Melodrama

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 332, 2 November 1945, Page 9

Melodrama

"STERNER STUFF" from 4YA was subtitled "A Yorkshire Character Play," which almost persuaded me not to listen.to it; if there is one thing that sounds "phony" on the radio it is what is termed a character sketch. However, there was a minimum of local colour in this one, the incidents in which could have happened anywhere, to anyone, in any industrial town. The main character was employed in a mill, and his wife and daughter (a couple of really detestable females if ever I heard any) nagged him about the impossibility of keeping up with the Joneses until the poor wretch committed what might be termed a passive murder. (The device of omitting to pass the tablets which would have warded off a fatal heart attack has been used already in The Little Foxes, but who’ is to remember that except a captious critic?) The senior manager ad safely defunct, the hag-ridden husand thus steps into deadman’s shoes, only to ‘discover, years later, that his family now are plotting to remove him in his turn, to make way for his daughter’s husband. He dies, appropriately and artistically, of a heart attack, in the same chair in which his late boss also breathed his last. This nasty piece of melodrama was put across very well, the husband being pathetically plausible, and the two women getting the most out of two entirely unsympathetic parts. : ‘