Thursday, June 16, 2005

I Predict A Riot - and I'm wrong

Once in a while, Radio 4 comes up with something fascinating that I didn't know about before. In the throwaway 11:30am slot today we had a nice hidden gem, The Riot That Never Was, a documentary about a 1926 spoof newscast by Ronald Knox that led to mass panic among listeners to the young medium, some twelve years before the more celebrated War Of The Worlds drama.
At the website you can, at present, hear both the documentary and a reconstruction of the original broadcast. And lest you fear the documentary itself to be a spoof, the incident is also mentioned in his biography at
Catholicauthors.com. Knox himself, as well as being a priest and theologian, also invented Sherlockian studies with a tongue-in-cheek lecture analysing Sherlock Holmes stories in obsessive detail. Not everybody got the joke there either.