RADIO
1 WONDER occasionally how much of the B.B.C.'s sweetness is wasted on the desert air. At Christmas-time, for instance, how
many other claims there are on an ordinary man's attention, how many other sources of his delight ! I listen myself to the radio not only for pleasure, but vocationally as the radio columnist of the Spectator. Even so, I have to make stern rules, and mark the Radio Times programmes much as in the old days one used to pencil in dances in a dance programme. To enjoy radio one must make deliberate appointments with it. I freely confess that in the familiar and familial crowd of Christmas-time I failed to keep all my appointments.
Some of these appointments, of course, are irrefragable. What a power is radio ! In a few years it has made the King's broadcast on Christmas day, and the survey of the people and life of the Commonwealth, as much a part of the day's ceremony as, say. the Christmas tree itself. I don't suppose there is anything to say of the King's last broadcast except the commonplace—that now as before it was decent, and dignified, and full of the sense of a high occasion: an occasion that demands not only kingliness (which is comparatively easy) but kindliness (which is much harder to communicate). I hope that I may be allowed to add this. Hardened broadcasters might well quail before the sense of such an occasion and the thought of the listening millions. To conquer a defect in speech into the bargain, as His Majesty has conquered it down these years, is something to inspire anyone who has ever imagined what it is like to find himself opposite a microphone, that ear of the world.
In lesser things, much fun last Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Mr. Richard Murdoch brought back Much-binding-in-the-Marsh for one special performance on Christmas Day, and proved again (if proof, as we say, were needed) that it is the best of all the variety programmes. (Take it from Here is surely much improved, but it still seems to me a little mechanical.) I don't wish Mr. Murdoch's stage pantomime any harm ; but the sooner it ends and releases Mr. Murdoch for his weekly re-visitation of Much Binding. the better this listener will be pleased. In general, I thought that these B.B.C. party festivities during the holiday had an engagingly spontaneous expertise, notably with the self-mocking Pantomania and with The Night of the Twenty-Seventh, in which Mr. Edward J. Mason assembled a highly heterogeneous crew of B.B.C. fictional characters, from Dick Barton the Dashing to Mrs. Dale the Domestic.
Television got through a crowded programme that must have left the Alexandra Palace mast tottering with fatigue. Toad of Toad Hall, I felt, was too huiriedly produced for success ; but Mr. Jack Hulbert's shoe-string pantomime Dick Whittington. after a bad start, suddenly swept into life. It took those short cuts to its effects that television was made for, and Mr. Hulbert's own severely controlled comedy was very fetching. Café Continental continues to be good cabaret ; and on Tuesday night it had the fortuitously added excite- ment of a spectacular faint by a young solo danseuse. It recalled to me the occasion (I don't know why there aren't more of these in the crowded bustle of the television studios) when the Prince of Morocco measured his length at the foot of Portia, Miss Margaretta Scott. Regarding his immobile form, Miss Scott raised an imperious hand. " Ho, there ! " she observed. " Look to the Prince I " and proceeded, as he was borne away, to speak both parts—cues and all—like that other good performer, Bottom. For the serious talks I was not too happy about Miss Muriel St. Clair Byrne's survey of modern Shakespearean production in the Third Programme series, Shakespeare and His World. There were far too many lacunae to make it at all a comprehensive survey. Miss Byrne rode some kind of hobby horse (William Pod, frqnt legs ; Granville Barker, hind legs) on the purity of texts, which was all very just in its way. But as an assessment of the work of Mr. Gielgud, or the extravagances of Mr. Komisarjevsky, or the actor-management of Mr. Won't, it was an inadequate risumi.
LIONEL HALE.
Previous page
