Ieuan franklin
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1.0 RationaleThis thesis sets out to investigate the uses of oral history or forms of vernacular culture in radio broadcasting in Britain and in Newfoundland (Canada). This is by no means an exhaustive survey of the convergence of oral history and radio broadcasting, as this would be an extremely difficult task to pursue, even if it were to be confined only to the broadcast output of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). BBC producers have long collected forms of oral history for utilization in programming, although the BBC has not (until relatively recently) used the term ‘oral history’ to describe such activities (the BBC has instead made use of the term ‘actuality’, see below). Therefore, identifying or sourcing radio programming which features forms of oral history is a difficult enough task, let alone determining whether or not they exist in the form of recordings, gaining access to them and charting their relative importance (see Chapter 2.0). Given the wealth of archived broadcast output, such a survey could not hope to be definitive, and it would therefore be prone to a stipulative or categorical approach to the inclusion of certain programmes above others. A survey approach would not afford much scope for reflection on whether a given programme or programme format constitutes oral history (see the discussion of StoryCorps, Chapter 4.6), or has made use of any elements of oral history methodology. Finally, to undertake such a survey would involve so much archival research that there would be little room to accommodate theoretical perspectives in order to cast light on the cultural and artistic significance of the convergence between oral history and radio production. In beginning to conceptualize this convergence I was interested in both the concept of convergence itself and the number of levels or domains on or in which this convergence might be said to operate. This had a great influence on the theoretical concerns of the thesis. For example, it occurred to me that an exploration of the topic might consider:
We will explore some commonalities and differences between the work of an oral historian and that of a radio producer, and the synergies which can result from collaboration between radio practitioners and local history groups, museums, libraries or archives (both of which fall under point 1) in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. The second and third points represent recurring themes that we will return to at various points throughout the thesis. This first chapter will begin to investigate and elaborate the third and fourth points of discussion - the convergence of (or dialectic between) orality and literacy or interpersonal interaction and mediated communication in radio broadcasting – to create a theoretical perspective that will inform the rest of the thesis. The broad theoretical concern of the thesis is to consider the (secondary) orality (Ong 1988) of radio broadcasting, and the role that (the promotion of) vernacular oral culture can play in the democratization of society. The inclusion of ‘lay voices’ and ‘audience input’ in radio broadcasting will therefore be charted as a measure of the democratization of radio. The thesis will work towards a social and cultural understanding of radio’s oral/aural basis or bias, which will prove useful in considering radio’s role in disseminating oral history, promoting dialogue, and building and binding communities. There is a scarcity of material on the conjunction of oral history and radio broadcasting, and what little extended analysis there is can predominantly be found in articles or book chapters (albeit very useful ones) by North American radio producers who have also undertaken oral history work (Orchard 1974; Dunaway 1984; Spitzer 1992; Hardy III 2001; Hardy III and Dean 2006), or in the memoirs of ex-BBC staff (Bridson 1971; Shapley 1996). Some social scientists interested in cultural preservation have considered how local media link indigenous communities with their (oral) traditions (Rada 1978; Spitulnik 2000; 2002), although discussion of ‘community memory’ (Klaebe and Foth 2006) has tended to be supplanted by the rigour of particular methodologies employed in anthropology, or in studies of radio’s role in development. There are also several penetrating studies of the politics and intellectual philosophies that have underpinned the BBC’s mission to enlighten and educate, which help us to understand its historical reluctance to ‘open up’ the microphone to non-professionals (LeMahieu 1988; Avery 2006). Some of the most incisive approaches to the study of ‘vernacular culture’ in radio programming, however, can be found in texts that explore British culture, heritage and language in a broader context, making use of archival material to consider radio’s role in consolidating regional or national identity (Samuel 1994; McIntosh 1999; Mugglestone 2003; Rose 2003). Academic approaches to what we might term aural history (oral history as broadcast) are