Random is the Word

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 443, 19 December 1947, Page 10

Random is the Word

NEW broadcast series from 4YA is called "Notes and Memories: The random recollections of an ex-service-man, of peoples, places, and melodies." Random is the exact word for this programme. It rather reminds me of a psychology association-test, when some very boring as well as some rather startling facts may emerge from a train of idle thought. No train of thought, of course, is completely random or idle, and the link in this programme between such oddly assorted things as "The Badge on Your Coat" and the Overture (continued on next page)

HESE notes are not written by the staff of "The Listener" or by any member of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service. They are independent comments for which "The Listener’ pays outside contributors,

(continued from previous page) to Rossini’s "Barber of Seville" is the fact that each occupies a nostalgic place in an ex-serviceman’s reminiscences of places and people which must be known also to hundreds of other returned: men. I must thank the compére of this session for introducing me to one piece of wry humour which I hadn’t heard before -Alec Templeton’s parody of a Metropolitan Opera broadcast, complete with intellectual commentator, overture, tenor and soprano arias, in a "potted opera" entitled South of the Border. The libretto and music of this masterpiece are more cohesive and logical than many genuine operas we have heard, in compressed versions.