Ieuan franklin
The Emancipation of the ‘Common’ Voice
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1.5 The Emancipation of the ‘Common’ VoiceThe early language domain of radio was a formal one, in which scripting determined rigid constraints on topic and on relevance. The qualification for communicative entitlement (or, to use the linguistic term, the attainment of a ‘subject position’) was defined in terms of public position, status, educational privilege and expertise; those in prestigious social positions who possessed both literacy and the experience of operating in formal contexts were predominantly those who scripted and voiced ‘radio discourse’. In this way, early BBC broadcasting mirrored the professional specialization characteristic of literate culture. As Aneurin Bevan protested in 1938, The people are excluded from forming judgement on various matters of public interest on the ground that expert knowledge is required, and that of course the people cannot possess…The debunking of the expert is an important stage in the history of democratic communities because democracy involves the assertion of the common against the special interest (quoted in Rose 2001: 423). Despite their positive depiction of the efforts of the BBC’s first Director of Talks Hilda Matheson to reform BBC talks in favour of greater spontaneity, Scannell and Cardiff ultimately defend the use of scripting by arguing that since all broadcasting was live during the BBC’s early history, talks need to be scripted, otherwise “what they gained in colloquialism and personal idiom they would lose in clarity and succinctness” (Cardiff and Scannell 1991: 163). In their view, the close attention to scripts was motivated by “an anxiety to be understood by the listener”. However, as Russell has noted, the Corporation was also preoccupied with other anxieties: The fact that a lack of recording technology for much of the inter-war period meant that programmes had to go out live was critical in this regard. Fear of unsuitable utterance, whether inappropriate political statement or simple nervous stammering, meant that programmes were tightly and sometimes unsympathetically scripted (Russell 2004). While it can be argued that the existence of a script ensured that the contributors would not over-run their slot in the programmes, there is no doubt that it facilitated the vetting of material and discouraged contributions from those without experience in literary communication. The field of regular broadcasters was thus limited to politicians, writers, professional actors and public figures - those who tended to speak in the approved ‘patrician’ dialect (see Rodger 1982). This underlines the fact that basic access to the media tends to be available only for those who already possess other forms of power or capital, whether economic, political or cultural (Talbot, Atkinson et al. 2003: 9). In fact these people are assigned status by listeners due to their mere appearance on the radio, a phenomenon that Lazarsfield and Merton have referred to as ‘status conferral’.25 Scannell and Cardiff note that the BBC was “as often as not concerned with establishing the credentials of speakers (their right to speak) and with situating them in a particular relationship with their audience, rather than as a covert form of censorship” (op. cit.). However, the Corporation was occasionally directly accused of covert censorship, as Marwick has shown (1981), with the example of the famous incident in March 1934 involving the car worker William Ferrie. A leading employer in the motor industry, Sir Herbert Austin, had inaugurated a series of talks on ‘Modern Industry and National Character’ on 26 February. For the next broadcast it was decided to invite a genuine working man, hence William Ferrie. Instead of reading from his approved script, when Ferrie reached the microphone he said: Last week a big employer of labour, Sir Herbert Austin, gave a talk about the British working man, and I have been invited to say what I think about the British worker. I am a working man myself, but what I wanted to tell you has been so censored and altered and cut up by the BBC that I consider it impossible for me to give a talk without it being a travesty of the British working class. I therefore protest against the censorship of the BBC and will give the talk instead to the press (as reported in The Times, 6 March 1934. See Marwick 1981: 160). A broadcast hastily arranged for the following week was given by an anonymous ‘working-class woman’, and showed all the signs of adjustment and embellishment at the hands of the producer (Marwick 1981). Significantly, the published text of William Ferrie’s speech was prefaced by his rebellion against linguistic stereotyping; “I also refused to drop my ‘aitches’ and to speak as they imagine a worker does” (quoted in Marwick 1981). This raises the issue of regional and working-class