Let's Whoop ’Em Up!

Radio Record, 7 August 1936, Page 21

Let's Whoop ’Em Up!

A Lowbrow Looks Over Our Radio Programmes

HESE New Zealand radio programmes of ours -let’s whoop ’em up! Yes, I mean that. When I sit shivering ‘in my little attic on these chill winter nights, there’s nothing very warming about a Violin Sonata,

INO. 42, IN "A WMLajor-pbut 1 could get quite a Kick out of a broadcast of a scene from a new musical talkie or two or three numbers by a good dance band. (Now, don’t say we haven’t got one-we have.) I’m -so lowbrow, yeu-say, that my forelock’s hanging on the ground? I know I’m lowbrowbut so are about a million other people who help to pay for the National Broadeasting Service. For a start, let’s look into this business of "geod" musie. Most of the great symphonies are fundamentally inartistic. Leo Reisman, the well-known American conductor, says their. composers were mechanieal tailare wha had

____- EE -V- hl OV OOOO no idea of the entertainment value of musie. If they had, he contends, they’d never have written their sym- , phonies so long. No one keeps his eyes glued solidly to the book he’s reading for two hours. % Well, it’s the same with symphonies. You can’t listen intelligently. to them for that length of time. Pll tell you an idea I’ve had at the back of my mind for a long time. What about an "In Town To-night’ programme,. like the B.B.C. puts over from London? Take Auckland for a start. The broadcast starts at -say-St. James Theatre, where the orchestra plays a number or two. You hear the audience ap- © plauding and you get the right atmosphere. Then over to the Civic Wintergarden, where the band’s playing and the crowd’s ¢ dancing. At the next port of | call, the Peter Pan Cabaret, there’s a floor turn on-a girl’s singing a new song-and it sounds pretty good to us. We feel like applauding along with the folk who are there. And so it goes on-to a night club,

pernaps, tO a new musica: talkie-just a peep in while the "hit" number of the show’s being played. And with it all an announcer with a bright and breezy manner, After a week or two it should be possible to have a prooramme af that

la ag I kind working like clockwork. And now for some of these American recordings. Without much trouble you’d get enough wreath: donations from New Zealand listeners to build a handsome mausoleum entirely of flowers for the Honourable Archie and his Japanese houseboy. Even worse, in my mind, are Eb and Zeb, a couple of American yokels whose humour might pass for such among a pack of cowboys in Texas-their efforts at being funny are merely pathetic. a There are the Cocoanut Grove Ambassadors, too. In the dear dead days when Mary Miles Minter was a dashing young thing and Clara Bow, quaintly enough,

was our idea of It, the Cocoanut Grove Ambassadors, musicians of the most famous night club in Los Angeles, were considered quite the thing. But since then there’s been

a depression, talking pictures and Mae West-in other words, they’re back numbers. America’s full of first-rate bands, making good recordings of the very latest tunes. Let’s have some of them and forget the lads from the Cocoanut Grove. Now I’m willing to be more serious. What about "amateur nights" on the

airfé reople who think tuey can keep a Great Bored Public amused send in their names and say what they -can do-play a mouth-organ, tap dance, sing "Annie Laurie" while standing on their heads, walk a tight rope-and they are sorted out and a programme arranged. Sometimes the microphone finds a winner-and a new star is born. More often than not the programme is just a darned good laugh for the listener. A great deal of excellent talent has been unearthed in America in the past 12 months by these "amateur nights." | American youth, too, has been given a chance to speak its mind, a high school boy and girl holding the floor.