Much-Binding

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 456, 19 March 1948, Page 29

Much-Binding

JN spite of its name Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh comes, in my estimate, nowhere near the first rank in humorous entertainment. Perhaps that is a little unfair: after all, its flavour is distinctly a wartime one, and must inevitably have lost whatever freshness it had when it first emerged from its scavenger hunt in the scrapheap of old wisecracks. The jokes are long in the tooth and long in the telling. One sees them coming and one yawns-not becduse they are bad jokes but because they are very tired ones by the time they get here. I was tired, too, by the time Coster had finished hypnotising Murdoch and Horne into saying how beautiful he was, almost as tired as Coster must have been. As a flesh and blood show, is feature would probably go over very well, but on the air it lacks the necessary speed of attack that gives a radio performance its sparkle. I must admit that I would like to have seen Coster teaching Rita to do the "backside kick" he learnt’in dancing class. One of the best humorous programmes, on rather a smaller scale than ‘Tommy MHandley’s and Charlie Chester’s, was the Bing Crosby Show, where the cracks flew with a most convincing spontaneity. I was very sorry to hear the last of this series.