Radio To-morrow

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 275, 29 September 1944, Page 5

Radio To-morrow

AST week we reprinted some comments by a radio critic who is ‘one of Britain’s younger social historians: Tom ' Harrisson of Mass Observation. This week we draw attention to a difficult, interesting, but obviously dangerous session introduced by the ABC in Melbourne: a political Forum of the Air. The common factor in both cases was the sense of experiment. Harrisson, who was saying good-bye to his Observer readers before going away with the Army, emphasised the importance of "seeing beyond the immediate." Things would be happening soon in radio which "very few, even at the heart of it, can yet visualise." Therefore it would have to be watched, not merely by the newspapers and those whose professional job it is to discuss such things, but by the whole community, or the world’s ears "will soon be drowned in a volume of uncontrolled sound ... the consequences of which may be unimaginably lowering to the wisdom and decency of man." In the Australian experiment, so far as it has gone-some of our readers must have broken in on it-restraint has not yet been lost, but it was a daring move to devote the second session to an open debate on Birth Control, with the three principal speakers Dr. Norman Haire, the chief Australian exponent of Birth Control on the technical side, Colin Clark, a Catholic economist, and Dame Enid Lyons, widow of a former Prime Minister and the mother of five sons and six daughters. It would have been daring to stage such a debate in a studio, and it must have seemed quite reckless to stage it in a public hall with the audience participating in the discussion; but it was done, and done with complete dignity and success. The discussion was certainly heated. Yet no one can suppose that such an experiment could be extended indefinitely-that whatever can be discussed in the street or round the fireside can be debated before the microphone, or that it is possible to spread "tolerance, reason, and justice" (the announced aim of the Australian session) by broadcasting intolerance and un-reason.