It is my good fortune that some 3o years have
elapsed since I last spent any length of time in bed, and during this period many new things which affect the well-being of the patient have been invented. Among these is wireless broadcasting. I feel grateful to the B.B.C. for the solace and distraction with which they provided me between 06.3o and 23.00 hours every day ; but I do not, somehow, feel as grateful as I should. One of the things which builds up sales- resistance in the round-the-clock (as opposed to the peak-hour) listener is the amount of advertising he has to put up with. It is not, needless to say, the strident, uninhibited commercial advertising that you get on the American radio ; it is the polite, the often almost deprecatory, drip-drip-drip of the Home Service and the Light Pro- gramme advertising their own wares. ". . . And that romantic signature-tune once more introduces half an hour's dance-music by Groppi Testudo and his Stinkpots! " cries a cultured voice with more or less of enthusiasm. Then Groppi himself comes to the microphone to say how glad he and the boys are to be back with us ; then we get the build-up for the first number he is going to play, then the identity of the vocalist (as he or she is lyrically called) is revealed, and finally the Stinkpots swing into action. Personally, I like the noise they make, and I do not particularly mind hearing the same tune played six times every day in a seven-day week, which
▪ I reckon is about the average incidence of (say) People Will Say We're in Love on the round-the-clock listener. But after a while this undercurrent of back-scratching and mild ballyhoo, this framework of mutual admiration in which a high proportion of the day's features are set, produces—in me, at any rate—a slight feeling of revulsion. Too often it takes what can only be described as an incestuous form— parodies by one well-known feature of another well-known feature, jokes by one B.B.C. personality about another B.B.C. personality, in the cosy but illiberal tradition of the School Magazine. But I suppose this sort of thing is difficult to avoid, and perhaps the majority of listeners would not like the B.B.C. to avoid it.
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