Austerity on the Air

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 173, 16 October 1942, Page 3

Austerity on the Air

E are often told, but never believe, that there is ‘no sentiment in business. Now we are told, and have no difficulty in believing, that there is too much business in sentiment. The BBC ban on what the robust Yorkshire Post calls "drivel and snivel" is a protest against the traffic in sobs and sighs. Suggestiveness comes under the ban, too, but suggestiveness has never got very far with the BBC at any time, and is in any case a wholesome thing by comparison with the emotional abuses of the sob-sisters and drooling neuters. But the trouble is, as the BBC has already admitted, that taste is largely interpretation. It is true, up to a point, that the public will want what it gets-and at present the BBC is in a position to say what that will be; but if the BBC offers brown bread in normal times and the Continental stations offer cream cakes it is quite clear what will happen. Sir John Reith went as far as anyone is ever likely to go in telling the British public what was good for it. He gave it plain living on week days and high thinking on Sundays. But after a few years of struggle he found it expedient to retire. To-day’s controllers may order austerity again, but when competition returns reaction will come with it. Besides, who can say Officially where sentiment ends and sentimentality begins, and how far sentimentality may then. go before it becomes slush? Who will say when the tenor ceases to be robust and the stolen tune begins to deprave? Every one knows answers that satisfy him as an individual, but who has the answers that ten million listeners will find convincing? It seems chicken-hearted to hesitate when uplift calls, but it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that although the BBC is gesturing magnificently, it is not waging war.