Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 736, 21 August 1953, Page 24

Open Microphone

NEWS OF BROADCASTERS, ON AND OFF THE RECORD,

By

Swarf

operation with the Maori Affairs Department, recently made available to the’ Ethnic Folkways Library of New York a collection of Maori music "Fone NZBS, working in co-

recordings, and that library, in turn, has issued a number of them in the form of an album of long-playing discs, demonstrating the full range of Maori

traditional music. Until now, very few, if any, samples of Maori music have been readily obtainable by anthropologists and other research workers overseas, and the new album is expected to satisfy, to some extent, a strong demand by students of folk-lore. Over the years the NZBS have recorded modern-day and old songs at important gatherings of Maoris. Information about such records is constantly sought by visitors, and especially by Fulbright scholars, who call at the short-wave studios and ask to hear them played. When Alec Templeton was here last year he spent two hours with Ulric Williams, officer-in-charge of Radio New Zealand (the short-wave station) listening to Maori songs and hakas, and other recent visitors who have shown a lively interest in them include Burl Ives, the singing guitarist, and Bengt Danielsson, author and member of the Kon-Tiki Expedition. Ulric Williams told me the other day that some time ago he assembled practically all the Maori recordings in the possession of the Broadcasting Service and made them into one library. He draws on this stock for a weekly session called Song and Story of the . Maori, broadcast by Radio New Zealand and now nearing its 200th week. Some of

these programmes will be broadcast by National Stations, starting at 2YA in the week beginning September 14. The first six Maori programmes will alternate with sessions called Songs of the Cook Islands, also compiled by Mr. Williams, and performed by Kaitara Pukepuke and his Rarotongans. Mr. Williams, who has been on the staff of the NZBS since 1946, was producer for the three New Zealand concert parties that went to Korea to entertain the Forces, and he led the second group. He has also written several programmes which have been broadcast by National stations. Ed

FAMILIAR CRY

= "| HE pedagogic instruction, "Forward, Dunhill!" which announces David Dunhill’s appearance ‘in Take It From Here, used to be the cry that summoned him to attend to some customer visiting

the Paris branch of a well-known busi-

ness owned Dy his uncle. It became irksome to the youth, who threw up-a chance of inheriting a

flourishing family business and became a journalist. After two years on a local paper at Swindon he gota bit bored with reporting, and then the outbreak of war settled the question of a career for the next few years. He joined ‘the R.A.F. But he had always had a sneaking regard for the stage, and that eventually took him into radio. He had his first experience of broadcasting in Egypt. He read occasional news bulletins at ten shillings a time and later he was transferred to the Fortes broadcasting station in Cairo as ‘a general duty announcer. He joined the BBC as a holiday relief announcer in 1946 and later became a member of the permanent staff. David Dunhill is married and has four children -two girls and twin boys. He lives near Guildford where he and his wife, an artist, run an old-fashioned pottery. Jimmy Edwards, says ex-Corporal Dunhill, is the "nicest R.A.F. officer. I’ve ever met." + ;

]- VERYBODY who. works for radio will appreciate the professional alertness shown recently by the six-years-old

IN THE BLOOD

daughter of a well-known BBC producer. The family lives in a block of flats in a

district of London where traffic is on the move night and

day and effects for street noises are peg in evidence. One evening a fire broke out near by. A fire engine arrived -at high speed but part of it broke away and charged ful] tilt through the ruins Bs: a plate glass window into a china shop. In the middle of the confusion caused by this crash another fire engine arrived from one direction and a couple of buses from another. Soon traffic was piled up on both sides as firemen were getting out hoses and policemen were trying to move on the crowds. When the din lessened slightly a small girl’s voice was heard adding one further request, "Do you mind doing all that again? We weren’t recording." ‘6

SYMPATHY

N July 31, the eve of the Ranfurly Shield match, a broadcast feature running at 1XH Hamilton was nearing its end. The station applied to Head Office, Wellington, for a replacement. I

understand that when the routine form was freturned with information

about a new feature, it carried two black strips of mourning on the top left hand corner and the legend, "In sad. and loving memory of the Shield which departed Hamilton, 1.8.53: not lost, but gone down South." ~

