"The Hands of Time" & the Amnesia Epidemic
_________________________ 

HILARY (as Elizabeth): When you suffered from amnesia...?
Jeff (as Brent): Yes. Elizabeth, I. . . I married another woman. 

Fittingly, the first program heard on WENN is a specimen of the much-loved
soap opera.  Some 65 such programs could be heard on network radio
just prior to World War II, reaching an estimated audience of some
twenty million.  Almost all, if not all, were a quarter-hour in length; many
were scheduled together in blocks of as many as 16 in a row.

"The Hands of Time" seems to well represent the form, as described
in 1948 by James Thurber, himself a passionate (but not uncritical)
listener:

"A soap opera is a kind of sandwich, whose recipe is simple enough...
Between thick slices of advertising, spread twelve minutes of dialogue,
add predicament, villany, and female suffering in equal measure, throw
in a dash of nobility, sprinkle with tears, season with organ music, cover
with a rich announcer sauce, and serve five times a week....It is the
hope of every advertiser to habituate the housewife to an engrossing
narrative whose optimum length is forever and at the same time to
saturate the consciousness with the miracle of a given product, so
that she will be aware of it all the days of her life and mutter its name
in her sleep."  (Thurber,  pp. 191-92)

"The Hands of Time" is typical in another respect -- the show's principal
affliction, amnesia, "strikes almost as often in Soapland as the
common cold in our world," Thurber wrote.  ("There have been as
many as eight or nine amnesia cases on the air at any one time."). 
One network soap, "Rosemary" (NBC, then CBS, 1944-55) is
described by Dunning in terms reminiscent of "The Hands of Time's"
opening malady.

The show was billed as the young Rosemary Dawson's "struggle to
find happiness as the wife of a returned war veteran" -- who, alas,
is afflicted with recurring bouts of amnesia. Living with her husband,
mother, and teenage sister, Rosemary had a happy-enough home
life until the night when her singing of "Night and Day" jarred her
husband's memory circuits.  He suddenly recalled that he had a 
former wife named Audrey and a daughter named Jessica. Somehow,
the process of remembering his former wife caused him to forget
completely who Rosemary was.  And all soap-opera hell broke loose.

Hell breaks loose -- among the characters and actors alike -- in
subsequent episodes of "The Hands of Time."
 

Comments or corrections? Please write to mikewats@aol.com

PRINCIPAL SOURCES
John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (1998)
James Thurber, "Soapland," reprinted in The Beast in Me and Other
   Animals (1949)
 

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