Radio Show.”

An abridged version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, read by Hurd Hatfield, and Anthony Quail’s reading of The Canterville Ghost featured in an instalment I called “We’re Just Wilde About Oscar.” A tribute to Edwardian horror writer William Hope Hodgson went a marathon four hours due to the non-appearance of the next shift, giving us time to do “The Voice in the Night” and two “Carnacki the Ghost-Finder” stories: “The Whistling Room” and “The Haunted Jarvee.” What a night! We were both exhausted by the time we shut down the transmitter and closed the station at 2:00 a.m.

The Sunday night before Christmas 1985 was my show. So I got on the mic and said, “Most people’s idea of a Christmas story doesn’t go past Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” and tonight we’re not going to be any different.” Yes, that old chestnut was on that night’s menu. Though first we aired what I consider to be Dickens’ dry run for A Christmas Carol, the short story “The Goblins Who Stole the Sexton” — “read,” I said, “by everyone’s favourite Father Christmas: Boris Karloff!”

Music was just as important to our program as was the spoken word.

Mike Oldfield’s albums of ambient music — Tubular Bells, Incantations, Five Miles Out, Platinum, etc — were regulars on the turntables. Robert Hardy’s reading of The Time Machine was intro’d at the beginning and at each break by the theme from the 60s TV series The Time Tunnel with its incessant tick-tock tempo.

A program on Algernon Blackwood featured “The Willows” (set on the River Danube) accompanied by “The Blue Danube” waltz playing softly under the final scene, the music with its trilling flutes brought up in volume as the story ended, rising to the orchestra’s full-blooded crescendo.

A funny thing happened on the night we played Valentine Dyall’s reading of The Birds by Daphne du Maurier. Its abrupt ending must’ve caught some of our listeners by surprise because, after its downbeat finish with humanity defeated by the birds, I then put on one of Michael Horden’s MR James ghost stories — and the phones lit up. “What happened to the story about the birds?” a caller asked. “You’ve put on the wrong tape!” another complained. I explained that that was how the story ended and got a baffled, “Oh?” from both callers.

After the James story, I got on air and explained very patiently that The Birds had indeed finished and there’d been no error in the studio. I then played its last few seconds again with Dyall’s solemn “He threw the packet on the fire ... and watched it burn.”

“That’s it, people,” I said. “The birds win.”

We were noticed by the Real World for the first and only time in late September 1986 when a major Melbourne newspaper wrote a short squib in its entertainment guide on our upcoming broadcast of the closing chapters of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Read by the author, Arthur C. Clarke, it made clear — or less obscure — what exactly happened at the end of the film.

At about this time, I was advertising in the Fellowship of Australian Writers newsletter for submissions to the program. Since we were working at a public radio station, I thought it only right to open it up to the public. Over the weeks, a few stories trickled in.

The two main sins in the work we received were a lack of imagination and a lack of originality. We did manage to wring a few good stories from Joe and Jane Public, but in the end I had to consider this experiment in audience participation only a partial success.

On 3rd August 1986, Pilots broadcast my Lovecraftian novelette, “Dead Air,” set within the confines of fictional radio station 3LTD. If nothing else, eighteen months at 3PBS had provided grist for the writing mill. Glen read the story in two long spurts, which took up the entire two hours of the program.

The music I selected to go with it was “The Piltdown Man” section of Tubular Bells and “Peter Gunn” by Art of Noise with its repeated dom-dom-dom motif. Afterwards, a fellow by the name of Dominick — or Dom as he was known — rang up and subscribed.

Around this period, late ’86, early ’87, Glen landed himself the position of Category Co-ordinator for Experimental Music. Like Drama, Experimental had two hours a week; it followed us after midnight on Sundays. Basically it consisted of the presenter’s free-forming with music samples, noises, voices, audio effects, distortions, playing tapes at varying speeds, playing tapes backwards, running both turntables together, etc. What another category might call an unholy stuff-up, Experimental called Art. Though it had its own presenters, on occasion Glen and I, usually working solo, presented our own Experimental programs.

Pilots into the Unknown continued throughout 1987 and into 1988. We did at least one Bribe to Subscribe on each show and, once in a long while, we’d get a new subscriber. We weren’t doing so many themed shows now, but tended to fill the two hours with unrelated bits and pieces. We were an odd radio show late of a Sunday night, transmitted on a station a lot of people had never heard of.

Quite abruptly, in the middle of 1988, Glen quit Pilots due to upheavals in his domestic life, leaving me to carry on single-handedly. Where I’d been doing a two-hour show every four weeks with some help from Glen’s excellent reading voice, suddenly I had twice as many programs to produce per month and no reader at all.

I had enough recorded material to keep me going, but doing the show alone was going to be awkward. With Glen gone, there was a certain loss of coherence and balance. No more crazy banter between us, no more discussions about this author or that book. An uncertain future of solo two-hour shows stretched ahead of me. What to do?

After presenting only a handful of programs by myself, Fate saved me any further worry on that score when I was involved in a traffic accident on the morning of the 24th September. I spent twelve days in hospital, followed by four months on crutches while my broken leg knitted. Debby, who was now presenting Wireless Playhouse alone, Greg having “burnt out” earlier in the year, reverted to the old every-Sunday schedule to fill the gap.

But I wasn’t totally out of the loop. A couple of times during those four months I managed to do a partial Pilots by proxy. In October I mailed Debby a couple of tapes, resulting in Wireless Playhouse giving over part of its 30th October broadcast to an ad hoc Halloween program with Vincent Price’s rendition of “A Horn Book for Witches” and Ed Bishop’s reading of Stephen King’s vampire story “One for the Road.”

A month later one November night Debby introduced a ghost story tape I’d sent her. “How to describe it?” she said, quoting my accompanying note. “Well, take the title literally.” It was MR James’ “Lost Hearts.”

Sitting at home with my right leg in a cast from heel to knee, I recorded these October and November programs. I labelled the cassette “Debby Does Pilots.”

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Proceed to part 2...