Quiet, Please

This article is about the radio program. For other uses, see Quiet Please.

Tom Kiesche (left) and Michael Lanahan in Corey Klemow's 2004 Quiet, Please! stage production at Hollywood's Sacred Fools Theater Company.

Quiet, Please! was a radio fantasy and horror program created by Wyllis Cooper, also known for creating Lights Out. Ernest Chappell was the show's announcer and lead actor. Quiet, Please debuted June 8, 1947, on the Mutual Broadcasting System, and its last episode was broadcast June 25, 1949, on the ABC. A total of 106 shows were broadcast, with only a very few of them repeats.

Earning relatively little notice during its initial run, Quiet, Please has since been praised as one of the finest efforts of the golden age of American radio drama. Professor Richard J. Hand of the University of Glamorgan, in a detailed critical analysis of the series, argued that Cooper and Chappell "created works of astonishing originality";[1] he further describes the program as an "extraordinary body of work" which established Cooper "as one of the greatest auteurs of horror radio."[1] Similarly, radio historian Ron Lackmann declares that the episodes "were exceptionally well written and outstandingly acted",[2] while John Dunning describes the show as "a potent series bristling with rich imagination."[3]

  1. ^ a b Richard J. Hand. Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931–1952. McFarland, 2006. ISBN 0-7864-2367-6 ; passim; especially Chapter 9 "The Unsettling Universe of Wyllis Cooper and Ernest Chappell: Quiet, Please (1947–1949)", pp. 145–166.
  2. ^ Ron Lackmann. Same Time, Same Station: An A-Z Radio Guide from Jack Benny to Howard Stern. Facts on File, 1996. ISBN 0-8160-2862-1, p226
  3. ^ Dunning, John (1998). On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Revised ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 559–560. ISBN 978-0-19-507678-3. Retrieved 2019-10-11.