RADIO
I SHOULD very much have liked last week to listen to The Pilgrim's Regress, Mr. C. S. Lewis's allegory about "Christianity, Reason and Romanticism," because this is a mind that fairly radiates activity, and therefore might be assumed to be properly active on radio. I should-liked to have heard Mr. John Betjeman's talk on the Isle of Man, for Mr. Betjeman has a taste, a flavour, all of his own. Also Mozart's Titus from Salzburg, and one or two other presumably good things.
But they were on the Third Programme ; and, in my August retreat, the Third Programme is a mere slur and slither of sound from any normal set. Eheu, the programmes that arc lost to me, lost to me! And it must be so all the year round for many thousands—I don't know the proportion—of listeners. There is no pleasure, but rather a weariness and vexation, in a half-heard programme: it is as bad as sitting in.a theatre straining one's ears at a mumbling, modern Hamlet. In large tracts of these islands the only use of the Third Programme is in arousing a great sympathy in us for those who are hard of hearing.
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