This Actually Happened

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 416, 13 June 1947, Page 18

This Actually Happened

[ RUTH, says the philosopher, is at the bottom of a well. Fortunately,-or unfortunately, we have among us a goodly number of Little Tommy Stouts, so that every now and then we get a programme such as 2ZB’s Sunday night series This Actually Happened. Now there are perhaps some of us who think, S.P.C.A. or no S.P.C.A., that the animal was not worth rescuing; that often the cat in question was no mouser but an insignificant stray better left in the well. Mr. Ripley, for example, of Believe It or Not fame, has a regrettable habit of rescuing stray kittens of no value to anyone. The cat in the well is not necessarily better than the cat on the doorstep, and an unimportant truth is no more valuable than an insignificant fiction. A significant fiction, on the other,hand, comes very near to abstract truth. All of which means that it is my considered opinion that factual truth, in a radio programme intended as entertainment, is largely irrelevant. A recent Sunday’s programme consisted of two items. The Club of Beautiful Men, and Luck Came to Pieter Lein. The first item bored me because, though perhaps true, it was as artistically unsatisfactory as the next-door : (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) neighbour’s factually true account of her cousin’s wedding reception. Pieter_Lien, on the other hand, was a rattling good story, and would have rated a kind remark from Tusitala. But here again its factual truth was largely unimportant, and the story was too remote from the usual run of human experience to be true in the wider sense of being geared to human values. Throw her back, Tommy!