THE JUNGLE AT SCHOOL
HAT schoolmasters are much the’ same the world over was delightfully demonstrated by Gwyn Thomas's Forenoon (1YC). This strategic map of the eternal warfare between the’ master, earnest, cynical, or merely professional, and the schoolboy, shrewd, devious and predictably unpredictable, offered wonderful sketches of teaching types, with their lumbering sarcasm, pedantic humour, donnish jokes and comic disillusionment, besides a pompous headmaster who, on finding an American comic-book in the school, thunders that the age is "threatened by the rule of the moron and the Morlock." Yet, at the same time, it managed to suggest something of the faith and purpose of teachers, and of the invincible idealism under the mask of scepticism. However, for me the most charming character was Fanshawe, the schoolboy expert in injured innocence and fabricator of insurance schemes and comic-book rackets; there is always one’ Fanshawe in every group of schoolboys. Reminiscent by turns of Mr. Perrin and Mr. -- Will Hay’s St. Michael’s, "Beachcomber’s" Narkover and Ronald Searle’s St. Custard’s, Gwyn Thomas’s comic documentary had a nostalgic character of its own, and was made with that incomparably smooth sophistication which the BBC brings to all such things.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540129.2.19.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 758, 29 January 1954, Page 10
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195THE JUNGLE AT SCHOOL New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 758, 29 January 1954, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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