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Brandon Acton-Bond’s Micro-Local West Region Features
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2.2 Brandon Acton-Bond’s Micro-Local West Region FeaturesThe fact that British citizens heard rural affairs being discussed by agricultural workers on the airwaves in the wartime series Country Magazine helped to raise the prestige of the national agricultural community, which consequently lost some of its rural ‘taint’ (Rose 2003). However, portraying (national) unity through (regional) diversity was problematic as an aim, and it was to remain so during the post-war era. For the West Region staff that had pioneered Country Magazine, representing the unity of their own geographically expansive and occupationally diverse region was itself a difficult task, and a number of programmes and series can be viewed as experimental attempts to widen and broaden coverage and surveillance of the Region. County Mixture, a series of seven programmes of considerable length and complexity created by producer Desmond Hawkins (who was involved in scripting Country Magazine and would later become Controller of the West Region), sought to extend coverage of the region through a portrayal of each of the seven Western counties in sound ‘portraits’. It met with some acclaim from the rural audience, yet the experiment could not be sustained, as the idea was to capture the essence of a community in each programme, and a county was too large a unit to be considered a true community (Beadle 1951: 154). One of the most ambitious attempts to reflect rural life undertaken by the West Region was the series Village on the Air. Each week for two years a recording car was taken to a different village and ordinary people were invited to tell their own story.39 West Region features producer Brandon Acton-Bond, who was based mainly in the Plymouth station of the Region, was interested in building on these attempts to reflect everyday life within the West Country. Acton-Bond was also a pioneer of oral history, as evidenced by the series he produced Fifty Years Ago in the West of England, which was broadcast in 1950. This programme has been singled out for praise by oral historian Paul Thompson (1971) for its vivid recollections of Cornish tin mining and the clay-workers’ strike of 1913. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Acton-Bond made several features that, through examining the daily life of a small community, documented what we might term not oral history but instead the ‘oral present’. Acton-Bond created micro-local sound portraits, which presented a kind of microcosm of the region, and he did this by employing two ostensibly contradictory tactics; he gained the trust of programme participants and collaborated with them over an extended period of time, and he utilised unobtrusive and discreet forms of surveillance in the recording of actuality. Acton-Bond was a consummate ‘sound hunter’ (see Bijsterveld 2004 for an explanation of this term), who, in his skilful selection of microphone placements to catch natural sounds, employed experimental techniques, such as recording on location from a shooting brake (Anon. 2006). His innovative recording techniques were inspired by the natural history broadcasts at which the West Region excelled. They often involved recording people as the sound recordist Dr. Ludwig Koch (who conducted a great deal of work in the BBC West Region) recorded wild birds – leaving the microphone ‘in position’ long enough that the birds (or people) ceased to notice it, and then activating the microphone and beginning the recording process (Beadle 1951). For example, in the feature The School On The Moor (1948), Acton-Bond placed a microphone in a village school class-room for a week, after which the children grew accustomed to it as ‘part of the furniture’. Then, without their knowledge, the microphone was activated, and a great deal of ‘eavesdropping’ actuality was recorded on acetate discs during the winter months to provide the basis for the feature, which was then narrated by the schoolmaster, Reg Bennett. The range of actuality featured in the finished programme includes arithmetic lessons, a school assembly, recitations, nursery rhymes, piano and choral practice, playground games, and sounds such as that of the children drinking milk from glass bottles with straws. The programme was partly organised around a comparison of school life today with the school life in the late nineteenth century, with Reg Bennett quoting from the school’s earliest logbook, which dates back to 1878. The programme is based entirely on first-hand experiences, and yet a kind of thesis discreetly emerges - about how little has changed over the seventy-year period in terms of material conditions and soundscapes, but how much has changed in terms of social attitudes towards the discipline of children.40 Another experimental local feature made by Acton-Bond was entitled Year’s Round at Bolventor (1951), during the making of which he made repeated visits with recording gear to this village on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall (where the school in the above programme was located). This was a longitudinal portrait of the village that allowed the producer to get thoroughly familiar with the community. Throughout the year almost every small social event in the life of the village was recorded for inclusion in the edited feature, as a means of presenting an authentic sound picture of Bolventor over the course of a typical year. In Year’s Round, Acton-Bond recorded, in addition to the events themselves, actuality of preparations for most of the social events featured, as well as comments from participants and