Prose Fairy Tales

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 893, 14 September 1956, Page 24

Prose Fairy Tales

RADIO magazine programmes sefve the same purpose as photographs in a newspaper. They provide the verisimilitude which helps us believe we know somebody we don’t know, and that helps us to escape the people we know too well. I’ve seen the opinion expressed that this passion to live vicariously other people’s lives is the most dangerous aspect of radio and other mass media. But it isn’t really a new urge; the only new thing is that being less sophisticated than our forbears we like to think our fairy tales are really happening, here and now. On a recent Sunday the eleven items contained in 2YA’s Radio Digest and 2ZB’s Sunday Supplement ranged from the pilot of a plane that got into difficulties over the Campbell Islands to a Pets’ Parade, from attempts to salvage Maori chants which Sir Apirana Ngata recorded on Edison cylinders in the 1900s, to a piano tuner at work on the Town Hall Steinway, from Sir Edmund Hillary and his dogs to Rita Snowden and her motor-cycles. Rather more prosy, perhaps, than Rumpelstiltskin and Jack the Giant-Killer, but hot (continued on next page)

to be despised. The people who appear on these programmes would not all have the knowhow to write and deliver a script, but talking informally for a few minutes they often do very well. And if they don’t-well, that item will soon be over.