Alternating Currents

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 541, 4 November 1949, Page 11

Alternating Currents

ETWORK allegiance, like political allegiance, runs in families, and just, as every boy and every girl who’s born into the world alive is either a little Labourite or else a little Conservative, so he is either born to the deep purple

of the Commercials or destined to assume the more negative but undoubtedly genteel colouration of the YA listener. Each household, of course, makes periodic excursions into alien territory, but more often for -the satisfaction of telling the folks at home of the strange goings-on in other parts of the dial than with any idea of widening its listening experience. But there is therapeutig value in being jolted out of your listening rut, and therefore a period of having your programmes chosen for you would seem to have something to recommend it. However, I cannot honestly endorse the system in vogue at Wellington Public Hospital. The general idea, I gather, is to give patients as wide a variety of listening as possible, and this is achieved by allowing the central receiving set, from which patients’ headphones take their cue, to be, manipulated by a succession of passers-by with varied tastes and strictly limited powers of concentration. By the law of aver-. ages this should result in a nicely balanced diet, But it certainly’ effects revolution in listening habits, for what chance has a YA-ite of getting interested in a Big Sister habitually lopped off in her prime five minutes before the end of the episode, and what impression does the serial‘addict get of a Classical Hour that begins in the middle of a phrase at 2.42 and ends staccato, at 2.20? And the anguish of the deprived

is horrible to see.

M.

B.