"FUNZAPOPPIN!"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 64, 13 September 1940, Page 14

"FUNZAPOPPIN!"

New Compere For New 2YA Session

day, eight o’clock the magic hour, It is the end of " Every Friday Night at Eight." (Groans from Wellington, groans from Auckland, Canterbury, Hawke’s Bay, Westland, groans from Nelson, Taranaki, Manawatu, Otago, Southland). But the twentieth is the beginning of "Funzapoppin’," 2YA’s newer and brighter light entertainment session. (Cheers, etc). Bright light music every Friday night from 8 p.m., plus skits, sketches and singing, have been drawing a big fan mail every week, The transmitter at Titahi Bay has been covering some ground, The mail comes from all over New Zealand and over the sea as well, Listeners write from Norfolk Island, where 2YA, and this session in particular, seems to have a healthy following: An eight-year-old lass adds her note to the praise of her elders, She says she is allowed to stay out of bed every Friday night to listen to the feature. But the show has now been taken off the air and will be replaced by a new feature which is to be most definitely more and better. Compére of the new show will be Fred Keeley, a globe-trotting entertainer who has settled down in New Zealand in recent years to work for the movie industry. Fred has played his way all round the world, and when he has not been playing himself he has been writing sketches, plays, short stories, songs, patter lines, and anything else the theatrical world has required of him. To "Funzapoppin’" he brings the knowledge of long experience. He was born in England, but bred in Australia, where he began a stage career that took him through Britain, the Continent, America, Africa, the Antipodean Islands. He spent some time in the the thirteenth is the

Philippines, and there saw many of the best developing in his favourite sport, boxing. To save his features for more particular audiences, Fred stuck to the sport only as an amateur, but he won the Australian feather-weight championship in the days "when the sap was flowing," as he puts it, and has remained interested ever since. During his stay in England he worked for and became friends with Jack Hylton; met Tommy Burns, whose world heavy-weight title had been lost while Mr, Keeley was a lad in Australia; admired Jack Johnson; wrote for the BBC, In New Zealand, among other radio activities, he helped 2YD with a lot of bright studio work when the station was just starting. "Funzapoppin’" will be completely home grown, Purely local talent will be used in devising and playing the programme, Remember: it starts on September 20, and it runs at 8 o’clock every Friday night,