Listening While I Work (26)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 252, 21 April 1944, Page 8

Listening While I Work (26)

By

Materfamilias

children I have lately been struck by the difficulty that all those responsible for Children’s Hours must have to face-i.e., what is a "child" in the radio sense of the word? Is it the pre-school toddler or the seven or eight-year-old, or does the term include all children to the age of 14? We are apt to talk glibly about "children," forgetting that each age is a stage by itself. The nine-year-old child is as far removed from the five-year-old as is a man of 20 from his father of 50, or nearly so. The child of 13 is correspondingly older than the child of nine. The school sessions have the great advantage of addressing certain standards. It is much easier to prepare talks or plays for special age groups or standards. For this reason I should think it would lighten the burden of the Children’s Hours if each evening were devoted to a special age group. % * * But apart from this age difficulty, all Children’s Hour organisers seem to regard it as their task to combine entertainment with uplift and with intimacy. Intimacy seems to be an important point. How can children be made to feel, the policy seems to be, that this is real and that the people behind the microphone are vitally concerned with and for them? Whoever first thought of this started a tradition which it has been hard to kill. The beginnings-in Britain I believe-were with birthdays, and though birthdays had to be dropped, some of the birthday aroma still remains. To my mind this is vicious, because it was, from the first, based on hypocricy. The child was led to believe that the radio fairies or some other such bogus beings were interested in his birthday, and this figment was backed up by the announcement of birthday good wishes and a_ present hidden in the cupboard under the stairs. Radio became a sort of super-Father Christmas-cum-fairies without the excuse of tradition. Fortunately, birthday greetings have disappeared, but a good deal of the bogus intimacy remains. % % * ‘THERE are other ways, too, in which this intimacy between studio and listener is fostered. Children are invited into the studio and all too frequently are invited also to perform. 2ZB has recently had a guest announcer competition and has a junior quizz as a regular feature. No doubt these do interest child listeners, especially if they know some of the other children in it. But is this the sort of listening that we want for our children? Surely they would be far better employed reading, carpentering, playing marbles, or flying kites, or even making apple-pie beds for their elders. "Intimacy listening" is in the same category as village gossipwithout the spice. As for junior quizzes, I don’t listen often, but I confess I am horrified at the way in which florins are handed out, not even for knowing, but for the most blatant guessing. A recent item went something like this: Announcer: When Tasman came to New Zealand, some of his men were murdered at @ bay which is called Massacre Bay. Since (continued on next page) |e to programmes for

(continued from previous page) then, gold has been- discovered there and the mame has been changed. What is it now ed? Child: I don’t know. Announcer: Now come along and see if you can’t guess. It’s quite easy, and I have given you a big hint. I said gold was discovered there. It isn’t Gold Bay but. ... Prt : don’t really know, but would it Announcer: Yes, come along. Just one little syllable added to gold and you'll get it. Child: Golden? Announcer: Yes, that’s it. You see how easy it is, and here are your two shillings (it might have been one shilling, but the principle is in the same in any case), Well, there we are getting the intimacy with hard cash, but we are also putting it into the heads of children that it is easy to earn money if you are smart without doing any work, and that you can get away with a lot by bluffing and guessing. Fs % * S for entertainment for children, I am strongly in favour of the story. Children who do not like stories are Tare, and a good tale well told will cover a fairly wide age group. I don’t think stories for children need many embellishments. Two sets of stories have run in recent months from ZB Stations: the one, Tales and Legends, with plain fairy tales simply told; the other, Streamlined Fairy Tales, with the old stories gingered up with a chorus of "Choralities" who partly dramatised and partly chorused and underlined, and added morals and other embellishments. At first the effect was novel and quite entertaining, but there are a lot of fairy stories, and this wretched twiddling and fiddling and embellishing went on for week after week and month after month. I found it a relief when the last child in my family lost interest-and that was some months before the last fairy tale had streamlined itself off the air.