EMPIRE BROADCASTS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 74, 9 March 1933, Page 11

EMPIRE BROADCASTS

Mr. C. G. Graves, the Empire service director of the British Broadcasting Company, was asked in London on January 1, about the New Year plans of the Empire service, and the marvels yet to come.

"At the present moment,” he said, "apart from the Christmas Day programme, which was a very special event, the programmes wo are broadcasting to the Empire are very simple ones indeed. What we have to do before we embark on anything really ambitious is to satisfy ourselves that the conditions of communication and reception are entirely satisfactory. "The first problem, in other words, is to reach stability on the technical side, and therefore so far as the programmes are concerned, I, in my work, am subordinating myself to a considerable extent to whgt our chief engineer wants done.

"It may be that in Australia, for example, speech is well received, and the smaller musical combinations come over clearly, but that symphony concerts and the larger orchestras are not so well adapted to reception. We do not know yet, and we cannot tell until we receive reports from tho other end.

‘ 1 Our aim is to build up a service of programmes to meet the requirements of listeners throughout the Empire; but to do this we must know not only what tho Empire' wants but what it can receive. It will be a little time before we are able to collate tho necessary information from all parts of tho Empire. "Wo believe wo shall find that people in all parts of tho Empire want to bo brought into touch with tho actualities of life in this country, such as tho Derby, the Boat Race, tho Changing of the Guard at Bucking ham Palace, the sound of Big Ben, and so on, and that is the type of service with which wo hope we may be able to provide them.”