Wedding Retrospect

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 441, 5 December 1947, Page 10

Wedding Retrospect

OOKING back on the wedding broadcast (I listened to 2YA’s one-hour résumé on Friday night) I think the thing that impressed me most was the. virtuosity of the announcers. Peter Scott, Richard Dimbleby, Wynford Vaughan Thomas-all three: names were familiar‘ from other BBC broadcasts, but one had connected these voices with grimmer and more controversial themes. Now I would not have been surprised if Audrey Russell (I. did not hear her in this particular version of the proceedings) had proved equal to the task laid upon her of equating outward minutiae with inward significance, of seizing upon the simple romanticism called forth by the sight of any girl on her way to her wedding and refusing to let this dominant theme be submerged by the tide of splendour and pomp accompanying it. The reporting of weddings has long been held to be woman’s work, but listening to the BBC’s Big Three on Friday I wondered whether in this activity, as in the higher branches of other female occupations such as dressmaking and cooking, men may not after all have the master touch. So adept were the three at confining in the spoken word not only the outward colour of what they saw, but also some of the emotional tensions in themselves, the principal actors, and the crowds around them that listeners to the broadcast felt the thrill of actual participation.