Awe-Inspiring

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 296, 23 February 1945, Page 5

Awe-Inspiring

HEN they read in their newspapers the other day that Lord Reith had spoken in Sydney about the "awful responsibility" on those who directly or indirectly control broadcasting, some people probably wondered at his use of that adjective. "Awful" has been so often applied loosely to women’s hats, or meals in restautants, or crowds on trams, that the terror has gone out of it-an awful example of how words become weakened and banal by popular misuse. But although, in fact, this word does not occur in the Bible (if Cruden is a reliable guide) and once only in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, everybody knows what it meant originally, and anybody who pauses to think for one moment will realise that Lord Reith was not using it frivolously or colloquially. He is not that kind of person.

What he said has, of course, been said before, but it is specially noteworthy when said by the man who made the BBC what it is and who in himself inspired such awe in his colleagues that one of them (R. S. Lambert, then Editor of the BBC Listener) has confessed that whenever he received a summons to the Director-General’s room he "had to go apart for a minute in order to control his heart beats and allow the mist which arose in his brain to clear away." And Lord Reith’s Sydney statement has. a peculiar significance also when it is read alongside his opinion, expressed in -a talk for the NBS last Sunday |

(see Page 9), that "it is often better not to speak even when one knows what one thinks and is inclined to say." He himself stands in such awe of the broadcast word that this was one of the very few occasions on which he has ever broken his radio silence. ‘That is perhaps to go almost as much to one extreme of reticence as some people before the microphone go to the other extreme of loquacity; and it is of course much easier to talk about the "awful responsibility" of radio than it is to translate that sense of awe into effective action. Lord Reith found that out in his years at the BBC. Yet this kind of fear is at least the beginning of wisdom.