Listeners Do Not Want Pills Without Sugar Coats

Radio Record, 29 July 1938, Page 6

Listeners Do Not Want Pills Without Sugar Coats

ATTACK is made this week against the NBS. talks, L. A. Macintyre taking up the pen to decry them as too worthily educational. He would like to see some of commercialdom’s enterprise brightening the choice of subjects.

F anyone asked me in what class of radio entertainment [ was most often disappointed, I know how unhesitating would be my

answer: ""The talks!’’ Not even the advertisements or the blatancy of the Commercials at their feeblest have caused me more chagrin than the honest and very worthy talks policy of the NBS. At one time, this service used to give us an interesting and uneven range of subjects and speakers. | To tune in at 7.30 or 8.40 o'clock at nights was to. take a chance, certainly, but very often you were rewarded. © Now, the "Whirligig of Time’ seems to have got the NBS giddy. Its talks policy centres within the narrow orbit of these learned researches into bygone days. Occasionally an S. K. Ratcliffe or a Professor Alexander visits the Dominion, occasiorially there is a plum from one of the tried New Zealand speakers. Normally, however, the NBS talks lately have been as dull as their titles. Te is not that I am complaining against the whole idea of the Whirligig series. [ listened avidiy _to the first half-dozen talks and found them extraordinarily interesting, delivered forcefully and neatly showing the impact of history on present-day, Even the speaker on ancient Rome swung his talk right up to 1938 Fascism and thereby changed historical research into a modern problem.

But. as Time and the Whirligig .went .on, this aptness and care be--came less obvious. Admittedly, I have missed. eleven in every dozen of

the latest talks--but only because those Which 1 nave heard have been so learnedly tedious. Am I alone in my distaste? The "‘talks’’ following of the NBS is turning in increasing numbers to dramatic serials from the Commercials and. the alternatives or, nowadays, to Parliament. : This is unfortunate not only because it shakes goodwill for the NBS, but also because it means that 90 per cent. of the good material that is being prepared and put over the air in the Whirligig series is being wholly wasted. The other 20 per cent. . benefitting only those who are sufficiently learned to need it. Although Professor Shelley is self-confessedly intent on raising the cultural level of New Zealanders: through the powerful medium which he controls, nevertheless I believe he is unwise to make’ such an obvious bid for his ideals as he is now doing through ' the NBS talks. In music, it is another thing altogether. Even lovers of swing, if their love is for ‘the sound rather than the excitement, can appreciate and enjoy operatic and symphonic works in small doses. By the skilful mixing of light jazzy compositions with better things, there no doubt can be an enormous amount accomplished in the field of greater musical appreciation. (Continued on next page.)

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But generally speaking there is nothing the public so detests as the suggestion it is being solemnly educated. And talks-far more than musie -shout aloud of their mission. Whatever the NBS likes to say, the Whirli_gig is an adult educational series and ~--as such- it is bound to be avoided by the majority. What the NBS talks need to hold the publie is a dash of the Commercial’s homely enterprise. That excellent series some time ago on the lives of women married to men in various professions and trades-talks given by the women themselves in unpractised, honest sentences-was a step toward a field of human interest that is unlimited. But the NBS preferred not to explore the field. Well, Whirligig of Time is sbowing that listeners like humanity, humour and colloquialisms in their taiks. Academic treatises, read no matter how precisely, do not amuse. Maybe it is the fault of the educational system, maybe it is our own earthly natures---whatever the reason we listeners simply don’t want to go back to sehvol. And if we must take our pills now and then please, we say, not with their sugar coats off!