No Slanger's Circus The opening salvoes of the General Election
engagement have been fired. Politics are outside the terms of a critic's reference, but I cannot help welcoming Mr. Churchill's broadcast for two reasons which concern radio proper. First, Mr. Churchill is a rarity among politicians in understanding that the microphone is a means of speaking to people in a room, and not a public address system wired to cover a huge hall stretching from Land's End to John o' Groats. Mr. Churchill, however orotund, never orates on the air. Secondly, he has come to believe—as he did not seem to in 1945—that the microphone is an instrument that magnifies a mood ; what is normal political hard-hitting on the hustings takes on a sharper, and sourer, note on the air. If all the Election broad. casts emulate the moderation of Mr. Churchill's, then we shall not this time have a Slanger's Circus.
Television seems at last to be getting under way with its "docu- mentaries," and the results have been rewarding. I Want To Be A Doctor last week seemed to me a little over-dramatised, but Mr. Michael Barry has so obvious a delight in the power of the medium that you can forgive a certain exuberance. Fifty Years of Industrial Research explored the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington. It was somewhat bedevilled by mischances.
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