Listening While I Work (6)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 230, 19 November 1943, Page 7

Listening While I Work (6)

By

Materfamilias

HAVE heard and read so much: about the popularity of Brains Trust and Irdormation Please sessions that I tuned in to 2YA last Friday for the first in a series of recordings of the BBC Brains Trust. Did I get what I had expected? Well, not qtiite. To be honest I had expected these eminent and_ carefullychosen speakers to be more quickly fluent and perhaps more immediately and brilliantly witty. This was because I had heard about them for two or three years yet had never actually heard them. But thinking it over I was glad that my impressions were what they were. They certainly held my attention and interest all the time. Their conversation was after all conversation. It was not a play, it was not a careful reading of care-fully-prepared scripts. It was what most of us would like and cannot often get -the opinions and remarks of good thinkers and able talkers in our own homes. And it had a generative quality. All of the questions and answers bear in themselves the seeds of further discussion. 4 That seems to me a special feature. Musical. programmes, of course, allow for discussion and criticism. Talks should, but usually don’t. A straight talk is, in fact, a somewhat unnatural device. The greatest writers since Plato have used dialogue or dramatic form. There is indeed much to be said for the wordy wrangles of the Middle Ages as against our present polite hearing of lectures with which we may well disagree. Therefore it is a healthy sign that discussion by experts should be a popular feature and that the experts should turn out to be ordinary good talkers rather than masters of wit and wisecrack. * * rT HE most entertaining of those I heard, the brightest, was the guest member La Guardia speaking from New York to London. Distance did not affect his fluency, and his interpolations (preceded by a buzz-buzz) came as freely as though he had been in the same room. There was nothing particularly abstruse or difficult in the questions, though some were vague enough to allow for vague discussion, But it all made me wonder why we in New Zealand have to import our brains from the BBC. Have we not got enough able talkers here? If the answer is No, I challenge it. The essence of any such discussion is that it should be on the spot (in every sense). There are many questions which interest us just as much as they interest British listeners, but we have our own angles of approach and our own special problems. : ba % % SUSPECT that one of the main difficulties for a Brains Trust in New Zealand is the war censorship. Every talk has to be written beforehand and passed before it can be put over the air-though I think an exception was made in the case of the Any Questions sessions of the Campaign for Christian Order last year. And script reading of course ruins free discussion. The introduction of dialogue into the 3YA Winter Course talks last year showed how

cramping the advance preparation of scripts can be. The difficulty could perhaps be overcome by recording such sessions and then getting the records passed. That should not be necessary if the speakers were wisely chosen, but it would be better than scripts. In Wellington alone I could think of a whole string of names that I would nominate for a 2YA Brains Trust-Professor Wood (History), Dr. Beeby (Education), Captain Leicester Webb (Current Affairs), Dr, Richardson (Science), and so on. I have, of course, no authority to name anybody, but the possibilities are endless. Ey Ea * OOD wine needs no bush. Does good music or poetry or writing need advertisement? It may sound ungrateful to ask such a question, since it is to help us poor ignorant men in the street and women in the home that so many of our musical and literary programmes are bound together with talk. But it seems completely wrong to me to assume that the listening world is a bottomless pit for ever yawning for more information. It may be, but I don’t think it is. Anyway I like people to speak for themselves and music and poetry to speak for itself. The important thing about all these people is not when they lived and what they ate or whom they married or whether they kept parrots and whether the parrots talked. They are important for what they composed or wrote and that is what we want to hear and understand if we can. I don’t think it would be too much for most listeners to have a whole half-hour of a single composer with a minimum of introduction. I have in fact noticed one set of programmes that is doing this. The series Grieg and His Music includes the playing of all the available Grieg records. I am sure that others besides myself welcome this and would like to see the practice extended. * %: x. This principle of more food and less dishing up applies especially to talks on poetry. I listened to the Sunday afternoon 2YA talk "Night and Sleep." At a guess I should say that the script was read by someone other than the author of it. It didn’t sound convincing. But the poems that were read were well read. I enjoyed hearing Shelly’s Ode, and Wordsworth, and T. §S. Eliot, and

others. They were pleasingly read and the poems would have stood by themselves without so much _ in-between chatter. The trouble is that the informa tion is not given to. be informative, but to give each session a " popular’’ veneer To me it is an unsuccessful compromise. Let us, if you like, turn a poet over to a critical expert who will use his poetry as illustration. But if the poetry itself is the important thing, let us have it neat.