Crime Doesn't Pay—Much
ANY of the Star for To-night plays are of the ordinary type, evolving themselves laboriously out of stock situations; after all, it must be very difficult to get hold of a completely new plot once a week. When one of these plays (entitled "Counterstroke") began, it showed all the symptoms of the average radio play-young married couple in debt, husband embezzles £300 from the bank where he works, wife’s old aunt comes nobly to the rescue (feeling unexpectedly philanthropic after a life of self-confessed miserliness). Just then I was about to switch off, when the plot took a twist. The senior bank officials, also a couple of embezzlers. afraid of being found out, offer the young couple another £300 to fly the country and draw the attention of the police; so, when Auntie dies, they can’t claim their fortune without going to gaol, not only for their own sins but for their superiors’ ill doings also. The play was over before I realised that the wicked young man had been suitably punished, but that the author had forgotten the Crime Doesn’t Pay motif long enough to let his two major villains get away scot free with the proceeds. Whether this was done on purpose or was merely an oversight I can’t say, but in any case it wasn’t sufficient to-raise the pedestrian plot much above the average,
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 395, 17 January 1947, Page 9
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230Crime Doesn't Pay—Much New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 395, 17 January 1947, Page 9
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