UNSOPHISTICATED

, "HE sprightly young woman you see pictured here is Mary Disney, a Melbourne actress who takes part in the serial The Deceiver broadcast by 4ZB at 10.0 p.m. on Mondays. She made her

debut in. Australia’s Amateur Hour, presenting

a Cockney sketch called The Front Door Steps. This encouraged her to study with the Melbourne actress-producer Lorna Forbes, and later she played in Miss Forbes’s production of A School for Scandal. She followed this with several important parts in other plays, and ‘her first leading role was that of Mary in Barrie’s Mary Rose. Today Mary Disney is much in demand by producers for

both national and commercial radio stations in Australia. She is usually cast in young and unsophisticated roles. *

UNCLE TOM COBLEY. AND ALL

[|-DGAR LUSTGARTEN’S BBC series, ~ Prisoner at the Bar, now going the tounds of the National stations, is a string of virtuoso performances. This one-time barrister, who has been broad-

casting in almost every kind of programme for

many years and has lately appeared with great success in BBC television, makes believe that his broadcasts are a relatively simple matter, In reality they are the product of much thought by a shrewd brain, hard work and considerable acting ability. In Prisoner at the Bar Lustgarten analyses a famous crime and its history. After this preliminary scene-setting he acts scenes relevant to the case and finishes his broadcast with the trial in which he plays the accused, prosecuting and defending counsel, judge, foreman of the jury and all witnesses. The series was the idea of Kenneth Adam, Controller of the BBC’s Light Programme, who suggested to Lustgarten that he should discuss in a half-hour programme some famous crime. Adam’s choice of broadcaster was a good one, for Lustgarten knows the law inside out, and as a result

of many years’ broadcasting knows radio technique thoroughly, too. He was momentarily appalled at the new task but resolved’ to make an attempt and started his first script on Hawley Harvey Crippen, remembering all the time that it was not a documentary report of the crime that was wanted but a _ reconstruction of it in terms of pure radio. His scripts are deliberately ungrammatical in many places because the average person, especially one under great stress during a trial, does not always speak good English but more often talks in jerks and broken senterices.. What. makes _Prisoner at the Bar outstanding is not so much the content of Lustgarten’s broadcasts as the. way he delivers them: This apparently ordinary-looking North countryman goes* to rehearsal with his script polished, perfect, and timed to within a minute of the right length. In the studio he takes off his jacket, hangs it neatly over a chair-back and in his shirt sleeves settles down to the table above which the microphone hangs. His one foible is ‘to have the central studio lighting switched off and to read instead by the light of a single green-shaded

lamp at his elbow. At transmission a curtain is drawn across the listeningroom window so that nothing disturbs him, and there he sits, alone, addressing the microphone as if it were a person to whom everything had to be explained in an informal, easily understood way. Few alterations have to be made in his script after rehearsal and fewer still in his characterisations, for Edgar Lustgarten is a very competent actor, convincing even when playing a woman’s part. As proof of this, an out-of-work actor wrote to him recently asking if all the parts for the rest of the series had been cast as he would very much like to play in it. *

MUSIC IN THE WAIKATO

INCE arriving in New Zealand a little more than three years ago, an English violinist, Samuel Artis, and his wife Betty Pierson, have given nearly 100 recitals for Community Arts Services,

and about the same number of school recitals. While in England, and at the

invitation of the Middlesex County Council, Samuel Artis began a series Of. lecture recitals to school children. These became popular, and within 12 months. he was organising and directing a group of 16-musicians who performed as trios and quartets to schools in Greater London, Along with Archie Camden (English bassoon player), Sidney Sutcliffe (principal oboe of the London Philharmonia Orchestra), Jack McCaw (clarinet player, formerly of the National Orchestra of the NZBS) and others, he presented informal recitals and concerts to thousands of London ‘school children. During the forthcoming school holidays. a Junior School. of Music, with the Hamilton Junior String Ensemble -as:a nucleus, will be. held at the Cambridge: High School under the direction of Mr. Artis, and on Friday, August 28, at 8.45 > p.m.,. listeners to 1XH ‘Hamilton | will. hear part .of a demonstration concert from the Junior Music School. * The Waikato district is singularly well looked after musically. Between August 24 and September 5 the Griller String Quartet. will conduct a session of group teaching at St. Peter’s School, Cambridge. This music school will be under the direction of Owen Jensen.