Ieuan franklin
Radio Features in the Post-War Climate
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2.1 Radio Features in the Post-War ClimateThere is a significant discrepancy in the historical coverage of both BBC Regional broadcasting and BBC radio features in scholarly and popular work. The experimental and socially conscious radio documentaries pioneered by producers such as D. G. (Geoffrey) Bridson and Olive Shapley in the BBC North Region during the 1930s have rightly received attention in a number of popular and academic sources (Bridson 1971; Cardiff and Scannell 1991; Shapley 1996; Scannell 1996b; Crook 1999; Street 2002), but there is little evidence of equivalent studies of post-war regional programming or features, except where attention is devoted to a particular body of work by a particular key figure that is publicly accessible, for example, the Radio Ballads, and Charles Parker’s role in their creation (Howkins 2000; Hendy 2004; Long 2004; Street 2004; Linstead 2006; Cox 2008; Harker 2009). This can, to some extent, be attributed to the appeal of the ‘golden age’ of radio broadcasting for both scholarly and popular sources. There is greater coverage of the decades during which BBC radio was the main provider of broadcast entertainment and information, before the BBC’s television service revealed its potential (demonstrated by the huge audience figures for the coverage of the Queen’s Coronation 1953) and before commercial television (ITV began in 1955) was initiated, both of which seriously eroded radio’s large audience base (there was a peak of 12 million exclusively radio licences in 1950). This was the beginning of a cycle whereby radio’s status in the media ecology would be demoted, as it was regarded as “too invisible, too transitory, too functional, too faceless, too passé to have a measurable impact on public life – yet simultaneously too ‘mass’ in appeal to be treated, alongside film or theatre, as art” (Hendy 2007: 141). The Second World War had a huge impact on the BBC, which developed new forms of programming, and cemented its relationship with its British listeners in a number of ways during this period. Firstly, broadcast news reporting as we know it came about during the Second World War, as a result of the fieldwork of BBC correspondents like Godfrey Talbot, Frank Gillard, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and Richard Dimbleby, who brought their microphones to the front line and described military events at the very moment they were occurring (Stroud 1969: 22). In this way, formal news-bulletins were augmented and complemented by informal, gripping and vivid eyewitness accounts. For example, Vaughan-Thomas broadcast the following from a Lancaster Bomber during a raid on Berlin, at 19,000 feet and wearing an oxygen mask: As we near the city it seems to be ringed by a wall of searchlights. There are hundreds of them in cones and clusters…a wall of light with very few breaks, and behind that wall the city itself – a pool of fiercer light, glowing red and green and blue. Flak from the guns is coming up in a steady stream. There are millions of flares hanging in the sky; the ground seems to be eaten up by fire (Stroud 1969: 30). The BBC developed a war reporting style in which correspondents and engineers moved with the armed forces, relaying both actuality of military engagements and interviews with troops, for the benefit of civilian listeners. Recording technology was, of course, vital to these War Reports; recording equipment was carried in a 30-hundredweight truck and, chiefly due to the advocacy of Frank Gillard, correspondents were soon able to carry portable ‘midget’ disc-cutting machines where it was dangerous for the truck to move forward. As a result of these War Reports, the Second World War was the first war in history that people could hear – with the blazing and crashing of guns and bombs – raging thousands of miles away. During the War, the BBC produced an additional five hours of programming a day for the North American Service, and as part of this programming, imaginative propaganda was produced by poets and writers to encourage America to enter the War. For example, Desmond Hawkins and Louis MacNeice produced a series called The Stones Cry Out, which documented the devastating effect of the Blitz on London’s famous buildings. Other programming often used dramatic reconstructions to give the audience a fuller sense of events that were impossible to safely document in sound – for example, an air raid (Hawkins 1999). The BBC also drew upon its pre-war experience in regional broadcasting, producing a variety of programmes in which ‘ordinary folk’ - both civilians and army personnel - were brought to the microphone from factories, military camps, or the bombed-out streets. D. G. Bridson’s Billy Welcome and We Speak for Ourselves, and Francis Dillon’s Country Magazine, heralded