By the Short Hair

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 477, 13 August 1948, Page 19

By the Short Hair

N a Sunday morning 9.30 is a good time to listen to 2YA, as then many BBC programmes seem to arrive, like baby dear, out of the nowhere into the here. It was purely by chance that I

came across Queen Victoria Was Furious, and last week by chance I found a delightfully satiric little oper etta called A Garland of Beards, being a history of famous, infamous, and

merely anonymous beards. The whole thing was done in the grand manner, and no ingenuity had been spated in the creation of a libretto that W. S. Gilbert could have acknowledged without a blush (except for his beardlessness). Throughout the operetta proper were the most ridiculously conceived prose divertissements — one interlude reported in test:match commentary manner a marathon innings of Dr. W. G. Grace, which lasted so long that the fieldsmen fell asleep and the umpire, similarly unconscious, gave him out L.B.W.; another related the ridiculous story of a man who had his beard pulled in 1892 for failing to pay the cabby; and thus was rung the knell of "the bosom, bustle, and the beard." For hereafter, in spite of a brief period of resurgence during the war years, the beard was destined to be cut off daily well before its prime, and no more permitted to "take its place, On every large and lovely face, Nor with its cosy shade begin, To clothe an amplitude of chin." It is strange to me that programmes as extravagantly, as wittily nonsensical as this should be aired in a comparatively unfrequented corner of the programmes. : :