ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 139, 20 February 1942, Page 15

ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS

ANY visitors to a radio station find that their preconceived ideas of what goes on there have to be modified. They find a scene of energy, efficiency, and exacti-tude-announcers/ concentrating on commercial copy, changing needles, adjusting monitors, checking scripts, and apparently doing a dozen things at once; technicians controlling formidable arrays of knobs, switches and meters, copywriters frantically penning, checking, and counting words in scripts, programme assistants playing the merest

fraction of a record to decide upon its suitability for a particular broadcast. But there is one sight which the visitor may see which will puzzle him at first. It is indeed a very strange sight. A man in a glass-walled room is, it would seem, at the very last gasp. It is easy

to understand why he is encased in-a sound-proof cell. He imitates the pose "The Dying Gladiator," but not for long. Now he needs only an Indian mat to be an imitation of Sitting Bull pointing at the horizon... The gestures of Hitler, Napoleon, and. Mussolini are

sphinx-like compared with the antics of this man in the glass-walled room. Who is he, and why is he there? He is the most important man at the station at the moment. He is the producer, and his antics are merely the sign-language of radio broadcasting. Once the red light goes on, the producer has to be dumb, but he still has to go on producing. Hence the signs, some of which we illustrate here, with Jack Maybury, production supervisor of 3ZB, proving that actions speak louder than words.