Post-Mortem

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

Post-Mortem

OCAL Bodies has never been a vety live topic, end, now that the elections are over, deader than most, but I should like to exhume it for long enough to consider whether something could not have been done to make the broadcasting of results a less unwieldy business. On a Parliamentary election night there

— is high drama in the air, and this drama is focussed and brought sharply home to us ‘by the immediacy of radio communication, There is not the same dramatic tension apparent in the election of a local body (though it is doubtless our own fault that there is not) and what dramatic content there is is spread too finely over the multiplicity of names and places to be effective. Any honest excitement we thay have worked up over the first fifteen places in the City Stakes is slowly dissipated by the time we get back to the race our money’s on via half a dozen county councils and a town board or two. Furthermore, though each progress result gives us the first fifteen in the field we are given no glimpse of that sixteenth horse (a rank outsider) who is hugging the rails close behind and may ultimately qualify for a place. However, Time, the tyrant, probably boggled at the necessity for even the fifteen names and numbers, and certainly one row did tread upon another’s heels so fast that there was not even room for the customary bar or two from William Tell in between. "What’s in a name?" asked Juliet, and certainly the majority of names heard by listeners on Wednesday night meant nothing to them. It seems as though we must wait for television (which proved at the Royal wedding to be merely a fair weather friend) before we can get over the air local élection results with entertainment value,