Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 924, 26 April 1957, Page 20

Open Microphone

NEWS OF BROADCASTERS ON AND OFF THE RECORD

STORYTELLER

N.P.S. photograph WHEN you meet friends of Asquith M. Thomson -and they’re pretty numerous-one of the things they’re sure to mention about him is his remarkable talent as a storyteller. Listen-

ers will remember his . recollections of school _ break-ups and school

concerts, and next week hes to be heard (YA-YZ link, April. 30) giving an amusing account of his experiences as @ sub-enumerator in last year’s census.

"Tommy"-as he’s known to Open Microphone-didn’t get off to a very good start that day, for the first woman who opened the door to him told him to go to blazes and t&ke his rubbish with him. As she explained later, she thought he was "one of. those religious people." Strangely enough, he says, no one else jumped to such theological conclusions, though he was suspected of being several other sorts of people. Mr Thomson (left) has many incidents to relate, and he ends with one that will puzzle and entertain listeners as much as it still puzzles him: +.

SEAGOON

\/ HEN Harry Secombe of The Goon Show was playing on the London stage not long ago in Rocking the Town, Swansea people who came to town for the show liked to go back-

Stage and recall with him. their schooldays when he. was not con-

Siagerea good enougn to take part in the end-ofgterm play. Scarlet fever, it seems, had left him very short-sighted. On stage at school: he would bump into the scenery, so he was given a job painting it instead of acting. In those days his sister was. the family comic, and when she started taking him along to church socials to help with heft ‘act he wasn’t at all eager-he suffered badly from stage fright. According to Eric Johns in Theatre World, Harry used to write verse that wouldn’t scan and short stories that no

editor would buy. That was in his early teens. His comic genius first started to bloom when, aged 16, he went to work in an office. He often got into trouble for taking off his boss on the phone, and it was on an office outing that he first appeared in London, giving an impromptu one-man show. In North Africa during the war Harry maintained this reputation as a clown, and. in Italy he met Spike Milligan. Back home he decided he had had enough of office work and would try his luck on the stage. At a Windmill audition he turned on his shaving act -one that has been pretty consistently successful with audiences ever since. In it he is a boy shaving for the first time, a man shaving with ice-cold water and a bad case of nerves, The management liked the act and asked him what salary he wanted. Twenty pounds a week seemed fantastic to Harry, but it was the first figure he thought of, so that’s what he asked for. He was accepted and signed up-for six shows a day for six weeks. It was during this spell at the Windmill, at a social club close by, that Harry used to talk with Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers about new ways of making people laugh. "Over those coffee cups," says Eric Johns, "the original goon type of humour was evolved." The ideas they worked out Harry tried out in the pro-vinces-not always With great success. One manager who wasn’t amused sacked him with the words: "You’re not going to shave in my time." Then he went on the air and started to sing, and his popularity spread. In The Goon Show Harry Secombe is, of course, the central figure, Neddie Seagoon. A writer in the London Observer recently described him ‘as looking but not sounding like an owl that has taken benzedrine. People who know Harry off stage as a friend and a family man say he is exuberant and kindly-a pretty good sort of guy to know.

BUSY MEZZO

‘THE New Zealand mezzo-soprano Mona Ross, who has spent the last four years with the Carl Rosa Opera Company, was a busy visitor to Wellington recently. Miss Ross studied at

the Koyal College of Music, and as_ she was completing her

studies there the College opera Cirector asked the Carl Rosa directors to

come and see her work. She. was accepted immediately, and ‘since then has sung all the leading mezzo roles, including Carmen, her favourite. Now she is back for . six months: holiday with her parents. When we met her at the NZBS Concert Section Miss Ross had been

discussing arrangements’ to appear with the tenor Richard Lewis and the National Orchestra in the Verdi Requiem. She was also making plans to join the New Zealand Opera Company for The Consul, in which she will take the important role of the Secretary, and for Amahl and the Night Visitors. We asked about any other appearances. "Well," Miss Ross said with a laugh, "I’m not committed tg anything else-I’ve simply got to haye a holiday." —

AST year New Plymouth earned itself national attention through what is thought to be the first New Zealand performance: of. Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice. The man responsible for this was William Komlos, who was recently in Wellington as guest conductor of’ the National Orchestra for a studio concert. Mr Komlos told us there had been "quite a lot of con-

troversy about Orpheus. In the main role he used a baritone instead of the customary alto. "I proved that it does work," he said. "Gluck wrote the part for a castrato and then adapted it for a tenor. This adaptation has been lost, but. it shows he was happy to have a real man singing the part, and I am quite happy to have a baritone. We found there were certain advantages in using a-baritone, for in. the trios if we had used three women’s voices they would have lacked colour." Behind this production lay eight months of rehearsals, and the performance took place in the local opera house, which is "quite. a good opera house, with the right atmosphere-one of the best in’ New Zealand." Mr Komlos, a Hungarian: b birth, arrived in New and in 1951 from Jakarta, and he is now pleased-to be able to say, "I feel that I’m not an outsider any more." In New Plymouth he taught at the Girls’ High School, taking over the orchestra, which he gradually built up, using cirl trumpet plavers. obo-

ists, flautists and clarinettists. Like many teachers in this country he has had to turn his hand to everything and teach woodwind and brass as well as his own instrument, the violin. "You have to-that’s all there is to it," he said. Apart from his work for school music,

he has built up the New Plymouth Symphony Orchestra to a strength of. over 40 players. This orchestra now gives concerts with such visiting artists as Janetta McStay, Alex Lindsay, David Galbraith, James Hopkinson and Laszlo Rogatsy. It’s work he described as of "a decent provincial standard." During the last two "years Mr Komlos has also conducted the first orchestra at the Cam-

bridge Summer School of Music, and he described Cambridge as "a splendid arrangement." Mr Komlos has a very busy life, and he says that the hard-worked music teacher often wishes there were more teachers. "There is a crying need for them all over New Zealand," he told us. "The material here is up to the standard anywhere in Europe-there is no lack of willing pupils, only a lack of teachers." His only regret about his life in New Plymouth is that of many people who live in provincial townsit is not on the main route for visiting overseas artists. This, he feels, is a great pity, as "our town has a real appetite for artists.’ This year he is taking a rest from opera, but it is a rest only in a relative sense, as his other musical activities will still make him a very busy man.

NOVELIST

1IGEL BALCHIN, heard from YC stations recently in the BBC series We Write Novels, is one of the bestknown of English novelists. His first book was published in 1933, and since then he has written a great many novels, several of them with an industrial or a professional background. He

considers it an advantage to give his characters a definite setting and to de-

scribe their work and the conditions in which they do it rather than to let them float about in a world of unearned or at any rate unexplained income. His best-known books to date are The Small Back Room, which dealt with the work of the behind-the-scenes "boffins". during the last war, and Mine Own Executioner. Mr Balchin was educated at Dauntsey’s School, and then at Peterhouse

College, Cambridge, where he was an exhibitioner and prizeman in natural science. Since then he has combined, in varying proportions, authorship and a business career. Five years at the National. Institute of Industrial Psychology gave him the background knowledge for Mine Own Executioner, a book dealing largely with psychiatry, his scientific work for the Army during the war supplied the authentic atmosphere for The Small Back Room, and his industrial activities have provi~ed invaluable detail for other novels. Both The Small Back Room and Mine Own Executioner were adapted ffor the screen, and the first also became a very successful radio play.