COMING TALKS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 75, 30 March 1939, Page 26

COMING TALKS

INTERVIEW WITH BETTY

BALFOUR

Farmers' wives are to have an opportunity of contrasting their own conditions with life on the Canadian prairie, where the seasons are so much more denned, and the winters so much harder. A Canadian visitor, Mrs. Gladys Strum, has . made a series of recordings for the N.B.S. about life on the prairies, seasonal work and recreations, and general organisation of society.. These are being broadcast in the women's sessions on Thursday mornings from 4YA.

When you go into a tobacconist's and ask for some simple thing such as a box of matches, are you clear in your own mind exactly what you want? The confusion of mind of some of the public in a little thing like this will be described in the second of the "Just a Job of Work" series at 2YA this evening. The subject will be the work of a tobacconist's assistant at her counter. There will be a lively description of various types of customers; those who know what they want, and those who don't.

Miss Betty Balfour, the English stage and screen star, was interviewed by the N.B.S. when she visited Wellington recently, and the interview will be heard tomorrow evening at 3YA. Miss Balfour will talk about the trend in the English screen industry, personalities of the screen, and the effect of the cinema on social life, and will correct some fallacies about temperament.

One of the curiosities of English life is the freedom with which views of all kinds can be expressed on the open-air rostrums of Hyde Park. This corner always gathers a crowd, and the spectacle of a policeman standing by to keep order while all kinds of opinions are voiced always impresses the visitor. Dr. A. H. McLintock, who recently returned from England, where he studied London life, is to give a talk at 2YA on Tuesday next entitled "The Safety Valve of Hyde Park." Dr. McLintock will also be heard at 2YA tomorrow evening on another phase of metropolitan life, "London Beggars and Their Ways."

Professor Arnold Wall, whose popular, expositions of words and their meanings and pronunciations are so well known in New Zealand, has made another series of talks for the N.B.S. entitled "Life and Language." It will have struck most of us that numbers of words have been introduced ijito the language during the last generation, especially as a result of the war, so that a man of 25 or 30 years ago suddenly transplanted into the society of today would find it difficult to understand what was said. Professor Wall will begin his series by examining some of these changes, and will then go back and show that right through the history of English, similar changes have been at work as a result of foreign conquest, commerce, and other forces. The first of this series will be heard from 4YA next Wednesday evening.