The Best of Its Kind

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 420, 11 July 1947, Page 8

The Best of Its Kind

[N a tecent copy of the BBC Listener the critic Harold Hobson summed up a month’s television programmes. The actual details need not concern us, since television is a thing of the future as far as New Zealand is concerned, but various remarks in his criticism may apply directly to broadcasting in all its forms in any country of the world. It may surprise readers to find Hobson saying that television programmes. are on the right lines when they contain so much of every sort of fare that the result is a sort of radio haggis; certain listeners (as can be verified nearly any week by a perusal of "Letters to the Editor’), seem to imagine that criticism consists of cramming one’s preference down the other man’s throat. Elementary consideration of the purposes of radio will convince anyone that all tastes must be catered for, but Hobson remarks succinctly that the radio fare which caters for each particular taste must be the best of its kind. By all means let us have variety-"good" music, "light" music, humour, drama, informative talks, anything else your taste de-mands-but let the "good" music be (continued on next page) A /

" (continued from previous page) played by the best combinations; let the "light’ music exclude the sickly sentimental, the vuigar, the raucous; let the drama be well acted and the dramatists chosen from the highest ranks; let the talks be delivered by those who are best informed and best able to broadcast their information in an interesting manner; let the humorists be such as Tommy Handley, who; like Donald Duck appeals to all heights of brow. So long as each section of radio entertainment represents the best of its kind, and each section of the listening public gets a fair share of its own particular entertainment, there is little need to dread, with Mr. Priestley, the dictatorship of the thirdclass mind.