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The Chronicles of Uncle Mose
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3.4 The Chronicles of Uncle MoseBefore interviews were included in the Broadcast, it was the inclusion of Ted Russell’s vernacular storytelling in the programme (in the form of the dramatic feature The Chronicles of Uncle Mose) that provided this kind of listener interest, countering radio’s space-bias through the reassertion of local culture, tradition and opinion. This regular feature of the Broadcast enabled listeners to experience “personal primary relations” (Narváez 1991) or ‘social contact’ through storytelling, rather than distant secondary relationships with a formal announcer, as we will see. The Chronicles of Uncle Mose was a short regular monologue which Russell began broadcasting in 1953, two years after the show’s inception. The Broadcast’s first host Jimmy James had come to the realization that the programme needed some variety or light-relief due to the monotony and repetition of its scripted delivery. After deciding against the option of commissioning a family drama serial (along the lines of the CBC’s farm serials or the BBC’s The Archers, which began in 1951), James hit upon the idea of hiring his storyteller friend Ted Russell. Russell was born in 1904 in a small outport community on Conception Bay, Coley’s Point. He had worked as a teacher and magistrate, and as a politician – between 1949 and 1951 he gained prominence as (former Barrelman) Joseph Smallwood’s Minister of Natural Resources, in a role that involved broadcasting information about co-operatives on VONF. However, he is best known as the voice of ‘Uncle Mose’ on the Fishermen’s Broadcast between 1953 and 1961, as well as for authoring the play The Holdin’ Ground, which built upon these monologues, and became very popular as a radio play. The Chronicles of Uncle Mose were set in the imaginary outport community of ‘Pigeon Inlet’ and were narrated by Russell from the perspective of the character of ‘Uncle Mose’ Mitchell. Pigeon Inlet, although fictional, represents in many ways the archetypal traditional Newfoundland outport, conceived as it was by Russell as a composite of several close-knit communities in which he had worked as a schoolteacher and magistrate. Russell cited three sources for his narratives: some were stories heard during his experiences working in outports, some were invented and based on such experiences, and some were sent in by listeners (Narváez 1991: 197). What was crucial in identifying these monologues so strongly with traditional outport culture was their use of vernacular language, conventionalized topics of conversation and traditional oral genres (beliefs, sayings, gossip, tall tales) that gave residents and listeners a sense of place and their roots. Russell achieved an effect amongst his listener akin to that achieved by Garrison Keillor in his Lake Wobegon radio monologues (included in the US National Public Radio programme A Prairie Home Companion); the monologues not only fabricated the immediate and imaginary community of Pigeon Inlet with which listeners could identify, but also engendered a radio or ‘mediate’ community of listeners. As Larson notes of the Lake Wobegon monologues, These shared memories, values and lifestyles were a fertile seedbed for the shared references in the monologues that seemed to unite the listening audience into an “as-if” mediated community (Larson and Oravec 1987; Larson 1995-1996). Narváez has written of the effectiveness of The Chronicles of Uncle Mose in uniting its audience into an ‘imagined community’ through parasocial connectivity (the approximation of face-to-face relationships), and its merging of social information usually assumed to be restricted to small groups within private contexts (what Erving Goffman referred to as ‘back region’ communication) with more widely acknowledged social information used in public behaviours (‘front region’ communication) (Narváez 1991: 192). We can briefly note that this ‘tradition’ initiated by Russell has occasionally been upheld in subsequent Newfoundland radio programming. For example, the radio soap opera Oil in the Family was another highly popular Newfoundland programme that merged front and back region communication. Launched in 1982 and initiated by (the then CBC radio producers) Chris Brookes and Diane Humber, the series was intended to recapture the audience that were watching television soaps rather than listening to CBC at a particular time. The programme sought to examine how the events of the day impacted upon the lives of ordinary Newfoundlanders, in the shape of a fictional working-class family. Two writers produced an eight-minute script every morning, based on that day’s news, and the programme was broadcast at 5.20 p.m., just before the Fisheries Broadcast, which was when the audience peaked. Oil in the Family immediately attempted to reflect the devastating impact of the ‘Ocean Ranger’ disaster which occurred the very night before planning for the series began, when the world’s largest oil-drilling platform capsized in a fierce winter storm, leaving all eighty-four men on board (fifty-six of them from Newfoundland) dead. It achieved this partly through portraying the depression and sense of injustice experienced by a particular character, Michael, who had lost a friend in the disaster: [The disaster] touched everyone, it was huge. People were outraged that the Provincial Government weren’t going to open an inquiry. [In the programme] Michael went to the Government building, saw the Premier in the elevator, and ran to catch it. We ended the programme by asking ‘”If you were in the elevator with Premier, what would you like to ask him about the Ocean Ranger enquiry? Phone in now…” And people did – we based the next day’s script