ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 448, 23 January 1948, Page 20

ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT

|. New Impromptu Discussion Series

HREE new sessions will be introduced shortly by the Talks Department of the NZBS, and for one of these, which has been tentatively called the Impromptu Discussion _ session, listeners are invited to send in topics for discussion by a panel of experts. The other two new programmes are a weekly United Nations session and a weekly Provincial Letter, by which each province will take its turn in describing its local affairs to the rest of the Dominion. As a variant of the controversial broadcasts which were started from 2YA last year and which each of the main centres is now adopting, Impromptu Discussions will be featured at various times during the year, starting probably in April. The procedure will ‘be that a panel of experts will be assembled and asked to give their views on questions (of opinion rather than fact) submitted to them by a chairman or questionmaster. It is not a "quiz" session, designed to discover what the participants know about matters of fact, but to get informed opinions about such questions as (for example) "How long will New Zealand’s timber last?" or "Are bad teeth in New Zealand caused by a lime deficiency in the’ soil?" That is ‘to say, they will be questions to which there is not merely a right and a wrong answer, but many answers, all of which could be.equally valuable. Help from listeners is required before these sessions can be started. The examples given above are the obvious questions. There must be many others on which listeners would like to hear informed opinions. Listener readers are invited to send in questions to be asked. These should be sent, with the envelope clearly marked "Impromptu Discussions," to The Listener, Box 1707 Wellington, C.1. Théy will then be sent on to the Talks Department, which will select the most popular for submission to the panel. As New Zealand is predominantly a farming country, it is hoped that plenty of questions on agricultural and pastoral topics will be forth-

coming. UN Activities The United Nations session which, begins in February will be broadcast on Mondays in the National Link at 9.20 p-m., that is, following the regular news service. It will consist largely of a round-up of news about United Wations activities, dealing not so much with major events as with the lesser-known work of the organisation and general background news. It will cover especially -the work of agencies such as UNESCO and ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation), ex-

| plaining their place in the general _ scheme. The news -source for these _ sessions will be shortwave radio transmissions from United Nations Headquarters. From September on, when the United Nations will actually be in session, these talks will probably be replaced by direct rebroadcasts from members of the New Zealand delegation in New York. For instance, it is hoped to rebroadcast (by courtesy of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) a five-minute weekly review of events given by Sir Carl Berendsen. Provincial Letter wil] begin early in February from the four main stations ‘only. In each province competent inde. pendent observers will be asked to discuss from week to week events of major importance that are occurring there. They will talk-in the main about constructive and developmental matterscultural as well as material-by means of which the rest of the country will get a better idea of the. way each province is developing its local resources. ‘Thus a letter from Otago might describe the projected Coal Creek Hydro Scheme and its significance for the province, or it might contain an account of the various cultural activities during the Centennial year. In this way, over a period of months a broad picture of life in the provinces will be built up. The first Provincial Letter will come from Otago, and as it is not intended for local listen. ers, it will not be broadcast from 4YA, but copies of it sent to 1YA; 2YA and 3YA will be broadcast by those statians at some convenient time during the week. Letters from each of the other provinces will be handled in the same way, and for the first month the arder of broadcasts will be Otago, Wellington, Canterbury and Auckland. During the week in which a province’s own letter is being broadcast from the other three stations, it will broadcast a letter from another province not served by a YA station. Thus Otago would, in the week that its letter was being read, broadcast a Provincial Letter from Westland say, or Nelson. Letters from the other North Island provinces will be broadcast in the same way, ~~