Ieuan franklin

Scrapbooks, which ran between 1933 and 1974, and which combined entertainment, nostalgia and social history. Each programme dealt with a year in history, and combined scripted narration with popular song, BBC archive recordings and the eyewitness recollection of events from actual participants. Where the events concerned were too distant in time to be recollected in person or through the use of archive, actuality was ‘reconstructed’. For example, in 1935 Leslie Bailey, the creator of Scrapbooks took advantage of Marconi’s visit to London to record him reading from a prepared script which relayed the details of the famous transatlantic wireless transmission from Poldhu, Cornwall to St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1901. Bailey later noted; “the interpretation of much history would be shaken to its roots…if we could hear its voices….in radio we have more than ghosts; we have voices, deathless links with the beginning of this century and beyond…” (Bailey 1966: 9, 55). The arrival of the tape recorder gave a fresh impetus and new direction to the series, which had always been carefully scripted. Bailey commented about one respondent who told him the story of tragic Beal na mBlath;
I swear that no script-writer on earth could have spun the words like the old soldier, and because he could talk ad lib at his own hearth instead of being dragged over to London to a frightening BBC studio he gave a remarkable idiomatic account of a piece of history (Bailey 1966).

176 See http://www.b200fm.com/.

177 From the Chair’s Report of the BCfm Ltd. AGM on 20^th November 2008: “BCfm Ltd. needs to learn the lessons from previous partnership working with the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, whose change of priorities and move to London was a lost opportunity to develop some exciting projects and the production of audio for teaching, research and archive purposes.”

178 Hooper-Grenhill has argued that “visual culture within the museum is a technology of power” which can be used to further democratic possibilities, but also to uphold exclusionary values (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 162).

179 Such interest in and collaboration with Commonwealth FM led to a number of commercial uses of the studio. For example, when the BBC established their Norman Beaton Fellowship - a fellowship named after a Guyanese actor, which aims to broaden the range of actors available to Radio Drama producers across the UK by encouraging applicants from non-traditional training backgrounds - they held the auditions at Commonwealth FM. It wasn’t just the BBC that sought to learn from the model of radio initiated at Commonwealth FM. The station manager of Independent Local Radio station Star 107.2 FM also participated in the project, despite the fact that Star FM is a music-only station. In considering the reason for this interest, we should first reassess any assumptions we might have that a community radio station operates on a smaller scale than a commercial station. The staff of Star FM at the time featured three presenters, the station manager and about five people working on marketing, whereas there were over 200 people involved in the first RSL produced by Commonwealth FM, which broadcast 24 hours a day for three weeks in 5 different languages (Chinese, Somali, Arabic, Punjabi, Bengali and English).

180 The year-round expense involved in operating a studio perhaps led to the museum viewing Commonwealth FM from a different perspective in the subsequent years, as something of a ‘white elephant’. Whereas the station had formerly been sustained as an integral, visible and self-sustaining component of the educative work of the museum, the studio was now increasingly being hired out to different organisations. Suddenly station staff had to compete for studio time and space with partner organisations, rather than having the studio available as a training centre, which was the purpose it was built for. At other times the studio was left unused, which led museum staff to view it as a liability, as a part of the gallery that wasn’t making money (Gibbons and Romaine 2008).

181 This illustrates one of the difficulties that community and alternative media advocates are often faced with: (negotiation with) the “private hunting grounds of administrative domains” (Mattelart and Piemme 1984: 220). Mattelart and Piemme have argued that one of the undeniable effects of new technologies has been to reshuffle these compartmentalizations, “to the extent that no overall policy of communication can be envisaged today without proceeding from a decompartmentalization of the various state departments” (ibid.). Furthermore, they argue that those movements fighting for alternative forms of media or communication must themselves undergo a process of decompartmentalization. Therefore unions should destroy the barriers between certain professional sectors on the one hand, and between struggles in manufacturing and in everyday life on the other (Mattelart and Piemme, ibid.) By the terms of this logic, it is significant that community radio activists are increasingly concerned with how radio practitioners can become community development workers and vice-versa, as there is too much compartmentalization between the two related movements.

182 Similarly, recordings of the Fisheries Broadcast (see Chapter 4) are preserved in the Folklore and Language Archive at Memorial University (MUNFLA) as oral history, as even the prosaic events of the fisheries communities today are tomorrow’s history.

183 During the 1970s and 1980s there was a high degree of crossover between community arts and community media advocacy and activism. Many of those who campaigned for community radio were also or became involved in community publishing (through organizations such as the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers) or oral history ventures such as Centerprise. During the early 1980s, for example, a ‘tape collective’ was set up in Lewisham, South London – a group of people who recorded oral histories on cassette for circulation - and out of this creative enterprise a community radio station was born (McTernan 2009). Convergence with community history activism would therefore represent for community radio a return to its roots, as well as a fruitful way forward.

