ARTC HALLOWEEN SPECIALS
[RADIO-SPECIALS]
Amazingly, for a performing group that has specialized in horror, the Atlanta Radio Theatre
Company has never had a full-fledged horror series. These Halloween specials come the closest.
[Program information]
ORIGINATION: W???, Atlanta (Peach State Public Radio).
DURATION: October 31, 1994-October 31, 1997.
PERSONNEL: Henry Howard (producer).
CASTS:
EXTANT RECORDINGS:
[Program log]
ARTC HALLOWEEN SPECIALS (W???, ATLANTA)
[
October 31, 1994 “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (live)
October 31, 1995 “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (live) / “The Island of Dr. Moreau”
(tape)
October 31, 1996 “All Hallow’s Moon” (live)
October 31, 1997 “Brides of Dracula” / “Stanhope”
ARTHUR MACHEN
Welsh writer that has been little-adapted for radio (or any other mass medium)…
[Frank Wilson, “The writer of fiction is no mere copyist,” June 2, 2009, When Falls the Coliseum]
“Among the many pleasures reading fiction can afford, perhaps the greatest and most lasting has
to do with the people one encounters there… [They] can seem more real than the people one
meets in the street, perhaps because, through the exercise of our imagination, we have helped
bring them to life. But how like the people we meet in real life are they really?
“Welsh writer Arthur Machen, best known for that very strange book The Hill of Dreams,
thought they weren’t “lifelike” at all. In a talk he gave on BBC radio in 1937 (available in a three-
CD set called The Spoken Word: British Writers), Machen said that “the supreme artists have no
interest in lifelike characters and don’t depict them save in casual moments of fatigue and
depression … the artist creates what neither he nor anybody else has ever seen in life or ever will
see in actual life.” According to Machen, it is “the artificer, the secondary man,” who “copies and
compounds from the life about him.”
“The point of departure for Machen’s talk was a remark of G.K. Chesterton’s about the
difference between Dickens and Thackeray: “You admired Mr. Micawber but scarcely expected to
meet him … you admired Major Pendennis, but so far from not meeting him, the trouble was to
avoid meeting him.” What this demonstrates, Machen said, is that “Dickens is an infinitely
greater artist than Thackeray,” the reason being that “Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller went about …
invisible to all eyes save those of Charles Dickens.”
[CHRONOLOGY]
Radio appearances of Machen:
(PROGRAMME)
[
???????? ??, 1937 [talk included in British Writers]
Radio presentations of Machen’s writings:
FANTASTIC TALES (BBC 7)
[Thursday—6:30- PM]
November ?, 2007 “The White People”
[“…The nature of good and evil and the origins of sin are explored in this
intriguing tale…”]
PERSONNEL: Louise Collins (reader), Ioan Meredith (reader).