WHAT HE WANTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 27, 29 December 1939, Page 10

WHAT HE WANTS

Interesting Proposal From 8S. J. Hayden

REVOLUTIONARY proposal for giving every listener everything he wants all the time, with a minimum of trouble, is one of the ideas S. J. Hayden, NBS Director of Recorded Productions, will take away with him when he leaves for Australia next month. During the longest continuous term of programmes service in New Zealand broadcasting, Mr. Hayden, like all broadcasters, has been fascinated and perplexed, by the problem of listening taste. He has seen standards established and altered, year by year. He has built up his own ideas about the programmes most people like best most of the time. But he is still not sure. He still does not believe that one transmitter under any circumstances can please a big enough percentage of the people who pay for it. A Solution? His solution: alternative transmitters, each specialising in a special type of programme. Tentatively, he divides programmes into two classes. The first programme, to be broadcast exclusively by one station in one centre, would cover better-class musical works, with talks, news reports, drama, and the other miscellany of broadcasting services. The second programme, stripped of all service miscellany, would concentrate on entertainment material of an easily assimilable nature: mainly music, with variety, rhythm, light dramatic material, and so on. His argument in support of these proposals works two ways, The first is that the listener would know in advance exactly which station was intended to cater for his own taste. There would still be opportunity for selective listening. As at present, advance publication of programmes would give the listener the chance to plan his listening, as it should be planned. But his field of search would be narrowed. He would know-as he knows now, which sort of movie he wants to see, and at which theatre-which sort of programme he wants to hear and at which station he will hear it. If he were so minded, he could have Nacio ’Erb Brown at 8 p.m, and Franz Liszt at nine o'clock, But if he only wanted the one, he could leave his dial all the evening with "Erb on the other end, or Liszt, as the case might be. The Programme Planner The other point of view was the argument that the programme planner’s work would be simpler and more interesting, Under this system the broadcaster who liked arranging classical programmes would be able to feast himself on his hobby while his contemporary enjoyed his swing, syncopation, or sentiment, or Gracie Fields. Mr. Hayden believes that this would mean better work by specialists, each in his chosen and narrower field. Asked whether this theory was not to a certain extent already in operation, through the YA stations and the National auxiliary stations in each centre (the NBS has 15 working aerials), Mr, Hayden said the existing system did not go far enough to fit his conception of a possible arrangement.

Admittedly, one station was expected to give more of one type of programme or service than another. But with that programme it mixed a lot of the sort of material to be expected from the other station. He skipped through The Listener pages to illustrate his point. The result, he claimed, tended to confusion. Although station A might be giving as much as 75 per cent. of its time to material which Mr. X wanted, Mr. X would still not be satisfied; for his encounters with the other 25 per cent. would, perhaps illogically, give him a fixed idea that this station was not catering for him. If his choice from the one transmitter were narrowed, the occasional item which did not exactly meet his requirements would be passed over for its five or ten minutes’ duration. He would be confident that a moment's patience would bring him back to his favourite items. Listening Taste Discussion of these points led Mr, Hayden into the dangerous ground of listening taste. He talked, inconclusively,. as everyone must, though few admit it, as he did, of the even bigger problem of whether radio should create taste or follow fashions. Referring to a ZB request session discussed in The Listener of December 8, Mr. Hayden said that similar tests of taste run by national stations had secured remarkably similar results. At 1ZB Bing Crosby just headed Nelson Eddy, with Gracie Fields, Deanna Durbin, and Miliza Korjus leading the women artists. At 2YD, an almost exactly similar result had been obtained from request sessions. The artists were the same, but Nelson Eddy in this case was a demi-semi-quaver in front of Bing Crosby, The " Conservatives " Could this sort of test be accepted as generally applicable? Was it not a fact that the people who liked Nelson and Bing and Gracie were the people who liked writing to ask for them? Were people who liked sonatas and symphonies too shy, too conservative, or too lazy to state their claims? Mr. Hayden was clear in his mind: "If I wanted a symphony I'd ask for it, and see I got it." Still, the point was clearly not decided, and it only served to remind Mr, Hayden, that there had been other examples of listening taste working along very different lines. He recalled visits to New Zealand by outstanding artists: Sargent, Grainger, Eileen Joyce, Elsa Stralia, and the clear statement of popular support given them whether they broadcast or played in concert halls, or both. First-Class Always Acceptable From this, he concluded that any entertainment was generally acceptable if it was first-class. The public would bicker about its likes and dislikes if it had to be content with average-to-good performances; but give it the master hand on the piano or the violin, the Jew’s harp, or a musical saw, and it would come in its hundreds and thousands to swallow Tchaikovski as eagerly as Irving Berlin, or " Boomps-a-Daisy." "Well, Mr. Hayden, where does that get you?" "It gets you to entertainment," he said, in italics, "which to my mind is the whole problem, and nothing else. I may be wrong, and I may be wrong in my ideas about how to be entertaining. But there they are...,."