Meat in the Diet

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 405, 28 March 1947, Page 9

Meat in the Diet

OMMENTATORS in the BBC ‘~ Listener have been’ complaining lately of too much meat in the programmes, and the impossibility of hearing, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting all but. a small portion of it. One complains "The exhausted critic reaches the week’s énd like a harassed parent at the railway station-Gissing, Shaw, Tennyson, Marlowe, Saroyan, Chekhov... .". Another writer lists the subjects for the week’s -talks, "The Romans in Britain, social philosophy, elephant-keeping, poets, poetry and the art of translating poetry, the art of Rodin, the art of chimney-sweeping, the art of chitiren,the art of the symphony, exploration-these were only a few of the subjects aired last week, . ." Overfed? Looking over the Dunedin programmes lately in a search for something new to write about, I can’t help feeling that intelligent listeners here are being given, in comparison, a starvation diet. It is true that, in exchange,

as it were, for our food-parcels to Britain, we have a good proportion of imported BBC programmes to liven our diet. But why should it be necessary to import our culture? It cannot be argued that with our smaller population we shouldn’t expect as much in the way of intellectual fare as the British listeners get. This is false reasoningit is proportion which counts, And, in proportion to our population, we have surely as high a percentage of poets, writers, musicians, teachers, good speakers, and intelligent listeners as any other country. We should therefore expect a comparable proportion of inteHigent broadcasts in our programmes. Cannot the brains of our intelligentsia be used to raise the standard of our serious broadcasts, and to provide more of them?