Only in Lviv
In January 1930, the Lviv branch of the Polish Radio was created – until 1939, Lviv's radio services were unparalleled by any other city in the Second Polish Republic. Statistics indicate the city had 45,000 radio subscribers. In the newly opened station, Schütz accompanied performances by Włada Majewska and Emanuel Szlechter. He also collaborated with the Lviv vocal groups Chór Eryana and Wesoła Piątka.
A real breakthrough came in 1932, when Wiktor Budzyński, the literary director of the Lviv radio, invited Schütz to co-create the experimental programme Wesoła Niedziela, broadcast throughout the country. For three weeks, between 4:00pm and midnight on Sundays, a 'pageant of Lviv folklore' was put on air: songs, sketches, radio dramas.
Wesoła Niedziela was soon transformed into Wesoła Lwowska Fala (1932-1938) – a 30-minute-long entertainment broadcast that was one of Poland's most popular radio shows in the interwar period. It is estimated that each episode attracted 6 million listeners – 1/6 inhabitants of the Second Polish Republic and over 50% of the urban population. The writer Wiktor Budzyński was behind most of the texts presented on the show. Incredibly prolific, Budzyński was compared to an 'automaton'. In the first two and a half years of the broadcast's existence, Budzyński wrote over 160 sketches and grotesques, 296 songs, 85 dialogues between Aprikozenkranz and Untenbaum, and five music comedies (and that list only includes his work for Wesoła Lwowska Fala – at the same time, the writer also worked on propaganda broadcasts and shows for children). The legendary show starred artists such as Szczepcio (Kazimierz Wajda) and Tońcio (Henryk Vogelfänger), Aprikosenkranz (Mieczysław Monderer) and Untenbaum (Adolf Felisher), the singer Włada Majewska and the actor Józef Wieszczek. Alfred Schütz was the music director. As he said on the Polish Radio on the 45th anniversary of the show's creation:
Each Sunday at 9:00pm all of Poland's radio sets received one wave. I don't remember the exact frequency, but I sure know the wave was cheerful because it came from Lviv (translator's note: this is a wordplay on the broadcast's name, which literally means 'a cheerful wave from Lviv'). […] When the self-confident Szczepcio and his partner in crime, Tońko, naive yet sassy, cast the pearls of their humour out to the world, the loudspeakers in the entire country burst out laughing and everyone at the studio, our guests included, cried with laughter.