Diary of Fate - 48/03/02 John Carthage

The Diary of Fate is a fun series for a number of reasons. It has a heavy-handed host who plays fate, a somewhat sinister sounding character who delights in emphasizing how he manipulates events to force life changing choices.

The characters in the stories always seem to make the wrong choice, and thereby assure their ultimate demise. Perhaps it's a hit and run driver, or a jealous husband who decides to eliminate his competition, or a man who murders his way to the top of the company. Whatever the scheme, you can rest assured that the cold-blooded culprit will dish it out in full heaping servings before he is forced to get a taste of his own medicine.

And that's the part of this series that is somewhat disturbing. The formula is basically that we hate to see someone be cruel to someone else but love to see that kind of person harshly punished. So, in effect, we're listening to the show because we want to see someone suffer, just so long as we can justify that pain by saying they had it coming to them. If you think about it, it's not really that different from watching gladiators being fed to the lions for amusement. The biggest difference is that the victims are actors pretending to die.

The crowd is still cheering for blood, but instead of applause, the radio arena survives on Nielsen ratings. After two thousand years of social evolution, only the technology has changed. The human fascination with death (especially of others) has not. But getting back Fate, he is played by Herb Lytton. Lytton was a popular radio actor famous for being able to pick up a script and read it cold without any practice or mistakes (The Digital Dele Too). His voice in this role actually sounds like that of a mobster: it's hard and unsympathetic.

Yet his fatalistic metaphors get poetic at times. He also seems to enjoy making dire warnings to the hapless mortal audience, threats that he won't even bother to finish uttering. No, that's Plebian work for the puny human announcer. It sounds like this: Fate: "Heed well you who listen, and remember, there is a page for you in--" Announcer: "The Diary of Fate!" And you thought having a chauffeur was cool? Imagine how impressive it would be to have an announcer accompany you everywhere to emphasize your importance by finishing your statements.

That would be even more aggrandizing than being the queen of England and referring to yourself as the royal "we". But I digress. The point is that Fate had fun with his all-seeing, all-knowing role, just as the audience enjoyed hearing him expose the various scoundrels that made up his weekly cast. He was like The Whistler that way, relishing his job of revealing the hidden secrets of the men and women who conspired to outwit the law. Many of the plots were cunning as well.
A double cross was par for the course, but a triple cross was even better! You really got to see the worst of what humanity had to offer in each episode, but again, justice always prevailed so all's well that ends well.