HEALING THE SICK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 724, 29 May 1953, Page 10

HEALING THE SICK

production of Children in Hospital (from 1YC) that it was quite a surprise at the end to hear a longish list of actors’ credits. It is a long time since I have heard a programme in_ whichreality was recreated in so lifelike. and unobtrusive a manner, and in which studio and on-the-spot material was so neatly dovetailed. Beginning with a moving glimpse of the squalor of early Victorian London with its appalling child death-rate, the programme traced the rise of the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, from its brave beginnings under Dr. West to the great centre of healing it is today. Listening to Charles Dickens’s impassioned appeal for the hospital-as recreated by Emlyn Williams-it was interesting to, recall that it was one of the few forms of organised charity to which he gave wholehearted approval in his novels, introducing it into. the second book of Our. Mutual Friend. He would surely have approved also of the result. Whatever there is to be said against the Victorian idea of progress, it is surely true that in the Victorian age and our own there has been an enormous development in at least one good thing--the power to alleviate innocent suffering. S convincing was the BBC Tailor-made Mystery HE first instalment of The Hidden Motive looked like the start of another tailor-made mystery from the practised hand of Lester Powell, Heavilyinsured wife of wealthy actor-manager dies in bath; eccentric onion-chewing Canadian statistical expert suspects murder; insurance agent investigates, interviews rhapsodical Welsh manservant, cool, good-looking secretary and dumb blonde "text-adviser," who later meets foul play in agent’s rooms. , . It looks as if we’re all set for a cosy exercise in actuarial detection. A minor and perhaps irrelevant mystery is the programming of this serial from 1YC. The "new deal" among the stations a few years ago has made real and substantial improvements; yet much that we get from the YCs is (in BBC terminology). "Home" listening; and The Hidden Motive obviously aims at a very medium height of brow. I’m not sure about thisshould we resent the encroachment, or is it welcome light relief? After all, the longer the hair. the more you need to

let it down occasionally.

M.K.

J.