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- 1.4 The Professionalization of Speaking
1.3 The Space-Bias of RadioHarold Innis’ assertion that the sustained use of space-binding media may facilitate the growth of empires (in the form of monopolies of knowledge) is reflected in an early essay on broadcasting entitled ‘The Social Destiny of Radio’. Written in 1924, it predicted that the development of radio broadcasting in the UK and the US will create linguistic as well as imperialistic unification, making English the universal language, and binding together the British Empire. The author chides those who foresaw the demise of the British Empire in the following terms: [T]hey forget that time and not distance is the controlling factor in communication, that this is the age of electricity and not of the frigate and the horse…Communication means organisation, and radio, particularly in its broadcasting aspect, will prove the most potent unifying influence that has appeared since the railway and the telegraph were invented. It must knit the dominions of Great Britain more closely together than ever…The telegraph and telephone have been called ‘space annihilators’ in their day…We never really knew what the term meant until the time came when thousands listened at the same time to the voice broadcast through the ether just as if they were all in the same room (Kaempffert 1924; quoted in Boddy 2004). John Reith, the founder and first Director-General of the BBC, believed the national space-bias of BBC broadcasting fostered democracy because it respected “no traditional demarcation of social or economic class in its ability to unite an entire population” (Avery 2006: 18). However, as Scannell and Cardiff have observed, Reith’s view of broadcasting as “the integrator of democracy” was “designed as much to persuade the authorities of the integrity of the BBC as a national institution as to serve the interests of democracy” (Cardiff and Scannell 1987: 159). This contradiction, concealed within Reith’s philosophy of broadcasting as ‘cultural uplift’, can be likened to the contradiction which underlies (the propagation of) Standard English (thus casting light on the early BBC’s language use) – Standard English aspires to be and is portrayed as a national language belonging to all classes, and yet in many respects it belongs to an elite, as a class dialect (Fairclough 1989). For Reith democracy could be perpetuated through the sonic dissemination of national and imperial standards. In bringing “rural areas…into direct contact with…Empire institutions, the clock which beats the time over the Houses of Parliament, in the centre of the Empire, is heard echoing in the lowliest cottage in the land” (quoted in Avery 2006: 18-19). In relaying the chimes of Big Ben as an aural keynote of the schedules, the BBC was ostensibly continuing an ancient, time-biased tradition whereby to hear the sound of church bells defines membership of a local community – each radio receiver thus became a bell, a node in the BBC network.19 However, this relaying actually confirmed the space-bias of the Corporation, in marking the extension of metropolitan authority and its supplanting of local culture. For example, when the British Broadcasting Company’s original local and metropolitan network was centralized (and therefore dissolved) through ‘simultaneous broadcasting’ (using Post Office telephone trunk routes), ceremonial openings were held in provincial towns and cities where the mayor’s speech would be followed by the live relay of the chimes of Big Ben (Lewis and Booth 1989: 55). The use of Big Ben’s chimes in the BBC’s Empire Service allowed listeners overseas to ‘perform’ British identity through an obsession with punctuality (Robertson 2008), marked off a territory of belonging, and helped to create “the feeling that colonial society is a living and palpitating reality” (Fanon, quoted in Baucom 2001). As a policy of improving communication over long distances was relentlessly pursued within Western nations, culture and social organisation underwent radical transformations. In collapsing distance, radio elided local or regional identity, and made possible the unification and standardisation of national communities (Spinelli 2000). Supra-territorial communications created new classes, professions and oligopolies, as well as new structures of thought based on speed and space (Carey 1988: 156). The profession of radio broadcaster, announcer or newsreader was precisely such a new profession, whose existence was a function of long-distance radio communication. 1.4 The Professionalization of SpeakingIn this section we will examine the BBC’s early attitudes to the organization of its own language ‘domain’ as a manifestation of the normative use and conception of radio as a space-binding medium. It is a widely accepted view in sociolinguistic research that the language of radio (or of mass media in general) constitutes a domain (Leitner 1983: 55). Speech varies according to domains, which, according to Fishman (1972) are associated with widespread sociocultural norms and expectations, and lead to congruent social and linguistic behaviour. For example, the type of language used (or regarded as permissible) in the ‘private business’ domain would differ significantly from that used in the ‘nursery school’ domain (Ray 2001: 4). Radio broadcasting can be regarded as a domain, especially as the rules that govern speech and communicative entitlement within broadcasting structures tend to privilege one linguistic style over another. This process is often revealed at the interface between visual and verbal realms, with the visual realms (literature, the use of scripts etc.) favouring formal or standardised linguistic style. In this Chapter I will