Alexandra Palace
In television, London Town continues to explore the metropolis, using film sequences with studio annotation. It is excellently de- signed and carried out with a smooth vivacity. The new series, Family Affair, is supposed to relate the doings of a typical suburban family, and is a highly synthetic hotch-potch ; its author, the enter- taining Mr. Eric Maschwitz, made the error of introducing it in a manner so sympathetic, so sidling and yet so sinister, as to strike a chill into the heart of the beholder. But bless, as ever, Children's Hour and Miss Annette Mills and Muffin and the rest, now the tutelary deities of my nursery.
Of Third Programme variations recently, I waited with some interest for Mr. H. S. Goodhart-Rendel's Edwardian Musical Comedy, which turned out to be uncommonly like breaking a butterfly on a wheel, and taking forty-five minutes to do it. Surely this was the wrong approach ? You could try either to fit these Edwardian diversions firmly into the Edwardian scene—how the sprightly and incomparable Max would have done it you could pull out all the musical stops. A faintly earnest dissertation, plus some chaste piano renderings of musical comedy airs, seemed to me to get neither the sociology nor the frou-frou. It was the disregard for the sheer natural appeal of the subject that was, perhaps, the initial mistake. Commended: the new series from Arnold Bennett's The Card, for which Mr. Wilfred Pickles is the inevitable choice. I like to think that Bennett dreamed first of radio and then of Mr. Pickles ; and then, all prophetic and all unknowing, wrote The Card. LIONEL HALE.
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