Let’s Go Places

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 462, 30 April 1948, Page 12

Let’s Go Places

ILL television comes I feel there is no particular point in broadcasting radio plays that are merely stage plays missing on the visual cylinder, Petticoat Fever, for example, which I had the misfortune to hear from 2YA last Friday night (I am no more capable of turning off a programme in mid-career than I am of returning a book half-finished) had as its single setting the interior of a wireless operator’s hut off the coast of Labrador. This seems like wicked ‘neglect of the listener’s ability (given ‘suitable stimulation) to feast his inward eye upon the rich pastures of the imagination. Why cabin and confine him for the necessary hour in a 10 x 10 living room with table (l.c.)g two chairs (lower right), and the wearisome company of a quartet, when you can give him all the advantages of a 12-scene drama and a cast of dozens without the expense and inconvenience of a revolving stage or a succession of creaking backdrops? Earlier in the week some lucky chance led me to listen to Celestial Omnibus, an adaptation of E. M. Forster’s short story in 2YC’s Mystery and Imagination series. Celéstial Omnibus did not: despise the mobile resources of the listener’s imagination, his ability, suitably guided, to range from earth to heaven, It took us to the Isles of the Blessed, and enabled us to see visions of poetic truth through the eyes of a Wordsworthian child. When listeners know they can be taken journeys like this why expect them to be happy in a hut with two bickering women and a brace of matrimoniallyminded men?