Sunday
The night the Sunday schedule pretended to be the news
A small audience — Charlie McCarthy had the country — heard the Mercury Theatre borrow the exact grammar of a bulletin. It is the shortest landmark day we hold, and the only one where the panic came from a play.
Opening the day…
The night of
Sunday evening, before 8:00 pm ET
The competition is the story. At eight, the Chase and Sanborn Hour with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy held most of the American audience — the surviving transfer of that night carries W. C. Fields, Dorothy Lamour and Nelson Eddy. Jack Benny had gone out earlier with a Halloween party script. Radio's most famous evening began with almost nobody listening to it.
8:00 – 9:00 pm ET
CBS carried the Mercury Theatre on the Air, sustaining, unsponsored, doing H. G. Wells. Orson Welles's company wrote the first half as a music remote broken into by bulletins — the Ramón Raquello band, the interruption, the field reporter at Grover's Mill, the announcer who stops talking. Every device in it was lifted from the previous month's Munich coverage, which is why it worked on the people who tuned in late.
9:00 pm ET onwards
Welles came out of character to say goodnight in the voice of a man who already knew. The scale of the panic has been argued about ever since and was almost certainly smaller than the newspapers wanted it to be — but the consequence was real: networks agreed to stop simulating news bulletins inside drama, and the fake-flash device effectively died that night.
Where this comes from
