One Woman's Meat

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 327, 28 September 1945, Page 12

One Woman's Meat

HEN 2YA brought a housewife to the microphone in the "I Know What I Like" series, we had an interesting example of a taste bent towards items which are related to life in the most simple and obvious way, and which make little demand on the imaginative faculties. Christopher Robin’s prayer, for instance, had happy associations with the time when the children were young; Clapham and Dwyer on renting a house appealed to this civil servant’s wife who had faced the problem personally. "The Lonely Heart" summed up her grief when her sons went overseas and "The Floral Dance" her joy when they returned. In theory nobody has more time for radio listening than the housewife; in practice nobody has less. opportunity for concentrating without interruption on developing a more specialised and subtle™taste. If we were to presume 2YA’s housewife to be typical, we still would not be much further towards knowing whether she liked these (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) things because they were what had come her way, or whether the programmes are planned as they are to suit the ultimate and cultivated taste of the majority of housewives, I have not yet heard one of this series that has appealed.to my own taste, but all of the exhibitors have shown, as our housewife did, intense enjoyment of their chosen items. There are obviously so many different tastes to be served, so many varying ideas of what would constitute an "improvement" in our programmes, and so many outside factors bearing on the development of each individual’s liking, that 2YA’s enterprise has driven me into the department of utter confusion.