a new impetus to bring the actual workers and farmers contributing to the war effort onto the airwaves in order to be celebrated as everyday heroes (see Black 1972: 128-135). With the coming of the Second World War, the working class soon became a major centre of attention for the BBC’s morale and propaganda activities on the home front. Having consolidated his standing as a pioneer of programmes and features by and about the working class with a nationally broadcast series launched in 1940 called We Speak for Ourselves, D. G. Bridson was asked to apply his talents to propaganda features about the worker. In 1941 he initiated the series Billy Welcome, which was an adaptation of his earlier Harry Hopeful series with Wilfred Pickles replacing Frank Nicholls. Billy Welcome saw Pickles and producers travel around Britain, recording for assembled audiences in factory canteens (Scannell 1996b) but also consolidating the BBC’s record in the coverage of traditional ways of life by documenting unchanging rural occupations remote from the spectre of war. Bridson shared a belief with many other BBC colleagues that this was necessary, as “people who spent their days in a factory were entitled to forget the place when they came home for the evening”, to look back to scenes they had known before the war, and forward to when they might visit them again (Bridson 1971: 78). This was pastoral broadcasting in both senses of the word. A Sheffield woman testified, for example, that Romany’s “talks of the country gave us the sensation of security and peace” (quoted in Longmate 1971) when she was a schoolgirl during wartime (‘Romany’ was G. Bramwell Evans, a North Region storyteller). W. Farquharson Small recalled the production of several of the rural Billy Welcome programmes: [Wilfred Pickles and I] travelled Galloway and Carrick together and out of all the dozens of men and women we met on farms, in pubs, in little workshops, on quayside and roadside we chose a clogmaker, a stonedyker, a fisherman, a potato-farmer, a weaver, an artist and a blacksmith. I made it my first aim to catch the most telling phrases from our conversations with intended ‘subjects’ – and to weave them into the script in their true idiom (Farquharson Small and Charlton 1949: 14). Scannell and Cardiff have asserted that the ‘cult of the ordinary’ reached its peak in the series Meet the People that W. Farquharson Small went on to produce in 1948 after working on Billy Welcome during the war (Cardiff and Scannell 1987: 167). This was a Light Programme31 series that aimed to humanize the industrial crisis by devoting each episode to the life and work of a single person. Some listeners clearly felt that some of these people could not maintain their interest throughout an entire programme: ‘For our health’s sake, let us stop painting a false and dreary picture of our nation as if it were entirely composed of industrial workers, salesmen and “clippies”’, wrote one correspondent, begging the BBC to portray heroic figures from British History such as Drake and Florence Nightingale (Cardiff and Scannell 1987: 167). Cardiff and Scannell attribute such impatience with the series to the “demise of the wartime spirit of collective endeavour which had seemed, temporarily, to transcend class divisions” (ibid.).32 In doing so, however, they may have underestimated the determining role of ‘tired’ production techniques that sought to achieve the impossible task of ‘bringing the world to the studio’. The problem was still one of the artificial conviviality that scripting and the studio environment created; the ‘synthetic personalisation’ pioneered by the BBC for what were often propagandist purposes was often incompatible with a search for the everyman (or woman): A mode of life characterized by austerity, modesty, constructed by hard work and built on a small scale does not lend itself to propagation through marketing (Illich 1981). It is difficult to imagine in today’s media climate that there was a strong feeling within the BBC during this period that the listener would not accept the new ‘convention’ of the ‘actuality-narrator’, of people discussing their own lives and experiences. Farquharson Small had found himself “violently at odds” with most of his colleagues in the Features Department at the time, who had wanted to used repertory actors to voice all the testimony of the ‘subjects’, rather than solely for flash-back scenes of youth and other dramatised episodes (Farquharson Small and Charlton 1949: 19). Despite the precedent set by the War Reports, institutional protocols, outdated production techniques and cumbersome disc-recording technology inhibited the impetus to reveal social realities in human terms rather than through economic data or expert opinion. A report on radio features in the BBC Yearbook for 1948 paid tribute to the ‘outreach work’ that had been conducted to find speakers for Meet