Many Happy Returns

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 474, 23 July 1948, Page 8

Many Happy Returns

PEOPLE'S personal reminiscences are not as a rule good entertainment value, and in real life they are something we usually dodge whenever possible. There are exceptions, of course; fame, or a particularly mis-spent youth generally get a hearing. It is some time

since I heard the first of the BBC series Return Journey, but the second, John Moore’s return to his native Gloucestershire, rather bote out my vaguely remembered impressions of the first, that the ingredients of this sort. of programme are unusually variable, So one might have anticipated that John Moordé would recall his childhood’s familiar haunts and friends, with a_ nostalgic note, and a description of a _ typical Gloucestershire village neatly worked in. But I could not have predicted that Mr. Moore would view his return from the excellent vantage point of the local pub, where a large part of the reminiscing is done by the local inhabitants. Nor did I expect him to find among his acquaintances so many characters that might have stepped strajght out of the pages of Shakespeare-Pistol, Nym and Bardolph, the three rogues of Double Alley, and Mr. Justice Shallow, to say nothing of all the rude mechanicals, I felt, however, that Mr. Moore (or Mr. Cleverdon) was rather trading on the fortunate proximity of Shakespeare’s birthplace to his own, in order to eke out his own quite excusable paucity of suitable impressions.