Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 733, 31 July 1953, Page 24

Open Microphone

aa a -*; NEWS OF BROADCASTERS, ON AND OFF THE RECORD,

By

Swarf

LTHOUGH the Broadcasts to ) Schools Department of the | NZBS has a reporting sys- | tem which tells how its efforts are | being received in the schoolrooms, | the Department thinks a personal visit is of more value, and occasionally members of the. staff are sent into the field to obtain first-hand information. | Earlier this year Don Allan and Freda

Boyce made a round of calls to schools in Wellington and the Hutt Valley, Joy Rogers visited the Hastings area, and now Miss Boyce has just paid a visit to 17 schools in the Taranaki district. "I found the children and teachers intensely interested in the school broadcasts," she told me the other day. Miss Boyce, who is an Assistant Programme Officer in the Broadcasts to Schools Department, is yet another Mainlander to make her home in Wellington. She comes from Christchurch, where she attended the Teachers’ Training College and later taught at the Southbridge District High School. While in the South she was a member of the Christchurch Operatic Society. Now she has joined the Wellington Operatic Society and is understudying one of the prirncipals for a forthcoming production of Chu Chiri Chow. She is--a mezzosoprano, Listeners last heard her voice in Fun for Juniors, a holiday programme which she compiled. Shortly they will hear her as pianist in the Thursday morning Kindergarten of the Air session, replacing Iris Brown, who has resigned to.take up another position in the Government service. *

BEECHAM’S EGGS

"\VHEN Sir Thomas Beecham made : one of his rare appearances on BBC Television recently. he was in the guise of a cookery expert as well as musician. Speaking of Mozart’s ex-

quisite overture to his opera The Marriage of Fi-

garo, the conductor said that anyone who wanted an egg cooked to perfection should put it into boiling water at the moment the overture started, By the time the piece was finished the egg ‘would be perfectly cooked. As the overture takes about four minutes to play

the veteran conductor’s culinary advice should be tempered with reserve by those who like a fairly lightly boiled 2g¢, always providing that they have a gramophone and are prepared’ to invest in a recording of the overture to The Marriage of Figaro-conducted by Sir Thomas, of course. ap

NELSON MUSIC FESTIVAL

vs NELSON has a _ long tradition of choral singing, and the public of the small Cathedral City have come to expect much of their musical young

people. On the evening of Saturday, August 8, choirs from the Nel-

son primary schools, Sacred Heart College, Intermediate School and Girls’ and Boys’ Colleges will join in a Civic Music Festival at the School of Music. As well as singing there will be instrumental items, verse-speaking and folk dancing. Station 2XN will broadcast the concert at 9.5 p.m. Ss

*HORNBLOWER’S THHSP!

arctan AT the lips of any but a thoroughly * "experienced player, the French horn can let out an _ accidental boink and bubble as embarrassing to the atidience as the croak of a choir tenor who starts on the fifth verse of a hymn when only four verses are ordered. But one man

in whose hands this tricky instrument is perfectly safe is the English horn virtu-

oso, Vennis Drain, whose recordings are often heard in NZBS_ recorded programmes. A month ago, at the. Aldeburgh Festival, Brain played Haydn's First Concerto for Horn, took five curtain calls from a wildly enthusiastic audience at the end, and then repeated tthe final movement. A nervous member of the" audience was heard to remark, . "You're always afraid that he might not be perfect this time, but he always is." Brain takes the most difficult passages with ease and maintains perfect tone and phrasing. No wonder Sir Thomas Beecham called him a_ prodigy. ‘His

grandfather was. an outstanding horn player; his father, Aubrey Brain, was principal horn player of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from its formation until 1945, Dennis took up the instrument of his own free will when he was 15 (he’s now 31) gnd his father taught him at the Royal Academy of Music; he was also under the tuition of G. D. Cunningham. Dennis Brain, who has his lips insured for . £10,000, gets most of his exercise at the ping-pong table. His technique, according to what he told Time, has a simple explanation. "You smile, or at least you stretch your mouth and put it up at the corners, and then you (here he makes a little spitting noise like ‘thhsp!’), flick a

Ak hair off with the end of your tongue, a: tiny hair, and that’s all there is to it." ~.

TALK, NOT LECTURE

* % AFTER he was put in charge of the BBC's Third Programme some months ago, John Morris went straight — home and bravely. listened to it right through for several nights in succession. —

It was an appalling experience, writes "Pendennis" in The Observer. In particular Mr. Morris ~

found himself hofrified by the dreary lectures of academic specialists. With the resolution to be expected from a ‘| former Everest climber Morris forth-

with decided he would do everything in his power to discourage such stuff. He determined to try to kill the lecture and introduce talk. Having got into his stride,-he is now trying to perSuade his more en- | terprising speakers — to perform without scripts at all —

simply to converse from notes. As soon as the fascinating fellow of the club or the commonroom gets a pen in his hand, Morris thinks, his mind fills with images of textbooks, printed pages and waiting critics, and he turns into a comparative dullard. Scriptless experiments with William Empson and Eric Shipton have convinced Morris that he is on the right track,

RAIN OR SHINE

* "Two BBC Variety comedians, Tony Fayne (left) and David Evans, seen below gazing appreciatively at the lady ; on the opposite page, were in a quanOe ene, a oe ee ee

