THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 465, 21 May 1948, Page 4

THINGS TO COME

A Run Through The Programmes

Merry-Go-Round at 2YN NAVY blue is the predominating colour in a neW edition of the BBC's | with Sub-Lieutenant |Eric (Heart-throb) Barker in command of H.M.S. Waterlogged. He is’ helped (or hindered) by other members of Waterlogged’s crew- Pearl Hackney, Jon Pertwee, Doris Pemberton, Richard Grey, George Crow, and the Blue Mariners. Pearl Hackney in private life is Mrs. Eric Barker. The two first met | when she was principal dancer and he | was comedian at the Windmill Theatre, London, the non-stop revue house that the blitz could never close down. They have a Tudor cottage in Kent and when she’s not on the air with her husband, Pearl is busy passing her husband’s scripts for the microphone-yet another case of woman having the last word. Merry-Go-Round is being heard weekly | from 2YN at 7.30 p.m. on Mondays. "G au rumpy e \ ITHIN a week of his 85th birthday _ Cyril Maude, affectionately called by Ris theatre colleagues the "grand old |man of the English stage," came out | of retirement recently to play one of his |most famous roles in a BBC version of Grumpy. Countless play-goers in England semember Maude as Andrew Bullivant-‘Old Bullivant’-who belied his grumpy exterior and gave the younger generation a lesson when he recaptured some stolen diamonds. Cyril Maude made his first stage appearance in 1884, and this will be the third time he has played Grumpy on the air-the play was broadcast twice from Bristol curing the war. He was born in London in 1862, educated at Charterhouse, and from 1896 to 1905 was co-manager with F. Harrison of the Haymarket Theatre, London. In 1906 he went into managément on his own account, and in 1888 married the actress Winifred Emery. Listeners to 1ZM will hear the one-hour play Grumpy at 8.0 p.m. on Tuesday, May 25. "Watson-the Needle" HERLOCK HOLMES and the admirable Watson will shortly be on the air again in The Valley of Fear, a serialised version of one of their later adventures. The fascinating character of Sherlock Holmes is supposed+to have been in part suggested to Conan Doyle by an eminent Edinburgh surgeon, Dr. Joseph Bell, under whom he Wad ‘studied medicine, but the Great Detective was familiarised to the public by his eccentricities ‘and mannerisms-his nonchalance alternating with energy, his dressinggown and hypodermic syringe-as well as by his amazing mental powers. His assistant and companion, Dr. Watsonprototype of a long series of familiar offsiders-was portrayed as a stolid_medical man whose stupidity, good-hum-ouredly tolerated by his brilliant leader, served as a foil to set off the qualities of the master. The Valley of Fear will start from 2YD at 9.0 p.m. on Tuesday, May 25. ‘Symphony Concert N the 13 one-hour programmes called British Concert Hall the BBC have produced a series of symphony concerts conducted by famous conductors, who,

for the benefit of radio audiences, act also as commentators. These concerts were specially recorded from the original broadcasts in the Overseas Service of the BBC, and in them British orchestras and soloists are presented at their best in a wide range of works by great composers. Sir Malcolm Sargent conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sir *Thomas Beecham the Royal Philharmonic, and Clarence Raybould the London Symphony and the BBC Symphony Orchestras. Included among the works played are symphonies by. Elgar, Sibelius, Dvorak, Vaughan Williams, Borodin, Schubert, and Haydn, but these are only the main items in a series which should be of outstanding interest to lovers of symphonic music. British Concert Hall starts from 4YA at 7.49 p.m. on Thursday, May 27. Oral Prophylaxis ON’T get us wrong, but our title has nothing to do with the suppression of free speech or anything like that. Oral prophylaxis is simply a high-sound-ing name for cleaning your teeth, and

the good old after-meals application of the toothbrush (historically, a fairly recent innovation among household habits, by the way) is said to have been one of the greatest factors in the reduction of dental disease. But it can’t do the trick alone, as most of us know from our periodical visits to the dentist. Bad diet and faulty metabolism are some of the other things that make teeth decay, and if after the latest spell under the drill you feel that something ought to be done to make those periodical visits less frequent, tune in to the A.C.E. talk Recent Advances in the Attack of Dental Caries, which will be heard from 2YA at 10.25 a.m. on Wednesday, May 26, and you might pick up a few practical hints. Piracy Up-to-date HE BBC Children’s Hour people,’ who ‘have made a careful study of thrillers, aim at producing robust entertainment for the millions of children who clamour for this sort of thing. At the same time the scripts are very carefully edited with a view to their possible effect on the more sensitive children who are subject to over-imaginativeness and nightmares. When youngsters hear the short BBC serial In His Majesty’s Service they should get the same thrill out of it as their fathers did from Herbert Strang’s stories, or their grandfathers from Seton Merriman’s books.

It has all the right ingredients. Two midshipmen are the heroes, and the exNazi crew of a pirate destroyer are the villains. There is a chase by the Royal Navy and some tough stuff in a secret hide-out before the pirates are caught and sunk on the high seas. The script was written by "Sea-Lion," author of The Phantom Fleet. In His Majesty's Service starts from 4YZ at 4.30 p.m. on Thursday, May 27. Music and Painting LTHOUGH, of music inspired by the arts, literature can claim the largest share, there have been many compositions resulting from an impression made upon a musician by a painting, and this Saturday, May 22, from 9.0 p.m., 1YX will devote an hour of its programme to Music Inspired by Painting. The first of the three items in the session is William Walton’s Portsmouth Point Overture, which is an interpretation in music of a water colour by Rowlandson. A boisterously gay work, it has been performed more often than any of Walton’s other compositions, though critics compare it unfavourably with his later works and refer to it as a product of the period-the slick ‘twenties. The second composition is Liszt’s Dance of Death, inspired by Andrea Orcagna’s fresco Triumph of Death, which shows Death as a woman flying on bat’s wings through a great landscape. Her taloned fingers hold a scythe with which she reaps the corpses of kings and nobles, beggars and cripples, old and young. It is a great painting and it inspired great music. The final work chosen for the session, Pictures at an Exhibition, is an example of indifferent painting inspiring fine music. It has been commented that it was presumably subject rather than pictorial excellence which moved Moussorgsky.