CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THJ THEATRE
I MUST confess to being a bit behind the times as far as le cas Piddington is concerned. I have never heard the Piddingtons broad- cast, and though I am vaguely aware that Nature has accused the B.B.C. of bad (or anyhow unscientific) faith in sponsoring exaggerated claims for their powers of thought-transference, I am not au fait with the controversy. I have been unable to follow the endless argu- ments in which Mr. Piddington and the Editor of the New Statesman have been inextricably locked for what seems a very long time, and I do not even know who Mr. Arthur Helliwcll is, or why he ought to eat his hat. So I brought to the Radio Sensation of the Year, now on view at the Palladium, an open mind.
In the back of it, however, there lurked a memory : the memory of a solid and indeed, I believe, a reasonably eminent citizen of Glasgow to whom, a few years ago, I found myself sitting next at dinner. This gentleman told me that he manufactured, in addition to more normal forms of wireless equipment, the tiny transmitters which form, apparently, an indispensable part of the equipment of the professional entertainer whose act is based on some form of telepathy. I was not accordingly disposed to reject altogether the possibility that Mr. and Mrs. Piddington had enlisted the aid of modern science in the accomplishment of their difficult feats.
At the Palladium it certainly looks very much as if this is what they do do. I say this because at the Palladium each of them is at all relevant times (save one) quite overtly in contact with a piece of wireless equipment. The microphone to which Mrs. Piddington is so closely affiliated while she is on the stage may be the standard article : so may the hand-microphone which her husband carries about with him. All I can say is that at the Palladium their act is performed in a way which suggests that anyhow the latter contingency is an unlikely one. Mr. Piddington only once abandons this micro- phone during " transference," and at this point he is led away with his hands above his head by a rather self-assured volunteer from the audience to the side of the stage, where he leans against the proscenium with his hands out of sight of the audience. My guess therefore is that the Piddingtons' means of intercommunication are mechanical rather than natural ; and I would further surmise that they include some arrangement whereby Mrs. Piddington receives, through the white cloth with which she is blindfolded, a visual image of the translucent white blackboard on which Mr. Piddington's assistant writes down words in brown chalk. This image is not a very distinct one and makes it easy, for instance, to mistake the word " long " for the word "going " at first sight.
These chimerical conjectures may be complete nonsense, and my theory may well have been proved baseless by tests more rigorous than those to which the Piddingtons appear to subject themselves at the Palladium. But I should be very interested to know whether their present act could be performed in its entirety (a) if Mr. Pidding- ton's hands were in sight of the audience during the only period when he relinquishes his microphone and (b) if an ordinary blackboard were used. I expect it could ; and I must hasten to add that it is a very enjoyable act, preceded by a bill in which Mr. jimmy Wheekr is very funny and Mr. Max Wall is rather vulgar.
PETER FLEMING.
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