Bearable unsilence

Press, 11 August 1980, Page 15

Bearable unsilence

Radio

Heath Lees

If happiness is a warm puppy in your arms, then faith perhaps resides' in ignoring the funny sinking feeling in your stomach. There are times on the air when that funny sinking feeling is all but physically projected. The locus classicus is of course at the end of the news when the reader says, ‘And now we say good evening to the weatherman (deep breath). . . good evening?. . .” Kierkegaard would have called that the leap of faith; when you cast off into deep space and hope there’s someone there.

The trouble is, you really can’t win. On -the one hand the weather man is often not there, nobody knows why. My own theory is that he’s gone outside to see if the rain’s stopped. Anyway, the silence becomes unbearable, and the announcer usually has recourse to music which, unless it’s actually “Raindrops keep Falling on My Head” or “Stormy Weather,” is less than relevant. Then again, the weatherman may actually be therej and come in on cue, but the reading is so poor and the voice so thin and nasal that the changeover — to put it kindly — is anti-climatic. No doubt the weathermen are chosen less for their vocal expertise than for their meteorological skill. Still, I resent being told that tomorrow is going to be fine and warm in a voice that is flat and toneless, obviously subject to its own vagaries of change, depression, and wind. The opposite obtains at end of 3ZB’s programming. There we have

soft, . romantic music vaguely reminiscent of Eddie Calvert, the Man with the Golden Trumpet, and a smooth, mellifluous voice-over which carves the country into little sections, bids each goodnight, and then continues in silky fashion to breathe warnings of famine, flood, and probably even pestilence.

On balance I think I prefer the musical, soft approach; it appeals to my sense of cowardice. I wonder if we shouldn’t also have the news read to a background of soothing music. Perhaps the horror of what is being said would have less impact. Perhaps some of the world of news and the world of song could be merged, as in "The inflation rate is 21 — the best things in life are free.” The newsreaders, unlike the weathermen, already have a humanising influence working for them. What used to be the news, objective and global, seems to be cut down to size when it’s read by Trev McKinlay, of Taihape. Personality is all, too. Radio Avon’s news theme with its. hectic, Telstarlike quality is matched only by the breathless style of the readers, who often go so fast you get the feeling they’re going to anticipate the news or

else drop dead, thus creating it. Even the Community News begins to need some softening these days. They’ll have to devise a way to stop people throwing their radios against a wall during an M.E.D. plea to turn off an appliance, especially if they’re the people who are still paying up the cost of the enforced conversion from gas. If the announcer tells you to switch something off until he advises that the peak load has pasesd, and if you switch off the radio you’ll be like Moses when the light went out. As for the rest of the information relays, ski reports, recipes, school heating, disasters, there seems little one can do — they’re neither good news nor bad news, but more the throwaway things, the newsroom’s toffee papers. Yet even the time check can have its own special interest, particularly when he soothes you in the early morning and then discovers he got it wrong. “The time is 10. . . minutes. . . (lazy pause). .

. to. . . seven. . . I MEAN TEMINISTOATE.” One imagines hundreds of pairs of electrfied feet hitting the carpet. Victor Borge used to claim to visitors that he could tell the time by his piano. Faced with scorn he would walk over and play some loud Rachmaninoff, at which a banging on the wall next door would be accompanied by shouts of “Quiet. Don’t you know its half past one in the morning?” A system like that, and you don’t need community radio. Just community.