A Spectator's Notebook
THERE being an open road through the air for wireless transmitters, advertisements can get free access to our homes (if we let them) through our receiving-sets, despite the B.B.C.'s very proper refusal to be used as a medium for advertising. Last Sunday, for example, anyone who happened to tune in casually to Radio Normandie could listen to an hour's entertainment pro- vided, on the American model, by a London weekly paper, which had evidently sub-let a part of its hour as a matter of business, so that the organ recital was interspersed with descriptions of the virtues of some houses being erected by a Bognor builder, of the products of a London clothing company, of a patent bread made in Willesden, and other necessary constituents of the full and free life. But a curious consequence of the practice of advertising through foreign Stations has cropped up. The Sunday Referee has been renting an hour on Sunday afternoons from Radio-Paris, primarily no doubt as advertisement for itself, but also to provide extra publicity for some of its advertisers, and by so doing has incurred the wrath of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association, which last week expelled it from membership. The N.P.A.'s view, I gather, is that this kind of development must be checked, because it diverts to the radio money that would other- wise be spent on newspaper advertising, and the money goes into foreign rather than British pockets. The Referee, however, means to fight, but it will inevitably suffer from the withdrawal of the co-operative facilities which N.P.A. members enjoy in the matter of transport and distribution of their papers.
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