Convert for Cheerful Charlie

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 429, 12 September 1947, Page 9

Convert for Cheerful Charlie

’M certain that to appreciate the humorous half-hour show listeners have to be so familiar with it that they can anticipate the next laugh and begin to chuckle before it comes. Many people like the American show, with its rapidfire gags, wisecracks, guest-artists, and so on. Personally, I like better what I have heard of the British half-hour show. It seems to have a more leisurely swing, although this is not due to any really slower tempo,'but is probably to the fact that a New Zealander finds the British speech (of whatever accent) more easy to follow when delivered at a fast pace than the American, and possibly to the fact that listeners here understand the point of British jokes because they deal with more familiar situations. All this occurred to me as a result of my reversal of attitude to Cheerful Charlie Chester. At first I couldn’t like him, consfdering the ITMA programme, with which I was familiar, as being superior. Now that I have heard half a dozen Stand Easy programmes I begin to like them. I listen regularly. I find the murdering of popular songs a delightful turning of the tables on writers of jazzed classics, I enjoy the parody of the screen travelogue and the radio serial in "Whippit Quick," and appreciate the muddled failure of Charlie to comprehend his pal’s explanation of some ordinary business like baking or butchery. Which proves, not that the programme is getting better, but merely that I am getting used to it. That is the way, I suppose, in which fans are aventually evolved out of incurious dialtwisters. ‘