31. An average of 100 letters a week are received by Miss Cheung Suet Lai for her request programme "Sincerely Yours". The letters come mainly from Hong Kong, but Macau, Canton, Formosa, Malaya, Indo-China, Indonesia and North Borneo also have regular listeners to the programme and one or two letters have been received from the United Kingdom and United States.
Features and Talks
32. December saw the start of the first of two series of programmes marking a completely new venture in Chinese broadcasting. For a long time it had been felt that the pattern of Chinese broadcasting had become stiff and set and that a radically new approach was needed to infuse vitality and warmth into the pattern. The firststep was to send radio out to meet its listeners and in this way the first weekly radio magazine "We are Living Below the Victoria Peak" took the air in December. After its initial teething troubles it very rapidly became an extremely popular programme.
The magazine is made up of four or five short inter- views, linked with narration and music. There are few official ceremonies reported in the programme which concentrates rather on local news of special interest, the gossip of the town, and the work and life of the thousand and one tradesmen and craftsmen in Hong Kong. All four programme assistants go out each week with portable recorders, gathering material from every corner of Hong Kong. On Friday afternoon, the mass of material is sorted and edited by the producer, the recording room is a maze of pieces of tape and as the interviews are edited, the narration is written and music chosen and at 10.30 p.m. on Saturday, listeners hear the results of this labour. In the voices of the fortune tellers, weighing machine makers, chopping board makers, locksmiths, gunny bag makers, driving instructors and many more have been found many natural born actors and the atmosphere of Hong Kong has really been captured in re- cordings made in such places as food stalls, silverware shops, slaughter houses, straw paper shops, fashion shows and so on.
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