Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 783, 23 July 1954, Page 28

Open Microphone

NEWS OF BROADCASTERS, ON AND OFF THE RECORD

HECTOR ROSS, who carries a banner for the common people in The Doomsday Story (page 8) has also carried one for a prince of Royal blood. The camera caught him here in cos-

tume as Glenaladale, a Highland chieftain, supporter of the young Stuart pretender in the British Lion film Bonnie Prince Charlie. He was in exceptionally good company, David Niven, Margaret Leighton, Judy Campbell and Jack Hawkins being the names listed just ahead of his in the publicity sheets. Notwithstanding his name and the Highland dress, Ross hails from Lancashire. By World War II he’d graduated from repertory to the West End, but, like many another, he left the stage for the battlefields of’ Greece, North Africa and Italy, ending up with the rank of captain. In 1946 he returned to England to appear in a war play, All This Is Ended, before the late King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. His performance brought him a film contract with Sir Alexander Korda, under which he appeared in nine films, including Adventures of Sherlock

Holmes, Night Beat, and, of course, Bonnie Prince Charlie. He has starred in about 200 radio and 56 television plays, was named "Television Actor of the Year," for playing Dick Dudgeon in Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple in 1949, and won the National Award for his performance in The Guinea Pig in 1951. Many listeners will have seen him in the flesh as Tony Wendice in Dial M for Murder, which was toured in New Zealand earlier this year.

PIONEER

. * MANY listeners will know that the BBC Palace of Varietics which is heard from NZBS stations, turns back

the clock to the days when the music hall was a convivial, full-blooded affair with any amount of give-and-take be-

tween artists and audience, but they may not know. that the producer of the

series now being heard, Ernest Longstaffe, first did this job about 17 years ago. When Longstaffe retired from the permanent staff of the BBC about five years ago he was 65, and had worked for the Corporation for 23 years. He gave himself a fortnight’s holiday, and then planned to launch out on a round of the towns he had visited years before as a touring conductor and_ producer,

taking with him a vaudeville production of the Longstaffe type. There is probabiy no man in show business who can teach Ernest Longstaffe anything about putting on robust, cheerful entertainment, for he is used to writing book, lyrics and music, casting the show, producing it, and then presiding over it from the conductor’s desk. He wrote his first composition when he was 16. This was a Sung Eucharist, which was done from a little church in his home county of Essex. Before he was 20 he had tried his hand as an estate agent and a commercial traveller, but the theatre wag tugging at him all the time.~So he started out in theatrical companies touring tiny English towns. This led on to bigger things, and finally to the West End. To use his own words he began as a "throaty and inadequate baritone" in the chorus, graduating to chorus-master, musical director and proprietor-producer. Ernest Longstaffe was one of the earliest to take his vast experience of entertainment from the footlights into the new-fangled broadcasting studio. His’ first production for the BBC was a onehour revue, The Bee Bee Cabaret. He followed that with revues and variety entertainments every few weeks, rounding off his first year by putting on the first radio pantomime. we

AMNESIA

AVE you ever had the nerve-wrack-ing experience of sitting up front at a concert, even if it was only in the local hall, while you waited for a friend, on his first appearance as a soloist, to make a mistake? It has happened

to all of us. Of course, when your soloist is an experienced concert artist

you relax, knowing that nothing will go wrong. According to an item in

Musical America, however, this sort of thing can happen to the best of them, and did happen not long ago to Jascha

mieifetz. Me was playing the Sibelius D Minor Violin Concerto with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra early this year when, early in the third movement, he signalled the conductor, Walter Hendl, to stop the orchestra and begin again. After-

wards he said: "I just forgot. It happened to me once before in 1919 at a Boston performance "of the same concerto and in almost the same spot." *