Author Archives: Nick Hennegan

Writer and creator of The London Literary Pub Crawl.com. and a few plays. BohemianBritain.com. Event and Theatre Producer. Done quite a bit on the wireless too!

BRMB Radio. Birmingham!

So I’m in a pub in my home town and this bloke is wearing this T-shirt. I worked for it… we had MASSIVE audiences but now it’s not around anymore.

Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds: A Radio Horror Classic

Giant robotic tripods attack a Victorian city using laser beams while people flee in panic
Giant robotic tripods unleash firepower during a chaotic Victorian-era city invasion.

Nick Hennegan celebrates the birthday of Orson Wells with part one of ‘The War of The Worlds.’

“The War of the Worlds“ was an episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air which was broadcast live at 8 pm on October 30, 1938 over the CBS Radio Network. The episode was directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells‘ novel The War of the Worlds and is infamous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening audience that a Martian invasion was actually taking place.

The first half of the program was delivered in a realistic “breaking news” format. Since the Mercury Theatre on the Airhad few commercial interruptions, the first break came after fictional reporters had described a devastating alien invasion and the fall of New York City. This apparently caused some confusion and fear among its listeners, though the scale of the panic is disputed.

Welles apologized at a hastily called news conference the next morning, and no punitive action was taken. The broadcast and subsequent publicity brought the 23-year-old Welles to the attention of the general public and gave him the reputation of an innovative storyteller and “trickster”

Here is part one of the broadcast.

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