Today we will travel back 71 years to 1951 for a detective story from London’s Scotland Yard. It seems like every time I discover a new old time radio show, Orson Welles is somehow involved. It's amazing how many shows Mr. Welles put his stamp of quality on throughout the 40s and 50s. Well today we will travel back to another of those quality programs, this time a show called The Black Museum.
The Black Museum was produced in Sydney Australia by Tower of London, a radio company that syndicated and sold all around the world. The show is based on the real life Black Museum, now known as the Crime Museum at Scotland Yards. This isn’t your ordinary museum though… no this museum is full of the most morbid items imaginable, instruments of death and murder. Unfortunately, the museum is not open to the public, and only is used for new recruits of the London police force. Despite the billing and description sounding like a thriller, The Black Museum is more of a procedural style police show. It was broadcast in the US in 1951, but wasn’t broadcast in the UK until the BBC bought the rights from Towers of London, still in business today, in 1991.
Host and narrator Orson Welles will take you item by item through this peculiar museum, today stopping by just a normal looking bathtub. So why not sit back, relax, maybe draw a nice warm bath to really get in the spirit, it has been a long day after all.
