Steve

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 343, 18 January 1946, Page 8

Steve

"COME ON, STEVE," the BBC programme in memory of Steve Donoghue, was a _ sincere and lively tribute to the personality and achievements of its subject; but to the outsider, for whom a horse is a large unfamiliar animal with a leg at each corner and a

couple of rainbows of assorted shirts on its centre section, this production had an additional interest. One of the best features of BBC drama has always been its sense of atmospheres, period,

background, and tradition; and here the life of Donoghue was used as a theme which symbolised the whole tradition of the English turf, focused, as it were, upon the single figure of the supreme jockey, the latter-day Fred Archer. The narrator raised the question why it is that the urban and mechanised populace of London (or Melbourne, or Christchurch) took such delight in haggse racing. Many answers have been attempted; but surely the simplest is that the mechanised civilisation-still new, revolutionary, uncompleted and highly unsure of itself-finds relief and reassurance in maintaining contact, even in so artificial a way as the totalisator, with the rural and agricultural civilisation that preceded it, with its far greater tradition, solidity and apparent integration and completeness-the Age of the Horse. That surely was why the feature described so lovingly the sort of man (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Donoghue was: the jockey who had a personal and intimate understanding and affection for horses, who made of riding a profession and an art; in every way the opposite of the mechanical expert, engaged simply in thrusting steel and petrol to the maximum speed for a fixed commercial return, whom we, half-dis-trusting our own civilisation, see in the speedway rider or record breaker. Will this popular nostalgia remain? Or, if and when we become more completely confident in our mechanical world and more forgetful of any other, will horse racing lose its amazing ascendancy?