THINGS TO COME!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 172, 9 October 1942, Page 2

THINGS TO COME!

A Run Through The Programmes

(2 you remember the eagerness and incredulity with which you first greeted the news that you could listen in — not merely to dots and dashes but even to’ words and music? Can you remember the first curious noises that came from the first radio set to which you listened? Station 4ZB was not, of course, on the air in those very early days, but it is celebrating its’ fifth anniversary on Sunday, October 11, at 7.0 p.m., with a special programme outlining the history of radio since the experimental beginnings of Hertz and Marconi up to the present large scale extension of radio. But you will also hear just what the radio can do-to-day in the way of providing every form of entertainment, so you should be prepared to learn, laugh, dance, or sob according to the programme, A Jumble of Bygone Days In 1938 a Wellington girl, Grace Janisch, won a prize in a radio play competition with " Bunnyfield." Since then, more and more " Bunnyfield Diversions " have from time to time diverted listeners. On Wednesday, October 14, we may hear from 2YA another of these small-town incidents in the play "Jumble Sale." This time Mr, and Mrs. Jarvis are determined to raise the annual quota of £10 for the boys’ holiday camp, and they do it on a jumble sale. Even in those palmy days before clothes were worn out and then worn inside out, when jumble sales produced large quantities of -couponless clothes, it was still a feat to realise £10 or so, but this is what Mrs. Jarvis did. Art Is Where You Find It Next week 3YA’s Winter Course comes close to the rocks of controversy with a talk on "Art Criticism," by Sydney L. Thompson (Wednesday, 7.38 p.m.), for artists and critics have been at loggerheads for centuries, and. neither artists nor critics agree even among themselves. "True art is nature to advantage dress’d" wrote Pope (at least, we think he said something like that), which might be construed as meaning that Dorothy Lamour is another Bernhardt, while Mr. Coward says that " Life is a curve and Art an oblong within that curve," which in turn might annoy the pre-Raphaelites, But Mr. Thompson is a critic as well as an artist, so perhaps he can reconcile the irreconcilables and produce a critical rule-of-thumb for us laymen. Experiment in Time In order to give plausibility to the suggestion that time constitutes a sort of fourth dimension (time-space, so to speak), H. G. Wells, in The Time Machine, asks the question "Can you imagine an instantaneous cube?" It’s the kind of question we would have liked to ask the Senior Maths Master but didn’t, and it certainly is the kind of question which makes the non-mathema-tical mind reel with its possibilities. Now that we have a nodding acquaintance

with English music, there is wiicstien | query of the same ilk which clamours for utterance. "What," we ask, "is an immortal hour?" We don’t know, and you don’t know, and probably Rutland Boughton didn’t either, but he made it the excuse for some delightful music which you can hear frotn 2YA next Tuesday evening. And you can take justifiable pride in the fact that our own NBS had outdunne Mr, Dunne and will present The Immortal Hour in sixteen minutes dead. Some hustlin’, hombres! Ex-Hollywood Film stars with three ex-husbands are no novelty, but the heroine of Rapid Fire has a little daughter, too, and it is to preserve this wonder child from kidnapping and publicity (see illustration) that she takes the radical step of moving from ’

Hollywood to England. this is the setting for Rapid Fire, the new radio serial by Joan Butler, which begins from "2YA on Monday, October 12, at 9.33 p.m. We do not know what rapid firing will be going on, but we look forward to hearing the Wonder Child go " Pop, Pop, Pop" at the three ex-husbands.