Gadzooks

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 367, 5 July 1946, Page 10

Gadzooks

RECENTLY I ‘found my attention drawn for the first time to a serial from 3YA called Richelieu, Cardinal or King? Now the case for the historical serial is that even when hazy on facts it awakes the imagination of the listener to the reality of historical epochs other than his own. This is an admirable thing to do, But I find myself compelied to admit that many such, Richelieu definitely among them, fall into ffie error of a false glamour. Persons living in another time are assumed to excite and titillate the public appetite solely because they wore the clothes we regard as fancy dress, spoke in a way we think of as archaic and were concerned with happenings that we think of as legendary and picturesque. The word I have placed at the head of this paragraph sums up this state of mind. But its result is inevitably a Hollywood vulgarisation, since any -historical epoch was to those living in it as mundane, average, confused and everyday as ours to us. This is rather important; do we not wish to appear to our descendants as our real selves and not as figures from a melodramatic mannequin parade? If so, we should surely abstain from presenting Richelieu, a real man who really lived, as a character from Ruritania, and from leading the unthinking to suppose that the love-life of a French King, because it was conducted in thigh-boots, long skirts, and feathers, was more romantic, passionate, and dignified than the next man’s.