PUBLIC WIRELESS LOVER

Evening Star, Issue 22004, 13 April 1935, Page 4

PUBLIC WIRELESS LOVER

PRETTY COMPLIMENTS WITH AH OBJECT American programmes, it is well known, are commercial in tjio sense that wireless is in private hands and that business linns may advertise (says a writer in the London ‘ Times ’). The desire to please the buying public is extreme; and so it happens that, among other amenities, a public lover is now provided, who pours out the very height and ecstacy of love, not in a general declamatory way, but intimately and softly, so that each listener may easily imagine it is meant for her alone. The deep need for admiration and affection is thus, in part at any rate, allayed, and women with stolid and boorish husbands, or with none, are nevertheless able at the “ love hour to hear the prettiest compliments and the most charming speeches. The feature is accordingly 'popular, and is the sort of thing that the makers of scent and cosmetics find particularly apt for their purposes, better even than a concert of soft chamber music, when they want to provide a programme which will leave sweet associations behind it. A new career, that of the wireless lover, has I bus been opened to young men whose fluency and warmth might land them in only too many breach of promise actions in real life. The privacy of the home, in which most listening is done, takes away from tho effectiveness of many wireless programmes, but it adds to the power of this one, and may have awkward results for American men, whose short-comings are already freely criticised. Tho shy and tongue-tied youth meditating his proposal, will have horrible qualms lest his performance shall look too crude and flat by the side of the skilled rhapsodies which have just been switched off because he has called with his flowers. Men have always had an answer when reproached with the obvious fact that the heroes in novels arc more eloquent lovers and more finished proposers than the men who actually marry women can claim to be. Novels and their characters, it is said in reply, arc deliberate illusion. That, alas, cannot be said about wireless announcers whose practised, soft, seductive tones actually fill the room from which they would themselves be firmly removed, but no one wants a diet of sugar, and happiness could yet bo further increased if, in addition to romantic lovers, other possibilities made themselves beard at the microphone. Women might be less critical, even in tho United States, of their actual partners if leal boors come grumbling and grousing through the microphone for half an hour at the end of tho day, cursing an absence of slippers and pipe in a style so alarming and unpleasant that the mild remarks of real husbands would lose all their power to exasperate.