A TROLLOPE SERIAL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 539, 21 October 1949, Page 5

A TROLLOPE SERIAL

Sir,-"Wool" urges me to follow his wholehearted example and "deliberately avoid" all radio adaptations of famous books, A very brief period of listening only is needed for assessment; I believe in sampling radio plays before passing judgment, and in any case it is difficult to understand how "Wool" can be so positive that all are "junk" if he has forsworn them for so long..I don’t know that I would even call The Lilian Dale Affair "junk," though it is certainly an entirely unjustifiable travesty of Trollope’s book. Your contributor has, I suggest, by his inflexibility, missed quite a few grains of wheat among the chaff -Dickens’s Dombey and Son and Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale as examples, and probably Scott’s St.

Ronan’s Well.

A. H.

R.

(Dunedin)

Sir-Cheers for L. Gerard for expressing his sentiments on this serial. He is not alone in wondering if he will depart this life before scoundrel Crosbie is brought to book. I wonder if the sponsors realise that each Lilian Dale "half-hour" comprises twenty minutes of serial, five minutes of advertising and five minutes of fill-in music ad nauseum. Radio listeners can tolerate the necessary evil of advertising script, but some of them wonder how a twenty-minute episode can become a "half-hour" broadcast. Some of them, too, realise that if these broadcasts really were half-hour ones, as announced, they might. in fact hear the end of this quite good play before its beginning has ‘ditt ita! faded from memory.

SHORT MEASURE

(Wellington).