AMERICANISATION

Greymouth Evening Star, 6 February 1936, Page 5

AMERICANISATION

A SAD EXPERIENCE. If I had any doubts about our conquest by America, the recent auditions I have been holding at the Ambassadors Theatre would tend to dispel them, (writes Sydney W. Carroll, in the London “Daily Telegraph”). With the co-operation of Press, invitations were issued by me to children between the ages of 12 and 16 to come to the theatre and display their juvenile talents, with the object of organising a child’s own variety entertainment.

After listening to and observing turns of some 300 children varying in age from seven to seventeen, I discovered, to my consternation, that at least 80 per cent. of . them, though born in England, were definitely iankee in character. They, either spoke through their noses, crooned the same American songs with damnable reiteration or tap-danced to American tunes.

They all walked a.s the niggers walk on Broadway. They aped the precocity, self-assurance and squeaky voices made familiar to us by Hollywood's crack film juveniles. Fifty per cent, of them favoured me with imitations of Greta Garbo, Mae West, i.iarlene Dietrich, Jean .Crawford and other Californian celluloid queens. Littlp tots of 10 had no difficulty accurately in simulating drunkenness or waggling their hips in Hawaiian fashion. Only two out of the lot ventured to sing an honest English song; two more experimented with a merry British dance, and my last line of British defence was.a troupe of Scottish girl dancers hailing from Dagenham and making more noise than all the rest put together.

Now all this seems to me to show a red light to the educational authorities. The cinema, by viritue of its cheapness, its comfort, its accessibility, its numerical strength, is reaching into the homes of England and capturing the children of England, and because of the preponderant influence of American pictures is gradually subjugating our children and subduing our race.

It behoves every parent who values his inheritance of Jtmglish culture to ask whether this country can afford to ignore the influence of the living English theatre in counteracting this dreadful tendency to convert sound into noise and disregard clearness and beauty of English speech for a hideous cacophony reminiscent of the madhouse and crazy delirium of movement akin to a corroboree.

We gain many things from our close cinematic, gramophonic and 8.8. C. contacts with America. We derive vitality, a love of speed, a snappiness and a sparkle all too often absent from our British equipment but we must not allow ourselves by a liking for and appreciation of these things to be denationalised and to become a mere annexe of the great American nation. Our purveyors of entertainment have a bigger respom sibility in this than they appear to be aware of.

Not content with bringing over American star artists to this country, they often bring over American plays and compel English artists to give bad and feeble imitations of American accents and bad manner. I am forced to the conclusion that I cannot by reason of the shortage of English material compose a juvenile variety programme on exclusively English lines and play it in a distinctively English way. T am waiting to see what the pantomimes, will produce in respect of English fare, how many real and original English songs will be sung and how many performers will avoid the temptations of their American conquerors.