argue that the BBC’s domain has historically been characterised by a bias towards literacy, especially in the initial decades of the Corporation’s history, when it exercised a rigorous control over programming through compulsory scripting. With the establishment of the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927 as a public corporation under the auspices of the state, the work of all BBC staff was closely supervised through the vetting of all scripts and the standardisation of pronunciation, which, significantly, also excluded the working classes (who constituted the majority of its audience) from participation in broadcasting.20 This fostered a bias within the BBC toward bureaucracy and literacy. As a result, certain forms of address became embodied in the BBC as institution. Specifically, particular attitudes or theories about the use of language on radio were translated into practice, especially in the use of Received Pronunciation (RP) by newscasters and announcers. RP, a term which has often been used interchangeably with ‘BBC English’, is a prestige accent with an almost exclusive social basis in the public-school educated upper-middle and upper classes, a demographic disproportionately employed by the BBC. Until the second half of the 20th century, RP was considered the most prestigious standard of speech in the UK - the emblematic standard for the nation - and its heyday was to coincide with the early decades of the BBC and the intentionally unifying power of the National Programme (Mugglestone 2003: 272). In 1926 the BBC formed the Advisory Committee on Spoken English (ACSE), which included amongst others Robert Bridges, George Bernard Shaw and Logan Pearsall Smith, and the phoneticians Lloyd James (Honorary Secretary and later also Linguistic Advisor to the BBC), Daniel Jones, Henry Cecil Wyld and Harold Orton (Leitner 1983: 61). The Committee therefore included several eminent experts on linguistics (Harold Orton, who headed the Survey of English Dialect, which will be discussed in Chapter 5.2). Clearly the Corporation took its responsibilities seriously; yet the BBC’s decision to employ only speakers of RP as announcers never seems to have been up for discussion by the ACSE: [RP] was used in practically all public domains, including education, law and the Church, and it was the natural accent for reading texts written in Standard English. As radio was a means by which many could be addressed by a few simultaneously, and announcing was defined as a public function – which, in the early days, consisted in reading Standard English texts – it was not surprising that RP was to extend its functions to this new form of communication (Leitner 1983: 61). The BBC’s use of language was bound up not just with its use of scripting, but with social class, with the Corporation’s policy of centralisation, and with the unidirectional structure of broadcasting. The degree of local or regional linguistic charcteristics permissible in national BBC broadcasting was minimal, at least until the Second World War, when J. B. Priestley delivered his hugely popular Postscripts in his Yorkshire accent (for more on wartime and post-war changes in broadcasting, see Chapter 2.0). During the 1930s the Regional stations were thought very much second-rate by those wedded to the metropolitan, managerial culture of the National Programme, but because they had a duty to express ‘local’ concerns, the Regions were more reflective of working-class culture than London, and more adventurous in their programme-making (McKibbin 1998: 465): [The work of the BBC North Region] more faithfully attempted to bring working-class culture and voice to the microphone. Here at the edge of the BBC’s empire there was less distance between producers and listeners. If it was the business of the BBC regions ‘to express the everyday life of the region, its daily work, its past, its attitude of mind, and above all the quality of the people’, as Grace Wyndham Goldie wrote in 1939, then what was broadcast in the North was a truer reflection of that audience, less the paternalistic mediation of the London-based National Programme (Lewis and Booth 1989: 64). Innovative examples of linguistic diversity and audience paricipation emerged in the BBC Regions, which often acted as a bulwark against the centralized control of the BBC, and which produced remarkable programming with meagre funding (offering an example to the under-funded modern day UK community radio sector, as we will see in Chapter 5). For example, the voices of Frank Nicholls and Wilfred Pickles and their participants in their respective (prototypical) ‘quiz and chat’ North Region programmes, Harry Hopeful (broadcast in the North Region 1935-1938) and Have a Go! (produced in Leeds and broadcast from 1946-1967), spoke both for and to regional audiences (see Cardiff and Scannell 1991). In their subsequent adoption as nationally broadcast formats (see Chapter 2.0 for discussion of Billy Welcome, the national successor to Harry Hopeful), they also helped to incorporate and constitute the regions more firmly as part of the nation, an especially important service during wartime (Ward 2004). As Mugglestone has observed, Reversing the traditional binarisms of ‘them’ and ‘us’ which so often seemed to dominate in these early days of the BBC, broadcasting in this sense did indeed provide some positive validation of that ‘vocal tapestry of great beauty and incalculable value’ which Pickles, among others, continued to defend against the linguistic hegemony of what had come to be the expected accent of the national BBC (Mugglestone 2003: 272). The early BBC’s setting of a standard for spoken language can be directly linked to its ‘script rule’, which made the scripting of programmes compulsory until