Fun & Games

Radio entertainment, which began with hams playing phonograph records and broadcasting the girl friend's lyric contralto, is rapidly returning to its pristine simplicity. Not only in the U. S. have sponsors twigged to the fact that the simple news-character and game shows are cheapest. Last week came evidence that the trend was well established in Europe. British Broadcasting Corp. last week challenged chess-playing listeners to a match by radio and mail. Six staff members chosen to play BBC's game will broadcast their moves. Listeners will I counter by postcard. The broadcasting players will meet the move suggested by a majority of listeners, will thus be able to ignore the tough ones suggested by isolated listening experts. The schedule calls for three broadcast moves a week.

BBC's Fun & Games Department has another new audience participation program, taken from the Finnish. Originated by Helsinski University's Psychology Institute and expansively called What Sort Of Person Does This Voice Belong To? the program presents nine inexperienced broadcasters, has each read for one minute from the same text. Listeners are asked to determine each reader's sex, age, height, build, degree of seclusiveness, personality, characteristics, profession. In one case the Finns made it harder by having twins speak alternate sentences.

American listeners last week were promised a weekly half-hour of assorted parlor games in the Town Hall Big Game Hunt, summer substitute for Fred Allen's Town Hall Tonight. Old Vaudevillian Norman Frescott, who takes over from Allen July 6, claims that his program will be the most diverse and complicated ever. "The audience asks the announcer a question," facetiously says he, "the announcer puts a question to a guest star, who puts one to the band leader, who puts one to the soprano. And after the program, the sponsor puts one to me."

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