Chapter 276: Our Struggle
One day in February 1032 of the new calendar in the other world, Brother Lowell, who was staying at the Crescent Manor in Moses Port, returned to his room after dinner, made some black tea, turned on the radio, tuned to the Innadri radio station, and relaxed to enjoy the music from the other world.
Innadri Radio Station only has six hours of broadcasting time, from noon to 2 o'clock, and from 6 o'clock in the afternoon to 10 o'clock in the evening. During the rest of the time, it plays music tracks in a loop.
Lowell couldn't appreciate the music in the morning session. Not only was the lyrics too shocking for him, who held the Azalea Badge, but he also couldn't accept the overly exaggerated style.
Lowell was very interested in the music played between 3pm and 6pm. He liked the hundreds of randomly looped songs and could even hum along...
——After all, it was a playlist collected by Zhao Zhenzhen, including classic works by national team singers such as Wu Bixia, Zu Hai, Yin Xiumei, Sa Dingding, Yu Wenhua, Gong Linna, Han Hong, etc., especially the Oriental Nightingale Wu Bixia, whose singing style is particularly in line with the preferences of old literary youths like Brother Lowell who are used to listening to opera.
After listening to only two songs, the clock hand pointed to six o'clock, and the music stopped abruptly, turning into the fixed BGM before the host came on stage.
Normally, when Lowell heard this voice, he would change the channel and listen to operas on other channels. The evening shows on the Innadelli Radio Station were all about how to scientifically raise chickens, ducks, and geese, deliver sows, ewes, and cows, use spare land to grow vegetables, prevent livestock foot-and-mouth disease, make your own farmyard manure, use broken pottery jars to grow green onions and garlic sprouts without soil, increase production by intercropping in the field, and other science and education programs that directly target rural audiences. It was quite interesting to listen to it occasionally, but Lowell couldn't stand listening to it too often.
Lowell did not change the channel today, and the reason was very simple... the radio drama for which he wrote the script was about to premiere.
Of course, there are radio programs in the world that are performed in the form of language, such as various musicals adapted from operas.
The famous work of the opera queen, the Red Queen, was adapted into several musicals and broadcast on radio stations in various countries and regions. Brother Lowell was one of the devout listeners - he even almost memorized the script of the musical.
When writing the radio drama based on real people, Lowell added a lot of Red Queen opera style into it, for example, the very confident aria of Brother Lowell at the opening of the first episode.
Unfortunately, after reading the faxed script, the ghost lady Zhao Zhenzhen personally came to Crescent Manor to meet with Lowell, and tactfully expressed her hope that most of the singing parts could be deleted, leaving only the parts that connected with the main plot. She also wanted to modify the profound and obscure words and turn them into popular terms, and to abandon the operatic singing style and let the actors sing in folk tunes.
In addition, Ms. Zhao unceremoniously changed the title of the radio drama given by Brother Lowell to the unartistic name "Our Struggle".
Of course Lowell refused. He could accept reducing the difficulty of understanding the work, but cutting the singing parts was too much. A musical that did not allow the actors to show off their skills could not be called an artistic work at all. Not only did they cut out most of the singing parts that fully demonstrated the actors' singing skills, but they also changed them all to popular folk singing. In that case, what artistic value did this radio drama have?
Zhao Zhenzhen's method of convincing Brother Lowell was very direct: all the actors participating in the performance were former red-light district workers with mediocre singing skills. If you really keep an insane amount of opera arias, the actors will be terrible, and the script you wrote will become a terrible show with nothing.
Brother Lowell was forced into submission.
The host introduced the adjustment of the radio station's evening program in a brisk tone, and used the time period from 6:10 to 6:55 to broadcast Innadri's first radio drama program "Our Struggle". He also briefly introduced the list of cast members, thanked Innadri City Hall and Westham Town Hall for their strong support for the program, and thanked Brother Alfred Lowell for writing the script, and then announced the official start of the radio drama.
The show started, accompanied by a bright background music, and a clear and sweet female voice sang the opening song: "My hometown is Westerme, a beautiful town on the land irrigated by the Barcelo River. My name is Caroline, and I grew up in this town..."
Brother Lowell sighed heavily upon hearing this.
It's not that the actress who played Caroline didn't sing well, but that this kind of singing style, which has no technical content at all and can be sung by any passerby on the street with a full range of notes, is like a nursery rhyme. It is not presentable at all.
What made Brother Lowell even more upset was that after singing the opening song, the actress who played Caroline started to speak directly: "My mother wants me to go home and find someone to marry, but I haven't decided whether I want to spend my life with a stranger. It's too abrupt for me to consider such a distant thing. I wonder if my mother was also in this dilemma when she was young."
Three more young-sounding male voices took over the conversation, singing in unison with the actress, using a few concise and straightforward lines to explain the identities of the four people and the initial plot - these young people heard that their hometown had a new lord and many job opportunities had been created, so they returned home from the city to see if they could find a decent job.
These dialogues were written by Brother Lowell after careful consideration. The actors' dialogue skills were also very good, and there were no major problems in their performances, but Lowell still sighed... He seriously considered the brevity of the dialogues in order to make time for the singing parts, but now at least 70% of the singing parts have been cut, and the remaining 30% have been changed beyond recognition. He simply doesn't understand what he is busying himself for.
