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5.4.0 Commonwealth FM

Having noted the need for a national archival strategy for community radio, we can now apply some of these observations about the connections between the heritage and education sectors and radio broadcasting through a case study of a multi-cultural community aural history project called Commonwealth FM. Commonwealth FM ran on a RSL (Restricted Service Licence)¹⁷⁰ for 3 years, as an educational outreach facility within the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. It was the first multicultural community radio station to operate in Bristol,¹⁷¹ and in fact it was the first radio station to operate from inside a museum. A large outreach project had been co-ordinated for the launch of the museum in 2002, and the idea emerged of broadcasting for a month on an RSL to coincide with and widen the reach of this activity. Museum staff (including the Head of the Oral History Archive, Mary Ingoldby) made a bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund, and successfully attained £50,000 in funding for the first RSL.

In terms of the latter aim, the idea was to use an annual educationally-oriented community radio RSL to form a link between the artefacts (whether physical artefacts or audio documents) of Britain’s past engagement with the nations of the Commonwealth and the present-day experiences and stories of the descendants and diasporas of those nations now living in and around Bristol (Priestman 2004). It was intended that this would occur as a result of volunteers and community groups using the oral history archive (in addition to museum exhibits) as direct inspiration for their creation of radio programmes, or to play and showcase oral history excerpts as part of their shows (Ingoldby 2009).

In subsequent years this type of archive-based activity decreased, but in some instances volunteers were trained in the use of Mini-Disc recording equipment, to go out into communities and collect testimony and stories, which were then added to the museum’s growing sound archive as ‘history in the making’. For example, on 1^st October 2004 a new project was unveiled called “Language and Legacy in Empire”, which sought to examine the ways in which the former empire has influenced the language spoken in the UK in the contemporary era. Funded in this instance by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the museum worked with the Centre for Employment and Enterprise to collect over 50 interviews with members of Bristol’s Asian, African and Afro-Caribbean communities. Many of these interviews were broadcast on Commonwealth FM. As well as representing a record of the way that the English language has been transformed by empire, the interviews were intended to provide a social document of the experiences of second and third generation immigrants, as contributors reflected on their use of language and experiences of trying to communicate, often in a language that wasn’t their mother tongue (Prudames 2004).

5.4.1 Technology, Oral History and Participation

At the heart of Commonwealth FM’s Radio Room was a computer playout system – to be precise the SS32 system was initially used, a system designed by Scott Studios for use in American commercial radio (and subsequently acquired by Google). The development of community uses of a commercial radio automation system was essential to Commonwealth FM, at a time when open-source solutions were not readily available.¹⁷³ As Priestman has observed, Commonwealth FM’s use of an automated system to broadcast oral testimony reasserted the ‘human presence’ of personality, orality and conviviality missing from commercial radio stations that use the same automated system to broadcast a relentless flow of music interspersed with advertising jingles:

Choosing and locating audio from the oral history archive to upload to the playout system also had its own difficulties - even when someone had an idea of what was wanted and had found a catalogue entry, choosing clips often proved difficult, as thousands of hours of material was yet to be digitised and was only available on cassettes or quarter-inch tape. Every week more audio material would be donated, or would be recorded by volunteers, which meant that access to the material had to take precedence over archiving. Experienced researchers, for example from the BBC or from film companies, spent weeks using the sound archive of the museum, but as far as Commonwealth FM was concerned, the fact that only a fraction of the archive had been digitised obstructed attempts to democratise access to it, which had always been a primary aim (Gibbons and Romaine 2008).

5.4.2 Programming: Empire, Free Speech and Traditions

After the first Commonwealth FM RSL, a pattern was set whereby the year-round activity of community and school groups would culminate in the showcasing of the best material during the RSL broadcast. Therefore a ‘stock’ of speech-based material could be stored up on the SS32 hard drive, which was supplemented by the entries (on CD) for the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, run by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association. A live schedule ran between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. every day during the RSL, “comprising a varied mix of programmes, oral history clips, world music and recorded links and idents” (Priestman 2004: 87). Even the idents contained oral history excerpts; for example, one African woman reminisced about how she and her neighbours used to travel to school each morning riding elephants. An eclectic mix of world music, including some live performances, dominated the overnight schedule.

