ON THE AIR AFTER every announcer, variety artist, band leader
and crooner had offered us the season's greetings in exactly the same phrases we were quite sure that it was Christmas Day at Broadcasting House. Perhaps the only greeting of the day which was not lost in this buzz of benevolence was the simple and touching offering of the Hamburg parish priest in the programme "Home Again." .His few poignant words could remind us that the festivity was a small oasis of rest in the vast devastated areas of work to be done.
• Boxing Day heard the greetings beginning to fade a little, and there were two examples of those genres of radio plays which, though "new," one seemed to have heard only too often. "Do you believe in fairies ? " was a clumsy fantasy in which the future is seen through the agency of a magic drink, and certain homely truths are brought back to roost once again. It suggested, in effect, that the rich have their difficulties, and that film-stars have very artificial lives. "Feathers in the Wind," by Mabel Constanduros, was a mediocre account of the January and May theme, treated here in such a way as to suggest that even its author did not feel very interesIrd. Later in the week another play on the Home Service, "Deviation South," by G. T. ,Thomas, was an addition to the seemingly interminable series of plays which owe their existence to "Outward Bound." In it those favourite "representative types" are crash-landed with a great show of technical flying knowledge on to a volcanic island. There they find "The Master" and other mysterious and knowledge- able characters, and there is considerable discussion—very suggestive both in technique and matter of A.B.C.A.—in which representative problems are settled frankly. Now though all three plays stated with disarming sincerity their authors' interest in various problems, they did very little else. With a gesture of the profound they raised issues, arranged them in various more or less popular designs and left them with a mysterious finger to the lips. They tried to combine instruc- tion with entertainment and failed to be very successful.
* *- * Miss Jennifer Wayne, on the other hand, is clever and unpretentious in doing just what the radio playwrights mentioned above find im- possible. Her new "This is the Law" series instructs very suc- cessfully, and entertains with more zest than many comedy pro- grammes. Miss Wayne's grip on that elusive radio technique, of which so much is said and of which so little is heard, is a firm and definite one. She has discovered a method of making the dry as dust fascinating and human, and 'her programmes have an even excellence, and, I fancy, a general success.
* 6 * * Two dramatisations of documentary accounts of war experience, David Jones's "In Parenthesis" and Ann-Marie Walters's "Moon- drop to Gascony," offered an interesting comparison and contrast. Mr. Jones is a literary craftesman, and was able to communicate in his book a powerful sense of the concrete experience of the 1504-18 trenches. But his attempt to present flat experience on levels other than the purely emotional-descriptive only resulted in a garbled, often confused statement. At best he was able to give us the sort of impersonal view which. those silent films of the battlefields offer ; at the worst a muddle of reminiscences and heroic styles. Miss Walters's story was a very fresh, well-told adventure which did not attempt to communicate on anything but a narrative level. Because of that it was more satisfying than "In Parenthesis," although perhaps one was inclined to give Miss Walters too many marks simply because she does not suffer from French philosophical 'flu, and because she does not drip with sentimentality over " le maquis " and "la Resistance." * * * * Mr. Dylan Thomas's talk' on Friday night did not surprise his admirers or myself. His spoken pyrotechnics were no better and no worse than his written displays, so that his talk seemed almost a self-conscious gesture of enlightenment by the Home Service towards the Third Programme. The air was a little uncomfortable afterwards, still a little warm, and one had a sense of Mr. Thomas, brow wet, sinking back satisfied with this poetic raid on a larger public than usual. From comments I have heard it seems that many wireless
sets were not allowed to grow white-hot. WOLF MANKOWITZ. [This feature consists of the best contributed review of the radio programme (not the Third programme only) of the .past week. Entries for next week's column must reach THE SPECTATOR office not later than the 'first post on Tuesday, January 7th. Length approximately 700 words. Envelopes must be marked "Radio."]
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