NUMBER ONE COCKNEY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 557, 24 February 1950, Page 9

NUMBER ONE COCKNEY

ARRY PAINTER was down a coal mine. Things were desperate. He and his mates were cut off from the shaft, the air was foul, the water was up to their chins and still rising; you could hear it gurgle. Probably it was dark, too, but that didn’t matter so much. What was important was the gurgle of

the water and the voices of Harry and his mates. That was all the listeners heard, and sound was the only tool the actors could use. Sound is still the radio actor’s only medium, but broadcasting has developed from a child to a wellgrown youth since the coal mining play Danger was broadcast from 2YA about 1930. Harry Painter, a man not used to keeping details, thinks Danger was per-

Zealand. "It was at least one of the first," he says, "and since then there have been so many that it is hard to remember the exact order." In all. these he has dealt with sound, and he has by now got his ear and his voice to a state of training where he can recognise what inflection and intensity are needed, and produce them, automatically. His speciality is the Cockney, and it

is not an artificial speciality. He was .born in London and came out to New Zealand in 1924, bringing with him experience gained with the Royal Air Force Concert Party in camp entertainments throughout the. Middle East during World War I. After doing some work in repertory in Wellington, he and a group of his" friends became _interested in adapting stage plays to radio. They didn’t know what they were doing, but they met their problems as they arose, improvised cheerfully, had a lot of fun and gradually improved the standard of their performances. In those days there were no recorded sound effects. They had _ to make their own. The mine explosion in

Danger, for instance, was | produced by rolling new potatoes up and down in a box. It took them nearly three hours before they discovered that it had to be new potatoes. Another early production Mr. Painter likes to recall is the serial Khyber, in which he, as Nobby Clark, helped Major Garvey keep the North-West Frontier through fifty-two episodes, a tour de force, whose episodes they recorded without. rehearsal. Winston McCarthy, now a most effective sports sound effect in his own right, was the’ man_ behind the noises in Khyber, He was kept busy firing fusillades, rolling rocks down hillsides, and uttering yells like a faraway Pathan. Once, when he was firing a blank with one hand and grasping fo the next noise with the other, the wad from the exploding blank hit Mr. Painter, who was convinced for a while that he had bern shot in earnest, instead of for the play. But the part he recalls with most affection is that of Topper. "That was a good show," he says. "It moved. Some of these serials take three episodes for the hero to get over a fence, but not Topper." Harry Painter likes radio, in spite of its limitations. "Sound is all you’ve got," he says, sounding most unlike his Cockney creations. "You must put everything into the part your voice can give it. On the stage we'd call it overacting." _And, with a grin, "Perhaps that’s why

I like at."

G. leF.

Y.