Wot, No Fairies?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 426, 22 August 1947, Page 8

Wot, No Fairies?

HAVE heard several items of 2ZB’s Saturday night, There Ain’t No Fairies, each time merely being convinced that There Ain’t no Scriptwriters and There Agn’t No Gold Up That Thar Tree so why not stop barking up it? However I am pleased to report that last Saturday’s Goldilocks and the Three Bears evoked several genuine chuckles. Perhaps it is hard for one reared on f |

Tinkerbell to take kindly to a programme with such a title, or possibly it is merely one of the kinds of Kumour for which you have to acquire a taste. Each little story in the series represents a modern version of the fairy tale, purged of its supernatural element (merely because a wise guy called, Clifford, the commentator at each episode, believes there ain’t no fairies). So his "Jack and the Giant-Killer" tells. of a young gadget-salesman who floors a giant of big business; his "Hansel and Gretel" is the pathetic tale of a young couple housed by an unscrupulous witch in a leaky cottage at an exhorbitant rental (they finally get rid of her by cunning application of the Fair Rents Act or its Australian equivalent); and "Goldilocks" deals with a Gracie Allen type of female reporter who goes on,the wrong assignment and finds herself in the apartment of the Three Bears (Father Grizzly, wife Honey, and son Teddy, plus occasionally cousin Pola) and is the means of cracking a story wide open as well as a bottle of brandy and countless victuals (no wonder the returning Bears find her fast asleep). As well ¢ having no fairies, the stories have moral; but since by 10.30 on a night the children are well out of the way listeners to the session are not likely to be distressed at the lack of * either. — .