Nothing Cosmic Hence the refreshment in Slices of Life. The
wife of a Rhondda Valley collier tells us, in ten easy minutes, how she came to be local correspondent for a Welsh newspaper, and how she goes round her job with her baby on her arm. A middle-aged man gives us a picture of his recent stay in a hospital. A young man remembers, with pleasing horror, how in the Army he was once obliged to fight the heavy-weight champion of Jamaica. No cataclysms here, no catastrophes, nothing cosmic: the very mild ups and the not-too- serious downs of life, recounted in those suitably switch-back Welsh voices. (Would it not, though, be a good idea for the Welsh pro- gramme to avoid announcers with standard English B.B.C. voices ? After the lilt of South Wales, the clipped speech of South Kensington comes as a shock.) No very great art goes into Slices of Life, either in the script or the reading of it. But it does remind you that, for the great majority of mankind, life is not the sound and the fury that radio and newsprint would lead a Martian visitor to believe.
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