As I Hear... Hot Day, Short Skirts

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31087, 16 June 1966, Page 5

As I Hear... Hot Day, Short Skirts

IBy

J.H.E.S.]

TT delighted me to hear that Christchurch had had its hottest June day for I did not hear how long, but a long time. (That is the. trouble about radio news. Something attracts your attention, you begin to think about it, and you’ve lost th< end of the story. And if the newspapers were ever afraid of the arrival and development of radio news competition, as I believe they were, they ought to know better now, as 1 believe they do. They have in fact found a lively ally, for everybody—l mean, nearly everybody—who hears a headline and a sentence or two on the air, or sees and hears its television equivalent, wants to verify and amplify It and rushes for his paper.) But, to return to this hottest day, I shall hold until I am statistically confuted that I experienced the hottest winter day in Christchurch, 30 or 40 years ago. It may have been June, it may have been July; but as I walked east down Worcester street I saw dozens of men who had their coats over their arms. I wondered what sort of woollies they had on beneath and below.

But ought not somebody to prepare a little book about New Zealand records In this sort of thing and other sorts of things? Where was the lowest temperature recorded, and when? What month, in what year, recorded the longest series of hard frosts? I remember one July—it must have been 1925 or 1926—when the headmaster of the Boys’ High School and I walked in every morning from Adams House, in Harakeke street, to the old school in Worcester street George Lancaster and I were hardy men, and we walked across the six-inch grass, bristling with frost, and arrived at the Armagh street gate of the North Park with our boots bone dry, and the frost sparkled under the early sun. No, it did not sparkle; it shone exquisitely white. And the heaviest downfall of rain? I fancy Otira has it, with 11 or 12 inches in one day, some years ago. And to change the subject from meteorology to the racecourse, what New Zealand jockey or driver comes nearest to Gordon Richards’s 4870 wins out of 21,834 starts? Who comes nearest to his six wins on one day in 1933—the whole

card, I fancy—and the first five the next day? The greatest of his six, by the way, was his first Derby in 28 races. But cannot we have such a collection of our records? » # ♦

TT is not surprising that, as A the General Election approaches, party meetings and the meetings of other organisations should apply themselves to radio and television; nor is it surprising that resolutions should be moved and adopted, favouring the licensing of private enterprise. I fear I have written about this before; but I shall briefly repeat myself. First, private enterprise will, very naturally, be interested in none but a licence to transmit advertising programmes. Grant licences on such terms, and you may kiss goodbye to the chance of a non-advertis-ing channel. But it is not that what a great many viewers want? If that is what they want, they should realise that their best (or their only) chance is to allow N.Z.B.C. to develop its second, non-ad-vertising channel. Next, let us suppose that private enterprise is given, and accepts, licences on terms that allow it commercial revenue for part of its time but bind it to transmit non-commercial programmes for the rest of its time. Ln my own opinion, such a partition is not workable; but that remains to be seen. Anyway, if private enterprise is to work on such terms it will have to lay out a great deal of capital and accept large running costs. It will have to find staff. It will have to buy programmes in a short market, to uphold quality. I do not think it possible, unless programme stand ds are to fall. Last, why does not the N.Z.B.C. produce more programmes of its own? Why does it not export programmes? Two questions. First answer, it is only within the last few weeks that N.Z.B.C. has been able to develop a good productions studio: in Auckland, in the famous old Kremlin, and that is the best that can be done so far. It will be two y»ars or so before in the Hutt the first properly designed studios will be built, Meanwhile, all that has been done has been done in madeover kitchens and pantries and outside, where (by general consent) the job has been well Jone.

Second question, N.Z.B.C. does export programmes: news and feature, sound and television. I could wish that this branch of its activity had been better publicised; but that is not my business, though it is the fact. To come back to it, if you want a non-advertising channel, you must look to N.Z.B.C. for it. If you want it otherwise, you had better be ready to pay more for it. I have not argued that point; but I think it argues itself. * * *

T AM always happy when I \ see questions of the arts break into the news, as when I read that the secretary of the Western Australia Art Gallery Society has resigned because his society has bought a piece of “junk sculpture” by a Sydney artist. He is “sick of the bloody rot” foisted on a “gullible public.” It’s not art at all, says he, but “a glorious practical joke on the public.” This piece, bought by the W.A.A.G. Society, is one put together by Robert Klippel from bits of junk. Do I throw my hat in the air? I do not. For I have not seen Mr Klippel’s construction. Being what it is, it must be an abstract. It may therefore be a good abstract or a bad one. I often wonder if those who blow off about abstract art, as such, realise that music is essentially an abstract art; and that, when it turns to “programme music” —that is, directly representational music—it is rarely first-class. I wonder if they consider somebody’s remark that all art aspires to the quality of music. And that means, to its ultimate and abstract quality: in music, of tone and movement and dynamics; in the other arts ... of what may correspond in line and movement and force. So, knowing nothing of these matters, I simply conclude that abstract art may be good or bad, as representational art is; and that you may compose a good design from junk, or you may not. It is not worth a damn that you have composed it from junk; but it may be. I can say only that I have seen some examples of this sort of composition, and not one has arrested me or pleased me. But that the next erection of junk may do so I am far from denying.

* * # GTILL dealing with aesthetics, I turn to the news

that the Dean of Somerville i College, Oxford, has banned 1 short skirts for her 72 girls 1 who will be sitting examina- 1 tions with 1900 male under- ; graduates beside and among i them. Her notion is that some < or all of l9OO will or 1 may be so distracted by the i sight of her young women’s i legs, from the knee up, as to 1 do themselves scant justice in 1 their papers. Scant or scanty < justice, as may be. Is it possi- 1 ble that Dean Mary Proudfoot 1 has underestimated ' the 1 opportunities the 1900 male I candidates have been given, 1 and appreciated, to study the 1 legs of the 72 Somerville I undergraduates and others? ‘ Is it possible that she has’i underestimated their inured 1

ability to absent themselves from felicity a while, in Hamlet’s phrase, and concentrate on their questions and answers? As for me, as a student, I can say only that, as skirts have grown shorter, I have been more and more appallingly struck by the shapelessness of many legs from above the knee down. Billiard table legs, piano legs, drawing attention to shapelessness above. Many of these lasses would do much better to hide what they show, as fashion bids. I know that, as the Victorian mother advised her daughter, on the eve of her marriage, she should “take no notice.” But I am, unfortunately, an observant type. If I mean unfortunate.