"This is not a musical at all, it's just a bedtime story for kids!" The older intellectual was very sad.
As a creator, he was very depressed, but in the towns and villages of Innadri, where the loudspeakers of the radio stations were installed, crowds of people were gathering more and more.
The people of Westham had long known from those two loudmouths, Alan and Benjamin, that someone from their town was going to be on a radio play, so many families had dinner earlier on purpose, and after dinner they brought their own bamboo chairs and benches and sat down on the street , eagerly waiting for the show to start.
Residents of small towns like Kane, Horseshoe, and Newin were not as active as the people of Westham, but they had heard on the radio a few days earlier that the City Hall was going to launch a radio drama, and after dark, those who were not in a hurry to go to bed or had nothing else to do gathered near the loudspeakers in each block, chatting with their neighbors while waiting to listen to the new show.
When the show started, the residents of these small towns were all surprised, especially those towns that the small caravan of four young people had visited before. The townspeople who had bought things from them all felt a strong sense of unreality when they heard the actors announce themselves by their names.
“Isn’t this the small caravan run by those young men?”
"Yeah, our family just bought the toilet paper they brought a while ago."
"I've seen that little girl named Caroline. She and her aunt and uncle even borrowed water from my family!"
"The things they bring are one or two copper coins more expensive than those sold in the cheap stores in the city, but it's a good thing that it saves trouble. Otherwise, I would have to go to the city to buy a towel."
"No wonder I didn't see them this week. Did they go to do the radio show?"
The people they had met before became characters in the programs launched by the radio station. This vague sense of participation made the townspeople who had purchased the caravan feel an inexplicable sense of novelty.
The show continued. Caroline and her three friends returned to their hometown and were so frightened by the undead parading on the streets that they wanted to return to the city immediately, which caused a lot of good-natured laughter from the audience - everyone in the entire Innad Territory knew that the undead first appeared in the town of Westham, and it turned out that the people of Westham were also very afraid of them at the beginning!
When Caroline returned home, the argument she had with the actress who played her mother, Ms. Winnie, over the dead cloth made many townspeople who had been struggling over whether they could buy the dead cloth smile knowingly... It turned out that Caroline, a capable girl who ran a small caravan business, was also worried at the beginning whether the cloth could be used!
There are undead walking around the town in broad daylight, so the four protagonists are both terrified and curious. This plot is expressed through the refined lines written by Brother Lowell. Those who have had the same experience can relate to it, while those who have not can fully satisfy their curiosity and become more and more interested as they listen.
It is difficult for people in the countryside to visit their neighbors before going to bed after dark like people in towns. Most people go to bed after dark.
This habit gradually changed after farmers got used to hearing all kinds of fresh and practical farming and breeding knowledge spread through loudspeakers. When it got dark, countless villagers left their homes, old and young, and rushed to the village chief's house with homemade torches.
Villagers who came early could enter the yard and occupy a place, while those who came late stayed in the open space outside the yard. Young people and teenagers picked up firewood to build a fire, which not only provided lighting, but also cooked some potatoes they brought, caught insects, raw wild fruits and other things as snacks.
The singing segment of the radio drama "Our Struggle" failed to attract the attention of the farmers at the beginning. When the actress sang the opening song, the villagers did not listen at all and continued to talk loudly to themselves.
The switch from singing to dialogue attracted the attention of the noisy farmers, who were gradually influenced by the rhythm of the dialogue and entered into the plot.
For farmers, songs can relieve stress and regulate mood to a certain extent, but it is obviously a joke to expect farmers who cannot even write their own names to appreciate the connotation of excellent operas and musicals... Those lyrics are poems, and their meanings are difficult to understand. Who knows what they are expressing?
If the lines and dialogues are replaced with easy-to-understand ones, the threshold for understanding will be lowered.
Zhao Zhenzhen revised Brother Lowell's script for the second time, replacing all the "cultured words" in the singing and dialogues that were not used by small town residents in their daily lives with plain words.
Lowell was upset that his work was turned into a "children's bedtime story", but this was exactly the effect Zhao Zhenzhen wanted - more than 70% of the listeners of Nadeli Radio Station were farmers, and farmers couldn't understand it, so was there any point in promoting this radio drama?
Zhao Zhenzhen’s hard work was not in vain. In the first episode of the radio drama “Our Struggle”, when the four young people were frightened into making fools of themselves by the ghosts in the town, not only the adult farmers but also the half-grown rural teenagers laughed out loud.
When the four young people are confused and struggling about the future, the teenage farm boys who have long known that life is not easy will worry with them.
As four young men run around town doing "market research" and decide to start a small business, the young listeners cheer .
The four young men were excited when Mr. Raikes supported them and allowed them to buy their first batch of goods on credit, and the audience was as excited as they were.
The 45-minute first episode ended with the part where Caroline and her companions were worried about the safety on the road and went everywhere looking for relatives and friends to help them do business. When the host came out to announce the next episode, countless people in the villages and towns of Naderi let out long "eh" sounds, feeling that they were still not satisfied.
