Pigs and Snobs
STATION 1YA’s Double Bill last Friday gave me a thoroughly enjoyable hour of drama. The first play, Streaky Bacon, was somewhat familiar dialectcomedy of a kind featured in books of one-act plays for amateur societies, dealing with a pig which threatens to break up a marriage. But the verve of a cast of Productions Section reliables made the bacon crackle crisply. However, The Romance of Horatio Sparkins was the piece de résistance; a delightful BBC dramatisation of a little piece in Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, lampooning Victorian middle-class snobbery. It usually is almost impossible to improve on Dickens, but I believe that the BBC managed it here, expanding the lightlysketched characters, s@mgranging Dickens’s dialogue, adding @éfme more which fitted in,’perfectly, and dramatising the comic climax over which Dickens "draws a veil." The relish with which the BBC producer and cast tackled this account of an impostor who gulls some vulgar social climbers indicates that Dickens’s point is not yet blunted by the intervening century. Come to think of it, there are many other pieces by Boz which might fruitfully attract the attention of NZBS script-writers.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19560420.2.42.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 872, 20 April 1956, Page 20
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188Pigs and Snobs New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 872, 20 April 1956, Page 20
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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