Ieuan franklin

114 I would like to suggest that the trend of the ‘cultural’ or ‘personal’ (rather than occupational) interest in the Broadcast continues to this day, even amongst those who do not have familial links with Newfoundland. It seems that the programme may have attracted in recent years a greater proportion of female listeners, and a significant number of middle-class listeners who have only settled in Newfoundland recently or seasonally (for example, those with holiday houses in the province). Several ‘new’ listeners to the Broadcast I have interviewed have spoken about their enjoyment of the programme, particularly of the vernacular speech of fishermen who phone in, and about how the programme has provided them with useful cultural and political orientation as a newcomer (colloquially, a ‘CFA’ or ‘Come-From-Away’) to Newfoundland. Thus despite historically being aimed specifically at a rural and predominantly male Newfoundland-native occupational community, the programme has also come to appeal to women, townies (residents of St. John’s) and CFAs.

115 All of the episodes of The Chronicles of Uncle Mose cited in this section were written by Ted Russell, broadcast on CBC Radio Newfoundland, and can be listened to via a website dedicated to the series at http://www.cbc.ca/nl/features/unclemose/moseHome.html

116 This was, and continues to be, a highly controversial topic in Newfoundland, as fishermen are habitually accused of ‘fishing for stamps’ or of being ‘freeloaders’ living off welfare, offending the majority of fishermen who, as Uncle Mose notes, are as hard-working as any Canadians, and entitled to the same benefits under the terms of Confederation.

117 This willingness to accept the notion of the Canadian mosaic and its multiculturalism can partly be attributed to both the protests of these groups against their own subjugation and to the anxieties which accompanied “the more threatening duality of a truly bilingual, bicultural Canada” (Carpenter 1979: 380).

118 Between Ourselves: Christmas Mummering in Newfoundland, MUNFLA/CBC CD 1776, 93-364. Originally broadcast 21^st December 1973.

119 The re-use of tape was considered economical, and it was unfortunate that sections of actuality required by CBC staff in subsequent years were sometimes simply cut out of a master tape and transplanted directly into other radio or television documentaries (Gunn 2007).

120 A report about the archival situation at CBC St. John’s from circa 1966 noted, “There is no centralized, systematic selection and preservation of valuable material. There are quite a few items of more than routine interest around but these are kept in the offices of producers, supervisors etc…” (quoted in Woods 1970). It is important to note here that this problem was systemic - CBC lacked a rationalized programme archiving policy until the establishment of CBC Program Archives in the early 1960s, and the CBC lacked a unified preservation policy from coast to coast for many years after that. It was only in the early 1980s that the CBC made arrangements to store their material in provincial archives outside of the Corporation. For example, an informal ‘storage and retrieval’ agreement was set up between the Beaton Institute (the official cultural heritage archive for Cape Breton University and Cape Breton Island as a whole) and the CBC in Sydney, Nova Scotia (Kipping and Doyle 1981). CBN has deposited material regularly with the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA) since the early 1980s, and the collection of CBC broadcast materials has grown so much over the years that they represent ‘sub-archives’ within MUNFLA (Inkpen 2004). Archival provision in the CBC Regions suffered from a lack of funds, but even if Regions such as Newfoundland had had more funds at their disposal they would not have used them to improve archival services, as other immediate needs were more pressing (Woods 1970).

121 Later Newfoundland contributions to Between Ourselves sought to develop the archival record (O'Neill 1975/1978) by recording eyewitness testimony and occupational narrative from ageing sources within Newfoundland that would otherwise have been lost forever. One such programme was called The St. John’s Holocaust. Broadcast in spring 1975, it documented the most tragic indoor fire in Canadian history, which took place in December 1942, when the Knights of Columbus servicemen’s hostel burned to the ground one Saturday evening during a dance (which was actually being broadcast live on a radio station) in St. John’s. Ninety-nine people were killed in the fire and one died later in hospital, and a judicial report later stated that the fire was likely to have been the result of arson. The production team managed to track down survivors, who overcame reluctance at recalling the traumatic event to be interviewed for the first time. As there was no pre-existing oral record of the event, many of these human-interest stories had never been captured before, and over three hours of interview material was preserved, as well as the one-hour on-air programme (O'Neill 1975/1978: 76). A Between Ourselves documentary from the following year focused on the 1934 St. John’s riots, which broke out partly as a result of government corruption, and can be said to have precipitated the collapse of Responsible Government in a country saddled with a huge war-debt. Three important historical figures that could remember these events were recorded on nearly five hours of tape, which will survive in the archives long after the events have receded from living memory (O'Neill 1975/1978: 77)

