Art of curling the lip on radio

Press, 11 February 1981, Page 17

Art of curling the lip on radio

F Radio Heath Lees t j

The radio-magazine programme beats your average magazine by virtue of the more personal dimension that the voice brings. Enjoyment, enthusiasm, irony and dislike can all be conveyed by inflection, whereas the author of a written piece has constantly to make himself clearer and more objective to avoid being misinterpreted. By the same token, a good piece spoken on radio can make a great impact on listeners, yet when read in print, can seem flaccid, even uninteresting. “Sunday Supplement” which takes place at the positively indecent time of 9.10 on a Sunday morning (YA) covers a wide variety of subjects and relies on a smally. army of contributors. Some of them write out their scripts well in advance with lots of occasions for “does not” and “is not” instead of doesn’t and isn’t and then come to the studio only to be transfixed in the deadly ray of the monotone — seeming, in the midst of all this deathless prose, to be as approachable as a nervous headmaster plagued with flatulence at Speech Day. . Others arenatural to the medium. The voice commands attention because of its warmth of projection. You can tell how the speaker feels about what’s being said. The words

themselves never get in the way; instant, apparently spontaneous communication is taking place. The 1981 series of “Sunday Supplement” is only two weeks old, and already the distinction between the haves and the have-nots is clear. The real radio piece in the first programme was by Rufus Wallingford, who had been to Nambassa and gave us an easy, personal response to do with what he saw there and how he felt. In the light of newspaper reports which saw fit to cover the occasion under the headings of sex, drugs and injury, this was a refreshing change. (According to the papers there was no sex; threes people had drugs; and a man was treated for swallowing the ring-pull opener from a soft-drink can.) Rufus, a self-confessed, moneymaking father of two, was impressed, sometimes clearly affected by the spirit that obtained in the world of music, sharing and making do. If not wholly converted to health foods, radical ideas, global concern arid self-sufficien-cy, nonetheless, he thought the atmosphere was all what Christmas should be, but isn’t any more. This striving towards a kind of secular Christianity recurs often in “Sunday Supplement.” BrianEaston, representing the new priesthood of econo-

mists was weighing in, on the same programme, against pollution and our lack of social concern, while Judy Finn outlined the price of not living in sin — that is, getting married. Best of all was Ron Walton, of Christchurch, who, in last Sunday’s programme had all the righteous indignation of the Old Testament prophets in a marvellous piece which centred on the government’s recently-trumpeted S7m to “save” the kokako. Within a few sentences he had presented a hair-rais-ing statistical picture of governments everywhere, pillaging the environment and destroying whole ecosystems in their pursuit of the electoral dollar. “What about reverence for life?’ he asked. “What about quality of life? What about human survival?” And then he did what you just can’t do in print. He curled his lip. “Seven million dollars, indeed” he said, witheringly. It was a splendid performance.