184 In her recent study of community radio in Ireland (Day 2009: 76-78), Day discusses some of the issues surrounding the employment of paid, professional, community development workers in community radio stations in Ireland. The Community Employment Scheme has supplied many of these community development workers, who are taken off the live register for the unemployed and required to work for 20 hours a week on schemes deemed to be of benefit to the community. As Day notes, there are many benefits to this – community development workers have expertise in sourcing and applying for funding, and they have an understanding that the project of community broadcasting is a process that needs to develop gradually, and which may not have easily quantifiable indicators or outcomes. One possible negative aspect of the employment of community development workers is that, although they work with volunteers and in open and accountable ways, “their agendas are more definitively set by outside – usually state – agencies” (Day 2009: 77). Paradoxically, many community groups that enter partnership arrangements with state bodies thus often risk being ‘co-opted on the state’s terms’, or at least marginalized due to the compartmentalization of state departments. Nevertheless, the sector recently (April 2009) received some good news in these recessionary times – seven community radio stations have been awarded core funding from the Community Services Programme (of the Department of Community, Rural, and Gaeltacht affairs), which provides for a manager plus three (full-time equivalent) staff. The Programme aims to alleviate disadvantage by funding not-for-profit community organisations that provide local employment and a practical service to certain disadvantaged members of the community. Such a success story reinforces the argument that community radio stations should see and define themselves (and thus be seen and funded) as community development organisations and not just radio stations.

185 In discussing the relationship between local documentary initiatives in film and radio, we can note the recent loss of John Gray, a passionate advocate of the use of actuality in radio broadcasting, whose career spanned the GPO Film Unit, BBC radio and television, and involvement in community broadcasting in Scotland (see Lewis 2006).

186 Connecting Histories has been involved with an oral history project run by the Afro-Caribbean Millennium Centre, which operates the Franz Fanon Research Unit and the Birmingham community radio station New Style. As part of the Three Continents One History Project, a regular oral history and discussion series was broadcast on New Style, with episodes including From Sun Up till Sun Down; Life on the Plantation and A Bird’s Eye View of the Caribbean; Art, Folklore and Music commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. The intention, again like Commonwealth FM, was to throw light on shared histories and legacies - in this case to “re-stitch the threads which have connected Birmingham with global patterns of trade, criss-crossing three continents”^ - creating a suitable archive for educational and community purposes in the process. In addition, New Style recently completed a unique broadcasting project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, called Timeline, which featured the oral histories of Caribbean people in Birmingham from the 1950s until the present day. See http://www.acmccentre.com/nsroralhistoryproject.shtml

187 This represents the New Labour solution to economic self-sufficiency and the management of social deviancy. Community-oriented initiatives aim to get people “to pull together in blighted communities around an agenda prescribed by the government, often with a strong dose of commentary on the virtues of community and moral obligation” (Ash, Massey et al. 2000).

188 Current practitioners within a community radio sector that is “hobbled by poverty”, to quote the author of the official report on the initial pilot project (Everitt, quoted in Buckley 2009), often lack the time and expertise necessary to successfully apply for grant funding from programmes offered by a variety Government Departments, and here the Community Media Association proves invaluable in offering information, advice and support. Paradoxically, stations must provide plenty of evidence of how they have achieved social gain whilst simultaneously portraying their communities as vulnerable and weak, needing to be nurtured, supported, and ‘developed’. It must be remembered that community radio cannot create communities where none exist (Lewis and Booth 1989: 187). Like community development, community radio is often expected to bring communities into being, or to work miracles by giving communities the ‘kiss of life’:
Indeed, communities are often latent and it is hard work to materialize them, to make them manifest. Communities nowadays are sleeping beauties that need a kiss to be awakened (Van Der Veen 2003: 581).

189 In most cases, after the caller has been ‘screened’ as permissible, the host allows the caller to put their point across and begin a discussion. The enables the host to give the impression of relinquishing control of the conversational agenda; yet the host can exploit the privilege of ‘first reply’ in establishing a critical discourse and quickly recover any lost momentum. Hierarchy established through ‘turn-taking’ is reinforced by technology; specifically, by differentials in the electro-acoustic characteristics of studio/telephonic sound:
The unequal partnership of the ‘talk show’ is evident from the voices alone, where the host, close to the mike and in full control of who speaks for how long, is in ‘conversation’ with a telephone voice (a boosted low-level signal with restricted bandwidth). Because the two signals are unequal (the host’s being the dominant one), compression techniques ensure that the higher one can always cancel the weaker. The usual turn-taking of normal conversation is distorted; the ‘two-way flow’ of this form of radio turns out to have powerful one-way gates! (Truax 2001: 43)

190 Thus in the nineteenth-century the movement of people and goods and the movement of information were seen as essentially identical processes, and were both described by the common noun ‘communication’ (Carey 1988: 5).

