THREE THOUSAND MILES OF RIVER
HE special Sunday morning feature for April 29, The Fulness of the Nile, is written by one of the top writers for the BBC, Louis Macneice. Famed for his radio play The Dark Tower, and for his script to the Everest film, Macneice has a flair for producing programmes of unusual interest. His Jatest assignment began in ; Egypt, where, for a Commonwealth series on Africa, he was asked to prepare a radio picture of the most famous river in the world-El-Bahr, the Nile. Three thousand miles of the river’s course he travelled by boat and air, from the Delta to the borders of Uganda... The Nile, he found, flowed past scenes of astonishing variety- past tall black fishermen, who stood like statues on the rocks at the Fula rapids, past the cotton crops of the famous "Gezira Cotton scheme," past the Royal Tombs embedded in the hills in the Valley of Kings, to Cairo itself, where the new vigorous army regime were planning many reforms, including new ~ uses of the Nile.
He found he had been a scene that exhilarated, trigued, confused and bored him. Haunting him were the great figures of the past, the pyramid builders, Moses, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra. Crowding in upon him were the present-day problems that this river presents to the countries that use its waters. And he came to the conclusion that to write up the Nile in an orderly fashion was a mug’s game. Instead he decided to use "a suggestive or glancing technique," to present the main character, the river itself, through a quick and kalaidoscopic succession of facts, figures, quotations, impressions and "character"
pitched into camera angles. He has combined saddened, in- ancient and modern by dramatic occasionallv reconstruction — recreating history of
a river which he describes as "a chain which binds us all to our earliest past and a spinal cord which is still as alive as ever." The programme will be presented on April 29, at 9.30 a.m., from all YAs and 4YZ, «leben le
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 872, 20 April 1956, Page 7
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342THREE THOUSAND MILES OF RIVER New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 872, 20 April 1956, Page 7
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