the People – but the problem was that the contributions as scripted lacked the immediacy and earthiness of the ‘raw material’ on which they were based: In the current economic crisis the stubborn realities are often to be found not in neatly packaged analyses by economic experts but in the often incoherent, muddled, but deeply held points of view expounded, shouted down, drunk over in shop and pit, Union Lodge, club, and pub. That is where the producers of these programmes went for their raw material. It is always difficult for a BBC producer to convince a worker that he is not an agent of the Government or of the boss, or something equally remote and probably hostile (BBC 1948: 78-79). Regional broadcasting had begun after a wartime hiatus on 29th July 1945, and the BBC management attempted, following the extreme concentration of broadcasting in London during the war years, “both to encourage regional development and to reflect life under then new Labour government by recruiting staff from a broader range of social backgrounds than hitherto” (McMahon 1999: 43). The ending of the war, which had itself forced the state into new kinds of collective mobilization, was followed by “the first social democratic government with a large and unimpeachable mandate for radical social change” (Chaney 1986: 247). The BBC’s reform of its own structures was therefore imperative as it enabled the Corporation to begin to reflect the widespread social and political challenges facing the country.33 One consequence of the BBC’s exalted status as a provider of news and current affairs during wartime was that the subsequent response to bulletins referencing local people and places in the Regions during the post-war era was overwhelming. It is believed that this led to a new bond between broadcaster and listener, which had not existed since the original local ‘metropolitan’ network of the 1920s (Beech 1968: 5), and which anticipated the localness of BBC Local Radio and of UK community radio. Such a trend directly contradicts the established view that the BBC’s Regional Service never recovered its pre-war vitality after its suspension during the Second World War (Scannell 1996a: 18-19).34 The post-war era, particularly the mid to late 1950s, also represented an auspicious time for the actuality-led radio feature, and other programming that featured ‘real people’. In a column for The Listener, published 10th January 1957, Michael Swan noted that, although it had not been long since BBC radio had begun to exploit the possibilities of the portable tape recorder on any scale, instances of the use of actuality could be charted across the schedule: ‘I am a tape-recorder’ might be the cry of scores of BBC men as they make their sallies into private homes, West Indian rum-parlours, Yarmouth trawlers… (Swan 1957). However, we must be careful not to fall into the trap of technological determinism in overstating the importance of the portable tape recorder in the democratization of radio. The increasing relative power of the working class in Britain during the post-war period had determined that certain concessions had to be made to non-standard dialects in national broadcasting (Fairclough 1989: 73). In 1944, Kenneth Adam (then the BBC’s Director of Publicity) could boast that the audience for “Pickles, for Middleton, for Blake, for Wightman” were numbered in faithful millions, “gathered as much for the way they speak as for what they say”, and that none of these men had an “Oxford vowel” between them (Adam 1944: 33). In the late 1940s Pickles’ demotic series Have a Go! received the largest ever regular audience for any British radio or TV programme - 54 percent of the population (Tunstall 1983). BBC radio’s need to provide entertainment for the mass audience and to retain a share of the working-class audience attracted to television “required a style of literary and dramatic diction and of performance which was closer to the idiom of ordinary speech”: It could not support a style of diction which was too refined or socially remote. The caricatures of demotic speech which had satisfied and amused the mandarin consumers of belle-lettres and socially exclusive theatre plays were not acceptable to the mass of listeners, most of whom spoke various forms of the demotic (Rodger 1982: 39). The broadcasting of actuality was given a real boost by the BBC’s employment of poets and writers to record and collect oral material on acetate discs, who then sought to re-create this material in new artistic forms. With the expansion of the BBC’s radio output and the establishment of the Third Programme in 1946, new avenues were created for producers, writers, and skilled engineers to experiment with speech programming, under the guidance of Laurence Gilliam’s Features Department. W. R. (‘Bertie’) Rodgers, who joined the BBC at this time, pioneered a new kind of actuality-based feature using