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Sports |
HAVE a happy Friday and a pleasant and relaxing weekend. After all, by
next week, April will have gathered her skirts and swept off for another
year, to be replaced by that skittish little number, May. Morris dancing
and May poles ...
***
ONE of our Column readers has e-mailed us with more memories of those
distant broadcast days, this time with reference to PNG. Graham recalls
the Wilfred Thomas programmes from 9PA and the short wave stations VLT
and VLK; they were unique examples of the art of broadcasting.
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FORMER 9PA listeners may be surprised to learn they were on LP disc and
came all the way from the BBC. So too were the Goon Shows; The Tennis
Elbow Foot Game; I’m Sorry, I’ll Read that Again; ’Round the Horne and
that unforgettable programme duo, My Music and My Word, with Denis Norden
and Frank Muir.
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THEN there was Edgar Lustgarten, whose recreation of famous murder trials
at London’s Old Bailey courts of justice were legendary. Lustgarten
brought a whole gallery of infamous British criminals and witnesses and
the judges who heard their cases to life, unaided by other voices, music
or sound effects.
***
SADLY, all BBC records were stamped with a “destroy date” at which point
the transcriptions service at 9PA headed by Trish Devine was supposed to
literally burn the discs. All we can say is that certain private
collections of discs swelled by the month and 9PA had the most virginal
commercial incinerator in the Territory.
***
GRAHAM also reminded us of Territorian Calls the Tune, a PNG programme
loosely modelled on the BBC favourite Desert Island Discs. Long-time
residents of PNG going finish were interviewed and played their choice of
discs for half an hour, generally interspersed with a flood of ribald
comments.
***
IN the capital, Fred Warren manned the transmitters in a corner of Mrs
Gordon’s farm, now called Waigani; we remember watching Fred motor past
9PA on what was at the time a single lane dirt road to Jackson’s
airstrip. If more than two cars passed in an hour we wondered what the
excitement was ...
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CHEERS, ol poroman!
– Dee Nesenolis
 
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