THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 186, 15 January 1943, Page 2

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through the Programmes

HE 3YA gardening expert is going to talk about lifting bulbs on Monday next and we are looking forward to listen-ing-in. Perhaps he will give us some instructions for finding the bulbs we intend to lift, We are full of that January-spring-planning feeling and so far nothing has come of it. We decided to lift those six expensive bulbs of Narcissus bulbicodium (petticoat daffodil, as our friends call them) from which there fluttered in September that one frail yellow cup-you remember? The one the snail nibbled. But funnily enough we can’t remember just which stone marked them. There was the stone we put our Narcissus jonquillus beside, the one that has scarlet tulips all round it, and the one with the white and mauve crocuses or crdcii; but which is which of these and which other one shelters bulbicodium, we just can’t remember. Keir Hardie James Keir Hardie, a Lanarkshire miner who led the Socialist movement in England at the end of last century and up to the Great War, is commemorated in a BBC programme to be broadcast from 2YA on Friday, January 22, Hardie was born in 1856, and worked as a miner in great hardship until he was 24, when he became union secretary. In 1887 he founded The Miner, which became the Labour Leader, one of the earliest Socialist papers; from 1892 to 1895 he was a member of Parliament, and again from 1900 until his death in 1915. Within the Independent Labour Party he spread Socialist doctrines, and tried to persuade the Socialist* International to call a general strike in the event of war. The failure of this ambition depressed him and is believed to have hastened his death. Bad Business If any one still imagines that he might, but for the law, do business with Hitler, he will change his mind after listening to a few episodes of the new ZB serial You Can’t Do Business With Hitler. This programme is based on the book by Douglas Miller, who was for 15 years U.S. Commercial Attaché to the Embassy in Berlin. It exposes Nazi propaganda methods and the political control of business--applied in milder form to American deals, in more brutal shape to other European states. The serial may be heard from 2ZB on Fridays at 630 p.m., from 1ZB on Fridays and Saturdays at 8.45 p.m., from 3ZB on Mondays at 6 p.m., and from 2ZA on eee: and Wednesdays at 8.45 p.m. Junketing Around The world of to-day is such a whirl of adventure in varying elements that we have to distinguish between air thrills, ice-capades, tropicalities, and ship-recklessnesses, In the last category comes the ZB serial Adventure on the High Seas (which may be heard on Fridays at 7.15 p.m. Saturdays, at 8.15 p.m, from 2ZB, and which starts from 1ZB on January 15, 3ZB on January 22, 4ZB on January 29, and 2ZA on February 5, at the same times), The adventures are retold by Dr. E. Allen Petersen, who went to China at the time of the out-

break of the war with Japan, was bombed out of Shanghai, and made off in a Chinese junk in which he sailed 17,000 miles round the Pacific. Which Foot First? Etiquette is the first step toward civilisation; abandoning it is the second. But before we can do any abandoning

or acquiring we must know what etiquette is. This is what Mrs. Dorothy Beavis will tell ts on Friday mornings at 11.0, if we listen to -2YA,. Our artist shows how ignorance on points of etiquette may disconcert a dowager, and though there is no peerage in New Zealand we may practise in the quiet of the home lest we some day offend an honourable unawares. We look forward to hearing how we may address whom, and with which foot we may shake off the dust of what.

Romantic McKenzies Nine McKenzies became famous enough during our first hundred years to earn a place in our Dictionary of National Biography; ‘one as a Prime Minister (for 104 days) and one as a sheep-stealer. For every reader of The Listener. who could write a hundred words of fact about the Prime Minister there are probably half a dozen who could do the same for the sheep-stealer, since we are a romantic race, and absurdly sentimental. But there is another McKenzie in our story who makes even the raiding shepherd a very ordinary fellow. A sheep stealer after all is just a thief; but the McKenzie who will be the subject of a talk from 4YA on Tuesday, January 19, was a thief and something very romantic besides. Tung in at 7.5 p.m. and discover what. Music for Fairy Tales Like Debussy, Elgar, Prokofieff, and others, the French composer, Maurice Ravel wrote music for the pleasure of children-a suite of piano-duet pieces called Ma Mére L’Oye (Mother Goose), and it is his own colourful orchestral version of this work that will be heard from 2YC on Wednesday, January 20, at 9 p.m. There are five pieces in the suite: The Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty; Hop o’ My Thumb (depicting the adventure with the breadcrumbs); Little Ugly, the Empress of the Pagodas (who was serenaded in her bath on musical instruments made of nutshells); Conversations of Beauty and the Beast (describing in music the magical transformation of beast into prince); and the final piece, simply named The Fairy Garden.