Should We Mourn the Third Programme?

Sse 1 think. The cuts, now they are here. are HOULD we mourn the Third Programme?

Not ;

not nearly so bad as at first seemed likely, For this we must thank the vigorous protest movement which has developed in the past few months.

No doubt more people would have Joined it. if the Third had not in the past gone out of its way to antagonize so many different kinds of listeners.

Tt has antagonized lowbrows by its snooty tone, and highbrows by offering, as ‘poetry. the work of Mr.

James Kirkup. It has maddened many who were humbly and honestly trying to educate themselves. by interlarding English Programmes with long passages of :

French. (The pretence that they understand French is among the most tiresome affectations of our haifeducated bourgeoisie.)

One of the highest brows I know, who set out to listen reverently to a play translated from the Peruvian, exclaimed half-way through: ‘No, no! This must have been commissioned by the Daily Express, in order to discredit the Third Programme.’

WORLD'S GREAT MASTERPIECES. Yet the Third has done a job which no other wavelength has attempted, ‘ and which TV is still afraid to tackle. It has relayed the world’s great Masterpieces at their proper length, unhindered by news bulletins and fixed time-tables.

And this (thanks to the protests) will continue. Last Friday all cuts were in abeyance. and Wagner's Gétterdammerung came from Covent Garden from, 5.45 to 11.10, with two short intervals.

Last week, too, we had Maxim Gorky's play “Yegor Bulichov’. And the dreaded ‘Network Three’ which enThe half-hour on ‘Parents and Children’, for example, was obviously needed: the BBC has for too long insulted fathers, and mothers who 80 out to work. by confining all such talks to the afternoon ‘Woman's Hour’.

ATTACKS ON CULTURE. But this is not the end of the cuts, or the end of attacks on culture. The BBC is: always making timid concessions to the Daily Express mentality.

How many times. on TV. has it presented a Shakespeare play. with a little talk beforehand to tell us it Snr rrr “~ PPDLLS LL LLL SL ALIS LPP ILL PLL PLP DDL PL LLL Printed by Plough Press, Ltd., r.o. 180, Clapham High St., London, S.W 4 won't really hurt—and then ruined the whole evening by stupid, barbarous cuts?

The friends of culture will need to shout as loudly for il as the Express shouts against it, if we are to keep the Third Programme. But then, the Third had better make some friends. Not by lowering its standards, but rather by raising them, by making itself more truly and completely human.

What the Third lacks can be felt by contrasting almost any of its items with the recent Home Service programme, ‘The Winter of the Bombs’.

VOICES OF LONDONERS. This consisted mainly of the voices of Londoners who had lived through the big blitz. There was the man in charge of the mortuary.

who helped people to identify their relatives.

‘T said to her: “Was your mother a woman that did a lot of sewing?” She said: “Yes. that’s right; she had a lot of marks, from the needle. on her right thumb.”

“That's her. then,” 1 said. 1 didn’t upset her by showing her the thumb. Because, you see, the thumb was all 1 did have.

Same colour... pened. A man came up and kicked him. very hard. on the seat. Somebody who had lost people in the raids, T suppose.’

There was the yoice of a mother, deliberately quiet, describing how she had searched the hospitals for days. and had at last been persuaded to look for her child among the dead. .‘Her hair was all burred away. And her face was marked. where she'd put her little hands up, to keep away the flames.’

THE FRIENDS IT NEEDS. This is not art: it is what art is all about. The artist is the man who tells us how it is that we can do these things to one another; and how we can learn to stop doing them.

He cannot do his job at all if he is snooty. or Superior, or if he talks a language different from our own.

The Third seems to recognize this. when it broadcasts the works of Gorky. But unless it can encourage the growth of new. British. Maxim Gorkys, it will never find the friends it needs to save its life.

LIL L LL IS LD LD PL Published ny Peter Freer, 180) Clapham High Se. Londen, SW ¢