EXIT THE CONCERTINA

Radio Record, Volume VIII, Issue 43, 3 May 1935, Page 5

EXIT THE CONCERTINA

ITH the pushing ahead of New .. Zealand's many electric. power schemes broadcasting is spreading its net in the remotest corners of the Dominion. Where two years ago the organ in the church hall anda few concertinas and wheezy gramophones provided the only music the community knew, to-day the finest orchestras of Europe and America are bringing to country folk a fuller realisation of overseas culture. Wherever one goes in country districts to-day the story is the same: electric light was installed; a_radio salesman followed . swift on its heels; the farmer, perhaps distrustful of these new-fangled gadgets, and thinking of a dwindling bank balance, protests that he doesn’t want the "durned thing on the place"; the salesman talks hard and is finally allowed to leave the set for.a ‘week; he comes back at the end of that time and finds more worshippers at the shrine of the Great God Radio. In England some consternation is being felt at the fact that the spread of broadcasting, with its careful pronunciation and university-trained announcers, is killing the county dialects. New Zealand has no dialects to worry about, although one frequently hears appallingly bad speech in many quarters. If broadcasting can do anything to combat this evil it will be doing the country a very real service.