_ a, i ee SS starred in six half- hour Variety programmes cahed Rain Stopped Plav. de-

signed for use in case of rain during the Test matches now being played in Britain between England and Australia. Fayne and Evans are rabid cricket fane

and they could not decide whether they wanted most to see the Tests played in fine weather or to have their extremely funny programmes broadcast. Tony and David are Bristol boys who went to school together and eventually teamed up in Variety. Their main interest’ in life is cricket, and they have at their fingertips the scores of every important game played during their life-time-and many others beside-and also the batting and bowling averages of most leading players. They have turned their hobby to good account and much of the success of their broadcasts lies in their mock sporting commentaries, particularly those dealing with cricket. Rain Stopped Play is concerned almost exclusively with cricket and each programme contains an extract from a BBC commentary given on some big cricketing occasion. To" select the six most suitable for the programme producer Alfred Dunning, Tony Fayne and David Evans spent many happy hours in the BBC’s Recorded Programmes Library listening to countless cricket comment-_ aries before choosing those they wanted. In the spring of 1949 the comedians made their first appearance in Variety Bandbox (heard from NZBS stations on transcriptions) and as _ impressionists they take part in many good radio shows. *-

SIGNIFICANT SYMPTOM

‘[ HE significant thing about the young woman you see here is that she is’ extremely intelligent-a symptom that cannot be diagnosed in the makeup of all show-girls. She is Margot Holden, in

a new pose, and one of the brightest panel members in What's

My Liner (the four ZB stations and 2ZA, Thursday evenings). Other members of the team are Elizabeth Allen, Jerry Desmonde, and Richard Attenborough, and the quizmaster is the 36-years-old Vancouverborn Bernard. Braden, whose clever ‘timing earns him many laughs in this show. For those who are curious about

such matters, Margot Holden’s personal details are: Age .21: height five feet three inches, eyes blue, hair fairish, and I can’t say fairer than that. +

ACROSS THE WATER

"HE Mokau River forming the boundary between Taranaki and Auckland Provinces has only one bridgethe one carrying the main New Ply-mouth-Auckland highway near Mokau township. Along the lower reaches the farms are supplied by a regular launch service, but where property holders have to cross the water they use their own methods, The most unusual is at

Sutton Brothers’ homestead, and consists of two wheels and a cage weichinge two and a

half hundredweight carried on a cable. Practically all the contents of the two houses on the farm have been hoisted across the river in this cage, including two refrigerators and two pianos and, the other day, Jack Brown, who conducts 2XP’s Farm Session, made the trip. ; The heaviest weight the cage has borne in its 15 years of service was a stationary hay-baler of 12 hundredweight. In case the cable snapped under the strain a length of wire was fastened to the baler so that it could be salvaged from the 25 feet of water below. The precaution wasn’t used. The rope has broken once-when E. R. Sutton was aboard the cage with three sacks of fertiliser, and his next step was the river. In spite of its isolation modern methods are used on this high-produc-tion farm. Paddocks which a few years ago were a mass of ragwort have been converted into clean pastures with a big catrying capacity, and it was to dis"cuss the methods used with the owners of the property that Jack Brown made his visit. The interview will be broadcast by Station 2XP New Plymouth at 8.0 p.m. on Thursday, August 6. dis

MAN WHO MADE HIS MARK

ns "AHU HOLE, editor and controller of the BBC news services, is soon to take charge of an interesting experi-

ment in presenting the news in television illustrated

by films and _ still photographs, Tahu Hole, who was. ap-

pointed to his present position in 1948, is responsible for the news bulletins and talks broadcast from London to all parts of the world. In the 1920’s Tahu R. P. Hole (to give him his full initials) was a reporter on a Christchurch newspaper. He left Christchurch in’ 1929 and later .became the first New Zealand reporter to fly to an assignment. He won. a yearly competition held by the New Zealand Journalists’ Association, and was offered a job on the Brisbane Mail, from which he went to the Melbourne Herald. Then, wanting to look about him, he went to England and_ travelled in Germany, France and Italy. After two years he returned to New Zealand and before long °

went to Sydney as a reporter. The Melbourne Sun-Pictorial appointed him to its leader writing staff, and after that came a period on the Star, for which he wrote a feature called "An Eye on Europe." He had experience on other papers and ended by being the youngest news editor on the oldest paper in Australia-the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1937 he left to be the Herald’s special correspondent in London, and later joined the BBC. He became a member of the News Division of the BBC in 1946. In Christchurch ‘journalism, part of bc! eared work of tall and na: geet es ea ? ak ' ap © --

Magistrate’s Court. Here, along with his colleagues, he filled in time during and — between dull cases with a rough sort of — ‘cricket on a strip of grass in the court--yard, or a game of fives in a corner — of a brick wall, He also applied himself _ zealously to carving his name and/or — initials on the top and sides of the Court’s Press bench, once causing a Magistrate to glance over and semark attired Tahu was to cover the No. 1 . meaningly, "Is that some wretched | mouse I hear?" The owners of other dis-~ tinguished names deeply embeddedeven burnt-all over the surface, used to speculate about what the R.P. stood for in Tahu R. P. Hole. The secretnever came out -in Christchurch, at any rate.