While tensions remain high between the United States and Iran, there’s at least one American that state radio in Tehran invites on the air each week for its millions of listeners. It’s just that he’s a fictional insurance fraud detective who’s been on the case since 1949.
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, a radio programme created by CBS that later found a devoted listenership in Iran for a Farsi-language version under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the 1960s, has returned to Iranian radio.
It’s not clear why the network controlled by hardliners has decided to bring back “the man with the action-packed expense account”, but his reappearance hearkens back to an era when Iran and the US enjoyed close relations.
The newly produced episodes introduce younger generations to a character that many older Iranians still have a decades-old fondness for, their ears perking up at the show’s signature start featuring three gunshots and Johnny Dollar answering a ringing phone with its title.
It does come at the end of the golden age of radio, before television became the primary entertainment source in America
“It is amazing, it reminds me of the 60s and 70s, when I listened to the episodes with my parents through a vacuum tube radio,” said Masoud Kouchaki, 73. “We did not have any worries except for guessing how Johnny Dollar would find the murderer.”