A Good Week for Words

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 736, 21 August 1953, Page 10

A Good Week for Words

"| HE successful radio talk or discussion -neither form is as easy as is sometimes supposed — depends partly on hitting a mean between the formal and the formless, This week offered an unusual variety of programmes which showed, in various ways, how the spoken word can be handled on the air, In Question Mark on housing (1YA), Vernon Browne gave his speakers their heads, and the result must have rejoiced many home-builders by its forthrightness. And on the same evening; (from 1YC) the Griller Quartet, interviewed by Dorothea Turner, were friendly and highly informative. The most recent of Harold Nicalson’s talks on King George V (1YC) dealt with the King’s constitutional functions, and was a good example of the kind of clarification which the highly practised hand can achieve. Thursday’s Arts Review contained a brief and entertaining talk by Guy Warrack on film music, enough to make one wish that he would talk at greater length, and with detailed illustrations. As for the Everest programme (1ZB, Sunday), it just couldn’t fail; it was crisply and unobtrusively edited, and the members of the expedition (not least our own George Lowe) did themselves considerable credit by their vivid and modest narration. ; Knowing the Real Thing $ the Griller Quartet (from Dunedin) brought the Schubert A Minor Quartet to its impeceable close, the applause bf the packed audience burst out with singular warmth. It was impossible not to be impressed by this, for only an hour before we had heard the crowd in the Auckland Town Hall rise to Sir Edmund Hillary and Mr. George Lowe in an exactly similar way. I draw no significarce from the fact that the mountaineers were in Auckland and the musicians in Dunedin; nor do we need to ask whether a single city could have produced two such oyations on the same night. The fact remained that two groups of people recognised two different kinds of superb achievement, and said so in

no uncertain terms. Perhaps underneath our dour and pernickety exterior there is a hunger’ for perfection, and perhaps that is why the not-quite-perfect (whether in drama or drainage) drives us into exacerbated public wrangles which must seem odd to the outsider. At least we have shown-and twice in one evening -that we know the real thing when we

see it.

M.K.

J.