After Handley

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 505, 25 February 1949, Page 8

After Handley

HOSE who used to follow up ITMA might do well, when it finishes its run in New Zealand, to transfer allegiance to | "Much-Binding-in*the Marsh." For one thing, it is similar enough in type, being typically English, to the Tommy Handley show to please most devotees of that session; but also it has -an air of originality which stamps it as the product of a slightly different, more restrained and placid school of humour. Notable among its characters is Sam Costa, who often lends an air of complete unreality to the proceedings by responding to a perfectly normal query about his wife’s health with some such malapropism as "That’s' very necromantical of you, sir." Costa’s expression, "Very curious," is also worthy of note, and the mistake is never made of introducing it too often, or in an inappropriate place in the script, The only fault I find with "Much-Binding" is the ‘musical interludes. I know well enough that musicians with a taste for satire have been spoiled by the "arrangements" in ITMA, those indescribable confections which were quite impossible of imitation. But we go to the other extreme in ‘"Much-Binding," where Gwen Catley, a soprano with a clear and lovely voice, sings inappropriate drawing-room ballads about birds and springtime. These may be all right in the "light" section of a musical halfhour, but they are quite out-of-keeping when used as relief between the spots of dialogue and nonsense in a humorous programme. :