.'It Isn't Done'
ARCHIBALD LYALL
Here is the first broadcast in an imaginative and amusing series which should have a wide appeal because they are to show ourselves as others see us. It seems that Mars has sent an anthropologist here, paying him a fat sum in Martian money to broadcast back to Mars his impressions of the strange inhabitants of the British Isles.
Various well-known people have been showing him round. And this evening we shall see what he has made of us under the guidance of Archibald Lyall , who broadcast last week on Jugoslavia. A better guide cannot be imagined, for since Lyall left Oxford he has travelled in every country in Europe and seen for himself how taboos and customs no more peculiar than our own are accepted by other countries in all seriousness.
In 1930 Lyall published a wittylittle book, ' It Isn't Done ; or The Future of Taboo among the British Islanders '. He has written several books of travel and so forth, and a novel, ' Envoy Extraordinary'. The visitor from Mars was greatly amused by Lyall's collection of match-box labels, nearly 3,000 in number, and recognised that this was mad world.