"A SPLASH OF COLOUR"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 385, 8 November 1946, Page 14

"A SPLASH OF COLOUR"

Sir-If there are going to be any changes in NZBS talks I hope something will be done about the ‘cheap and nasty programme "A Splash of Colour" which 2YA is playing on Sunday afternoons. I would never have thought the NZBS would consider a circus march a suitable introduction to a programme about the great French sculptor Rodin, yet that wes what we had in the latest one. The tone of it all was cheap, vulgar, and indefensible on any ground. Loose talk about "the world’s great treasures of art" -being "culled" from the canvases of "unaccountable men" of "unorthodox behaviour,’ when splashed about without qualification and read by an announcer ‘as if there was something to sell, does no credit to a division of the Broadcasting Service from which we have a right to expect high standards of taste. ' I would like to suggest that when the NZBS buys up job-lots of this kind (presumably from Australia, where commercial radio is infested with such mental depravity), care should be taken to play ‘the records through before they are put on, and if the words "to-night we introiduce" occur, then at least the stuff ‘could be put on at night and not in the afternoon. I believe that there are plenty ‘of people in New Zealand who could ‘have produced a far better series of such | programmes than these.

ONE LISTENER

(Wellington).

"THE CORSICAN .BROTHERS" Sir,-I notice in your latest number a reference to a new serial by Alexandre ‘Dumas-The Corsican Brothers. The

great Frenchman’s name is too often made to cover matter he never penned, and errors concerning him are far too common. For one thing Dumas did not visit Corsica periodically; he made one excursion there, and one only. Your paragraph states that Mme. de Franchi sent one son to be brought up in Paris, and lost all trace of him, and because she thought he might be killed in the family vendetta. A glance at Dumas’ romance will speedily show that Louis de Franchi went to Paris at the age of 21 because he wished to study law, and that so far from the de Franchi then having a vendetta on their hands, Lucien was busy trying to stamp out that custom among his neighbours, by acting in some sort as an umpire between them. It is most unfortunate that Dumas-one of the world’s greatest story-tellers-is generally so distorted on the screen and over the air that one can only know what he wrote by reading his books. .F. W. REED (Whangarei.) (We depended for our information on material supplied by the producers of the serial, and are glad to have such an acknowledged expert as Mr. Reed put them right. Ed.) LS?