Listening While I Work (41)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 277, 13 October 1944, Page 30

Listening While I Work (41)

By

Materfamilias

T was enthralling to me, a mere townswoman, to find farmers’ wives disclaiming their efficiency and hastening to assure me that they are all Barbaras-or at any rate that they have friends and neighbours who are Barbaras. As I said in my original remarks about the serial, I like Barbara, and I shall look at my country friends when next I stay with them with a fresh affection, untempered by inordinate admiration. I too regret that there are not more serials and stories by New Zealanders and about New Zealand. But what seems most to have rankled with correspondents was the fact that I called listening to Barbara "@ pleasant, if not very important halfhour’s listening." It is perhaps not, easy to define an "important piece of listening." The pleasantest meal of the week may be an afternoon tea with friends. It may be the most carefully prepared and elaborate, but it still would not be as important in nutritive value as a plain lunch of baked potatoes and salad and rice pudding. I hear a good many things that I could call pleasant listening — a comedy interlude on Saturday morning, a serial like Rebeeca, or a Fibber McGee show, or a Gilbert and Sullivan programme. I may make a point of never missing one, but it may still not be important in the sense that I mean. The things that I would consider have been important listening experiences to me are, in fact, very few. Occasionally I have heard a BBC recording of, say, a war experience that has opened my eyes. To many, Dorothy Sayers’ The Man Born to Be King must have been very important, not because they in every / case approved-dquite the contrary-but because the plays threw an unsu light on a perfectly familiar story. It is not the things that we enjoy doing most that are most important to us, generally speaking, but the things that are difficult. * * *

T is my impression that we have had less poetry read from 2YA than from any other station and for some this may have been a merciful release. But for those of us who like poetry and who enjoy hearing it well read, the new Monday evening 8.0 programmes from 2YA will be welcome. Dr. Faustus in 15 minutes struck me as a daring experiment before I listened, but, in spite of the telescoping, that brief quarter-hour contained so many of the best and most familiar lines that it must have delighted those who knew the play and also introduced those who did not to some of the best of its poetry. R.A.F. Poems read by Laurence Olivier was no doubt the more popular programme, partly because John ‘Pudney’s poems are so much part of what we know and hear about every day and partly because they were so excellently read. * * % RECENTLY-PUBLISHED report on Primary Education issued by the N.Z.El. contains some interesting statistics on children’s listening habits. The survey covers 36 town schools and 82 country schools. It was found that in the town schools the percentage was considerably higher and the hours to which children stayed up to listen much later. All the same, the numbers of children in the lower standards listening to serials

seemed to me remarkably high. In this group of 36 town schools it was found that 56 per cent of Standard I children listen to The Green Hornet -a serial which I would have considered quite unsuitable for children as young as that. Then 51 per cent of Standard I stayed up till 8.15 p.m. listening to Easy Aces and 24 per cent until 9.15 p.m. with Doctor Mac, At 9.15 p.m., the advent of Women of Courage reduced these numbers of juvenile listeners to six per cent. Curiously enough, these particular figures seem to show a steady increase in the. numbers of young listeners up to StanIV, and after that a slight decline. As many as 12 per cent of Standard IV children stayed up to 9.30 p.m., and out of the whole number of children it was estimated that 48 per cent listened for five or more nights. In countty districts the percentages listening were considerably lower: from 30 to 36 per cent listen up to 8.15 p.m., but after that the num- ' bers drop to a mere nine per cent. Apart _ from the fact that by listening children lose hours of sleep which they need, this time represents a misuse of leisure. This is what those responsible for the report say about it: "Inquiries show that the number of children who listen to quiet musical programmes or to children’s sessions is comparatively small. It would perhaps astonish Uncles, Aunts, and Big Brothers to learn just where their children's programmes rank, if listened to at all, in the — children’s minds of to-day. In view of all this, is it too much to ask that modern inventiveness and initiative devote sorhe of the time spent in arranging the present type of radio-serial-plus-advertisement programmes to devising programmes more suited to showing the child the best method of utilising leisure hours, and in assisting parents in the same direction. Children’s book reviews, children’s plays in serial form, talks on hobbies, etc., could form programmes well calculated to fill in hours of leisure in the early evenings."