During the first RSL (in 2002) the Commonwealth FM team decided to focus on at least one ethnic group or country ‘belonging to’ the Commonwealth (there were then 54 countries of the Commonwealth) every day. Every community group (for example, the Sikh, Somali and Bangladeshi groups) would have a representative who would present a show every week or as a one-off, and producers were employed through the Heritage Lottery funding to work with these community groups. Each group had its own agenda and perspective, and they would broadcast (either in English or in their own language) a magazine programme in which speakers would be invited to talk about food, travel or current affairs. As the Bristol Poetry Festival was taking place at this time, poets were also invited in to give readings.

Commonwealth FM was not yet simulcasting (streaming) on the Internet (this was to happen during the second and third RSLs) but on many occasions Commonwealth FM linked up with a distant station in a Commonwealth country. One such instance - a live ‘link-up’ marking the anniversary of Nigeria’s independence from the UK - exposed some of the difficulties citizens (even those with political power) sometimes experience within post-colonial societies where the kind of free speech exercised on most forms of community radio is inadmissible:
We had somebody who was exiled from Nigeria in the studio talking to a politician there. It was obvious during the interview - live on air – [that] she knew what it was like, why she couldn’t go back there, and the politician was just giving it the spiel. And, as it turned out, suddenly after about 10 minutes the line just went dead. And [after] subsequent research we got hold of him again, and he said; “Well I had someone right next to me, listening to what I was saying and when he didn’t like it he just turned me off”. And that was an eye-opener for us, because we’re used to free speech…I don’t think we censored anyone on Commonwealth FM… (Gibbons, Gibbons and Romaine 2008)
In the case of more conventional RSLs, the station managers have to take an active role in monitoring programming – they have to ensure that free speech is maintained whilst also ensuring that the broadcasting of offensive or controversial material does not take place. As Commonwealth FM was an educational project based in a museum these concerns were in some ways even more paramount, but as on-air discussion took place in up to six different languages (Chinese, Somali, Arabic, Punjabi, Bengali and English), the rigorous monitoring of content was almost impossible (Ingoldby 2009). The station therefore aligned itself with the wider ethos of the museum, which covers maritime, military and technological triumphs but also examines racism, economic exploitation, cultural imperialism and slavery (Mourant 2005), “neither condoning nor condemning the empire but rather presenting a balanced view of the impulses behind empire and the legacy of empire” (Hann 2003: 1).
To achieve this balance, Commonwealth FM frequently broadcast discussions in which diverse or contrasting opinions could be shared, in which current events or ancient traditions could be paid respect, criticised, or sometimes greeted with humour, even within the same programme.¹⁷⁴ For example, a programme called ‘The Fattening Room’ explored the centuries-old rite of passage in many communities in Nigeria’s South-Eastern Cross River, as part of which brides-to-be follow a daily routine of feasting, sleep and inactivity in order to put on weight. In contrast to Western society, a woman’s rotundity there is considered to be a sign of good health, prosperity and allure:
Brides in this country, six months, say, before they get married starve themselves so they can get inside their wedding dress, and look like a size 8 or size 10. But what they do in Nigeria is send them away for three or four weeks before they get married to fatten them up! Elderly matrons tell them to how to cook and serve their husbands and get fat…I think it’s a dying thing now. It stimulated a great debate, we also covered mixed marriages as well as arranged marriages, female circumcision… (Gibbons, Gibbons and Romaine 2008)

5.4.3 ‘Steam Radio’: Bridging the Past and the Present

Some of the most stimulating work with school groups occurred when Commonwealth FM became involved in the Texts in Context project (2003-2005), in which archival sources (in facsimile form) from the British Library, the Commonwealth and Empire Museum and three other regional and national museums were situated in different historical, social and cultural contexts, to enable secondary school students to explore how the English language has continually evolved and changed over time. Each school class made two whole day visits to their chosen museum, where activities and research around the texts was undertaken.

