BETTER PROGRAMMES, PLEASE
Sir-When I find time to write to your excellent journal I usually do so to criticise something or other. This letter is, I regret, no exception, but first may I congratulate The Listener on its interesting and well-written articles and also upon your managing to print more and more of the radio programmes. Unfortunately the NBS ‘seems to be well and truly bogged down under the
dead hand of bureaucratic control in some respects. I suggest that too much time is still given to broadcasting of overseas news. And why are the evening programmes still interrupted for 25-40 minutes at 9.0 p.m. for a local re-hash of the news? Surely this could be livened up by putting over headlines only in a snappy manner (within five minutes) by using two announcers to read alternate items. This would give our long-suffering programme organisers a little more scope. As for the Pacific news, why bother to inflict this on 2YC .listeners? Why not leave it to ZLT-the Pacific Islands could still hear it. Then why put current ceiling prices over the ZB Stations on Saturday nights at 9.0 p.m.? Who wants a Saturday evening’s entertainment interrupted by such information? And as for those bucolic broadcasts of the weather! Some fluency, please! Although radio plays — commonly known as "soap-operas’"-were originally invented by some bright American sales-
men to sell soap and other goods and 15-minute instalments or less were and still are sufficient for their nefarious purposes, why must the NBS have its plays chopped into small pieces also? Admittedly something is being done in this direction --a few full-length plays are being broadcast, but not sufficient, and also the type of plays generally is bad. In nearly every instalment of a play someone is either being murdered, intimidated or wronged, shot or tortured -no wonder the world is in the state it is! English literature does possess a wealth of dramatic art-cannot more of it be broadcast in place of all the penny dreadful stuff we hear? Let us have more variety and flexibility in our broadcasting even at the risk of arousing storms of criticism which would at least show that people were listening instead of saving electricity.
SPICE OF LIFE
(Kelburn).
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19460418.2.14.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 356, 18 April 1946, Page 5
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374BETTER PROGRAMMES, PLEASE New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 356, 18 April 1946, Page 5
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