FOR OUR CENTENNIAL

Radio Record, 22 July 1938, Page 21

FOR OUR CENTENNIAL

-s. EVERYBODY GOES ON THE AIR IN BUDAPEST :

[DEA that might well be used during the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition in 1940 is one from Budapest. During the annual Industries Fair in Budapest, time on the air can be bought by everybody. The Hungarian Broadcasting Company reserves four hours daily, during the ten days while the fair lasts, for the transmission of messages spoken by anyone who wishes to try out his talent as a speaker and personally deliver into the microphone messages to the home folks who sit around the loudspeaker in remote villages or outlying places, eagerly waiting for the voices of absent friends or relatives to sound from it, For a very smal] sum, anybody may step before the microphone and talk for 60 seconds. Messages must first be written down and submitted to the broadcasting censors. If passed, the

papers on which they are written are returned to the would-be radio speakers, who often stand in long queues, biding their turn until they can be admitted into the studio. A professional speaker receives them and "eoaches" them. Some of the amateur broadcasters are badly in need of encouragement. There is no one, however, who does not get a thrill from the sense of being heard by thousands of people, .This popular institution, ‘"Hverybody’s Broadcast," turns out ten thousand new radio "experts" and broadcast fans annually-for anybody who has ever said before the microphone: "T am having a grand time..." is told by countless friends and relatives at home that she, or he, as the case may be, has a much better radio voice than the professional announcer. And anybody who has been told that becomes a radio expert for life!