July 20, 2018

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Review 📃

Episode 15

Suffering Wangdoodles! This was definitely the most ambitions episode i’ve tried to make since I’ve started and I can’t believe that I managed to get it done in an hour. I wish I had time to talk about all the crazy gadgets in it! Speed Gibson is one of my favourite all time radio adventure stories – I hope it’s now yours too!

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

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Speed Gibson

 I sometimes think about the holidays that I went on with my family as a kid. Some of my main memories are actually the long drives that we’d be on, sitting in the back of the car, listening to radio shows, reading a book or having to share my Gameboy with my brother. As a family, we’d listen to classic radio shows.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Round the Horn, The Navy Lark. We’d listen to whole seasons back to back. Giant boxes containing four to six tapes slipped underneath the passenger seat. And I think it’s because of these formative experiences that I love old radio so much. I’ve listened to all of Lucille Ball’s My Favourite Husband, which was the kind of prototype that morphed into I Love Lucy, the television show.

And of course, there’s Richard Diamond, private detective from 1945, and the new adventures of Nero Wolf, the disabled armchair hard boiled detective that sent his assistant out to gather evidence and he had solved the mystery from his wheelchair while he tended his orchids at home.

But my favourite show that I’ve listened to as an adult has to be Speed Gibson of the International Secret Police, which was a weekly show which ran from January the 2nd, 1937 to May 25th, 1940.

Of the International Secret Police! The show itself was serialised, three episodes, sometimes four a week, with comic book plots with titles like Troubles with the Boa Constrictor, In the Path of Cannibal Ants, and Barney Confronted by the Talking Gorilla.

The show has three main characters: Speed Gibson, a fifteen year old pilot, his uncle Clint Barlow, who is a member of the secret police, as was Speed’s dad, who is now dead. Uncle Clint’s sidekick is Barney Dunlap, known for his catchphrase, “Suffering Wang Doodles“.

Each show is between 10 and 12 minutesy to an episode. And to the Modern Ear has a kind of Tintin / Joe 90 Vibe. Of course this show invented the genre. The show is full of batshit plot holes where people dress up in excellent disguises, resulting in bizarre dialogue like this.

Instead sending it to Cab and Chief Riley, International Secret Police, International Building New York, we send it to Fifi’s Hat Box, Fifth Avenue. Fifi’s Hat Box. Yes, we, we are using a military store as a front.

Something to tie in with my French disguise.

And of course, like all great shows, there is a bad guy. The Octopus. He’s kind of like your stereotypical bad guy, with his henchmen, and his vast spy network. He’s also a bit like Cobra Commander, and just as campy as Skeletor.

One of the really interesting things about the show, I think, is that it kind of feels like it has the sci-fi elements, because the show is all about aircraft. Their plane is the Martin M130 four engine flying boat, also known as the China Clipper.

This was one of the most up to date planes at the time. Which first flew in the Philippines in November 1935. The other technological element of sci fi in the show, at the time at least, was its use of shortwave radio. The show seems absolutely obsessed with it as a technology. It’s used as a key plot point to get people into trouble, and out of it again.

Some of the characters carry around concealed shortwave radios in tin helmets. Report back to the International Secret Police Headquarters, internationally. In this clip, you’ll hear the octopus contact Speed Gibson, and I think they do a really nice treatment on the audio. I mean, I assume the actor’s just speaking into a cone, but I think it sounds really good.

The show, of course, is not without its faults, and it is a product of its time. Most of the dialogue from any of the female characters in the show can be condensed down into the two words: “I’m frightened”.

But there are also some strong feminine characters that get the boys out of trouble by hitting people over the head with umbrellas or … by coughing.

These two characters are of course, the governess, Marcia Winfield, to little Jean Kingsley. But whilst not treated as heroines, these characters are extremely well fleshed out across the 178 episodes, and it’s definitely a testament to the writer, Virginia Cooke, for including these characters for the whole family to follow along.

One of the interesting facts about the show, nearly 70 years on, is that no one knows who played Speed Gibson.

It seems kind of insane to me that we can be sitting here talking about this radio show from only 70 years ago, and have no idea who it was. Maybe we will one day, but until you listen to this episode of my show, you probably never heard of the show at all.

So I really recommend that you go check it out You can find it on archive. org and also the old radio archive It’s also my birthday next week and it would be really great If you could all share this episode and previous episodes with your friends family dogs pets, that would be great Please give me five stars on itunes too.