HAMILTON COMES ON THE AIR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 522, 24 June 1949, Page 8

HAMILTON COMES ON THE AIR

Official Opening on July 2

HEN 1XH Hamilton goes on the air for the first time at 8.0 p.m. on Saturday, July 2, the station will be officially opened by the Hon. F. Jones, Minister of Broadcasting. Following the Minister, the Director of Broadcasting will introduce local dignitaries representing the area within a 30-to-40-mile radius of Hamilton which the station is designed to serve. The opening speeches will be followed by a studio concert! featuring the Hamilton Caledonian Society’s Pipe Band, the Hamilton Citizens’ Band, and Waikato Presents, a vatiety show by local artists. The broadcast will conclude with the first of a new series of the popular BBC variety programme, Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh. Like its prototype 3XC Timaru, Station 1XH is intended to be a radio community centre for the closely-popu-lated rural district in which it is centred, and the programmes will be partly commercial. In terms of broadcasting time, this means that commercial programmes will be on the air from 7.0 a.m. to 10.0 a.m. and from 6.30 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. on week-days, while non-commercial programmes will be heard from 7.30 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. on week-days, and all the time on Sundays. The Station Manager, C. I. B. Watkins, has had wide experi-

ence in both National and Commercial branches of the NZBS, including service at 2XN, 2ZA, and 2ZB. News that the management and staff of the Much- Binding Country Club are back on the air in a third series of BBC Transcription Service recordings should be well received by listeners to 1XH, where the new programmes will have their premiere at 10.0 p.m. on opening night. From what we've heard of these recordings the incorrigible quartet of Murdoch, Horne, Costa, and Denham are this time in better form than ever, and their particular brand of’ humour"easy, unforced, humour," as they call it~-seems to be making their show one of the most popular on the air. One thing about Much-Binding that appears to have puzzled members of the post-war generation, however, is the exact meaning of the words in the title. The clue lies in the fact that the principal members of the cast served in the R.A.F. during the war. All of them were therefore familiar with that most commonly heard slang word of the air force, to bind, for like boob, black, prang, and prune, iit was a familiar sound on the lips of disgruntled men during the years 1939-45. Perhaps it isn’t very strange that wars should produce numbers of new slang expressions, and as every ex-serviceman knows, the army and navy had some (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) very picturesque ways of describing their reactions to military life during the last one. But the R.A.F., which was almost a new arm of the services when war broke out, created practically a complete private language for itself, and for anyone who wants to enjoy a few hours of amusing reading, Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of R.A.F. Slang is, as they say, "simply wizard." In this book Partridge.lists the verb to bind. He says to bind means "to bore or be a nuisance to anyone," or (if uséd intransitively) "to be given to excessive complaints; to be officious in the discharge of one’s duty-especially a nuisance to one’s subordinates." Out of the Ooze That doesn’t seem to have much connection with a Tadio variety programme, but those who heard the early numbers of Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh will remember how they related the amusing adventures of a group of ex-R.A.F. types at an old Air-Force camp somewhere in England. What they may not have remembered, however, is that the title Much-Binding originated in another BBC programme, Merry-Go-Round, which was broadcast during the war in three different (Navy, Army, and Air Force) versions. In the Air Force edition, Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh was an R.A.F, station near Waterlogged Spa, Sinking-in-the-Ooze, which was inhabited "by such queer customers-as Lord Waterlogged, Flying Officer Kyte (a really whizzo, bang-on type), and Commander Highprice (late of the Secret Service, at your service). When the war ended some of the original inhabitants of Much-Binding, now in civilian clothes and practically on the rocks financially, went down to the old place to attend an auction of the property and contents (purely out of sentimental reasons) and ended up by buying the lot. So with such a lot of worthless bog on their hands they had

to solve their money problems by turning the camp into the Much-Binding Country Club, where the former officers could become the new management and staff. There they have been perpetuating some of the old gags, and creating a lot of new ones, ever since. The scripts for the weekly BBC broadcasts of Much-Binding-there have been over a hundred performances since the show began-are written by Murdoch and Horne themselves, and everything depends in the long run on the close personal friendship between these two. "Intellectual buffoons,"’ as one critic described them, "they form the perfect humorous coincidence, and Murdoch’s quicksilver quality blends with Horne’s stolid eloquence like steak with onions." Slightly Undignified. But to get back to the word binding. It apparently had, like most service slang, a slightly undignified origin, and in his introductory remarks on R.A.F. slang Eric Partridge writes, "To bind a person is to bore him stiff; probably from the ill-temper that so often results from. being bound or constipated. Hence, by a not unnatural transition, we say, ‘So-and-so was binding all the morning,’ that is, grumbling, or complaining or finding fault, or merely being a nuisance or a bore." The word itself became so popular during the war that several variations on the theme became stock parlance amongst flying men. Perhaps the most common of these was the airman’s invariable remark after he had completed some particularly odious duty: "It was a bit of a bind." Anyone complaining about service conditions was always "doing a bind," while if he merely felt like he was "thoroughly bound up," or perhaps just "out on a binder." When the war was, only recently over it used to be easy to pick a former air force type by his use of the word. Lately it’s fallen a little into disuse, but it’s still a valuable addition to the overworked vocabulary we use to describe what is after all a very common state of mind. As far as the radio programme goes, although there’s not, as much binding at Much-Binding as there was in the days when it was an air force camp, the name seems somehow to have stuck to the | session, and we've got to hand it to the, BBC that it’s a pretty good one,