THEY LISTEN TO SERIALS ALL DAY LONG

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 339, 21 December 1945, Page 14

THEY LISTEN TO SERIALS ALL DAY LONG

WO girls in the head office audition department of the NBS ‘ commencial stations sometimes feel as if they live within the covers of a book. One moment they listen to good music and the next they are with Detective-Inspector Dogsbody, tracking down a desperate criminal in wax. On five days a week, from 8.25 a.m. to 5 p.m.-and overtime when mnecessarythey listen to serial stories, tragic and comic, hearing in a year an average of 11,000. commercial announcements about various products, and about the same number of radio features. One, Frances Anderson, has been on this work at the turntables for nearly four years; the other, Zoe Elliott, for three years. And after that they are still reasonable, sane young women with a sense of humour. Theirs is a wartime appointment, substituting for ~ PilotOfficer Lawrence, who is overseas. Listening to serials may be rejaxation for other women but to these girls it is a routine job. At first, they told The Listener, they "nearly went crazy," but soon settled down. They felt like new assistants in @ china shop, afraid to handle. the goods. "We were terrified when we first began to work with the discs," they said. But now they flip them over expertly while the onlooker waits nervously for a crash.

Before a new feature starts on the air there is a certain amount of preparatory work.. Recordings are timed with a stop watch and cue sheets are

filled in, to accompany every disc and instruct the technician who puts the records over the air. Introductions and music themes are fitted in, and one of

the most worrying parts of the job is finding a theme suitable to the subject of the programme. Familiarity with the policy of the NBS is necessary so that certain standards can be maintained. When any recording oversteps the bounds of good taste, the girls note the offending part and mark it on the disc. There is no actual list of banned words, but swearing is, of course, deleted. If a character in a heavy drama gets himself so worked up that he cannot refrain from describing some act as wholesale b..... murder, the b..... is carefully marked on the needle track so that the technician can mute it. But all doubtful passages are referred to the appropriate executive officer before an actual deletion can be made; it is for him to decide if an "awful word" can be cut out without spoiling the dialogue. The responsibility is on the girls to note offending parts and also to put aside for re-cutting records with undue surface noises or other defects. Neither of these two has had a sickener of radio-at least that’s what they say-because they even listen at home. But though these girls have listened to years of garrulity, neither has done any broadcasting. They say there are quite enough people :already taking up the air without joining in themselves.