Listening While I Work

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 225, 15 October 1943, Page 14

Listening While I Work

By

Materfamilias

| F all listeners or would-be listeners the housewife is the most favoured. She has a potential listening time from early morning until the family come home and insist on favourite serials, news, or swing. She can get an apparently interminable flow of household tips beginning at 9 a.m. from the Commércials with Aunt Daisy and continuing with A.C.E. talks, Health in the Home Talks, Home Front Talks from the Nationals, followed by Shoppers’ Séssions, Home Service Sessions, Health and Beauty Sessions from the Commercials, Clearly, radio aims to make the good housewife into a better one, (The bad housewife will probably be lying in the sun or be off to the pictures and impervious to the well-meant efforts of radio anyhow.) % * * HEN take the serials. Almost any day of the week from almost any Commercial station between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. the listener may keep five or six stories going. I cannot say I have ever tried or am ever likely to try to follow six serials a day, not to mention the evening serials which I have not counted at all. But I can imagine that serial listening would become as fascinating as crosswords, Does this bit belong to Dearest Mother or to Linda’s First Love? Was it the girl in For Ever Young who was left in that hideous predicament or was it Judy and Jané? Some way behind serials, but high up on the list, I would put what might rather euphemistically be called "interest programme"’-travel talks, talks with a reminiscent air, talks which have a purpose other than instruction or sensation. Last on the list comes what is for many a woman in her home a highlight, the classical hour, which is happily planned for 2 p.m., a time when even the harassed mother of small children can, if she is clever, make for herself half-an-hour’s listening at the least. mes es

ND the rest of the time? For most of it there is a spate of every type of light music which will insinuate itself into the unconsciousness of the housewife who believes in having her radio on. And I am prepared to believe, for I have often heard it said, that she is more cheerful and less lonely for this’ Also, and this is an important function of radio, it is a valuable clock. "I’m lost without it," one woman told me, "I put the porridge on with the 7 a.m. news, and the 7.45 a.m. news is the signal for the children’s breakfast. The kiddies must be out of the house before the 8.45 news begins. By the time Morning Star comes on I have done the bedrooms. Music While You Work is the signal to tidy up before catching the train in to town if I have to go in. Each programme change is an indication of something I must do, I can have it on all day without listening at all. In fact I can’t imagine who could listen all the day and all the time. But it’s a dandy timepiece .. ." ES * a HE title of a recent Sunday afternoon programme "Facing the Sunset" took me back to a story that I loved in my (Continued on next page)

(continued from ‘previous page) youth of the old Viking who, when he realised that his end was near, bade his servants clothe him in his battle-dress and carry him up to the Yorkshire cliff tops so that he could die looking out over the sea over which he had driven his boat in storm and sun, in plunder, in victory, and in defeat. I had always pictured him facing the sunset. But listening to the programme the other day I realised that the Viking chief was doing nothing so ignoble. Turned to the North Sea his back would be to the sunset. He may have been facing the oncoming night or the dawning day, but he was not looking back. And as I listened to the recapitulation of small items of interest about six or seven men and women who had in my youth and before been notable-most of them were familiar to me on the grounds of age-I found that they, too, were looking forward. True, among the octogenarians were Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and Lloyd George, but with them it is not their age, but their youth-in-spite-of-age that makes them important to us. No, anyone who is worth talking about deserves more than five minutes of time and a better excuse than longevity. We indulge our nostalgia too much. We look back to the days that were happier and more prosperous. The older men and women in any generation should have the ripeness and wisdom to lead forward, not look back. Is it surprising that young people become impatient of a generation that is for ever looking back? The story of Lot’s wife has a moral for us, too. "Facing the Sunset" should be followed by "Facing the Dawn." % * Ba . RECENT Winter Course talk on New Zealand Literature by Professor I. A. Gordon made me wonder why I did not listen to Winter Course talks more often. Professor Gordon took two New Zealand writers (or rather writers about New Zealand), Samuel Butler and Lady Barker, and talked about them so freshly that it was hard to believe at first that he was suffering from that handicap of all radio talkers-reading his script. He does not say what you and I might expect him to say; neither does he give a recital of facts culled from a wellspent hour in a library. He says what he thinks himself. He does not try to teach or to be in the least exhaustive. But he is interesting enough to make me want to go back to the shelves and get down the books that he is discussing. SE