122 Browne’s recollection of the aural history programming that preceded the Between Ourselves signals a possible area for future audience research and archival research into CBC ‘provincial input’ – whether ‘networked’ programming, in which the province-as-community present itself to the wider national community, has often consisted of a message (text) simplified down to the barest essentials, for the sake of maximising linguistic and cultural intelligibility. The message is therefore frequently experienced by the members of the community as a misrepresentation (Cohen 1982: 8), compounding the fact radio programme ‘slots’ and production schedules often “allow less contextually nuanced representations of traditional culture” (Spitzer 1992: 88).

123 To give some examples from another province of Canada, the Saskatchewan Archives Board holds copies of Saskatchewan editions of Between Ourselves mostly from the late 1970s, on early education in the province, on homesteading, rodeo cowboys, the depression and prohibition eras, the use of steam threshing in farming, the production of the first weekly newspapers in the prairies, and on the contemporary issues surrounding the creation of a national park in the grasslands region of Saskatchewan.

124 It must be remembered that the Extension Service had only three fieldworkers in 1967 – they lived in the communities in which they worked, sharing their aspirations, and pioneered a process of community education known as participatory development (Williamson 1991).

125 In an interview with the present author, Paul McLeod, who worked as an editor on many of the Fogo films, recounted what Donald Snowden had told him of this controversy:
The story that Don told me is that they went to Memorial University to look at this [filmed] material before they came back to Fogo. There was Lord Taylor, who was the (British) President of the University…Moses Morgan the Vice President, the Dean of Arts Leslie Harris, Snowden - for the University side of things. And then of course the filmmakers – Colin [Low]…and quite a number of very well known NFB filmmakers from that time. They screened the material and Lord Taylor had a fit and basically said ‘You can’t screen that’, and there was great consternation obviously because of their [the University’s] investment. And as Don told me, they went to supper, and another person who was there was Richard Gwyn, the journalist who [in 1968] wrote [biography of Joseph Smallwood] ‘Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary’. And at supper Gwyn said that he didn’t think that Smallwood would be that upset [about the films], especially if his Ministers had an opportunity to respond. It was out of that [idea] that the feedback mechanism came about…It was acceptable to his Lordship and then it went on from there… (McLeod 2007).

126 We might usefully conceptualise Fogo Island in anthropological terms as a liminal community (Delanty 2003: 44) that had grown estranged from the wider society of which it previously represented a constituent unit (due to their complex political and economic relations with another larger island - Newfoundland) and which was not yet reincorporated into that society. The Fogo Process represented a rite of passage, in which a community was ‘brought into being’ through the act of creating a collective image of itself.

127 We can speculate that, due to his chronic agoraphobia (Bell 1999), Schwartz made use of recording technology (‘the mechanical ear’) not merely to ‘internalise’ the outside world, but as an extension or augmentation of his nervous system; a disproportionate number of agoraphobics have weak vestibular function (a part of the auditory system or inner ear) and consequently rely more on visual or tactile than auditory signals.

128 In pre-modern societies, face-to-face communication determined that culture, in terms of the physical settings of social activity, was locally based, and that space and place were contiguous. For most people the sense of the past and of the sense of distant places, as well, as the sense of the spatially delimited and historically continuous communities to which they belonged, were constituted primarily by oral traditions that were produced and handed down in these local contexts. The advent of modernity has increasingly separated space and place by fostering relations between ‘absent’ others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction (Giddens 1990: 18). As we have noted, the increasing availability of mediated symbolic forms has, to some extent, ruptured the decentralized fabric of culture; yet the role of oral traditions has been supplemented, and to some extent reconstituted, rather than eliminated, by media cultural production (see Jordan and Pile 2003: 169).

129 These changes occurred in Northamptonshire as a transition from the village to the town; from a boot and shoe industry based on agriculture and cattle rearing to one based around industry and the development of the market town.

130 As in some of Bourne’s writings, the notion is of a rural people who have become entangled in a “network of economic forces as wide as the nation” (Bourne, quoted in Rose 2001: 28) and whose oral traditions are ill-suited to providing them with orientation. The customs and values of the rural life had been buried by an industrial culture which was itself about to disappear (Seabrook 2005), and the last remnants would be preserved as museum pieces.