observers (such as that of Tommy Hooper and Reg Bennett as they watch a horse race at Bolventor Sports Day). In this way the listener gets a sense of work and leisure ‘processes’ unfolding within everyday life, with frequent examples of what Erving Goffman termed ‘backstage behaviour’ or ‘back region’ communication.41 The programme is notable for this consistent attention to ‘performances’ that are an integral part of the fabric of social life and (presumably) not enacted especially for the production, and it seamlessly stitches together the social rituals, ambient sounds and private ‘asides’ of the micro-public sphere.42 Though the programme is inevitably provincial and parochial, it documents social history of a unique sort, by recording local festivities and celebrations, and restoring collectivity and community context to broadcast spectacle and sport. Year’s Round is one of those rare examples of a programme in which the producer set out to comprehensively record a sonic reflection of the living present, and which now functions in the modern context as ‘sound heritage’. At this point it might be useful to refer to Ridington’s (2006) distinction between oral history and acoustic history. Whereas oral history is an account of the past using spoken words, acoustic history is an account of changing soundscapes: Acoustic history is the history of events as they are heard, rather than objects as they are seen, while oral history is a narrative account of events by participants (Ridington 2006: 51). Acton-Bond’s programme in a sense also represented a local or regional analogue to the kind of national broadcasting perpetuated by the BBC during the 1920s and 1930s, when it sought to inculcate a sense of nationhood, belonging and community through the sustained use of outside broadcasts, and an ingrained emphasis on national ritual and royal events (Mackenzie 1986).43 During this period the BBC broadcast thousands of outside broadcasts, including such diverse fare as religious services, opera, plays and music hall entertainment, dance music, public speeches, ceremonies and sporting events.44 As Scannell and Cardiff observe, Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of the national culture as its calendrical role; the cyclical reproduction, year in year out, of an orderly procession of festivities, rituals and celebrations – major and minor, civil and sacred – that marked the unfolding of the broadcast year (Scannell and Cardiff 1991: 171-172). As many of the Outside Broadcasts originated from London or the other urban centres, the Regions came to excel, almost by default, in programmes that reflected back to their audiences the culture of everyday life in the areas they served (Scannell 1996a: 14). They did this most successfully through the development of Regional outside broadcasts and features. Acton-Bond’s experimental programmes represented a micro-local approach to the reflection of everyday life within a region, which blended these two programme genres together.45 It is arguable that the life of the typical English village, as documented by Acton-Bond, could never hope to provide what might be regarded as a truly ‘broadcastable’ event of the kind that were documented by BBC Outside Broadcast staff - if it could it would not be a typical English village (Beadle 1951). Perhaps this was Acton-Bond’s point – West Region listeners were reminded that each town, village or even parish had its own unique calendar of ceremonies and rituals, in contradistinction to the national calendar. Acton-Bond’s ‘local outside broadcasts’ can also be contrasted with the national outside broadcasts of the BBC in a broader and more profound sense. It has been observed that the shared narratives or ‘social memory’ of differing groups can attest to varying perspectives on past events. This is especially evident in the disparity between narratives of rural or isolated communities and the timelines of ‘national’ histories. National memory is regarded as the most widely held but also the most contested form of social memory (Tallentire 2001). Discussion or memories of the Second World War, for example, are conspicuously absent from Year’s Round, despite the fact that the feature was made in the period immediately following the end of the war. Perhaps we can say that in portraying a local vernacular reality,46 the programme abstained from the rhetoric of reconstruction that may have characterised the ‘official’ discourse of the BBC at that time.47 The programme might also be said to demonstrate the way in which many aspects of popular culture exuded a sense of stability and traditionalism in the immediate post-war years – people engaged in and valued leisure activities and social rituals in much the same manner as they had before the war (Philips and Tomlinson 1992: 9). Acton-Bond’s unusual production methods clearly evidence a desire to capture everyday settings, social interactions and ‘naturally occurring’ situations. His aim was similar to that of ethnographers, who hope to minimise their influence on the life-world that they set out to record, in order to facilitate open and unguarded expressive behaviour. One of the advantages of documenting social life in ‘natural’ and public settings is that there are a great many social actors whose presence and significance is countervailing to that of the ethnographer or sound recordist (see Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 110, 191). In this way their presence has little or no effect on the pace or content of events, and as they record extensively they are able to document many conversations and ordinary interactions with a minimum of interference (Ridington and Ridington 2006: 79). The ‘eavesdropper model’ of radio broadcasting recognized by Bell (1997 orig. 1984) and experimented with by Acton-Bond has not been adequately recognized, discussed or theorized, except perhaps in discussions of radio art and sound installations. In his discussion of ‘broadcast talk’, Scannell asserted that the effect of listening to radio is precisely not that of overhearing talk not intended to be overheard; that all radio talk is public discourse (Scannell 1991: 1-11). While this was once the normative model of studio-based discourse in radio, I would argue that the use of actuality in radio features and of experiments in perspective in radio drama has pioneered and popularized an alternative ‘eavesdropping model’ of discourse. BBC radio producers have always given a great deal of consideration not just to what kind of environments might be recorded as vivid actuality material for radio broadcasting, but also the way in which the resulting actuality would itself be affected by the manner in which it was recorded, and how to counteract the inhibiting effect of the introduction of recording technology to the social environment.48 Acton-Bond’s experiments can, in fact, be traced back to early experiments in storytelling through the atmospheric or informative use of sound. The German tradition of the ‘hörspiel’ is of great relevance here, a form of radio drama in which a soundscape is constructed, through extensive use of sound effects, actuality and ambient sound. As early as 1927, Otto Alfred Palitzsch had critiqued radio’s tendency to act merely as a conduit for the other arts by transmitting plays by Ibsen and Shakespeare, calling for a new kind of “pure radio play that is not somehow carried by a choir or geared to voices and music but is integrated into an acoustical atmosphere at which the hooting of the automobile and the bray of a donkey are able to find their place, just like the whistle of the wind and the chiming of devotional bells in a village church.…” (quoted in Heinzelman 2004: 48). In Britain there had likewise been a rich tradition of attention to soundscapes in radio drama, although the same tendency in radio features (the ‘sound portrait’) is not so well documented. Quayside Nights: Plymouth (Worsley 1935), produced by Francis Worsley and broadcast by the BBC West Region on 10th August 1935, is a pre-eminent example of a sound portrait. This programme featured specially recorded actuality of tradesmen and workers on Plymouth’s quayside – the sound of Barbican fish market salesmen selling lots is interspersed with the sounds of cranes and winches loading pig iron. Later that same year, a radio feature called Dinner is Served (Gilliam 1935) (produced by Laurence Gilliam, devised by Gerald Coxon, and broadcast on the national Home Service on 17th October) depicted through sound the organisation of the national food supply – the production and distribution of vegetables, fish and meat from source to consumer, featuring, for example, the testimony of a Lowestoft herring drifter skipper and girl gutters and packers. Such programmes not only added a new dimension to radio broadcasting through their use of actuality; they also represented ‘thumbnail sketches’ of work processes underlying everyday life that a great deal of people took for granted. A column in an edition of Daily Worker the following year (February 7th 1936) chastised the BBC for the fact that this type of broadcasting was the exception rather than the rule, and asserted that the Corporation was mired too deep in its ‘battleship organization’ to mingle with real people: The microphone could be the ear and the voice of millions, a sharing of experience by means of which people become alive to themselves. Today it is only a platform for old men to lecture at us. Just imagine listening to miners from their galleries underground, a walk round East London, a trade union meeting, soldiers talking to fishermen… (Audit 1936: 7). As with the introduction of ‘sync sound’ lightweight cameras in documentary filmmaking (see Taylor 1998), the refinement of mobile recording techniques (such as the introduction of the tape recorders) enabled the producers who followed Acton-Bond’s example to record individuals and interactions in informal settings in a way that had not previously been possible without recourse to studio dramatization, with its intrinsic fictionalization. This development in radio features was – again, as with documentary film – often contiguous with the avoidance of the expository or editorial commentary that had dominated the form until this time, and which had tended to conflate the voice of the narrator with that of the programme itself, and, in turn, with the voices in the programme. In Acton-Bond’s features about Bolventor life he negated this problem by contracting a member of that local community to perform the role of narrator and scriptwriter, so that his voice performs a constituent role within the programme as it did within the community. Hendy has written about this technique as utilized in a latter-day programme called Spar Boys (transmitted on BBC Radio 4 on 11th July 2001), which is “narrated by someone with experience of his own” (Hendy 2004: 179-80, emphasis in the original). Whereas presenters/narrators have increasingly been positioned as ‘ordinary’ co-members of the listeners’ life-world, these radio documentaries feature presenters/narrators who are also members of the life-world represented in the programme. Thus Acton-Bond’s work can be regarded as a groundbreaking experiment in co-production, and in presenting the soundscapes of an acoustic environment coterminous with that of the rural West Region listener. Download 1.05 Mb. 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