Much Laughing

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 783, 23 July 1954, Page 11

Much Laughing

HE beginning of another series of Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh over 3ZB finds me once more facing fearful odds. "The mere repetition of an impediment in speech just isn’t witty or funny or anything else." Yes, there’s a point there; so in the last few mornings I’ve looked rather warily in the shaving mirror for a dulling of the expression, for it simply is a fact that I laughed till the tears rolled down my cheeks. As against the "improbable" joke, I counted as really clever and quite unexpected the way Horne, Murdoch and Co, tuned into themselves, so that what the loudspeaker said came over as an echo of what they were saying there ,and then. I also enjoyed listening to the chorus of BBC announcers being schooled to say "Sorry: I will repeat that," and the radio critic’s crack at the "moronic studio audiences" certainly went down well with the same people.

Hut this counterattack against these Philistines without my sense of humour must stop before I begin to look at thent with the cold disturbing stare of perfect sanity. And in truth I can no more remember all the things that made me laugh than the sober man can recall just why he thought he was being so witty the night before. -Westcliff Without a Frame you notice that ‘when they film a Somerset Maug- +

ham story they enclose it in a sort of frame, with Somerset Maugham _before and after, an admirable way of preserving the ironic detachment of the style. I felt that the NZBS’s dramatised version of The Creative Impulse would have benefited from similar mounting-the characters are seen by their author a little too obliquely to be convincing full-face. But I certainly enjoyed it. There were echoes of Lady Bracknell’s "Found?" in Mrs. Forrester’s "Gone? Gone?" when she hears of her husband’s departure with her cook. The three main characters were roundly played, but Mrs. Forrester’s satellites seemed a little dim. Perhaps the Auckland cast, ears attuned to Festival felicities, found the dialogue assigned them thin and unconvincing, or perhaps their experience of New Zealand’s literary coteries has accustomed them to better things. :