Shaking Down

To entertain people, to bring the truth home to them, and to sell them consumers' goods are three functions of U.S. radio that are properly kept distinct. At its worst, radio confuses these functions in an appalling manner; at its best, it performs each with remarkable brilliance. The war taxed radiomen with a bigger job of straight communication than they ever had before. It evoked some inspired work, but it also made new incongruities, new confusions and waste effort inevitable. Last week signs were at hand that the situation was shaking down.

Order. This week the U.S. radio business as a whole gratefully adopted a plan of orderly procedure in its wartime duties. The result of long study by the Office of Facts & Figures (TIME, Feb. 23) and by network and station authorities, the plan was simplicity itself.

Each nighttime program on the networks will henceforth give a generous part of its time for a Government announcement once every four weeks (e.g., OPA's Leon Henderson spoke for 15 minutes on last week's Bing Crosby program). Each daytime serial program will carry an announcement once every two weeks. Local stations will get fortnightly "priority sheets" to tell them which items of appeal or information are important, which can be dispensed with.

Said OFF: "Certainly OFF does not aim to interfere with radio in its great function of providing entertainment to the public. On the contrary, it hopes by careful planning to prevent the kind of irritation that grows out of appeals and messages of great quantity and little quality."

Quality of a kind that might have been looked for in vain four months ago has begun to appear in U.S. radio. It has come perhaps spontaneously, out of the great tingling of the challenged country, or from the sweat of men who never before had such compelling reason to demand excellence of their work. Its mark is a superior honesty.

An example was last Saturday's This Is War!--eleventh in the all-network series--with its marvelous, absorbedly humming child, "Jimmy Smith," and his scolding, pleasant mother, not at all the Mother Figure faked ad nauseam in U.S. mass art of all kinds. Last Friday's MARCH OF TIME, too, was in part purely documentary, using its skilled soundmen in a sketch of infantry officers learning enemy sounds at night, and bringing in the solid voice of Brigadier General Leven Cooper Allen from Fort Benning to inform everybody that in the U.S. Army one order all officers learn is "Follow me."

The Sunday afternoon Army Hour (TIME, April 13) by last week had won over even inveterate showmen to whom its soldier voices at first seemed flat. The Radio City slickness, though perceptible from time to time, scarcely counted in a show whose most sustained and exciting passage literally followed the line of flight of the bomber ferry, from the U.S. to Montreal to Newfoundland to England, with the voices of pilots crisp and fresh in the Canadian afternoon, weary and dull on the night landing field across the Atlantic.

Comity. Radio, as a kind of vastly superior long distance telephone, on which everybody can listen in, is beginning to link up all the United Nations.

CBS's People's Platform, a dinner party at which a concealed mike comes alive in the midst of table talk, used to be regarded by its mildly ruminative Moderator, Lyman Bryson, as an experiment in keeping the art of conversation going in the U.S. An unrehearsed program, it went off the air soon after Pearl Harbor, came back in March, last week went for the first time to London for a panel of lively British conversationalists. As a rare concession, the British censor allowed off-the-cuff chatter (about British life, work and sentiments) to be broadcast abroad.

From the other side of the world, where Australia and New Zealand celebrated Anzac Day (anniversary of Gallipoli), Mutual continued to bring the programs of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., on one of which last March Mutual's galvanized listeners heard General MacArthur's somber, devoted little speech on his arrival in Melbourne station. Last week's prize from Australia was a song, The Aussies and the Yanks Are Here, written by Private Johnny Nauer on a troopship en route. It wasn't a bad song at all.

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