Heart of Furious Fancies

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 382, 18 October 1946, Page 11

Heart of Furious Fancies

""T HERE was an Old Person of Lyme, whose conduct was far from sublime; he ran up and down in his grandmother’s gown, which’ amused that Old Person of Lyme.’ Such grand ‘and grotesque figures one had thought confined to the pages of Lear, illustrated with those large-headed, tiny-footed figures, canted forward or backward at perilous angles, ancestors at once of Thurber’s and of Emmett’s goblins; but one was wrong. "What Is An Eccentric?" the first of a BBC series from 3YA on that entrancing topic, overwhelmed the listener with an elves’ army of citizens from real life, in no degree less strange in their mode of conduct than Lear’s gallery of oddities. The distinguished naturalist who sought to be bitten by a vampire bat (the bat unflatteringly refusing), who harnessed a crocodile, and held his sprained ankle (not the crocodile’s) under Niagara Falls-as more efficacious than the kitchen tap-who sat on tree-tops at 81 to watch birds; this sort of thing in no way falls short of Lear-or for the matter of that, of the White Knight. The BBC manner lends itself to the urbane yet sharp tones of those who explain, to a world impressed yet never entirely convinced, the logic of unreason. And we are promised further philosophical speculation on the place and significance of eccentricity in society.