For more information about the radio program, I recommend a visit to The Digital Deli Too.
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Richard Diamond, Private Detective aired on NBC (1949-1950) and later ABC (1951-1952), sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, and later by Rexall; later still, it moved into syndication on CBS in 1953, sponsored by Rexall.
Starring as the eponymous Richard Diamond is Dick Powell, a former song-and-dance entertainer. I love, love, love this guy's voice. It's as smooth and rich as melting chocolate ice cream. Powell's first role as hard-boiled detective was as Philip Marlowe, in Murder, My Sweet. And in almost all of few episodes of Richard Diamond I've heard so far, Powell often croons a song at the end of the program - and I don't mind it one bit!
Opposite Richard Diamond is a name you'll see come up often and likely in another post: Virginia Gregg. She plays the role of Diamond's love interest, Helen Asher. Gregg, that vixen of the airways, also played the role of Brooksie (the sweetheart of George Valentine on Let George Do It) and as Betty Lewis (on Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar).
Richard Diamond is a typical daily-fee-plus-expenses detective, ex-OSS detective. (OSS = Office of Strategic Services, a WWII intelligence office that predates the CIA).
Richard Diamond, Private Detective, actually has a double tie-in to TV. Richard Diamond's character was neatly split in two when he made the move to television - one half as the classic, smoky, dark-eyed, womanizing private eye; one half as the cool and comedic straight man.
The darker half of Richard Diamond's character appeared on TV four years after the end of the radio syndication run. Richard Diamond, Private Detective first aired on CBS in 1957, starring David Janssen (of TV's The Fugitive fame). It ended on NBC four years later, right back where the series had started from. Unlike on the radio, this Richard Diamond was a former cop, and he has both a love interest and a sexy secretary, the lucky dog.
Now here we would have had a great opportunity to compare one radio broadcast against its television counterpart. Both episodes are entitled "The Pete Rocco Case." The radio broadcast aired on October 4th, 1950. The television version was broadcast on September 9, 1957. However, sadly, every link back to the video of "The Pete Rocco Case" has come back either buggy or mislabeled (the clip labeled as "The Pete Rocco Case" is actually the third season episode "Act of Grace", which aired on October 12, 1959).
Still, what I can provide is a nice comparison between Janssen's sharp-tongued, narrow-eyed, hard-boiled TV detective, against Dick Powell's silver-tongued sarcasm. But something tells me you'd never catch Janssen crooning to a lady.
So what's the big difference between the radio and TV versions, aside from the obvious?
First of all, the medium changes the tempo and timing of the story telling. On radio, you can establish place, time and situation through dialogue or monologue, supported by sound effects and background music. The main character may say something a little like this: "Tuesday morning I found myself at the back of a greasy spoon reading the backs of my eyelids and drinking a gunpowder concoction erroneously labeled as coffee."
In a visual medium, all that can be replaced by the set of a diner, a table with half-eaten breakfast, a pot-bellied cook and some devilishly good looking private investigator yawning behind a newspaper. The difference? About five to ten seconds. That doesn't mean much, unless you have a strict budget of 25-30 minutes - a budget you need to keep right to the second, nothing over, nothing under. What time film saves needs to be made up elsewhere - silent reaction shots, footage of cars driving from A to B, establishing shots, etc.
I will say, it's a lot easier to follow a fight scene shown on TV than one heard on the radio. On TV, you don't have to worry about such awkward constructions as "(Gasp!) What are you going to do with that gun?" or "Now, I'll just hit you over the head! with this flower pot. There...that oughta keep you quiet." And seeing the guy with the white hat struggling with the guy in the black hat is a lot more entertaining than listening to two Foley guys dancing about on a sandy wooden platform. (Foley men were the sound effects artists.)
For a second thing, there's a time lag between the radio series and its televised incarnation. Tastes can change a lot in ten years. Take a more modern example: In the '80s and early '90s, Murder, She Wrote was all the rage; now, it's any one of the Law & Order or CSI series (or one of their many, many illegitimate offspring) - and even those are on the way out. I don't think a cozy-style murder mystery show would do as well in the 2000s as it did ten years before, and it certainly wouldn't do well in the hard-hitting and ultra-sexy 2010s.
Thirdly, I think it really does come down to the actor. On TV, it goes without saying: Image is everything. Compare the two pictures here: which one is more believable as a film noir style private eye?
<-- Dick Powell?
Or David Janssen? -->
The producers of the TV version of Richard Diamond wanted to bring a certain something to the set, to satisfy a particular audience; and that excluded the chocolatey-voice Dick Powell and all his lovely songs.
So when we compare the two series against one another - the radio version with its Singing Detective and active, bubbly love interest, versus the TV version with its brooding lead man and husky secretary - I think you'd agree that there's very little in common between the two series except the title and name of the principle character.
But there's another side of Richard Diamond that the TV series of the same name doesn't express: the funny stuff - and the music, obviously. So Blake Edwards, the creator of Richard Diamond, took a new tack and revived the essence of what made Richard Diamond such a unique and entertaining character.
Among Blake Edwards' many other credits are films such as Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Operation Petticoat; but he'd also created another very famous TV detective - one who has all the suave wit of the original radio Richard Diamond...a fellow by the name of Peter Gunn.
I could go on about the differences between TV and radio, but nothing is better than letting you judge for yourself. In this case, I do have two identical stories to present to you, one from the Richard Diamond radio program, and one from Peter Gunn. Both involve a...well, I'll let you find that out for yourself. Both are funny, but for very different reasons. Pay special attention to the reactions of the main and supporting characters, and understand how the medium affects the act.
Without further ado, then, I present to you tonight's double-feature, inspired by Richard Diamond, Private Detective.
Oh - sorry, further ado forthcoming.
You may recognize some of this situational humour from another comedic suspense/mystery film series. You see, Blake Edwards created another one of the most recognizable characters in the world of crime fiction. He directed and co-wrote most of the Pink Panther films.
Henry Mancini wrote the theme songs for both The Pink Panther and Peter Gunn.
Okay, no more further ado. Enjoy the presentation.
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Radio spotlight: Richard Diamond, Private Detective. "The Elaine Tanner Case" (February 12th, 1950). Listen until the end for the funny song by Dick Powell (even he starts to laugh at the sound effects).
All content courtesy of Internet Archive.
TV spotlight: Richard Diamond, Private Detective. "Act of Grace" (October 12, 1959). Item found on YouTube. Gotta love that car phone and the breathy, headless secretary (who had originally been played by Mary Tyler Moore).
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Radio spotlight: Richard Diamond, Private Detective. "Timothy the Seal", aka "To Guard a Seal." (February 5th, 1950) All content courtesy of Internet Archive. By the way, the movie Powell references at the end of the episode is "Mrs. Mike" - a movie in which Powell starred in 1949. The song he sings is the theme to the same movie.
TV spotlight: Peter Gunn. "Let's Kill Timothy". All content courtesy of Internet Archive. Aired on January 19, 1959.
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