What've They Got...?
| HE English have a flair for documentary on the radio as on the film. The other Sunday, listening to the Buckinghamshire programme by Jack Hargreaves in the Looking at Britain series, I could only sit back and admire the easy skill with which we were conducted in imagination round an English shire. The technique has been worked out in a hundred such documentaries — dramatic pace and treatment, clash of voice, clash of opinion, flashbacks to the past and forward to the future, with the unobtrusive commentator holding it all together. There are no dark secrets about it: it is all there for anyone to hear. For example, I imagine that no one would fail to notice the effective way Hargreaves emphasised the changes 100 years have btought to Buckinghamshire, by his two voices breaking in on one another, the one anxious to show us the relics of past industry-the old lacemakers and chairmakers-the other, interrupting, impatient to vaunt the new light industries which show that Bucks is moving with the times. Our New Zealand documentaries are improving but we are still well back compared with these. The programme on Inchclutha. broadcast a few days ago from 4YA had moments when it seemed that the producers realised that a documentary was something more than bringing knowledgeable inhabitants to the mike and asking them’ questions-but only moments. Yet what have the BBC producers got that ours haven’t got? More time, more money and more intelligence is probably the answer: you can’t make good documentaries without using a lot
of all three.
K.I.
S.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19491118.2.25.7
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 543, 18 November 1949, Page 15
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264What've They Got...? New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 543, 18 November 1949, Page 15
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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