A PANEL ON ITS TOES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 742, 2 October 1953, Page 10

A PANEL ON ITS TOES

Z5 BOOK REVIEW sprang to life recently with a brilliantly successful expertment. Instead of a book to each reviewer we had an important book discussed by a panel. Perhaps even more importont, members of the panel were well informed. criticel. opinionated and vocal. The subiect was football, the author was Danie Craven, the nanel comprised Winston McCarthy and two ex-All Blacks, Mark Nicholls and Jim Parker. The discussion, which lasted nearly 20 minutes, could have done on for an hour. Few ‘intellectual’ discussions on the air, other than from the BBC, have had such vigour or listener appeal. But then few have been so intolligently handled. Football is not intrinsically more "exciting than more orthodox religion, or what passes more often for droma. If this discussion on football was more. exciting than many talks on more "seribus" subiects, it was partly because the panel was on its intellectual toes. But above all, fervour, poetry and candour made a merry game of a discussion about a game. By contrast, most of our intellectuals give us diffident, mannered autopsies; and that even on authors very much olive. | hope we have learit something. Afton Vogt (Readers are invited to submit comments, not more than 200 words in length, on radio programmes. A fee of oné guinea will be paid after publication. Contributions should be headed "Radio Review." Unsuccessful éntries cannot be returned.)