accents (the two were often believed to be synonymous), which, while not actually ignored by the BBC, were seen to be comical and lacking in weight and dignity. Scripting often determined a wooden and self-conscious presentation that only served to reinforce the existing prejudices about regional accents; the inclusion of scripted testimony from ordinary people on In Town Tonight (which was first broadcast in 1933) furnished many a comedian with material for parody (Black 1972). The emphasis in this series on celebrities and eccentrics obscured its roots in Regional Outside Broadcasts; for example, Northern Notions, a North Regional programme (produced in Manchester with ‘link-ups’ to Leeds) utilized a greater degree of location recording than In Town Tonight, and broadcast reminiscences that long predated the coining of the term ‘oral history’ (Lazell 1989: 31). Russell argues that it wasn’t until the 1970s that regional voices were heard outside of the Regions or the National “ghettoes” of comedy and human interest: The mimicry of upper-class English accents that became an ever-greater feature of radio comedy from the 1950s was one liberating factor here, but it was the loosening of attitudes towards speech within society in general coupled with the flow of talent unleashed by local radio that finally forced the BBC to appreciate the benefit of speaking in mixed tongues (Russell 2004: 135). The liberation of dialect from these ‘ghettoes’ of comedy and human interest was a slow and gradual process of contestation, the history of which is difficult to reconstruct. Scannell and Cardiff have provided a great service in chronicling several aspects of this history in their A Social History of British Broadcasting (1991). Of particular interest to this thesis is their discussion of the BBC’s treatment of unemployment in the early to middle 1930s, with the development of new forms of social reportage by the BBC’s Talks Department, under the leadership of Hilda Matheson and Charles Siepmann (see Appendix B). Unfortunately, the BBC soon backed away from this type of participatory and controversial programming in the run-up to the charter renewal in 1935, with the disbanding of the liberal Matheson/Siepmann Talks Department. The talks on unemployment had represented an outlet for working class opinion – in their absence it appeared that the BBC’s monopoly of broadcasting, instead of providing democratic access to payers of the licence fee, determined that there was a monopoly in communicative entitlement. This in turn reinforced the belief amongst many people – especially the working classes – that they were unable to express their own opinions to those in positions of authority. Hilda Matheson, who had initiated many of these experiments in Talks ‘reportage’, had an understanding of how this situation was reproduced by the effect of the lack of ‘feedback’ in broadcasting. In a letter dating from 1929 to H. G. Wells she encouraged him to broadcast his views on peace but urged caution as to the controversial potential of any religious, industrial or political statements: The British public, our odd assortment of listeners – have of course all the national prejudices, even more I think when a loudspeaker talks to them in their sitting-rooms than when they read something in print; perhaps it is a feeling of impotence, as they can’t answer back or interrupt. It would for instance, strike them as unfair if one were to attack such conceptions as God, King or America… (quoted in Avery 2006: 96-97). As Matheson implies, the print medium creates distance and allows critical and psychological space, whereas the spoken word is associated with the ability to directly challenge (and is, by consequence, always potentially polemic). As Avery has observed, Hilda Matheson, like Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, was acutely conscious of radio’s unidirectional organisation, and pioneered the informal mode of address in scripted talks (which remains her most important and lasting contribution to broadcasting practice) as a means of obviating it (Avery 2006: 97). This ultimately set Matheson on a ‘collision course’ with Reith: [Reith’s] desire for national unity involved an effort to structure broadcasting as a vehicle for what the Romantic writers Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge respectively have called ‘alloquium’ as opposed to ‘colloquium’ and ‘oneversazione’ as opposed to ‘conversazion’ – in other words, talking to rather than with others (Avery 2006: 37). As Moores has noted, citing Scannell and Cardiff’s history of the interwar BBC: The key to that change [in BBC talks] was a realisation that existing forms of public communication – such as the sermon, the lecture or the stage performance – were wholly inappropriate as models for the routine fare of broadcasting because of the space which separates producers from consumers