The Voice of Christmas Eve. Coming to you live, straight to you.
WMRG is a small station with a big evening, and the big evening is Christmas Eve. The rest of the year it does what small stations do: hog prices at five in the morning, the weather, the school lunch menu, church announcements, a little music, a little news, and Bing Marlow in the evenings talking to the county like it is one large family that has just sat down to dinner.
The call letters stand for the two people who put up the money. They share a last name, and it makes up the third letter. They are not on the air and never were, although one of them voiced a commercial once, in a pinch. Their names are on a brass plate by the front door. In a newer tradition, the white tree sits in the corner of the front lobby, and features ornaments from their childhood.
The Christmas Eve broadcast goes out live from the studio with a studio audience in the seats, the Hi-Fi Five behind the band shield, Vivian Vale on the second microphone, Chester on the floor with his cards, and Bing standing next to Vivian, warm as fire. It is the one night a year the station stops being small. Every kitchen and parlor and every person in every car pulled over on the side of some road is listening. It is for this reason that the station goes all-out on Christmas Eve.
Audience members are sworn in at the top of the broadcast as members of the Live Radio Show Audience Code. The obligations are few but binding, and Article Three concerns the applause sign. What happens in the studio stays in the studio. The folks at home hear a broadcast. You will see how it is made.
Bing Marlow, Vivian Vale, Chester, Maggie, The Kids, The Narrator, The Hi-Fi Five.
