Joyce Gives a Party

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 919, 22 March 1957, Page 14

Joyce Gives a Party

OYCE GRENFELL requested the pleasure of our company for threequarters of an hour on the National Programme on March 10. I was delighted to accept, for as readers of this column will know, Miss Grenfell is a favourite hostess of mine. But I’m afraid it was rather a dull party, and Miss Grenfell was not really on form. She was not helped by an announcer who called her successively Miss Grenfeel, and once, disconcertingly, Grenweald, and the quality of her entertainment, styled gentle satire, was at times so gentle as to stir no response whatever. Her pert young girl telling her parents to grow up was an awful old chestnut, and the sentimental ballad is a genre which she is not equipped to deliver with any conviction. Her diction, too, though rattlingly audible in speech, is muddy in song. In adenoidal Cockney ("Me and my friend, we go out dancin’"y, she was much better: far more her style, this. Oddly, she succeeded very well in a group of Virginian plantation songs. Her programme was preceded by a reminiscent talk about childhood, in which such themes as childish terror in strange surroundings, minor betrayals, and "yarng larv" were given a pleasant airing. But if her programme was a fair selection of the solo revue which she has presented in London and New York, I remain somewhat mystified by its success.