131 In seeking to account for the under-achievement of working class pupils in language-based subjects Bernstein distinguished between two forms of speech pattern, which he termed the elaborated code and the restricted code (Bernstein 1966). According to Bernstein, members of the working class are generally limited to the use of restricted codes, whereas members of the middle class use both codes. Restricted codes are a kind of shorthand speech, which is context dependent, and largely limited to dealing with objects, events and relationships familiar to those communicating (see Haralambos and Holborn 2000: 832). According to this line of thought, the meanings conveyed by the code are therefore limited to a particular social group and not readily available to outsiders. In contrast, an elaborate code renders explicit many of the meanings taken for granted in a restricted code, and thus tends towards universalistic meanings and the capacity for abstract thought.

132 With their re-emergence within the orality and literacy debate, the purely conceptual elements of Bernstein’s thought have been recuperated, but their use has tended to support the segregation of orality and literacy into two modes of knowledge. Tannen has observed how the inclusion of context has often led to a preponderance of content (or communication as transmission) over interpersonal involvement (or communication as ritual); of objective, rather than subjective forms of ‘knowing’ (Tannen 1982). Tannen has asserted, however, that the oral-literate divide should be replaced with a continuum (hence we can also refer to a folklore-popular culture continuum), as fieldwork undertaken by Tannen and others has exposed the extent to which “both oral and literate strategies can be seen in spoken discourse”:
Understanding this, let us not think of orality and literacy as an absolute split, and let us not fall into the trap of thinking of literacy, or written discourse, as decontextualized. Finally, the examples presented of conversational style make it clear that it is possible to be both highly oral and highly literate. Thus, let us not be lured into calling some folks oral and others literate (Tannen 1982: 47-48).

133 At some points within the first programme The Changing Environment (broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 20^th December 1967) Seabrook appears to completely misunderstand or misrepresent the interview situation, deriding the customary habit of an interviewee to recount past conversations with her mother as “the old…talking to shadowy or absent companions”:
She has become indifferent to her interlocutors. Their only function is to start conversations in which she supplies her own responses and her dead mother’s of eighty years previously…even the inflections change…they invoke their dead in the slow incantatory inflections of their secret language, and resume ghostly dialogues with those who shared their obsolete idiom (Seabrook, prod. Cleverdon 1967).
In the second programme The Response to the Environment (broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 3^rd January 1968), Seabrook comments on a preceding extract from a group interview (with two women), concealing the key factor of his influence as interlocutor despite the fact that his interjections can clearly be heard (in the extract he introduces the topic of superstitious belief by asking them about a local story):
They speak together, pooling experience, trying to impose meaning and coherence on events that defy their understanding. Fragments of popular science and psychology exist uneasily in their discourse…they return to slumbering Pagan superstitious beliefs… (Seabrook, prod. Cleverdon 1968).
Given Seabrook’s agency here as both interviewer and narrator, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is a further example of the manipulation of evidence to support the theory. Interview ‘data’, like any other form of data, must be interpreted against the background of the context in which it was produced (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 126). Perhaps this is symptomatic of inexperience with the oral history interview - the oral historian would easily accommodate folkloric anecdotes or the vivid recall of childhood experiences rather than viewing them askance as some kind of ‘private language’ or communion with the ghosts of the past. Alternatively such narration might be regarded as symptomatic of inexperience with the conventions of the radio documentary or feature – despite the occasional presence of his audible interjections within the interviews, Seabrook’s narration often seems to refer to sections of actuality as if they are unprompted and unvoiced, private thoughts rather than recollections sourced from recorded interviews. Given the conventional format of this radio documentary, the listener cannot be expected to ‘suspend disbelief’ and their familiarity with the convention of actuality.

134 After an actuality extract in which an old woman relates the harsh poverty of her upbringing during the depression, the narration presumes to comment: “Memory works on the material, exaggerating the suffering and privation…” (ibid.)

135 The Radio Ballads were a series of radio features (broadcast on the BBC Home Service between 1958 and 1964), which were essentially sound portraits of a variety of communities (including railwaymen, fishermen, miners, construction workers, boxers, teenagers, gypsies and Polio sufferers). The programmes are renowned for their ingenious construction, in which recorded extracts of vivid direct speech (actuality) are interweaved with specially written folk songs, music and sound effects.

136 One model of interpretation as an ‘extension of culture’ is the application of ‘Participatory Action Research’ (PAR) – see endnote 16, in Chapter 1. As we have seen, with reference to Challenge for Change and the Fogo Process in the previous chapter, the philosophy of PAR asserts that “the essence of ‘authenticity’ is its cultural meaning; the bottom line must be that host communities determine what is meaningful for them” (Getz 1997).

