Southern Exposure

South African radio, currently consisting of eleven English-language stations and eleven Afrikaans, is state-owned, but some time next fall it will start broadcasting commercials. The purpose: 1) to give business a hand with a new advertising medium; 2) to get more money for better radio programs. To help decide how to go commercial--and how commercial to go--the Government sent a brainy, 31-year-old actress, Hermien Dommisse, to study U.S. radio. Last week, after three months of the job, she had some conclusions :

"American radio clearly offers its listeners more than any other radio in the world. No other system is comparable in number of transmissions or variety of programs, and only BBC broadcasts can often bear comparison for quality.

"Yet with all that, your radio seems to me an amazing tissue of unkept promises and bad mistakes. One of the worst . . . is that there are not enough able radio writers, actors or directors to fill the least part of your colossal number of broadcasting hours. And you make almost no effort to cultivate them. . . .

"Of course, there are such recognized horrors as soap operas and trite commercials. And singing commercials! Really, it hasn't been proved to me that anybody listens to them. But the most conspicuous lack in your broadcasting isn't appreciated here at all. You all seem to console yourselves that, with all its faults, American radio is far ahead of anybody else in broadcasting techniques. That's absurd. . . .

"Just take one example. Your radio has only one way of making a transition between dramatic episodes--the music bridge. Why, we're years ahead of you there. Our montage transitions are something to hear--well-thought-out mixtures of sound effects that tell a story in themselves."

Labor & Art. "And do you know what's behind this lag in experiment over here? Your radio union, the American Federation of Radio Artists. To put together a fine radio program takes time, but the union's rigid wages-&-hours regulations make it impossible--or at least financially prohibitive--to spend enough time rehearsing. . . . While union regulations provide for strikes in case wages fall too low, they make no mention of any action in case the station's artistic standards sink.

"This ... is a basic paradox: one moment money is the chief inducement to produce good programs; the next, it is the chief inducement to produce bad ones. In any case, money always has the last word."

After what she had seen & heard, Observer Dommisse had at least two points to drive home to her Government: 1) keep firm control over programs and advertising; 2) take long steps to develop radio talent.

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