Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 769, 15 April 1954, Page 28

Open Microphone

* NEWS OF BROADCASTERS, ON AND OFF THE RECORD,

By

Swarf

R the next few months June Irvine, 2XG’s shopping reporter, will have nobody’s ° shopping problems to worry about but her own, for she is heading for a holiday in England and on the Continent. Her sessions are being taken over by Pamela Kemp (shown below).

who has spent most of her life in Gisborne. After leaving school Pamela Kemp took up Kindergarten work. At the end of the twovyear course she gained her diploma, and in the following year was appointed Assistant Director at Campbell Kindergarten, Auckland. *

FISH PORTER, STAR SINGER

ARS. P. STEWART (Hastings) says she would like some information about the English vocalist Steve Conway. Steve Conway, whose real name was Walter James Groom, was born in Bethnal Green, London. His first job

was as errand Doy tor a brewery firm in East London. He had

a fine soprano voice and took part in many concerts round

about where he lived. After his voice broke he rested for a while and then started to take lessons. Success at talent quests led to engagements during the evening, which brought him £8 a week. When he was appearing at the Trocadero, Elephant and Castle, in 1944, a composer and music publisher, Reg Morgan, offered to manage him. At this time Steve was emploved as a porter at Billingsgate Fish Market, and Morgan worked hard to develop" his singing career. His first broadcast was with Morgan in a "Meet-the Composer" spot in Variety Bandbox in January, 1945. For this show Morgan had changed his protege’s name from Groom to Steve Conway. He was an immediate hit. The BBC featured him with Sandy MacPherson and with the .band leaders Ambrose, Lew Stone, Peter Yorke and Maurice Winnick. Soon Conway was a top-of-the-bill act at £150 a week. Steve had suffered from heart trouble, and he collapsed while playing at the Alhambra Theatre, Bradford. He entered. Guy’s: Hospital, London, for an operation a year or two ago, and there he died. One of his most popular songs was "Good Luck, Good Health, God Bless You." we

FLYING DOCTOR

mx | ISTENERS to Station 2XN Nelson will hear, at 8.44 p.m. on Thursday, April 22, a talk by Arthur W. Parrott on the Flying Doctor Service of Australia. Mr. Parrott is at present engaged in entomological research for the Commonwealth Scientific and Indus-

trial Research Organisation and State Museums

and Agriculture Departments of Australia. He spent more than _ three months towards the end of last year travelling through the Eastern and Southern Australian States, visiting museums 4&nd other places in the course of his work on parasitic wasps, which he is classifying and naming for various

institutions. It was during this tour of duty that he gained a great respect for the service given by the Flying Doctor to the "exiled" people of the Australian

outback. Arthur Parrott, who lives at Wakapuaka-a suburb of Nelson-was formerly biologist to the New Zealand Fresh Water Research Committee and the Canterbury Museum and, more recently, Curator of Insects at the Cawthron Institute.

STRATFORD

MAVOR MOORE, who, as Chief Producer, has been. closely concerned with CBC television since its inception four years ago, has left the Corporation to take a leading role in the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford. In the meantime he will be engaged in writing, composing and or

ducing the annual review with which his

name has often been associated, Spring Thaw. When he resigned, Mavor Moore said that the launching of Canadian television had been the most exciting experience in his life. After graduating from the University of Toronto in 1941, Moore became a feature producer. He left in 1943 to serve Overseas as a psychological warfare officer, and returned in 1945° as chief English language producer for the CBC International Service. After a short term as senior producer in Vancouver, he resigned to join his mother, Dora Mavor Moore, in launching the New Play Society in Toronto, which was the cradle of Toronto’s new flourishing professional theatre. Iu the next four years he produced or supervised more than 50 stage plays and musical revues, writing some of them himself and acting in many. He also wrote and appeared in CBC programmes as well as in the U.S.A. His articles, stories and verse have appeared in several Canadian periodicals; he has composed popular songs and was for a time on the faculty of the Royal Conservatory of Music, where he taught playwriting and history of the theatrical arts. From 1946 to 1950 Mavor Moore spent the summer months in New York a

with the United Nations Radio Division as a writer and director, and eventually executive producer of programmes that were given world-wide’ distribution. Three of those programmes won Pea"body Awards, the radio equivalent of Hollywood’s Oscar. x

BIG STEAL

tt ‘THE BBC show, Educating Archie, will start at the four YA _ stations

on May 8, ,Archie Andrews is the chap who steals all the laughs from

Peter Brough-the fellow who pockets all the money made by Archie Andrews.

HAIL 2053!

* A NOTHER "time capsule,". made of "aluminium and 12 feet long, containing mementos of the show business and special editions of trade papers de-

picting the current entertainment world, was buried at Las Vegas re-

cently. Included in this peerless treasure for posterity are recordings of top American talent, Bing Crosby’s pipe, what is purported to be the only } sweater worn on the screen by Jane Russell, Sugar Ray Robinson’s gloves and Ray Bolger’s dancing shoes.

YOU COULD HEAR A COUGH DROP

2% 5 ECORDING of sounds at famous places, such as the stamp of feet when the Guard is being changed at Buckingham Palace, or the challence of the sentry during the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London, is one

of the routine jobs carried out by the BBC's recorded pro-

grammes department. Recently BBC engineers went to the British Museun to record the silence in the reading room-the holy of holies where scholars and other people engaged in research are found in large numbers. The domed roof provides a loud echo and the bsilence of the celebrated place emerged on the recording as a _ great roaring

sound of heavy breathing, coughing and rustling of pages, punctuated by loud bangs whenever a reader dropped a book, or someone shut a door or tripped over his feet. Many places, say the engineers, area great deal quieter than the reading room of the British Museum. os

"ns if -RANK MUIR and Denis Norden, the inseparable script-writing team of TIFH, are both ex-R.A.F. They work a fiye-and-a-half-day week and take the whole business very seriously. Both have also taken part in radio and TV quiz programmes.

FAMOUS VOICE

‘HE cables told us the other day that the British Ministry of Works is to attend to a "bruise" on Big Ben caused by a glancing bomb during the war. Big Ben, the BBC’s most famous voice, celebrated thirty years of continuous brvadcastine at the end af lact vaor Ran, G+

George, writing in the Radio Times about the bell of

the great clock at Westminster, said that no one seemed to know exactly who thought of Big Ben as a_ possible broadcaster. Put some engineers still working at. Broadcasting House tool: part in the first experiments in 1923. They mounted. a microphone on _ the roof of the building across the road. linked it to the old BBC "headquarters at Savoy Hill. and found that traffic noise nearly obliterated ‘the suunds of Big Ben striking the hours. The next step was to take a microphone into the belfry itself and. working by the dim light of hurricane lamps. they carried out experiments on a closed circuit. The result of their work was a microphone hung in a football bladder on the river side of the great bell. This worked for many years in spite of the Westminster pigeons’ furious attack, carried on even though the bladder was

-ae inedible and could not be used for nesting material. The modern equipment is heavier and both pigeon and fool proof. Big Ben is now piped to the Broadcasting House control room and put on the air by a control switch, while for television a scale model of the Westminster tower is shown to viewers as the last vision item of the day’s progranime, the news in sound following immediately. ; *

BARITONE FROM TIMARU

[AN LUND (below) is a Timaru-born baritone, now aged 21, who has been ‘interested in music’ since he was

five. Last year he sang with the 3XC Christmas. and Easter Choir. and’

elso with the Clarion Octet. South Canterbury listeners to 3XC on the evening of Wednesday, April 21, will hear Ian Lund in a group of Negro Spirituals.