Broadcasting as Social Contact

1.6 Broadcasting as Social Contact

What is often neglected in the discussion of communications and media scholars is the ways in which radio, in overcoming or negating spatial (and social) distances, can channel, mediate and shape interpersonal interaction (or ‘private eloquence’), in addition to effecting its mere approximation or reproduction.²⁶ As storytelling lies at the heart of the social bond, an awareness of this potential is essential in understanding how radio can serve to bind actual communities; “how radio functions to fabricate both mediate and immediate surrogate communities” (Larson 1995-1996: 89). A valuable early text from which we can conceptualise the ability of the medium of radio to create social contact and forge a sense of community is Professor Charles Madge’s “Broadcasting as Social Contact”, published in the BBC Quarterly in 1953. Departing from the then prevalent criticism of the perceived standardising or corrupting effect of mass media, his article sets out to explore the positive contribution that broadcasting makes to civilisation:

1.7 Broadcasting and Mass Observation

We can immediately make a connection here between Madge’s essay and an originating impulse of Mass Observation, the survey movement Madge founded in the late 1930s with Tom Harrison and Humphrey Jennings. Its original premise was that, in a highly stratified and class-based society such as Britain, the various demographic groups remained a mystery to each other. This was considered to be potentially catastrophic for not only the disenfranchised ‘man in the street’ but also the administrative elite, who, like the BBC, were “aware of a rising political consciousness across the wider demographics of women and the working class – [but] remained unable to communicative effectively with…a people they could not comprehend” (Rennie 2007b). Mass Observation had been launched at the very time when the experimental (Matheson/Siepmann) ‘phase’ of the BBC Talks Department had been curtailed:

It is indicative of the growing crisis at the heart of public life in Britain that at the same time as the BBC’s attempted inquiry into the state of the nation failed, two young graduates were launching an independent fact-finding movement called Mass Observation. The immediate impulse behind it was the abdication crisis and the realization, as Tom Jeffery has argued, was that “ordinary people were being misled by a complacent press and indifferent government, both deeply ignorant of the needs of working people…” Against this people needed to know the facts about international affairs, government policies and about themselves; only if people were given the facts could democracy work (Cardiff and Scannell 1991: 70-71).
This ‘gulf’ was increasingly recognized, and the Ministry of Information did enlist the services of Mass Observation to survey the morale of the masses, when the aerial bombardment of built-up urban areas came to be regarded as inevitable (Collins 2004: 129). Studies were commissioned into the attitudes of the population to food shortages, clothes rationing and to preparations for air raids. In entering into this ‘partnership’ with the state, however, Mass Observation became a somewhat contradictory entity, as it had originally and primarily been intended to be responsible to the communities from whom it had obtained its information. Who was in ultimate possession of the facts that could make democracy work? Mass Observation became a kind of ‘double agent’, which operated according to principles of collective authorship that would later become intrinsic to oral history and community publishing (volunteers and respondents speaking or writing accounts of their own lives in their own words) whilst providing the administrative elite with useful intelligence-gathering, in the form of access to the ‘hearts and minds’ and everyday lives of the working class.


Above: A woodcut by Eric Frazer from the Radio Times, June 1939, to mark a programme on Mass Observation
The BBC can be said to have had an elective affinity with Mass Observation during this period, in its capacity for gathering information with a view to promoting social change. Mass Observation influenced broadcasting by offering a valid alternative to top-down, didactic forms of documentary representation.²⁸ The BBC’s talks on unemployment (see Appendix B), for example, had broken new ground in this way:
Thus the BBC began inviting the unemployed to document their lived experiences and the material conditions in which they lived by baring their souls before the microphone and thus the nation. The technique devised was one which emphasised public participation; increasingly, unemployment talks sought to adopt informal modes of address in an attempt to establish a more intimate relationship between the BBC and its listening public (Bailey 2007: 473).
These talks demonstrate that the BBC had already begun to experiment with extempore forms of speech before the Mass Observation ‘movement’ was founded. Nevertheless, as Briggs has noted, Mass Observation had a key influence on BBC staff searching for new techniques in ‘the broadcasting of the spoken word’ at the end of the 1930s, frustrated by the conservative ‘turn’ of the Talks Department approach with its renewed emphasis on the formal script and the single speaker:
Could not the BBC learn from Mass Observation? Did it have to rely on an elite? Could not more use be made of speakers in the regions, speakers who could not naturally use the standard BBC English with which the Talk was associated? Was it not necessary to break with ‘intellectualism’, with ‘the Platonism of the founders’? (Briggs 1965: 149).
To return to Madge’s essay, we can conclude that, according to Madge, broadcasting occasionally demonstrated its potential to serve the same intended social function that Mass Observation was designed to fulfil, a kind of ‘cultural reinforcement mechanism’ to generate dynamic density. Madge began his discussion by considering the way in which the BBC’s Regional structure created a ‘knowable community’ (Williams 1973) through the decentralized networking of intimate, ‘regionally sourced’ voices:
The metropolis, as we know, tends to dominate the field of cultural innovation, and the provinces are correspondingly impoverished and relatively unproductive. The regional programmes not only help the provinces to keep their end up, but they interpret the provinces to each other and to the metropolitan audience. In view of the great differences between the regions in occupational structure and general character, this may be important. The listener in the Home Counties, relatively cosy and suburbanised, is brought in contact with the Lancashire mill town. The Midland engineering worker hears about life on a Devon farm (Madge 1953: 73).
What Madge identifies here is essentially broadcasting’s ability, through the use of talks, features and ingenious scheduling and networking, to reflect the serendipitous interaction of everyday life, the unplanned encounter. This helps to create a ‘knowable community’, and to allow people to catch what Marcel Mauss termed “the living aspect…the fleeting moment when the society and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation as regards others” (quoted in Gregory 1977: 93). People from different regions or different cultures organize reality in different ways; their vocabulary or dialect may, for instance, “cut the rainbow spectrum of colours at different points from ourselves” (Mennell 1972: 161).²⁹

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