One A2 class working at the Commonwealth FM museum in the ‘Experiences of Empire’ strand made use of the oral history archive to produce a radio programme presented ‘live’ from the 1903 Delhi Durbar. This incorporated interviews with Lord and Lady Curzon, an argument between a colonial hunter and a present day human rights activist, and several mock advertisements for Edwardian products (Hooper-Greenhill, Dodd et al. 2004).
The experiences of the paid producers in enabling the community groups and schoolchildren to create a new kind of programming in which the voices of the past are summoned (through the use of oral history) or imaginatively recreated (through scripting)¹⁷⁵ for educational purposes was a major inspiration for B200fm,¹⁷⁶ which broadcast for two weeks (B200fm shared an RSL with Radio 19, a community radio project targeting areas of social deprivation) in 2005. B200fm (and Radio 19) was created and operated by many of the same team involved in Commonwealth FM, and many of those people then later went on to found, run and manage BCfm, Bristol’s first full-time community radio station, which started broadcasting from the Beacon Centre (the community centre where B200fm had been broadcast from) in 2007.¹⁷⁷
B200fm celebrated the bicentennial of the birth of the famous British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and all programming was created from the perspective of the Victorian era. In other words, it was a ‘virtual’ Victorian radio station, recreating and celebrating that era. Each day of the broadcast milestone events in Brunel’s life were chronicled, such as his meeting Mary Horsley, his marriage, being given the commission to build the suspension bridge, the SS Great Britain, and the Great Western Railway, and so on. With the collaboration of local writers, historians, actors, musicians and school groups, a wide range of bespoke programming was created for the project, including speech, music, features and drama.

For example, in the style of ‘on the spot’ actuality news reporting, events such as the Bristol Riots in 1831 or the opening of the Great Western Railway line between Bristol and London in 1841 were witnessed and commentated upon as they happened. Modern broadcast formats such as the venture capitalist television programme Dragon’s Den were ‘transported back’ to the Victorian era, so that in one programme Guglielmo Marconi (played by radio practitioner and scholar Chris Priestman) had to pitch his idea of the ‘radio wave signal’ to a panel consisting of historian and television presenter Adam Hart-Davis and the actor and Bristol councillor Simon Cook. A daily news programme presented the exact news from that particular day in history 200 years ago, including the sports results and the weather forecast.

5.4.4 The Relationship between Commonwealth FM and the Museum

An interesting paradigm was set up with the decision to house the Commonwealth FM radio station in a museum, suggesting the extension of the museum’s oral history archive to create a kind of local culture of listening, and a communicative feedback loop in which the museum speaks for and to the community, which speaks for and to itself and back to the museum. As we noted in Chapter 1, radio broadcasting has perpetually been utilized or conceptualised as a space-binding and distributive medium, which tends to obscure the relationships and synergies that do or might exist between radio stations and museums or sound archives as repositories of aural culture. Jack Siemering, the creator of National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) All Things Considered believed that public radio itself should be ‘an aural museum’ (quoted in Cohen and Willis 2004: 596). NPR’s StoryCorps, a nationwide oral history collection project in the United States, initiated by radio producer David Isay (see Chapter 4), inspired one respondent to the radio-based electronic journal Transom Review to consider the relationship between radio and libraries:

