IN QUEER PLACES

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3284, 5 July 1943, Page 6

IN QUEER PLACES

BROADCASTS FOR THE 8.8. C. RADIO CORRESPONDENT SOME STRANGE INTERVIEWS (By Bob Trout.) Radio correspondents are accustomed to doing their work in queer places, like aeroplanes or tents, but even after ten years of stalking news and features for CBS I never expected to rehearse a broadcast in a small front parlour with one spectator: an ill woman watching from her bed. There was only room for an audience of one; the bed took up so much space there was no room to sit down. "The woman was Mrs Dawson, wife of Ernest Dawson, who was taking part in the first broadcast of the Columbia Broadcasting System/British Broadcasting’ Corporation exchange series, Trans-Atlantic Call. Mrs Dawson had just returned home, from the hospital, after an operation. She Washington. When my eye fell on a framed certificate on the wall, Mr Brown' explained it was given to his father after a lifetime of service in the same felt mill in which he has spent his entire working life. At the bottom of the certificate were the

wasn’t well enough to sit up in her brass bed, but, lying back- on the pillows, she listened critically, and didn’t hesitate to tell her husband, during the rehearsal, he departed from his natural manner of talking. A Natural Scene This kind of rehearsal for* an “actuality,” broadcast, using real people appearing as themselves, was new to me. D. G. Bridson, the supervisor of the BBC end of the series, sat outside in a sound truck parked in the blackedout foggy street, listening to my interview with Mr Dawson, who quickly got used to the sight of the portable microphone there in his own parlour’ surrounded by his own familiar wellpolished furniture. It was a natural scene: the small fire glowing in the grate and throwing reflections on the brass ornaments which seem to be so popular in the little row houses in the industrial north of England; Mr Dawson, standing in the middle of the floor’ in his shirt sleeves without a collar, talking away; and Mrs Dawson, in her knitted bed jacket, listening with great concentration from her bed. Out of such conferences in the parlour —oi’ just as often in the kitchen surrounded by stacks of china and lines of laundry drying before the fire—comes the material used in Transatlantic Call. In the sleepy, rural village of Wilton, in the west of England, the scenery, and the -people too, are a complete contrast to industrial Oldham. But our method was the same. One afternoon, I was sitting in the kitchen with Mr Reg. Brown looking at some photographs of the annual Wilton Mayor’s procession, in which Mr Brown carries the mace, the symbol of the people’s power, used also in the House of Commons in London, and the House of Representatives in

words: “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” United Countries Mr Brown had been very interested when I told him that the mace must always be in place in the House of Representatives before the Speaker can call the House to order. Now, when I told him that that motto on the certificate was pretty familiar to all Americans, his west country reserve vanished and he began to tell me his ideas of a world in which the nations will stand as united as America’s States and Britain’s counties. lam not enough of an economist to know whether his ideas of tariffs are sound, but they were obviously the result of many months of thinking while he went about his work at the factory or relaxed after supper in his tiny, crowded kitchen. Most people who appeared on the two programmes which have so far been broadcast are working people, and we have to catch thehi at home in the evenings, after work. Usually, their evenings are not very long, for they must go to bed early to be fresh for another long day. At one house in Oldham —in Brooklyn street, by the way—-we found one of our people, old Mrs-Eliza Bolton, in bed asleep at 7 o’clock. She insisted on getting up, dressing, and building a fire, and then explained that she doesn’t like the blackout, so when it gets dark she goes to bed. The fire was cheerful, if you got close to it, but hardy Mrs Bolton seemed as impervious to cold as most English people and half the time left the front door wide open.

Different People Englishmen, living in different parts of the country, are at least as different as Americans from thenorth, and west. But, as England is so much smaller, the regional dividing lines are much sharper: a hill or a river may separate two villages in which different dialects are spoken and the differences are much more noticeable. .Generally, I found the people in the northern industrial towns quicker, livelier, and more eager to accept a stranger as a friend without the period of shy conversational preliminaries common in the western farming country, as it is common in some parts of the United States. In the houses of Oldham, the tea kettle was whistling almost before we had got into our rehearsals, and when my new friends found my accent as strange as I found -theirs they laughed as quickly, with no embarrassment. On the farms in the west, the results were the same in the end; it just took a little longer to become intimate. In Wilton, Lord Pembroke wanted to get on the air to tell American listeners that, as Lord of the Manor, his ancient rights are not what they were. And that’s what he did say. He can’t cut off anyone’s head today, and if he tried any monkey business, he would be pitched either into the creek or jail, by his infuriated tenants. “And rightly so,” said Lord Pembroke. Whereupon I stepped to the microphone, and somewhat rudely, said: “So What?” I couldn’t convince Lord Pembroke it was rude, though. That remark of mine was inserted at his request. I’ll never know just where he got the idea that “so what?” was the proper American comment at this point. It might have been Hollywood’s influence, but there is no moving picture theatre in Wilton. Perhaps, in the long winter evenings. of blackout, Lord Pembroke locks the door of the library in the manor house and pores over the collected -works of Damon Runyan.