Episode
number: 2
Network broadcast date: Tuesday,
August 4, 1964
House
of Cards
Genre: Topical drama
Author: George Bamber
Production number: 3
Production date: Tuesday,
June 23, 1964
Director: Warren Somerville
Plotline: Months after a nuclear bomb left the outside world a radioactive wasteland, time, food, and oxygen begin to run out on a young couple and two children who stayed safe in a fallout shelter. Despite the severe radiation and temperatures too high for humans to exist outside, the family hears a persistent scratching sound at the shelter door...
Listen: https://archive.org/details/T5project/Theater+Five+640804+002+A+House+of+Cards+(clipped+close).flac
Cast: Vicki Vola, George Petrie, Bryna Raeburn, Guy Sorel, Cecil Roy
Notes:
Bamber was a young writer whose radio work began on Suspense in 1959; some of his writing had a sci-fi "what if?" aspect to it.
Bamber eventually left writing for corporate marketing in the paper and lumber industry and later became a successful and popular avocado farmer in Southern California.
This episode has a good Twilight Zone feel to it. TZ was one of the series that influenced Bamber's writing.
Nick Palmer, who is writing plotlines for this T5 Project, has identified this as a recommended episode.
One of the few ads of T5. This is from the 1964-10-06 Shreveport LA Times; note that KWKH picked up T5 after it was already being broadcast by some stations for two months. This made it difficult for ABC to make national announcements about which plays would be broadcast on a particular date. It was up to the individual stations to supply episode information to their local newspapers.
Here is an ad almost two months later than KWKH... from CFRA in Ottawa, Ontario from the 1964-11-24 Ottawa Citizen.
And then two years after that, more than a year after T5 production ended. The series went into syndication, and here it is as listed in the 1966-11-22 Pittsburgh PA Press radio timetable.
Note also that the series name is spelled in three different ways: "Theatre Five," "Theatre 5," and "Theater Five."