October 30, 1938 ........MegaStar
On this day, October 30, 1938, a young Orson Welles inadvertently caused nationwide panic when he broadcast his radio version of HG Wells' War Of The Worlds. MegaStar watched the American's overreact as usual...
That's your career over Orson, whoever you are.
Didn't anyone tell you that your fellow countrymen will believe anything. Even a tinpot actor pretending to be a journalist getting blasted to death by an alien.
You should have sent your theatre company to shadow us hacks for a bit, Orson. Then they would have learnt how to do a more authentic journo-gargling-to-death sound.
At 8pm this evening Orson opened his show my announcing: "The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in War of the Worlds' by H.G. Wells."
Yet still the daft statesiders thought the content of the programme was for real and not a bunch of luvvies doing silly voices.
So when music from the Meridian Room broadcast as part of the whole charade was interrupted with news of a tentacled monster bursting free from a crashed capsule in New Jersey, the open-gobbed listeners bought it hook, line and sinker!
Roads were jammed with people trying to escape and women ran into churches heralding the end of the world.
Red-faced Orson had to come on air and remind those tuning in that it was just fiction.
Bang goes your hopes of climbing the ladder to Hollywood, Welles, my boy.
