ANNOUNCERS ON B.B. C.

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 26944, 21 January 1953, Page 7

ANNOUNCERS ON B.B. C.

Author’s Criticism Of Voices

LONDON, January 19. The author, Sir Compton Mackenzie, writing in the “8.8. C. Quarterly,” states that it is time that what he calls the “nancified” voices of sneakers on the 8.8.C.’s third programme disappeared. although he adds that the third programme “even at its worst” is preferable to the “pseudo-comic nalfhours” of other programmes. Praising the service which the third programme has rendered to literature, poetry, drama, and music, he adds: “It is better to listen every evening to the most excruciating preciosity in that ghastly voice too often affected by young intellectuals than to be condemned to the cheap wisecracks of those pseudo-comic half-hours in the home and light programmes, heavy as concrete, reinforced by the mechanical giggling of an ersatz audience. “We may speculate that with the advance of television those pseudocomic half-hours will become redundant in sound broadcasting, because it is impossible to believe they will be able to compete with the visual presentation they obviously require. Sir Compton Mackenzie suggests a “sharper discrimination” in the selection of voices for the third programme. He states: “Owing to the haphazard use of radio by so many people, it often happens tnat they get the third programme by accident, and when they hear an inadequate voice talking about a book or a writer they immediately conclude that all ‘highbrows’ talk in that Tiancified’ way and, switching the knob to a pseudo-comic half-hour, thank God that the ‘highbrows’ live in a world remote from themselves.

“Not that the third programme has a monopoly of inadequate voices. I have heard critics on Sunday morning sound like four hens pecking at a banana skin flung into their enclosure, and I have heard world renowned figures present themselves over the air as awkwardly as schoolgirls at a prize-giving.”