Elimination Tests

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 486, 15 October 1948, Page 10

Elimination Tests

HAVE listened to a couple of sessions of the All-New Zealand Quiz and am prepared to certify it nonintoxicating and non-habit forming. It is far too close to the viva-voce examination for my taste-a similarity heightened by the fact that most of the competitors answer tremolo or have frogs in their throats. I feel that YA personnel lack experience in the quiz field -the icy: hauteur they oppose to a wrong answer makes me feel almost nostalgic (though I would never have thought it possible) for the delighted brays that greet the flunk at ZB level. The gong was operafed as ruthlessly as

J. Arthur Rank’s, and the mortality it occasioned among our Export Quality brains was far too high. (Many a good man was gonged up on in the middle of giving the correct answer.) The questions were, I thought, harder than those asked in the International Quiz, and no credit was given for the near miss. The All-New Zealand Quiz strikes as coldly upon the constant quiz listener as Cromwell upon Merrie England, but the strong element of ruthlessness and _-repression in the regime is explained by the fact that its primary purpose is Elimination. In a session so relentlessly totalitarian in object the question of listeners’ entertainment or competitors’ comfort is of course quite immaterial.