disc recordings, which was widely imitated and became known as the Radio Portrait. These Radio Portraits are commonly acknowledged as the definitive oral histories of vital Irish literary figures, such as Joyce, Synge, Moore and Yeats, built up from anecdotes and reminiscences of those people who knew them: The fitful memory, the tongue-tip remark, the halts and flows and deflections of talk are what we tried to capture and record, being certain that this was work which belonged to radio more than to any other medium (Rodgers, quoted in Gilliam 1950: 206). Rodgers developed a technique of editing telediphoned scripts (an early dictation/transcription system which made use of wax cylinders). The actuality extracts as recorded were then identified, isolated, and edited together in the same sequence. Although each of the finished programmes was a ‘mosaic’ of memories, the original recordings had been lengthy and unguided interviews:35 Since it was clearly undesirable to sieve, and thereby arbitrarily to shape, their piecemeal memories beforehand, these were recorded at length and at random. In this way a great snowball of haphazard desultory talk was amassed, and in the light of after-study it was strictly edited, drastically cut, re-formed and linked together. Sentences, and even single words, were lifted into new contexts, fragmentary collections were dovetailed, viewpoints that were distractingly far removed were married in argument or agreement, people who in life had neither met nor known one another were made to meet on disc, were juxtaposed by accord or by contrast (Rodgers 1952: 138). Rodgers felt, like most contemporary oral historians, that the interview encounter itself should not be overly shaped or ‘sculpted’, and that the editor of recorded biographical material should ideally also have been the collector of it – he or she knows their interviewees intimately, and is best placed to judge how much ‘weight’ to put on aspects of their testimony. With the use of recorded actuality, the producer’s work often tended to combine what had previously been a separately administered ‘chain’ of roles or tasks – that of interviewer, sound engineer or recordist, writer, editor and narrator - and he or she was increasingly attuned to the creative possibilities that lay in the intersection of orality (the recordings) and literacy (the transcripts). With the reawakening of interest in regional culture after the attenuated centralisation of the war, it was felt that regional broadcasting was the vehicle for the preservation and diffusion of “local ways of speech [and] their day-to-day life and growth” (Strong 1945: 24). Although ‘roving’ producers like W. R. Rodgers and David Thomson were collecting Celtic folklore and oral tradition for the Features Department in London, the post-war era also heralded something of a renaissance in actuality-led radio features or documentaries made in and specifically for the Regions. Frequently these Regional features were subsequently broadcast on the national wavelengths of the Home Service or Light Programme. The ‘networking’ of Regional features was actively pursued for reasons of finance and prestige, as Regional Programme Heads held a proportion of the network’s programme allowance to spend at their discretion on programming (Beech 1968: 5).36 The average BBC Region effectively functioned like a two-way mirror37 – it reflected the character of the region back to itself in order to create an ‘imagined community’ whilst at other times providing cross-reflections of the life of one part of the nation to the others. In this chapter I will draw upon archival research to examine how field-recorded actuality was incorporated by pioneering producers into Regional radio broadcasting in order to broadcast the voices of those layers of society excluded from access to public speech or membership of the public sphere in their respective regions, and in British society as a whole. By doing so these producers gave voice to the communities of the ‘peripheral’ working class and the ‘invisible’ or submerged underclass, to farmers, shipbuilders, miners and craftsmen and (in the work of Denis Mitchell) to the homeless, the unemployed, itinerants, and prisoners. These kinds of people had never been given an opportunity to freely express themselves in a public medium such as radio, and this had the potential to expand the listener’s awareness of the diversity of social groupings that actually constituted existing local, region and national ‘communities’. In many ways such broadcasting was continually redrawing the symbolic boundaries of these communities, and it thus represented the ‘cutting edge’ of public service broadcasting (see Chapter 1.8). Through its social ‘surveillance’ such work represented ‘the art of the welfare state’ (Norman Swallow, quoted in Corner 1991: 56).
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