THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 139, 20 February 1942, Page 3

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

ourselves, and it mustn’t go any further, but..." We hear this and we know that we are listening to a RumourMonger, one of those _ public menaces whom Fougasse depicts in the club, in a public telephone box, at the breakfast table, chatting deux-a-deux while Hitler (or in our case the Mikado) forms a horrid third. And we don’t want to be Rumour-Mongers or Tittle-Tattles do we? So perhaps the A.C.E. was unfortunate in giving the title "Speaking Confidentially " to their talk from 2YA at 3.0 p.m. on Monday, February 23. This is just to assure you that you can listen in without qualms. Give Me the Daggers As an erudite but involuntary contributor to our last issue pointed out, women can no longer be regarded as the weaker sex. What surprises us is that the canard should have persisted for so long. Dip as you will in the bran-tub of history, and if you don’t draw a Boadicea at a venture, you'll strike Cleopatra who was the snake in many a grass widow’s love-life, Mrs. Macbeth and her daggers, the polyphiloprogenitive Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, the Lear Sisters, or Donna Borgia with her carton of knockout drops. Yes, women are tough. Ask any married man. We ourselves at one time knew a woman correspondent who had some long stays in China, so she made a wireless set out of them. But she sent such nerve-shattering reS¢ O F course it’s just between

ports from behind the enemy’s headlines that we were relieved when she decided to join the guerilla forces. So far this record has been rather a frightening one, but we can leave it to Margaret Johnston to show that adventurous women are not always anti-social. From 2YA on Saturday week she begins a new series of talks on "Some Adventurous Women." Rosita Forbes, the explorer, will be the subject of the first broadcast. Ici On Parle Journalese Time was when the Man in the Street (or Woman in the Home) knew no more about the jargon of the reporters’ room than a bookie does about the Vishnu Buddhaiyat. In those days a " front-page

splash" simply meant that Marcus Superfluous, Praefix of the Capitoline, had been tipped in the Tiber by submersive elements of the local helotry, or it was capable of other but no less literal interpretation. Later the phrase would have been taken (in London at least) as having reference to the widelyfostered belief that the use of carbolic acid derivatives is a social obligation. But came the dawn of the talking picture and all was changed. To-day every schoolboy knows that reporters are perennially intoxicated, that they are born with hats on the backs of their

heads, and that they concoct articles which with unintentional accuracy, they call "stories." To this generation therefore, BBC programme, "Front Page Splash," which 2YA will broadcast on Thursday of next week, should present no linguistic difficulties, and it may even show that the pressman can react as well to high explosives as to the alcohol in which the sensational film has so consistently soaked him. Women And Children First The wrestling stadium is a dim blur of faces. The air is blue with smoke and asterisks. Beneath the are lights two figures struggle to evade the death-grip. They moan piteously. They bang each other’s heads on the floor. They insert fingers into opposing nostrils, tweak hairs, and gouge out each other’s eyes. We can’t help feeling there’s a way out of half this useless suffering. Couldn't they come to some simple arrangement beforehand, similar to the compact made between Sir Giles and his adversary in Mr. Disney’s film The Reluctant Dragon. Not that we favour an anterior arrangement in the case of dragons, for the average dragon is incurably depraved,

and delights in breathing fire and slaughter over the countryside and devouring all the women and children first. And though dragons are now extinct, women and children aren’t, and are still occasionally in need of protection even if it isn’t from dragons. That is why we feel that listeners will be interested in a talk on the work of the Society for the Protection of Women and Children, which will be heard from 3YA on Tuesday, February 24, at 7.10 p.m. "Weary And Ill At Ease" "Fancy being in the room with her while she was strumming about and hunting after her chord! Fancy being in heaven with her when she had found it!" exclaimed Samuel Butler, writing in his Notebooks on the subject of Adelaide Ann Proctor’s "Lost Chord." "It should be ‘The Lost Progression, for the young lady was mistaken in supposing that she had ever heard any single chord ‘like the sound of a great Amen!’" he wrote, "unless we are to suppose that she had already found the chord of C Major for the final syllable and was seeking the chord for the first syllable; and there she is on the walls of a Milanese restaurant arpeggioing experimental harmonies in a transport of delight to advertise Somebody and Someone’s pianos, and holding the loud —

pedal solidly down all the time." Perhaps some listeners will think this is rather harsh comment on a very popular composition: anyway Sir Arthur Sullivan’s setting of "The Lost Chord" will be heard from 4YA at 4.7 p.m. on Sunday, February 22, sung by the tenor, Richard Crooks, The Hour Before Dawn Thrills in the air, thrills over the sea while a torpedoed steamer sinks in the fog, thrills in a deserted area behind enemy lines-these are only a few of the tight corners into which listeners to Coast Patrol will find themselves transported. This new serial, dealing with the exploits of those who guard from the air the coasts of Britain, will be heard from Station 4ZB, starting on February 24, and from 2ZB on March 3, and thereafter eaclf Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday evening at the times stated in the programmes, | Gather, Gather, Gather Like the MacGregors, the Americans are strong on gatherings. We do not refer to the painful variety which have a ten-

dency to afflict one in adolescence, rendering the Eton collar and Old School Tie even more unpopular than usual, but to the type indulged in by the Associated Advertising Clubs of America, Kiwanis, Knights of Columbus, Ku Klux Klan, or the All-American Interdenominational Institute of Embalmers and Morticians, Inc. ("Why go round halfdead when we can bury you for 37.50?") Many American gatherings are termed conventions-for no logical reason that we can discover-but we are sure that those which Dr. I. D. Blair proposes to talk about from 3YA on February 26 will be much more conventional (and no less interesting). The Violin Wins Brahms’s "concerto against the violin," as it has been nicknamed, will be performed by the Wellington violinist, Vincent Aspey, and the NBS orchestra under Andersen Tyrer from 2YA on Tuesday, February 24. This concerto was, like those of other 19th century masters, Brahms’s only essay in the form, and it has a formidable reputation for the difficulty of its solo part. Someone called it a "concerto against the Violin" and Bronislaw Huberman, who as an infant prodigy had played the work before Brahms replied "It is a concerto for violin against orchestra, and the. violin wins." The solo part was submitted to Joachim, the great virtuoso, who made suggestions for removing the worst difficulties, but Brahms hardly took any notice of them, so that the concerto is still hard to play.