I am struck by the parallel images of the travelling StoryCorps vehicle and the old fashioned Book Mobile [mobile library]. I see so many connections between public radio and public libraries – all that free information and inspiration for and by the people. I like the idea that the Story Mobile would house a collection of stories as well as the means to record them. I picture various headphone stations where you can listen to randomly playing stories, like overhearing conversations (quoted in Isay 2003).
On a pragmatic level, Commonwealth FM was an ideal tool to publicise the museum to the local community, and to portray it as an interactive and responsive institution. This was especially important given that it has often been deemed ‘politically incorrect’ to support exhibitions on the empire – the subject’s unpopularity, especially in arts and museum circles, has meant the withholding of funding, jeopardising the public presentation of an important part of Britain’s history (Hann 2003). The radio station was able to counter this reluctance to discuss empire by publicising activities at the museum, and attracting a young and ethnically diverse demographic. The station’s activity was contiguous with the use of powerful first-person audio testimony in the museum, which, like the use of the handling collection and tangible artefacts, diverted from the classic model of the static and non-interactive visual exhibition, which has often been seen as problematic by source communities (Hann 2003) due to such things as the use of authoritarian and obtrusive labelling (Silver 1988: 192).¹⁷⁸
The fact that Commonwealth FM was supported by grants meant that the station had no recourse to advertising, which in turn meant that other broadcasters had no qualms about collaborating with Commonwealth FM. For example, when Bristol primary school pupils interviewed older people about their memories of WW2, using training provided by Commonwealth FM, these recordings were gathered as part of the BBC ‘People’s War’ project to gather an archive of World War 2 memories.¹⁷⁹ Despite the success of these ventures, it was retrospectively felt by some of the paid staff at Commonwealth FM that whereas the first RSL was about attracting people to the museum, by the time of the third RSL (in 2004), it became about attracting funds.¹⁸⁰ During the first RSL some of the team had spent an hour of each day walking around the galleries of the museum with a radio microphone talking to visitors and asking them what their favourite object or display was, why they were interested in about the museum, and why they thought it was important. The station had thereby used both the museum’s resources and the museum’s ‘audience’ as subject matter but also functioned as another way of monitoring public interest in and use of the museum.
Ultimately, however, the success of an initiative like Commonwealth FM is hard to assess, except through the sheer volume of volunteers and school groups who became involved in each RSL (there were a hundred volunteers involved in the first RSL, and in subsequent RSLs hundreds of schoolchildren became involved). This difficulty is symptomatic of attempts to measure the popularity, impact and social reach of community radio as a sector, in the sense that practitioners lack the time and funding to carry out audience research themselves, and that audience measurements and even volunteer records are inadequate because they do not provide evidence of the level of community engagement with the station or of the sharing of ‘intangible heritage’.
Perhaps community radio activists can benefit from the museum sector’s experiences in creating and hosting collaborative exhibits. Community consultants and advisory committees have long been involved in the development of museum exhibits, but collective decision-making across a broader array of integral activities, which are normally controlled by museum professionals with specialized training, requires a much more radical shift within the institution (Peers and Brown 2004: 158).

This redistribution of authority can be equated with the organizational culture/philosophy of community radio. It can also be likened to the concept of ‘radical trust’ which has emerged in recent years to describe the process by which museums and libraries have utilized online input and feedback generated by the public through blogs, wikis and other examples of social or collaborative Internet resources, especially as a step towards soliciting the help of non-professionals in the curating of exhibits (Chan and Spadccini 2007). Peers and Brown have argued that collaborative exhibits “lead the participants to ask new questions and to identify new kinds of problems; they reorient professional and institutional activities and they change priorities; they stimulate the re-formulation of policies and procedures.” (2004: 167). They call these changes paradigmatic because of their persuasive impact on a comprehensive range of museum practices. Yet, as they acknowledge, there needs to be more evidence of the impact of these exhibits on audiences:

Museum exhibits do not do their work in a moment, and the creators of exhibits usually find out only years later, if ever, about the new perspectives that were suddenly glimpsed by a local visitor, a tourist, or a school child during a visit to an exhibit (and especially the school child), of the curiosity that was whetted, or of the small epiphanies that were sparked. Yet this accumulation of individual viewer experiences may well, over a long period of time, constitute the most lasting legacy of any exhibit project. Museums pursue collaborative exhibits in the hope of multiplying these small impacts and because of their faith that the directness of voice the exhibits privilege will remove distorting lenses and correct mistranslations, enabling rather than obstructing authentic communication across the boundaries of difference (Peers and Brown, ibid.).
For an example of such a small epiphany, note the following, excerpted from a report, which documents the reaction of a schoolgirl to her involvement with the Commonwealth and Empire Museum as part of the ‘Texts in Context’ project:
While inspiration is not perhaps what might be expected from a collection of artefacts related to the slave trade, when asked if she had been inspired by her experience, one 14-year old girl from St Thomas More School in Bristol thought for a moment and then replied: “If I wasn’t gonna try before, I would try now, because the sort of people who don’t believe in Black people, I would just try to show them…It inspired me in a different way that I haven’t been inspired before. It makes you feel that learning, pushing yourself, is actually worth something. Sometimes you think what’s the point, but if you went to the museum, you think well it is actually worth something, that pride and dignity that they took away from the slaves it’s worth giving it back to them.” (Hooper-Greenhill, Dodd et al. 2004: 29).

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