Chapter 4: Editing and Editorial Control

Chapter 4: Editing and Editorial Control

4.0 The ‘Weaving Medium’

I cannot deny the past to which my self is wed

The woven figure cannot undo its thread (Louis MacNeice, quoted in Parker 2007).
The idea of radio as a storytelling medium has always held a place in the popular imagination, and the modern success of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion testifies (as The Chronicles of Uncle Mose did in Newfoundland, see Chapter 3.4) to this idea, to radio’s status as a secondarily oral medium, and to its ability to create (imagined) community (see Larson 1995-1996). However, this particular aspect or function of radio broadcasting has received relatively little serious attention in the historiography of radio, or in scholarly texts. Repeated assertions of the novelty and technological ‘magic’ of radio broadcasting as a ‘new medium’ in the 1920s, for example, may have obscured the way in which the medium may have been considered somewhat ‘atavistic’ in its capacity to perform a ‘bardic’ role. Even the German Modernist writer Otto Alfred Palitzsch imagined in 1927 that radio would promote an oral culture of new minnesingers [troubadours], new Homers, a restoration of "that lost epoch when the people's hunger for fables was stilled by itinerant singers and chroniclers" (quoted in Heinzelman 2004: 48). In discussing the orality/aurality of radio as a medium in Chapter 1, we briefly explored the idea of the ‘flow’ of radio programming or scheduling as equivalent to the flow of traditional folk tales or ‘verbal art’, through what Berland has referred to as the “structural combination of narrative elements condensed across time” (Berland 1990). The fluidity of oral transmission is in this way ‘reproduced’ by the flow of radio, especially if we accept that scheduling (or the listener’s use of the medium) tends to blur distinctions between boundaries and genres, such as information and entertainment, speech and music.
We must, however, briefly consider some possible arguments to counter or problematize this concept. In contrast to the organic unity of the orally transmitted story, the tape recorder made incision into recorded material possible, so that any element of sound could be cut out and inserted into a new context as desired. Schafer has argued that the compression and juxtaposition of elements within radio schedules has been influenced by the facility to edit (initially magnetic tape) (see Schafer 1994: 94), as well as the development of recording technology to pre-record programmes. Like scripting, this has heightened the degree of editorial control possible over radio’s aural flow, and Schafer argues furthermore that the proliferation of funny, ironic, absurd or provocative juxtapositions in scheduling (for example, in American commercial radio), which can be attributed to montage editing, has contributed to the “break-up of unified cultural systems and values” (ibid, p. 94).

Radio tends to merely fabricate spontaneity and is tightly controlled as an audio medium; extraneous silences or syntactical errors in speech are usually prohibited, for example. More broadly, as we noted in my discussion of Innis’ attitudes to radio in Chapter 1, it can be argued that radio adopts a false rhetoric of intimacy when it addresses the individual. For Adorno (1991), individual audience participation in the radio world was a ‘fetish’ insofar as radio could only address a generalized other in mass form; the DJ patter "coming up next for you" really means "coming up next for all of you." This pluralized "you" was therefore seen by Adorno as the epitome of the loss of individuation and any co-present sense of group solidarity (Westgate 2008).

Radio producers have learnt to exploit the plasticity of magnetic tape (and subsequently the fluidity of digital editing) to conjoin and layer voices, in a manner that approximates interpersonal communication, in which “the interlacing of speaking positions weaves an oral fabric without individual owners, creations of a communication that belongs to no one” (de Certeau 1984: xxii). The facility to both record and edit with tape enabled BBC producers like David Thomson and W. R. Rodgers to act as public folklorists, collecting, preserving and disseminating oral tradition through radio broadcasting. A consensus subsequently emerged amongst such producers within the BBC’s Radio Features Department during the post-war era that “the new [oral] literature of radio is nearer to the old” (Gilliam 1950: 207) model of oral discourse than to printed literature.

The development of such montage techniques in British radio was retarded by institutional protocols, and the widespread feeling that listeners would be disconcerted by the lack of the mediating voice and comforting presence of the narrator. Nevertheless, experimentation occurred both with the use of actuality and with the use of the narrator during the late 1940s and early 1950s, as we saw with Brandon Acton-Bond’s West Region features in Chapter 2.1. Produced by W. R. Rodgers and broadcast on 30^th May 1950, Bare Stones of Aran is a radio feature that encapsulates the transition which was occurring at this time between the radio feature as reliant on the nuances of the written word, and the radio feature as sound portrait or actuality-based travelogue, featuring the voices of ‘real people’ encountered during the production process. Instead of utilizing the narrator as a figure who explicates or adjudicates the testimony of these people, Bare Stones of Aran utilizes the narrator as the listener’s guide in a (radiophonic) journey. The programme provides a window on the experiences of the radio producer as folklorist, maximizing sensitivity to the ‘source communities’, and affording the listener a proximity to and immersion in an oral, traditional culture.