THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 155, 12 June 1942, Page 5

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

HE title of Miss Noeline Thomson’s talk from 3YA this Saturday (June 13), "Shorten your Belt and Lengthen your Life" looks at first like one of those ruses to get us to give up potatoes, meat, bread, butter, chocolates -in fact all those items of diet that constitute a meal as opposed to a nibble -~and subsist on a lettuce and a raw carrot. But perhaps the method is physical not dietetic, such as "A leap out of bed at 6 a.m, and three back somersaults down the front path, then lightly leaping the front gate twice, collect the milk and walk up to the house with a quart balanced on the head and a pint on the palm of each hand. Using the bottles as dumb-bells begin, etc... ." Then Miss Thomson’s talk on the following Saturday, June 20, is entitled "Fit Your Furniture." Does she want us to emulate the medieval monk who sawed his half circle out of the table so that he could sit close to the food? Night Thoughts The city sleeps. Most of the people sleep, for shades of night have long since fallen fast, and blinds are now drawn at 5.30 p.m. Yet All Through the Night life goes on. Presses thud behind the closed doors of newspaper offices. Reporters, policemen, taxi-drivers, flow in and out of milk bars. All through the night E.P.S. key-men lie awake gleefully planning midnight coups, fire-watchers wait poised in the darkness, alert to spring to rake and shovel at the faint hiss of the incendiary. And even in the suburbs silence is not supreme, All through the night in many a Peaceful suburban home the wifely voice relentlessly pursues the cadences ‘of the curtain lecture. And perhaps it is this exclusively feminine accomplishment which is commemorated in one item from 1YA’s Choral Society pro-

gramme next Saturday evening at 7.57, a rendering by women’s voices of the traditional "All Through the Night." We notice, however, that there is another item scheduled for 8.14. Uncovering Canterbury After this week’s introductory session, the new Winter Course talks from 3YA get well under way next Wednesday with a discussion on the physical setting of the province. If Christchurch and the plains were Canterbury we could better

understand the necessity for such a talk because if a city which is set on a hill cannot be hid, the converse must hold good. But Canterbury is not all platitudinous, As our artist has somewhat surrealistically pointed out, there are mountains behind the cities of the plain (though they are rapidly being brought low by the erosive action of chamois, deer, talkers, winter sportsmen, and other exotic fauna), and bush, and sheep, and farmers, And wild pigs, which Auckland Winter Course listeners may or may not be interested to know grow biggest and fattest on the foothills of Parnassus. There are also nor’-westers and the Waimakariri River and the Lyttelton tunnel, In fact an industrious lecturer could, with the many physical attributes of the province, indefinitely postpone grappling with the problem of its mental set-up. We Stand Corrected According to information reaching us from official quarters, our forecast in last issue of the new Winter Course talks series from 1YA did not exactly correspond with the facts. The foothills of Parnassus, in short, are not entirely given over to nonsense literature. Next week, for example, J. W. Shaw is going to talk about Izaak Walton, and old Izaak is one of the last persons we would accuse of writing nonsense. Making allowance for his flights of fancy and his occasional poetry-readings, Walton is, for a writer, a surprisingly practical man and whatever his admirers may think of his literary eminence, he would be the last person to want a place on the summit of Parnassus. Who ever went angling on a mountain-top? The Viennese Waltz Will any dance tunes live as long as Beethoven’s symphonies? Most lovers of the classics will say immediately that they will not, but if dance music is taken in its broadest sense, no less an authority

than Percy Scholes, compiler of the monumental Oxford Companion to Music, claims that some dance tunes undoubtedly will. " Lanner and the Strauss family," he observes, "created a type of waltz which became known to the world as the Viennese waltz, a type of which grace, lightness, melody, charm and piquancy are the characteristics. Their best waltzes have never been surpassed and it seems as likely that such a waltz as ‘The Blue Danube’ will live for . ever as that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony will, do so." Station 3ZB, accordingly, should find everybody at home at 9.30 p.m, on Sunday, June 14, to listen to a 30-minute feature programme "Strauss the Pied Piper." Variations on a Familiar Theme With that simplicity of mind, that naiveté and that literalism which are so large a part of his charm, Russell Clark has given us (below) his interpretation of the talk "Education and Reconstruction" which will be given from 4YA next Tuesday evening by G. W. Parkyn. His strictly conventional treatment of the theme, however, ignores (as usual)

the deeper implications of a topic which, we trust, Mr. Parkyn will fully explore. Post-war reconstruction, as anyone interested in the schoolboy vote will agree, entails a New Order in schools as well as in society, and if there is to be a New Order,-elementary justice demands that pupils should have the opportunity to tender for it. We can therefore anticipate the extension of the compulsory trade-union principle to the classroom, the abolition of corporal punishment, and the settlement of disputes by conciliation and arbitration, the rehabilitation of the Old School Tie, and recognition of the principle of self-determina-. tion as it applies to the Submerged Fifth, not to mention the Lower Fourth. The school milk issue no doubt will be socialised instead of pasteurised, and homework will be paid for at double award rates, That (if we many coin a phrase) will be the day. On the Level? In spite of all the development schemes one reads about outside the land agent’s office our opinion has always been that marine flats grow rather than develop. Yet "Development of Marine Flats" is the title of the talk by C. Walker in 1YA’s farmers’ session next

Monday, June 15, at 7.15. We have preferred to keep the word "develop" for an all-round process of growth rather than an up-and-down one, to express the slow evolution of a permanent form rather than to describe something which is here to-day and completely renovated to-morrow. Consider any block of marine flats. Last week there were perhaps a few hillocks of sand. This week’ there is a notice saying " Blank and Son, Contractors" and a forest of steel pylons. Next week appears a block of luxury flats, each complete with striped awnings, harbour view, kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, boxroom) and room to swing a cat. Strange topic for a farmers’ session, one may think, but after all the NBS knows best, and perhaps our enterprising landsmen are already contemplating putting the egg‘money into "Seaview" and "San Marino," Dramatised Lives The struggles and varying fortunes of the late Harry Holland, former Leader of the New Zealand Labour Party, are brought to radio in "The Life of Harry Holland," the first of a series of biographies of "Famous New Zealanders " which the Commercial Broadcasting Service is producing. Henry Howlett plays the part of "H.E.H." and Diana Craig is Mrs. Holland. The CBS production department was lucky in being given access to many of Mr, Holland’s family records, including diaries and hitherto unpublished documents. The first instalment of Harry Holland’s life has already been heard from 1ZB and. 2ZB, and will play from 3ZB on Sunday, June 21, 4ZB July 4, and 2ZA July 18, Playing time is nine o’clock on Sunday evenings. Others famous in New Zealand history whose lives will be dramatised by the CBS are Hobson, Samuel Butler, and William Rolleston.