THE HITCH IN THE BROADCAST

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 117, 19 May 1945, Page 8

THE HITCH IN THE BROADCAST

By ROBIN ARROL, in the Empire News "THE hold-up in the 8.8.C.'s Nine o'clock News the other night, when a page got out of place, lacked the superb complexity of that other occasion, several years ago, when a news reader fresh to the job was Inadvertently handed a script on simple plumbing repairs instead of the nine o'clock bulletin.

The man was nervous and, after the usual introductory formula, plunged headlong through half a dozen sentences. He then discovered, to his intense annoyance, that he was talking drivel. "Don't Go Away" With the 8.8.C. horror of leaving millions of ears cocked with nothing to fill them, he groped blindly for the "Blue Danube" record, found that someone else was using it, and lost his head.

Shouting at the microphone, "Don't go away!" he bounced out of the studio, and as luck would have it, collided with an embittered choir which was on its way out after a vain attempt to get a broadcasting engagement. "This way, please," said the news reader, with sudden calm, and, deftly but courteously rammed the choir into the studio, waved towards the microphone, and whispering: "Anything you like," gave the nonplussed singers the air. Millions of news-avid listeners heard an outbreak of muttering, abruptly followed by a mass attack on John Peel, as loud as it was irrelevant. All over the land watches were consulted, chairs shifted back, and eyebrows raised. Meanwhile, 8.8.C. officials, now mobilised, were tearing up and down corridors and in and out of studios in search of the missing bulletin. As the hue and cry developed radio fans in distant lands had their programmes interrupted by sudden hoarse demands:

"I say! Is that our bulletin you are reading?" "Let's look at that script you've got!" "Have you, by any chance—?" After a quarter of an hour the thing was discovered in a remote little studio at the end of an almostforgotten corridor, where a purple little man was improvising from it a talk on English pastimes for the Arctic Circle.

Impregnable Choir By this time the choir had worked itself to a pitch of extravagant confidence. Oblivious of the passage of time, it was singing item after item from a repertoire mastered by the sweat and application of many years. Officials gathered at the door of the crowded studio, tapping their feet impatiently and pointing to the Nine o'Clock News, which was being waved by the now demented news reader.

People In ascending order of importance tried to break through. One of them, more resolute than the rest, managed to fetch the conductor a smack on the back before he was submerged by waves of sopranos; but the conductor took this for approbation and, with a goodnatured jiggle of the hand, hurled his forces afresh across Britain. Eventually an engineer, persuaded that all was not well, switched the studio off. The news reader was led away by his wife and mother (who had been summoned hastily), and, more than 25 minutes late, a reserve news reader began, with a crestfallen laugh, "Here, in spite of everything, is the Nine o'Clock News. . . ." The necessary reorganisation, however, had been overlooked. The man was immediately cut off, and the listeners, except those who were shouting into telephones, found themselves introduced to a garrulous man who claimed to be ah exponent of the trombone, and proceeded (for those who would let him) to prove it.