RADIO
A CORRESPONDENT, who is COlUICOOS but very fierce, urges me IO hurl the weight of the Spectator against recorded programmes. "In one day—one single and solitary day—last week I counted twenty- nine recorded broadcasts," he writes with statistical spleen, and goes on to demand a public ceremony of record-smashing in Portland Place, followed by a bonfire. The gravamen of his complaint is that the recorded play, talk or musical hour lacks what the French call actualize ; the listener does not get the feeling (an important part of his pleasure) of being there, of assisting, at the time. I know how he feels, and sympathise. (Some of his twenty-nine pro- grammes though, must have been " repeats " from earlier in the week.) One great pleasure of, say, the theatre lies in the immediate sympathy, the instantaneous intimacy between actor and audience. But I don't go as far as my correspondent in some of his later suggestions ; as, for instance, the one about boiling all the B.B.C. producers in oil. The recorded programme must lose a little of the atmosphere of the "live " ; but it is sometimes a necessity. It stands to reason that Mr. John Gielgud cannot be somewhere round Shaftesbury Avenue at 9.30 in the evening and simultaneously Playing Hamlet in Broadcasting House. And which would you sooner have, Hamlet recorded or no Hamlet at all?
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