on that (Brookes 2007). In addition to the reflection of topical issues, the more public forms of knowledge in The Chronicles of Uncle Mose consisted of practical information on government programmes or direct commentary on issues of direct relevance to working-class Newfoundlanders during that period. This represented a continuation of Russell’s pre-Confederation broadcasting career (and therefore was symptomatic of the continuity between pre- and post-Confederation Newfoundland radio broadcasting), in which he broadcast information on positive economic development as Minister of Natural Resources (Webb 2008). The programme in this way provided vital orientation to listeners adjusting to the massive socio-cultural changes accompanying Confederation and resettlement (see section 3.7 on the Fogo Process for an explanation of resettlement), which Newfoundland society underwent during the years the programmes was on the air. The public forms of knowledge were not conveyed in a didactic fashion but instead were introduced as shared references, thus merging with the social information normally associated with private contexts. These issues included fish prices; fish markets; the state of the Canadian dollar; fishing regulations; conservation, poaching and the twelve-mile limit; and the role of education in the changing fishery. They also included issues of wider concerns such as the United Nations; taxes; tourism; forest fires; and (a frequent pre-occupation) ‘what it means to be a Canadian’ (see Narváez 1991: 198). Many of the Chronicles document the way in which the fact of economic dependence on Canada during these years had to be accepted, but that it vied with the native instincts of self-sufficiency and suspicion of ‘distant’ authority characteristic of ‘rural’ Newfoundlanders. For example, an episode called News from Nova Scotia (March 10th 1961) highlights the initial resistance of some Newfoundlanders to old age pensions, a feature of the ‘new life’ as part of Canada after Confederation. Grandpa Walcott wants to keep working, even though he is receiving a pension, and refuses to accept that this takes jobs away from the unemployed. His character is a wise old patriarch of the community, who symbolizes the self-sufficient attitude of Newfoundlanders that remains in place no matter which political party, or even form of government, is in power. In the episode Net Loft of Gossip (broadcast 14th April 1961)115 Mose explains the practicalities and exigencies of qualification for unemployment benefit stamps, not before giving a tirade against those who believe that Newfoundland fishermen shouldn’t have been made eligible, as they are supposedly ‘seasonal’ workers. Mose sees this as segregation of the fishing community, who he believes are the current scapegoats for the draining of the Canadian unemployment fund. He attributes this not to ‘mainland Canadians’ but “the people who talk over the radios and write in the newspapers over the summer about how well the fishermen in this area or that are doing with the fish, and how if it all keeps up, they’ll qualify for insurance….”116 Episodes such as Young Men Fishing (broadcast 2nd December 1960) and The United Nations (broadcast October 7th 1961) satirize the arrogance and competitive rhetoric of top-ranking politicians, providing anecdotal evidence with which to demonstrate how compromise is reached amicably in Pigeon Inlet. The homespun wisdom, locally grounded perspective and frequent misconceptions that can be found in Pigeon Inlet also provide a great deal of humour in themselves, but chiefly as a satirical weapon to wield against authority figures, asserting the value of both local knowledge and local ignorance. Interestingly (especially given that these episodes predate the inclusion of fishermen’s voices on the airwaves), these episodes play on the fallibility of news or talks on the radio, questioning the idea that the listening public should automatically confer those people (politicians, pollsters and pundits) who broadcast on the radio with authority. Even ostensibly non-topical or ‘message-free’ episodes are often characterized by playful subversion. For example, Santa Claus (broadcast December 16th 1960) alludes to the space-bias of radio by centring on the commercialisation of Christmas through radio advertising – a child who overhears a radio broadcast featuring Santa Claus in Toronto wants to know how he can also be in Pigeon Inlet if he is really “up there, in that place, on the radio”; “They wouldn’t tell lies like that over the radio, would they, Uncle Mose?” Unmistakeable throughout many of The Chronicles of Uncle Mose is the presence of a healthy scepticism about decisions being made bureaucratically, in power bases located far from the outports (whether by the provincial government in St. John’s, or the federal government in Ottowa, the Canadian centre of governmental administration), using abstract terms and concepts which take little account of the veridical realities of outport life. Local knowledge and oral culture here provide a bulwark against those “experts in knowledge who do our knowing for us, who inform us but whose knowledge does not easily connect to our actual experience and to the basic transactions of life” (Carey 1988: 165). For example, I would like to suggest that Ted Russell’s experiences of working as a magistrate furnished him with an understanding that belief in the law and the legal profession, that institution of literate society which relies heavily on the official word in the written document, has “supplanted belief in community arbitration, and in general eroded belief in the principles of good neighbourhood which had animated the communal culture” (Buchan 1972: 199). Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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