after the Second World War (Bridson 1971: 52-3). The scripting of radio talk can, to some extent, be regarded as a logical step in the aim to create a bridge between sender and receiver when they are separated from each other. In this sense radio talk represents ‘secondary orality’; oral language is ‘applied’ in a (space-binding) situation where the meaning is in the text, rather than the context (Ong 1988: 136; Crisell 1994: 55). However, the BBC’s use of RP and scripting often determined a ‘performance of reading’ (Kivy 2006) that eliminated the speakers’ individual vocal phrasings or ‘grain of voice’ (Barthes 1977). The spatializing imperative of print enhanced the ability of the BBC, which had a “global and imperial attitude towards English” (Fennell 2001), to impose a specific national and corporate style of speech on marginal speakers of dialect. In doing so it also reinforced the intransigent structures of broadcasting, which determined that large numbers were spoken to (and for) through broadcasting but precluded from discussion.21 I have linked the BBC’s propagation of Received Pronunciation to a bias towards space and literacy for several specific reasons. It was widely accepted, although never empirically proven, that RP was more intelligible than any other accent and hence was the only appropriate accent for transmission across spatial and social distances (Leitner 1983: 61). As I noted earlier, the BBC’s adherence to RP and scripting was also symptomatic of a bureaucratic print world-view. Bureaucracy, as defined by sociologist Max Weber, is constituted by rationalised elements which owe their existence to the cognitive and normative systems of the print world view – hierarchy, objectivity, efficiency, specialization, written rules and records, and centralization to name a few (Mollison 1997). The BBC’s use of language exemplified the practice of codification – the attainment of minimal variation in form through the establishment of the prescribed language code in a written form. This helps to explain the actions of the Corporation’s administrators, which led to the retention of the vast majority of written scripts, while a small fraction of the early programmes themselves were preserved (allowing that this became possible only with the development of reliable sound recording technology). This bias towards the retention of scripts and not sound recordings was not an attitude shared by BBC archivists or producers. Yet the hegemony of scripting as a compulsory practice was reinforced by the BBC’s habitual reliance on lectures, speeches, and literary and dramatic adaptations: [W]hat is most crippling for radio is that it persists in wearing the millstone of its literary role…[The BBC’s Broadcasting House] studios are still heavy with the stench of printers’ ink; most of its broadcasts are still weighed down by a style evolved for the eye and mind of the individual reader, never intended to be spoken aloud (Clery 1964). The use of scripting and RP determined that, unlike in the vernacular oral tradition, there was little tolerance for spontaneous or emotive speech, ambiguity or persuasive rhetoric. This was, of course, a very necessary restriction when applied to the reporting of news, but more widely was seen as a solution to the BBC’s requirement to be impartial throughout the schedules.22 The BBC’s obsession with control over scripting and impartiality ensured the dominance of the modalities of the expert and the authoritative, and that the social distance between those entitled to broadcast and those entitled to listen was extremely wide. As Bourdieu observed of the lack of political representation of the working classes: “At best, they are at the mercy of their own spokesmen, whose role is to provide them with the means of repossessing their own experience” (1984). This was unfortunate, as one school of thought that influenced the BBC’s policy in the 1920s and 1930s to provide a standard of ‘correct’ undifferentiated speech was, in fact, quite egalitarian in its aims. The intentions of the BBC to perform the pedagogical role of improving the socially and regionally marked accents of its working class listeners through the use of RP derived from a longstanding idea that in eroding dialect variations in speech class distinctions could also be eroded. The BBC’s position here was supported by a view held by “sections of the middle class who were aware of social inequality and felt that accent was one of the prime factors which stabilized and perpetuated class barriers and put the lower classes at a disadvantage” (Leitner 1983: 62). RP as a class dialect was based on written norms – to be socially and economically upwardly mobile, it has historically been necessary to possess a high level of literacy and a good command of a form of the spoken language which is close to literate norms (Kerswill 2001). Yet could the circulation of RP through the aural medium of broadcasting ever hope to function directly as a means of affecting speech patterns or raising standards of literacy across the British Isles? The impact of broadcasting, in the words of Professor Stanley Ellis of the Leeds University Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies, was “to introduce an entirely alien form of pronunciation right into the homes of the people” (Clayre 1973: 78). What it did provide for some dialect speakers was a means of orientation – for example, a Scottish minister interviewed in 1973 for the BBC programme The Impact of Broadcasting noted the following about meeting people coming from remote areas of Scotland to the metropolis: I find, working down in the South, that the average Scot now coming to London has been so influenced by the mass media that he has much less difficulty in adjustment than