in mediated interaction, and because of the private nature of reception contexts (Moores 2000: 19). During the transition period from one dominant medium to another, the content of the new medium (radio broadcasting) is beholden to older forms of ‘public speech’ (theatre, gramophone records, newspapers, pamphlets). This is partly due to the new medium seeking legitimacy and “artistic respectability by the transfer of cultural objects that already had prestige” (Williams 1976: 95). As all broadcasts were scripted during the BBC’s early history, they were burdened to excess with what Enzensberger derided about mainstream broadcasting: “authoritarian characteristics, the characteristics of the monologue…inherited from older methods of production” (Enzensberger 1970/1976: 49). The legacy of these characteristics can be seen in the fact that the BBC’s experimentation with informal discourse for many years involved not the inclusion of extempore speech but the simulation of such speech through the mediation of scripting. Even when the BBC invited ‘real’ people into the studio or sought to transmit the voices of the working classes, initial interviews had to be transcribed by secretaries, edited by producers and editorial managers and then given back to the original subjects to reproduce for live or pre-recorded broadcast usually with wooden and self-conscious presentation. Any departures from the agreed scripts would be faded out and the subversive miscreant discreetly shown the door of Broadcasting House (Crook 1999). It was as though future interviewees were to be given an opportunity to learn what kind of testimony was expected of them before they ever had a chance of voicing it for themselves (see Bell and Van Leeuwen 1994: 38). Even when the BBC made use of the technological possibilities of portable disc recording, it was used mainly as a research tool, in a manner akin to print journalism. If ‘actual’ people in the ‘real’ world were to be interviewed, it was to make the scripts more ‘authentic’ and certainly not because their ‘real’ voices were to be heard on the air (Silver 1988: 186). Several innovative radio series were created using variations on this basic technique; for example, Bridson’s Harry Hopeful, cited earlier, and Francis Dillon’s Country Magazine (1941-1953, see Chapter sections 2.0, 2.2 and 5.2). Unfortunately, however, the methods with which the BBC pursued “a commitment to overcoming the dehumanizing effects of institutional discourse” (Scannell 1985: 10) often produced dehumanizing effects. The arrival of the tape-recorder (during the early 1950s) not only permitted the pre-recording of ‘talks’ but also made possible the widespread recording of actuality, and put to an end convoluted attempts to simulate informal speech - people could now be heard speaking their own words in their own environment. Those who spoke in thick dialect, or who had difficulties in reading from a script or getting accustomed to the microphone or studio environment, were ‘discovered’ as a new source of broadcast material (Horstmann 1991: 18). This was due to the facility of tape editing, which could remove syntactical ‘errors’ from actuality. There have often been (and arguably always will be) difficult ethical considerations attached to the editing of speech, as we will see in Chapter 4. For now we can emphasize the importance of ‘giving voice’ to non-professionals not just in terms of gestures toward participatory democracy, but also in terms of the voice as a register of indirect meaning. We have already noted that the print medium creates a form of decontextualized communication, whereas in oral communication “the ethos, the personal charisma or social role of the speaker” (Sreberny-Mohammadi 2005: 30-1) is key to interpreting the text. Therefore radio’s status as an oral/aural medium depends on the extent to which broadcasting, unlike writing and reading, is bound by the specificity and immediacy of the dialogic broadcast ‘event’. BBC Features Producer W. Farquharson Small explained this in 1949 in the context of the Light Programme series Meet the People: I firmly believe that there is a virtue, and a great virtue, in having the ordinary citizen tell his [sic] own story in his own voice…not the voice of a professional reader…for there is oftentimes…a passage of real eloquence…This is what E. A. [Archie] Harding referred to in a recent Schools broadcast dealing with the Spoken Word, when he said…that the one subject on which we can all be truly eloquent on occasions is ourselves. ‘You can call this kind of eloquence, if you like, private eloquence,’ he said; ‘and the extraordinary and new thing that Radio has done in the realms of the spoken words has been to make some private eloquence public’ (Farquharson Small and Charlton 1949: 20). Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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