A Brief History of Barnaby Druthers Part V

As the idea of Barnaby evolved, one story concept stuck with me: if Sherlock Holmes as a character was relevant in any time period, why not Druthers and Adler? With that in mind, I thought of where Barnaby might be a true “fish out of water” and determined the nature-loving world of Oregon in Modern day would certainly give the amateur detective pause. So I penned “All We Bring To Bear” a four part mystery who-dunnit involving an assortment of ludicrous characters. This would be the first Barnaby we would attempt to record online.

One would not consider the concept seamless as the audio quality of participants varied depending on whether they had an individual microphone or used the one on their device but on the whole this story allowed us to learn how to record during the Pandemic and move our show forward.

With an Oregonian story, it made sense to reach out to stations in Oregon to see if there was interest in our audio theater program and we found a home with KCIW in Brookings. The wonderful tight knit group of dedicated volunteers were actively engaged in making the community radio thrive in their hometown and it was and is an honor to be associated with them!

The idea of community radio is worthy of a specific topic/post and I’ll do that separately.

In August 2020 we found great interest in Barnaby Druthers as a show, separate from Nutmeg Junction.

Nutmeg Junction is the anthology series that enjoyed the ability of doing different stories, genres, characters from week to week. We’re still going strong since 2018. (see https://nutmegjunction.com/) But what we found was that Barnaby Druthers was a specific series with an understandable concept and individuals at the stations could easily decide whether the show was for them or not.

The program grew as interest grew.

We built the Barnaby Druthers program, which is 28 minutes.

And we built the Barnaby Druthers Mystery Hour which is 56 minutes including Barnaby for 28 minutes and Nutmeg Junction audio theater in the second half.

Things were on a roll. I’ll stop the history for now and in the next post, discuss something about the creation of an episode.