he had before (quoted in Clayre 1973: 79). The intention of some within the BBC to promote conformity in language use through radio broadcasting (in the form of RP) ultimately failed.23 Attitudes towards a standard variety of speech are entirely relative and subject to change – standard varieties have changed in the past and will continue to do so, just like all living languages. This is what William Labov has referred to as the ‘uniformitarian principle’ (Bauer 1994: 2-7) of language. As McKibbin has observed of the early decades of the BBC (1998: 511), radio broadcasting itself was a speech community, “but membership of it was passive rather than active.”24 Although its influence was powerful, it involved no linguistic exchange, due to the unidirectional nature of radio broadcasting and the consequent passivity of listeners. The BBC overestimated the unifying power of the National Programme and the susceptibility of its listeners – changes to language are slow and gradual, and face-to-face contact is a prerequisite for linguistic diffusion to take place. Therefore despite the BBC’s careful attention to language use, the Corporation had, to some extent, succumbed to the non-reciprocal, present-minded and didactic mentality induced by the space-bias of radio broadcasting. Especially as radio was considered to be an ephemeral medium, the consideration of cumulative change over time was neglected. However, we must also note that, from the late 1920s onwards, the ACSE endeavoured to seek the public’s views, and showed itself willing, as an organization, to take some of the criticisms on board and to revise earlier decisions. This promoted the idea of a ‘listening BBC’ which regarded its decisions on pronunciation as largely provisional until proper feedback from an ever-larger circle of committee members, advisers, and the public, was received (Schwyter 2008). Why do recordings of old radio broadcasts sound so stilted when listened to today, even those that aren’t restricted to the use of RP? This is a difficult question to answer, as there are many factors to take into account, which are outside the remit of this discussion. For example, if this question was to be fully addressed changing technologies of (and attitudes to) audio ‘fidelity’ should be taken into account. For now we can be argue that, especially before the Second World War, much of the talk that was heard on BBC radio was marked by awkwardness and ‘communicative unease’. An initially authoritarian or paternal mode of address began to give way to a “more populist and democratic manner of style” (Scannell 1991: 10; Moores 2000: 19). This is evident in the following excerpt from a BBC-endorsed manual published in 1948 entitled ‘Public Speaking and Broadcasting’: There is a greater gulf between spoken English and written English than most of us imagine. The moment we take up pen or pencil we become slaves to certain customs and conventions of style that never worry us when we are speaking…The main fault of too many radio talks is that to the listener they are obviously being read; they have been written in the literary idiom; the fountain of speech has been petrified, and even the most experienced broadcaster would be hard pressed to bring it to life again at the microphone (Wright 1948: 20). As a result the BBC learned to fabricate a sense of spontaneity or ‘liveness’ in their programming. An industrial relations specialist named John Hilton, for example, introduced deliberate hesitations and errors into his 1930s broadcasts in order to sound more natural (Bell and Van Leeuwen 1994: 35): It is not far from the truth to say that the more easy and natural a speaker sounds over the radio the more artifice he has had to introduce into the preparation and reading of his script (Wright 1948: 13). These techniques were put to use in the development of a new mode of governmentality, and the establishment of a new profession – the media professional. Speakers like Hilton became professional broadcasters; by 1939 Hilton had abandoned his specialism to run a kind of agony column of the air, dispensing advice and championing the cause of the ‘ordinary man’ against confidence tricksters. As Bell and Van Leeuwen observe, he had “moved from a position of addressing the ‘ordinary men’ from above to one of speaking for them, of being their representative” (op. cit.). It is arguable that this was also symptomatic of a broader shift from a literacy-based model of ideal communication to one based on oral discourse (Kacandes 2001: 21). Whereas signs of forethought, a feature associated with the written, were once considered desirable in speech as in writing, we are now suspicious of or amused by what sounds rehearsed, and we instead value spontaneity. As Fairclough has observed, those experts and professionals (doctors, lawyers, politicians, academics and so on) who once constituted broadcasting’s limited repertoire of ‘accredited’ voices have now learned to adapt their ‘repertoire’ to the need for a more conversational form of address in the domain of radio (Fairclough 1995: 139; Hendy 2004: 177). The notion of ‘media skills’ or the ‘media professional’ suggest that people develop their communicative style and expectations according to the unspoken rules of the media domain(s) of the time, which influences their approach to both media encounters and interpersonal encounters (Avery and McCain 1986: 130). The medium of communication influences the individual’s capacity for ‘impression management’ – the process whereby one seeks, consciously or unconsciously, to shape one’s self-presentation and control the impressions that other people form of them (Goffman 1969). Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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