"Hooray for Us"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 791, 17 September 1954, Page 26

"Hooray for Us"

ALAN MORRIS, of the Productions Staff of 3YA, is nothing if not versatile. He has cut some entirely new grooves in radio. To check on this, listen’ to 3YA on September 21, at 8.0 p.m. You will hear the first in a series of six half-hour shows, Hooray for Us, which Alan Morris has written, produced and, in large part, acted. From the first words of the compére, "With the kind permission of the Latsonian Embassy we present Hooray for Us, a programme based on a script found in a side pocket of an old pair of diplomatic bags," you will sit up and put pipes or knitting. aside. We're accustomed to putting pipes and knitting, and novels aside for a good, fast-moving TIFH "type-of-thing." You’ve just: got to, or you miss a lot of the gags. You miss what they call "yacks" in the trade, the chuckles that purely verbal humour brings. But some shows put over a mainly situation humour. And that’s quite a feat, on radio, because situation humour is largely visual, and the mike is blind. If someone tells you about the mouse that had had so many operations it went to a music shop and asked to see their mouse-organs, please, that rates a chuckle. It’s straight mike material. But if a radio show gets over to you the acute embarrassment you (and the other chap) feel when you haven’t seen each other for years, you’ve forgotten each other’s names, and you're both walking towards each other along an otherwise

empty footpath, and... well you know how it is. Gifted humorists, radio actors, or producers, without using a gag in a cart load, can dig us so cunningly in the ticklish spots that we explode into laughter. We don’t carefully lay down our knitting, pipes, and novels. Instead, stitches, ash, and unsolved murders drop in all directions, and we slap our knees, guffawing helplessly: We may wonder afterwards what we were teajly laughing at. We may not realise it was ourselves. That is what Alan Morris hopes to achieve in Hooray for Us, Into it he has not only managed to inject an unusually large amount of situation humour, but he has avoided the personal insult- between-principals gag, which forms such a large part of overseas shows, But the insult is still there -the gentle insult of the lampooner, the satirist. And the subjects of the lampoon, the caricature, the gentle dig? Who but us, us New Zillanders, indignantly regarding Laya Raki’s posturings, sitting in the Square waiting for Benefit Day, struggling over mountains in search of Truth and Beauty, with a Geiger counter in our hand just in case, or, every man his own hamfist, building another couple of rooms on. But there is no synthetic built-in applause in the show. It makes direct contact with the fireside on its own say-so. Six Christchurch bands do the music, by turns. In the first show, besides the multiple voices of Alan Morris are heard Happi Hill, Dick Barlow, Margaret Barrer, Beatrice Muir, Simpson Guillen (West Indian calypso singer), Coral Cummins and Rod Derrett, with Bob Bradford’s music. In producing the scripts, 3YA staff associate Bernard Kearns was the discriminating dog, on whom Alan Morris tried his scripts, He bit as often as he barked.