137 Unfortunately, the resentment felt by MacColl at the assumption of some critics and journalists that Charles Parker was the (main) progenitor of the Radio Ballads soured the working relationship between the men in later years. Instead of attributing the success of the Radio Ballads to their interviewees themselves, or jointly writing a Radio Ballad manifesto (which would have been appropriate given their involvement in Left politics), MacColl and (to a lesser extent) Parker became embroiled in a ‘turf war’ over authorship, which fortunately did not prevent them collaborating on several radio and folk music based projects during the 1960s and 1970s.

138 I do not mean to dismiss the importance of memos and minutes to an understanding of radio programming – on the contrary, such archival evidence can furnish the researcher with an indispensable understanding of the determining effect of (an) institutional organization on cultural production. As Lewis has suggested, to understand the process of mitigation and censorship which radio discourse has often been subject to by BBC management before being broadcast, such institutional evidence must be interpreted in the light of “the importance of tradition and precedent in a bureaucracy and the role of meetings in reproducing them, the invocation of ‘audience’ to justify particular positions…” (Lewis 1991: 15) and so on.

139 These breathing patterns were compared with dramatic pauses and releases during singing, which seem to have been regarded by MacColl as gaps which allow the listener to take in what has been communicated, and thus perhaps even as a space in which the (radio) listener may constitute their own presence. As Ian Campbell, who performed on Singing the Fishing (1960), recalled:
…MacColl had isolated not only obvious elements such as vocabulary and phraseology, but subtler elements such as speech rhythms and vocal patterns. It was not possible to regard the actuality and songs are separate components which could be created independently and then assembled into a finished product; they were overlapped and intertwined…musical rhythm was synchronized with speech rhythm or sound effects, and songs took their tempo and pace from the preceding actuality…The edited actuality was played through a loudspeaker into the control room above, and simultaneously the musical director and her group in the studio. The producer was then able to combine and balance the two channels as he recorded them onto a master tape (quoted in Cox 2008: 102).

140 Other recordings from the production process may yield similarly useful data about the evolution of the programmes. For example, the unedited actuality recordings for The Big Hewer not only reveal aspects of the interview context (and Parker’s techniques as an interviewer) but also hint at other directions the programmes might have taken. For example, an extensive interview with Dr. Dafydd Thomas (held at the South Wales Miners’ Library in Swansea) yielded a great deal of fascinating scientific information on pneumoconiosis, but this was not utilized in the finished programme. Perhaps this was due to the need to sustain the emotional, rather than informational, core of the programme. The physical effects of mining on the human body are instead conveyed through folkloric expressions of how the coal (in its extracted form) represents their sacrifice – “you’re not burning coal, you’re burning blood”; “a tombstone of solid coaldust”.

141 Gould, with the vital assistance of Lorne Tulk and Donald Logan, exploited the possibilities of montage editing and stereo phasing – by using this ‘crosstalk’ technique he reflected the disorienting ‘sensory overload’ of the contemporary soundscape. This was somewhat of an ironic conceit given that Gould chose to focus on lonely and isolated environments in the Canadian North! Nevertheless, the listener can find calm within the ‘storm’ of voices once the listener begins to appreciate the interweaving of voices. As Charles Hardy III has noted,
Once the listener lets go of the monovocal narrative thread, and becomes an observer of the passing ebb and flow of voices and stories, hears the rhythms, and experiences the polyphony of thought, a feeling of great calm and knowing takes over; a retreat into the self that enables a much more dispassionate and perhaps “objective” relationship to the history. Here, then, is how contrapuntal radio may have relevance to the practice and presentation of oral history…as dialogue and joint creation (Hardy III 1999).

142 In defence of Gould, it might be observed that variants on this kind of editing practice had been experimented with by radio producers for many years, with the interposition of extracts of scripted, rather than taped discourse, to simulate interpersonal interaction.

143 Charles Parker, in letter to Anthony Whitby (Controller, Radio 4), 3^rd February 1972. Charles Parker Archive (CPA). MS4000/1/2/6/4.

144 Parker’s observations on the ‘vicious circle’ created when institutional protocols are built upon spurious judgements about public taste and capability are familiar from debates about the amount of violence and sex on television. Longitudinal and empirical research on the influence of television on children has demonstrated that, with the translation of popularity into ratings and the concentration of ‘popular’ content in peak viewing hours, taste is to some extent artificial –

Download 1.05 Mb.

Share with your friends: