ON THE AIR
No regular listener to B.B.C. programmes can have failed to notice the paucity of original features and plays. There is, it seems, a serious shortage of script-writers—or, at any rate, of writers willing to concern themselves with the broadcasting medium. In an article headed Scripts Want'edi in the recently-published B.B.C. Year Book for 1947 (an excellent half-crown's worth, by the way), Mr. Louis MacNeice goes so far as to say that "unless it can get scripts from outside its own staff, the Third Programme may run dry in features and probably in drama." "This," he adds, rather inadequately, "would be a great pity." It would, in fact, be a tragedy for listeners and a sad reflection upon the present generation of writers. Mr. MacNeice attributes the unwillingness of authors to write for radio to two factors : ignorance and snobbery. He might have added a third: the attitude which the B.B.C. has too often taken towards outside writers in the past. There has unquestionably been a certain amount of cliquism and exclusiveness on the programme side of the organisation. But Mr. MacNeice makes it clear that henceforward outside writers with something to say will be welcomed with open arms. "The B.B.C. is offering more scope—and more money." One hopes that his cri du coeur will meet with an adequate response.
"A man's reach should exceed his grasp," said Browning, which may be a good principle for the conduct of life but hardly leads to the production of successful works of art. Conception certainly out- runs execution in Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen's enormous double drama on the rise and fall of Julian the Apostate, which was the sub- ject of an International Drama feature in the Third Programme last week. Ibsen was living in Germany when he wrote it, and was obviously under the influence of the characteristic German en- thusiasm for the kolossal, with its concomitant weaknesses of incoher- ence, empty rhetoric and lack of dramatic conviction. The task of telescoping the ten acts of Ibsen's "splendid failure" into an hour of programme-time was skilfully done, with the help of an admirable commentary written by J. C. Trewin ; and on the whole we were given a very fair conspectus of this huge and inchoate work. There were moments of genuine impressiveness, but much of the dialogue is, of course, nothing but loud-mouthed bombast—a complete anti- thesis to the spare, pregnant style of Ibsen's later masterpieces. Allan McClelland, Ernest Milton and the rest of an accomplished com- pany battled nobly against overwhelming odds, but they could not persuade us that it was anything but unnatural and unconvincing. Nevertheless, we owe to. Mary Hope Allen, the producer, and her collaborators one of the most interesting programmes of the week.
* * * * Radio would seem to offer exceptional opportunities for burlesque and parody, but we hear little in this genre and very little indeed that displays any evidence of real wit and artistry. Take, for instance, Grand Uproar, a skit on Wagnerian opera which was performed in the Home Service Iasi week. It was sadly heavy-handed. The libretto, by Henrik Ege, had its points, but they were mostly rather blunt. The "running commentary," spoken by Kenneth Horne, was crude and unsubtle, employing the bludgeon rather than the rapier. But the weakest part of the whole affair, to my mind, was the musical score by Frederick Curzon. It does not seem to me either funny or clever to take snippets of well-known tunes from Wagner's operas, to dress than up a little differently and to set them to sup- posedly humorous doggerel. For one thing, it is a great deal too easy. It is the sort of thing that third-rate entertainers at the piano do when they announce that they will play Pop Goes the Weasel in the style of Raclunaninov, and then proceed to combine it with the best-known bits of the Prelude in C sharp minor—a proceeding just about as effective as dressing up a congenital idiot in the robes of a Doctor of Divinity and then announcing that he has thereby become a paragon of learning. The essence of parody is to assimilate the style of the original and to apply it to incongruous material ; nothing of the sort was attempted here. The best thing about it was Horace Percival's performance as a Wagnerian tenor of .markedly inadequate
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