Radio Vaudeville stands pretty much where it stood six years
ago ; and the recent efforts to brighten things up by following the craze for non-stop entertainment are not much of an improvement. I think Mr. Filson Young gets more or less at the root of the matter when he suggests that it is wrong to produce radio-vaudeville shows in front of an audience. It can only irritate listeners to hear laughter when (so far as they can tell, having only their ears to guide them) there is nothing to laugh at. Last week, in a vaude- ville programme on the National wavelength, Mr. Harold Scott's parody of " Sonny Boy " was drowned in (to me) unwarranted laughter. I do not doubt it was all very funny to watch ; but unfortunately it was not a television turn. But there is another and even more fundamental cause for the failure of radio vaudeville. The number of comedians who can get their humour " across," when they are deprived of gesture and have only the spoken word to rely on, is inevitably small. Most stage-variety jokes are too thin to bear the disembodiment that radio demands. Nothing short of a new kind of humour will succeed. If any department of broadcasting needs a special training school, it is vaudeville.
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