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This is a blank page Chapter 2: From Paternalism to Participation? The Post-War BBC Regions2.0 Radio Research MethodologyThis chapter will develop some of the themes of the previous chapter, which demonstrated that struggles over access (to the means of communication) are inextricably linked with struggles around standardization (of language). The three case studies in this chapter will focus on the uses of actuality (speech and other sounds recorded with portable equipment) in radio features made in the post-war BBC Regions, in which key radio producers broke through the ‘script rule’ to give voice to the disenfranchised or under-represented in society. As a prelude to this I will briefly discuss some issues surrounding the methodology which I employed in researching these case studies, which examine the work of the Regional radio feature innovators Brandon Acton Bond (BBC West Region), Denis Mitchell (BBC North Region) and Sam Hanna Bell (BBC Northern Ireland). Firstly, there is the question of how to research and access programmes from this period. The BBC sound archives are reputed for their considerable size and richness, and have been characterized by an enlightened archival policy and a rare continuity of management. Gaining access to BBC radio programmes, however, still presents a challenge to the researcher, despite the access provided to bona fide researchers for no charge via British Library facilities. The real challenge is not so much in gaining access to the required materials, but in gaining access to catalogued information in order to learn of their existence and to discern their potential importance and relevance. The BBC’s own catalogues of archived radio material exist in the form of a series of hardback volumes and microfiche files within the British Library. However, the entries in these catalogues are far from being comprehensive or up-to-date and they provide only a modicum of information (for example, a programme title, a brief explanatory subtitle, production and transmission dates, and production and script credits), so the researcher is typically obliged to search in editions of the Radio Times or The Listener for further information. The BBC’s comprehensive in-house ‘Infax’ database of catalogued data was briefly piloted for public web-based access (as an ‘experimental prototype trial’) but ran into problems related to confidentiality issues, and at the current time no plans appear to exist for its return. This is unfortunate, as it provided an invaluable resource for researchers, containing as it did details of well over 900,000 BBC programmes dating back to 1938. Without ‘Infax’, there is currently no official public access to catalogued information about BBC radio programmes outside of the British Library, apart from recent material originated since the BBC began to produce a webpage for every single programme broadcast on their networks (in 2007). In the context of relatively recent broadcasts, the British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) provides an invaluable service by operating TRILT, the Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching (http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/trilt/), which contains listings and metadata for over 300 TV and radio channels with data from 1995 onwards, and which is accessible to academic institutions that have BUFVC membership. The difficulty of collecting information about older radio features inevitably induces the researcher to utilize what would be termed in film studies an ‘auteur theory’ approach, in which the radio producer or feature maker can be seen as having built up an artistically and thematically coherent body of work across a (BBC) career. Thus the recent resurgence of interest in the work of Charles Parker can also be attributed to Parker’s personal vision, as the Charles Parker Archive encapsulates a life-work in collecting and sharing vernacular culture across various media, chiefly in the form of actuality-based radio documentaries and multimedia theatre. In this Chapter a portrait of British Regional broadcasting in the immediate post-war era will be built up by examining the work of similarly-minded ‘radio auteurs’. Although they made very different kinds of radio features, Denis Mitchell and Sam Hanna Bell both developed an abiding interest in the experiences of hidden or submerged communities and belief systems in the areas in which they lived and worked, whether this meant shipyard workers or unemployed vagrants, members of an urban faith healing church or rural adherents to fairy folklore. However, the question inevitably arises - can someone who is (most) concerned to give voice to the marginalized in society and minimise their own voice/presence be called an ‘auteur’? We will discuss the complexities of the notion of authorship in this context in Chapter 4. For now we can note that, faced with the difficulties of collecting information, the researcher must often adopt the auteur approach, and to this end searching the BBC catalogue index (held within the British Library) for the names of producers proves the most simple and effective method of locating programmes. Likewise, when requesting files in advance of an appointment at the BBC Written Archives at Caversham it may prove useful to narrow the research focus by first studying the file(s) pertaining to an individual producer, which means that the researcher can then process a more ‘manageable’ amount of pertinent archival material. Writers like David Thomson, George Ewart Evans, W. R. Rodgers, Louis MacNeice and Sam Hanna Bell who were employed by the BBC to produce radio features were, on the whole, better known to the wider British public as poets, novelists or folklorists, and for the researcher any autobiographical material from their published works may offer some primary evidence about their radio careers. For example, Bell’s book ‘Erin’s Orange Lily’ includes a chapter which recounts the making of the BBC series Fairy Faith (Bell 1956) (see pp. 117-119), and in George Ewart Evans’ book ‘Spoken History’ (Evans 1987) there is a chapter about radio in which Evans draws upon private correspondence to pay tribute to Charles Parker, and briefly discuss several radio programmes he made with David Thomson during the mid to late 1950s. Once programmes of interest have been identified and a listening appointment made (within a listening ‘booth’ at the British Library) there is then the issue of the actual audition of the radio material. Playback of material on older formats (such as acetate discs or magnetic tape) requires a degree of specialist skill in the use of analogue audio technology, and thus the researcher must ‘listen in’ to the item in one sitting as it is played remotely by a member of staff. For some BBC archive material listening copies are available on CD, and in this instance the researcher is free to pause, rewind or fast-forward the recording at his or her leisure within the listening booth. The radio programmes discussed in this thesis make use of actuality or audience participation in a variety of ways, and I have been interested in charting these uses in as much detail as possible. Of particular interest has been the way in which the listener may gain an understanding of the nature of the relationships that have ‘grown up’ between the radio producer and the people that they meet and record. When listening to a programme I constantly sought to assess whether I was gaining this kind of understanding, and, if so, whether it was relayed via actuality or narration; via the programme participants or the broadcaster/producer. In Chapter 4, for example, I will discuss how the use of narration can enhance the listener’s sense of co-presence (in a programme entitled Bare Stones of Aran); or proscribe and undermine the listener’s identification with the interviewees (in a series of two programmes entitled The Five Generations). To conduct any close analysis of the radio producer’s deployment of narration or actuality, the researcher must have the ability to stop and scan the recording, akin to the person transcribing an oral history interview. However, the researcher must constantly remind him or herself that even verbatim transcriptions fail to convey qualities of popular speech, such as accent, rhythm, tone and volume that carry implicit meaning. At a basic level this means that the mood of a radio programme is often determined not by what is said, but by how it is said, and it is certainly a challenge to capture this in the form of research notes and then to reconstitute the experience in the form of academic writing. Steven Sheehan highlights some of these issues in a review of the documentary Coming from India broadcast by the National Public Radio station NJN in 1998: …Coming from India’s listeners can note the confidence, sense of triumph, and even ironic good humor in one interviewee’s description of the campaign she led against anti-Indian hate groups. A transcribed account of the same story might leave the reader with the false impression that she saw herself as a victim, not a conqueror, of racism. Moreover, the aural quality of Coming from India allows the listener to better understand the nature of the relationship between the researchers and the people they meet. One hears pride and magnanimity in the voice of an Indian-American woman as she and the interviewer discuss the food she has prepared for her visit. We get a sense that she interprets the interaction as an important encounter between an Indian-American host and a representative from the wider [New Jersey] community. By creating an audio documentary, the producers have retained layers of meaning that would have been lost in a traditional written presentation (Sheehan 2001). Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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