made challenging by the fact that the scholar is, in a sense, negotiating the borderlines between “multiple marginalities” (Cotter 1999: 384); the peripheries of mainstream academic concerns. For example, the discipline of oral history - which is itself a field of research profoundly concerned with (social) marginality - is often neglected in academia, due to the pre-eminence of quantitative studies, or evidence about the fallibility of memory over time.1 The incorporation of actuality, oral history or folklore into radio features or other kinds of programming, and the impact of this phenomenon, is often overlooked in British radio studies or accounts of British broadcasting history (for an exception see Rodger 1982, and the recent work on Charles Parker and the Radio Ballads cited in the following chapter), and radio is often overlooked in studies of media (Lewis 2000; Lacey 2008). Media is, in turn, not generally considered with depth and accessibility in most studies of folklore (for an exception see Narváez’ essays on Newfoundland radio within Laba and Narváez 1986), or sociolinguistics (for an exception see Fairclough 1995), and so on. However, the advantage of this situation is that the scholar is induced to attempt a multidisciplinary approach; thus my theoretical approach has drawn upon elements of sociolinguistics, folkloristics, communications theory and cultural studies. I will begin my conceptual and historical exploration of the use of oral history in radio broadcasting by focussing on the subject of orality and literacy in radio production, establishing the divergence between the BBC’s (initial) use of scripting and the (later) use of actuality (a term used to refer to recorded speech collected from ‘informants’). In doing so I will explore similar issues to those often debated by oral historians about the relative qualities of the sound recording and the transcript, their preservation, and their relative fidelity to the original interview encounter. The ultimate purpose of the BBC’s scripting, however, was not to make oral sources more accessible, as with the transcription of oral history interviews. At best scripting was used to make oral sources more permissible or ‘presentable’ to listeners accustomed to the precise enunciation of BBC announcers. At worst, as a means of achieving a high degree of control over output and language use, scripting actually precluded the vast majority of its audience from participation in broadcasting altogether. The advent of the portable tape recorder helped to break the yoke of compulsory scripting, allowing a greater degree of audience participation in programme content. However, as I will demonstrate in Chapter 4, both the use of scripting and the use of actuality can be seen as a means of achieving artistic or editorial control, through the processing and assemblage of the ‘raw material’ of recorded speech. Whereas the use of scripting segregates the contexts of the original dialogic encounter and the final radio transmission, actuality represents a form of integration and continuity between the two; this can be more broadly conceptualised as segregation or integration between interpersonal interaction and mediated communication. The vital and complex contributions of the Canadian scholar Harold Innis (1894-1952) to communications theory (pertaining to the time- and space-bias of communications media) will be introduced in this chapter, which will bring us to one of the key concerns of the thesis – the way(s) in which the incorporation of actuality in radio broadcasting may accentuate or extend the oral/aural bias of the medium and therefore its attention to local culture and space-time, according to the logic of Innis’ theories. What this means in practice will become clearer through various case studies contained within this thesis, but for now we can begin to explain that this may play a role in countering what Innis referred to as the space-bias of radio broadcasting.2 In order to immediately utilise Innis’ theory of time- and space-bias, and to develop the discussion of orality and literacy in radio production, we will examine the nature of the BBC’s early use of language, in terms of the ‘professionalization of speaking’. This professionalization can be identified as symptomatic of what Innis conceptualised as a bias toward space, especially as the BBC’s centralised control allowed it to achieve a high degree of hegemony in controlling the language ‘domain’ of British broadcasting, and increased the experiential degree of polarity between margin (each BBC region) and metropolis (Broadcasting House in London).3 However, in this chapter I will also explore the notion of broadcasting ‘as social contact’ (Madge 1953), and how the incorporation of interpersonal interaction in its programming has often enabled the BBC to overcome this space-bias, reflecting through its programming its audience as (in Raymond Williams’ phrase) a ‘knowable community’ (Williams 1973). Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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