THINGS TO COME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 650, 14 December 1951, Page 32

THINGS TO COME

HOSE who were lucky enough to hear E. Martin Browne and his wife, the actress Henzie Raeburn, during their recent visit to New Zealand have looked forward to the programmes which they recorded for the NZBS. Some of these have already been broadcast from some stations, and the four illustrated. talks are now to be heard in a series from six National stations. They will start from 3YC on Monday, December 17, at 9.30 p.m., and during the following two months will go to 3YZ, 1YZ, 2YC, 2YZ and 1YC (or 1YA). In these programmes Martin Browne introduces his subject and then with his wife reads extracts from plays. The series begins with T. S. Eliot, whom Martin Browne considers the single most important influence in the English theatre of this generation. Later broadcasts will be about The Work of Christopher Fry (whose plays have become so well known in New Zealand in the past year), Poets of Today in the Theatre, and Religious Drama in the Festival of Britain. Blacks and Blues Sudan was once described as "a country of blacks ruled by blues," for when Kitchener feconquered the country towards the end of last century, men recruited from Oxford and

Cambridge, with honours degrees and athletic blues, played an important part in the government. A New Zealander who for a short time had experience of its government as a member of a Governor-General’s Advisory Council for the northern Sudan is E. A. Turner. President of the Sudan Chamber of Commerce, he represented commercial interests on the council, on which he sat with another 26 members -all Sudanese. Mr. Turner spent 30 years in the Anglo-Egyptian Bank in Khartoum, and in a talk which 4YZ will broadcast at 7.15 p.m. on Wednesday, December 19, he will give his impressions of the country. Apart from his comments on government, he discusses such interesting topics as the importance of the Niles (Blue and White), the climate, agriculture and exports (which include those melon seeds which you may have nibbled with the evening aperitif in a Cairo bar), law, and the "rather artificial" life of the British population. Brain Explained T isn’t everyone who can present a difficult scientific or medical subject in a radio programme lucidly and dramatically, in a way that non-scientific listeners will understand and experts approve. This is a field that Nesta Pain has specially marked out for herself, as listeners who heard her programmes on

the human brain, The Silent Areas and The Temporal Areas will appreciate. Another of these dramatised programmes, The Basal Areas, will be

heard in a BBC transcription from 4YC at 9.30 p.m. on Friday, December 21. The small area at the base of the brain is one of its more primitive parts, and disease or injury that releases it from control of the higher centres may result in emotional dis-

turbances and undisciplined behaviour. It could even destroy the sense of moral values and social responsibility-which may be an explanation of some of the strange cases that reach the courts. Colourist OHN RUSKIN, whose "short pamphlet" in defence of J. M. W. Turner became Modern Painters, a five volume work, described Turner as one of the seven supreme colourists of the world. This great English painter seemed to grow increasingly fond of brilliant

colour and light. Yet for the first half of his life as an artist-he had chosen his career when he was 13-he painted mainly in browns, greys and blues, with sparing use of red and yellow. The change which was to influence his last 32 years as a painter occurred at the time of his first visit to Italy. When Turner died on December 19, 1851, he left about £140,000 for a charity for the "maintenance and support of male decayed artists, being born in England, and of English parents only; and of lawful issue’"-though, in fact, after long litigation, bis next-of-kin got most of the roperty, the Royal Academy £20,000, and the nation his works, On Wednesday, December 19, the one hundredth anniversary of Turner’s . death, 2YC will broadcast at 7.45 p.m. a talk about the painter by W. S. Wauchop, President of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. Young Playwrights \ HEN Margaret Elliott wrote Terror at Night, a play about a bush fire, and won last year’s Correspondence School radio playwriting competition, the judge, O. N. Gillespie, said: "The people in it are all natural, and.they are all New Zealanders, both in the way

(continued from previous page) they talk, and the way they react to danger and problems. Everything that happens could take place in fifty parts of New Zealand, and it works out well." The play also had much suspense, Mr, Gillespie said. This playwriting competition has been an annual event since 1942, This year Mr. Gillespie is again judge-he has done the job since 1948and a former pupil of the school, Shirley Cartwright, who twice won the competition, has offered a prize for the winner. In the Correspondence School session which YA and YZ stations will broadcast at 9.4 a.m. on Wednesday, December 19, listeners will hear this year’s winning effort and the judge’s comments on the competition.

Ireland and Symonds OHN IRELAND grew up in a literary home. Both his father and mother were authors, and Carlyle, Leigh Hunt and other men of .letters. had been familiar friends. He has written’ piano compositions of great delicacy, sensitiveness and (sometimes) humour, including Decorations ("The Island Spell," "Moonglade" and "Scarlet Ceremonies"), and his four Preludes, three London Pieces and Equinox. He has also composed works on a larger scale. Ireland’s songs number more than 50, including the setting of Masefield’s Sea Fever, in which

his reproduction of the poet’s thought captured the British public’s imagination so that for too many of its members John Ireland means Sea Fever and Sea Fever John Ireland. A choral work of his, These Things Shall Be-a setting of John Addington Symonds’s Utopian poem -will be broadcast by 3YA at 3.37 p.m. on Sunday, December 23, with the Halle Choir. and Orchestra conducted by John Barbirolli.