Ieuan franklin

1.8 Knowable Communities

In 1955 the BBC ordered an internal review conducted by Frank Gillard, the former war correspondent who would later play the decisive role in establishing the network of BBC Local Radio (in 1967). In the report, Gillard stated that a healthy national culture is based on a healthy regional culture, and that broadcasting should nourish that culture ‘from the roots up’. He also identified the dual and complementary responsibilities of Regional broadcasting – to serve the Regions themselves; and to reflect the Regions in a national context (quoted in Reynolds 1995: 143). Madge had suggested two years before the internal review that the national broadcasting of locally originated programming had several social implications for audiences:

Programmes on local or regional topics will, to listeners outside that locality, convey two kinds of moral, if they convey any at all. The first moral is that people are much the same everywhere: this is perhaps the moral one might be tempted to draw from the Wilfred Pickles programmes…the second and contradictory moral […] is that there are very real differences between people in different communities – differences which call for at least a little effort on the listener’s part if he is to stretch his own mind to take them in. Here the best documentary efforts of the B.B.C., like those of the British [documentary] film industry, have been outstanding, and have shown that the real coalminer, for instance, is always more interesting than the literature about him. The great thing is that the material can, if well handled, produce a very strong impression that the account being given is honest and therefore a reasonable basis for forming personal judgements (Madge 1953).
The first thing to be said here is that Madge has identified and articulated very simply the value of reflecting ‘real people’ and ‘real lives’ without merely representing them through the proxy of reportage or narrative accounts (the real coalminer is always more interesting than the literature about him). The incorporation of ‘real life stories’ into BBC schedules, eventually (bearing in mind the Corporation’s paternal and pedagogical reputation) enabled the Corporation to present itself as an institution which people can engage with “without having to be institutionally convinced that it is to their advantage to do so” (Illich 1971: 55).

Secondly, these two ‘morals’ illustrate the way in which the concept of community implies simultaneously both similarity and difference; that the members of a group of people (a) have something in common with each other, which (b) distinguishes them in a significant way from the members of other putative groups (Cohen 1985: 12). As every social role is reciprocal to the social roles of others, it is as important “to understand, to decipher, and to anticipate their conduct as it is to manage one’s own” (Horton and Wohl 1956/1986: 194), and the function of radio broadcasting is therefore to provide and exemplify patterns of conduct:

Thus the spectator is instructed variously in the behaviours of the opposite sex, of people of higher and lower status, of people in particular occupations and professions. In a quantitative sense, by reason of the sheer volume of such instruction, this may be the most important aspect of the para-social experience, if only because each person’s roles are relatively few, while those of the others in his social worlds are very numerous (Horton and Wohl 1956/1986: 194-5).
Madge, with his notion of the listener ‘stretching his mind’ to accommodate difference, alludes to that element of community which embodies this ‘relational’ sense of discrimination - namely its boundary. Cohen has observed how, as a threshold, the boundary “encapsulates the identity of the community and, like the identity of an individual, is called into being by the exigencies of social interaction”; “boundaries are marked because communities interact in some way or other with entities from which they are, or wish to be, distinguished” (Cohen, op. cit.).³⁰
There was, however, a major obstruction to the BBC’s attempts to create a knowable community through its radio programming in this fashion, which inhibited the democratization of radio broadcasting. As we have seen, the early BBC was sedimented with a layer of class and elite interests, which belied its claims to act as a vehicle for democratic public discourse. The working class lacked access to the BBC’s official modes of representation, and so they were typically represented in the proxy form of narrative accounts not of their own choosing. In this manner public service broadcasting recreates representational democracy, which “like the classic realist text, is premised on an implicitly mimetic theory of representation as correspondence with the real” (Julien and Mercer 1998: 3).

It has been widely observed that the notion of community, like that of representational democracy, has always been problematic because it its necessarily or inevitably exclusionary (Hall 1999). Communities are emergent entities which are products of structurally conditioned social practices, and which possess capacities for “integration, self-awareness and boundary maintenance” (Ruane and Todd 1996: 9, emphasis added). A national community, in particular, is an abstract collectivity, which is too vast to be comprehended by the individual (Chaney 1986: 249). Therefore a sense of belonging has to be continually engendered by opportunities for identification as the nation’s identity is manufactured and reconstructed by public service broadcasting or by the heritage sector (see Chapter 5). This determines that the concept of public service broadcasting must itself be constantly redefined, its “aims and objectives continuously updated and made relevant to a changing social and economic environment” (McLoone 1996: 2). The participation of licence-paying citizens in broadcasting can therefore be regarded as necessary and vital in shaping the way in which public service broadcasting defines, relates to and serves local, regional or national communities.

Communications media are vitally important for the construction and maintenance of social contact between peoples in differentiated layers of society (Chaney 1986; Alexander and Jacobs 1998). In accordance with Durkheim’s concept of ‘dynamic density’, Alexander and Jacobs have argued that what they term as the “realm of symbolic communication” is a vital function of the public sphere in civil society. They have also asserted that the maintenance of this symbolic realm, given that the size of modern societies means that contiguous and interpersonal interaction with everyone is impossible, depends on the media and its ritualistic function (see Thumin: 268). This is an underlying theme of this thesis, which contends that the use of oral history in radio broadcasting can be identified with the model of ‘communication as ritual’ (Carey 1988, see Chapter sections 3.1 and 5.6), and continues to represent, the most effective, appropriate and meaningful means of creating interpersonal interaction through the electronic media. In the following chapter, we will test this assertion, and apply some of the foregoing ideas about the importance of Regional broadcasting by examining case studies of the radio feature output of three BBC Regions (North, West and Northern Ireland) during the post-war era, paying close attention to the creation of knowable communities, and the redrawing of community boundaries.
Notes