025,000 RADIO AND TV CENTRE PROJECT

BY A STAFF REPORTER MORE THAN £125,000 worth of building and re-equipment work has begun on the new radio and television studios at the National Catholic Centre for Mass Media at Hatch End, Middlesex.
Fr. Agnellus Andrew, O.F.M., who was ,a pre-war pioneer of priest-broadcasters, has moved with his staff of experts from the sedate house, St, Gabriel's, where he has been based for 12 years, to the equally sedate St. Ninian's, next door, while the builders work on measurements and prepare to move in their bulldozers.
While the staff settle in at St. Ninian's as their new permanent headquarters, St. Gabriel's is being adapted to have the massive up-to-theminute technical block grafted on to it.
In spite of the National Catholic Centre's name, it is in fact the only centre in the world for training missionaries in the English-speaking countries in the effective use of radio, television and film.
GROWING NEED Fr. Agnellus pointed out last week that the need for expert training in these media is growing rapidly in this country as welt as in the foreign mission field.
At home there is the growth of the local radio station, which offers an unprecedented opportunity of getting people interested in religious questions. But so far very few of the parish clergy in Britain are prepared to cope with techniques demanded by broadcasting.
Local broadcasting. states Fr. Agnellus, has already started in Leicester, Sheffield, and Merseyside. It will start soon in Brighton, Durham, Leeds, Stoke-on-Trent and Nottingham.
Fr. Agnellus and his team have joined forces with Anglican workers in the field, and the joint committee have been asked to sponsor training courses and conferences in each of the eight towns that are going ahead with local broadcasting.
LAGGING BEHIND Closed-circuit television as a means of preaching and teaching is also on the programme. Greater London Council plans soon to follow Glasgow's lead in this direction, and this gives further scope to Catholic priests and lay apostles, but also gives them so much more to learn.
This is one big reason for the new technical project at Hatch End, which is scheduled to open next autumn.
Another is the Church's growing awareness of how far she has been lagging behind other forces in the world in the successful use of radio and TV: particularly far behind the Governments of Russia and China, where the old straightforward missionary activity has virtually been killed.
In much of Africa, India and South-East Asia, too, the missionary's presence is increasingly precarious. This is why the Hatch End team are constantly besieged, just when they have come to the end of one giant programme of work, by yet another group of missionaries who are about to leave for their missions and nuat have a crash course now in the use of mass media.
There was the recent instance of the two Yugoslav priests. Since the resumption of relations between the Vatican and Belgrade. the Government has allowed the lauching of a new Church bulletin, and have left the way
open for a religious slot in the hitherto strictly secular broadcasting programme.
WILLINGNESS The upshot was that two priests came to Hatch End with very little English but plenty of willingness and capacity to learn their new "trade." Four more will follow them early next year.
From June 1966 to October 1967 the centre put 261 priests, nuns and laymen through courses both at Hatch End and in other parts of the country. Of these, 52 were for work in Africa, one for India, one for Ceylon, two for the Philippines, one for Barbados, two for South America, five for Malta, two for Australasia and one for the United States.
Now, as the number of demands grows, the degree of technique required for coping with the advances in broadcasting know-how also increases. Hence the need for the new studios.
In the centre of the complex is a 40-foot diameter octagonal television studio, with double-glazed glass brick windows for lighting during conferences. This provides soundproofing for when programmes are being televised, when the studio is blacked out and only artificial lighting is used.
Glass partitions open into the chapel on the side of the complex, so that when necessary the two together can form one big TV church.
On the opposite side from the chapel are separate steam radio studios, At the back, a 600 square foot basement is being dug to house air conditioning, heating, lighting and other gear.
RESEARCH So there will be a threefold purpose in the new type Hatch End centre which Fr. Agnellus started "without so much as a spoon in the house." It will train broadcasters for work at home and abroad. It will televise and broadcast programmes to the many stations which cannot afford normal fees, as well as prepare programmes for B.B.C. and I.T.A. And it will close down for intensive research work in broadcasting and programme techniques which it will pass on to professional and amateur mass media operators.
Only top line experts are allowed to work there. These include Mrs. Grace Wyndham, formerly head of B.B,C.'s current affairs, and Gerald Ramshaw..,who formerly worked on B.B.C.'s training staff. Miss Ann Dalton, B.B.C. studio manager, voluntarily gives all her spare time to the centre, where she helps to organise the domestic activity as well as her work in running the courses.
New school for Sandra Laing
SANDRA LANG, the 12 year-old white girl who was classified coloured and then white again, has at last found a school willing to admit her after being barred from her local Catholic school in Piet Retief, 180 miles south-east of Johannesburg.
Her father, Mr. Abraham Laing, said that a church school would accept her when the next school year starts at the end of January. The principal of the school has insisted there must be no publicity surrounding her admission, and M r. Laing refused to say where the school was or even to indicate if it was in the Transvaal.
Mr. Laing said: 'This is the answer to all our prayers. All our other efforts, struggles and pleas were in vain." He was bitter about the attitude of the authorities, however. "I feel we have been degraded by the administration," he said.