Listening While I Work (38)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 268, 11 August 1944, Page 15

Listening While I Work (38)

By

Materfamilias

or, rather, at first hearing, what it is that makes one programme a good documentary and another 6 flat piece of propaganda. The answer rests with the producer, and with BBC programmes coming out thick and fast there is at present a good choice of producers. There is also very great variety in the productions. The best that I have recently heard is the BBC production To See the Vacant Sea. This is unemotional and unsensational. It is as documentary as if a film unit had been sent to an R.A.F. Coastal Command station and had photographed the men at work there; only instead of a film unit we have a visit by a BBC reporter, and his account-dramatised-of what he saw there. There are no special headlines, no emphasis on subs sunk or planes missing, The emphasis is on the deadly routine, the importance of precision, navigation, alertness, attention to detail. For the 50 times that a plane leaves "to see the vacant sea" the crew may sight a sub once only, but the routine flights have to be made. This could be very dull listening, L: is a little hard to say at first sight

but it isn’t. The programme was given in two parts on two successive Friday evenings from 2YA. I liked almost everything about it, the: convincing atmosphere of the station, the economy of descriptive words, the simple, unsensational account of the _ practice bombing and the music, Vaughan Williams’s Coastal Command Suite, It was a welcome contrast to so many of the documentary or semi-documentary programmes which build up excitement by quick patter and strained voices. a * ba T? SEE THE VACANT SEA is, I fancy, a studio production built up from an eye-witness account. Perhaps that is why it is really more satisfactory than some of the other types of similar programmes-T ransatlantic Call, or (to take another recent BBC feature) Aeroplane Hospital (2ZB, Sunday, 8 p.m.). Aeroplane Hospital described the routine of plane salvage and repair in Britain. It was interesting because we like to know how these things are done, but it had the usual sort of questions and answers by employees and people on the job, and despite the varied accents (Welsh predominating), there was a monotony due, I. imagine, to the fact that most of those taking part were reading scripts in their answers. Another BBC feature heard (continued on next page).

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from 1YA, Welsh Lidice, while it contains a good deal of very real interest to the ordinary listener, has also that monotonous quality which comes from the very authenticity of the recording of actual people on the spot. A little of this comes over well. Too much spoils the flavour. * * *® (GREAT FIGURES OF THE MOD.ERN THEATRE is a series of talks that seem to me to have been going on a long time, But unlike most series that go on a long time, they are rather gaining in interest than losing it. I was only mildly interested in the great figures of the past, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse, Edmund Kean, and others whose names I knew less well, but as we got on to the actors and producers of to-day I found myself listening with far more attention. We know enough of Noel Coward, John Gielgud and the Lunts to want to know more-not just the story of the rise and fall of a reputation, but also what they are trying to do for the stage of to-day and how they are trying to do it. * * * TRE LIVING THEATRE series con- tinues from all ZB stations on Sunday nights. It astonishes me that they manage to keep such a steady level of mediocrity, but as I have not listened to all I may of course have missed the better ones. Last Sunday’s play, Fishers of Men, described a Nazi-occupied fishing village where the fisher folk were organising the escape of Russian prisoners. As they are all foreignersBulgarians, Germans or MRussiansthey are all made to speak with guttural and strained voices, and when they are Nazis they are brutal. Well, I do not doubt that many of these situations have a factual background but they are certainly not’ new, and I can’t help thinking that someone is being paid good money for nothing.