191 For example, an Innisian perspective might focus on the way in which the operation of community media organisations according to principles of self-management can be said to highlight the way in which communication and organisation may produce each other. For example, the sharing of rituals can be said to enact organizational culture as it operates from the residual of past communication practices (Clegg, Hardy et al. 1999). In terms of the orality and literacy issues, experienced community radio practitioners should foster dialogue by sharing their institutional memory with volunteers who are not prepared to read lengthy station manuals (Wallace 2008). An Innisian perspective may shed light on the way in which the production of participatory community radio content by volunteers is a process that can support, promote and reproduce a participatory, volunteer-driven organisational and ownership structure, and vice-versa.

192 The slender collection of material from these Marxist theorists pertaining to radio, along with Lorenzo Milam’s anarchic community radio manual “Sex and Broadcasting” (1974) and the Challenge for Change journal Access, were at least the key, if not the only, texts which community radio practitioners could use to educate themselves in the ‘organisational philosophy’ of running of a non-profit, non-commercial station during the 1960s and 1970s (Davis 1975). Enzensberger’s socialist theory of the media inspired Tetsuo Kogawa (who translated some of his work) and other micro-radio pioneers, before the growth of the current ‘Low Power FM’ advocacy movement. Despite recent work on the anti-capitalist ‘creative commons’ of the Internet and new media there is arguably still a relative lack of academic material on the egalitarian and reciprocal character of community radio.

193 This ‘paternalist’ tendency, some have argued, is probably impossible to fully obviate, even in community development:
However much the rhetoric changes to participation, participatory research, community involvement and the like, at the end of the day there is still an outsider seeking to change things…who the outsider is may change but the relation is the same. A stronger person wants to change things for a person who is weaker. From this paternal trap there is no complete escape (Chambers 1983: 141).

194 Community media possesses many of the characteristics of so-called ‘new media’ – it relies on community affiliations and the circulation of communication through volunteer effort (Rennie 2007a), and presents a platform for ‘the presentation of self in everyday life’ (Goffman 1969). Community media is, however, very different from user-generated content and social networking media, even though it is fuelled by similar factors. Community media organisations not only provide the means for the production and distribution of this content; they also allow for participation in the running and management of the organisation itself. In doing so they are socially responsible in that they not only attempt to cater for, but also seek to incorporate the participation of, groups not otherwise adequately represented.

195 In a review in the Spectator of a Radio 4 programme entitled The Rise of the Common Voice, Michael Vestey offered a defence of the early BBC’s lack of ‘lay voices’:
For the fledgling radio service to survive, it needed to convince the governments of the time that broadcasting was necessary. Many powerful people couldn’t see the point of it or saw it as a threat. When so-called ordinary people did begin appearing they were interviewed in private, their words were scripted and they then read their scripts in the studio. Although this practice continued through the Fifties I suspect it was more to do with a fear that people who weren’t used to talking in public would make poor radio (Vestey 1997).
This explanation highlights the ideological nature of the BBC’s inculcation of broadcasting as a ‘public function’ incompatible with convivial speech. The BBC thus naturalized a partial and biased approach to the language domain of radio. The BBC’s audience was not permitted to determine what constituted ‘poor radio’ in the first instance – Reith’s model of public service broadcasting vehemently rejected the prioritisation of populist fare. Vestey is, however, right to acknowledge the pressure that the BBC was under to persuade the British ruling elite of the benefits of broadcasting. As Lemahieu has observed,
Sanctioned by government and supported by influential elements within the entertainment industry, the BBC embodied a paternalistic ideal of public service which promised to restore power to the cultivated elites who, Reith maintained, would gladly broadcast their talent and wisdom to a grateful nation. In the 1920s, broadcast technology remained in its infancy, replete with the problems and annoyances which other mass media experienced in their early years. To attain a position of cultural importance in a society shaped by the complicated crosscurrents of traditional and social class, the BBC needed to transform wireless into a respectable medium of cultural exchange (LeMahieu 1988: 179).

196 This can be regarded as pertaining to an ‘eavesdropping’ model of radio, which retains fidelity to the particularities of oral speech, but which may be regarded as ethically problematic. We discussed the idea of an ‘eavesdropping’ model of radio in Chapter 2.1.

197 Imbert Orchard, “Report on the Living Memory Project”, unpublished CBC report, December 1962, Imbert Orchard Papers, Provincial Archives of British Columbia. See (Duffy and Mitchell 1979: 79).