Ieuan franklin
Charles Parker: The Admissibility of Montage after the Radio Ballads
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4.6 Charles Parker: The Admissibility of Montage after the Radio BalladsIn the Solitude Trilogy, Gould pursued his own vision of contrapuntal radio, often at the listener’s expense (Plowright 2007), making some sections difficult to listen to or make intelligible in a conventional manner. The issue of intelligibility is one that the BBC has always given a great deal of consideration to, and one that is inextricably linked to programme genre and the particular character of the broadcasting network. Gould was able to showcase his trilogy as a result of the open-minded, eclectic and somewhat ‘highbrow’ ethos of CBC’s Ideas slot. Between 1998 and 2003, the Australian public-service broadcaster ABC showcased ‘acoustic art’ with its regular programme The Listening Room, setting aside a space for experimentation equivalent to the BBC Radio 3’s Sunday Feature. In the last years of his BBC radio career, Charles Parker produced programmes for the ‘middlebrow’ BBC Home Service/Radio 4, rather than the ‘highbrow’ Third Programme/BBC Radio 3, and so he lacked an outlet for the more experimental aspects of his work. He was also constrained in his proclivity to montage actuality by differentials in the institutional treatment of the genres of current affairs and documentary, as we will see. Despite the precedent he had himself set in the Radio Ballads, Parker was frequently in conflict with representatives of BBC management about the ability of the listener to accept the convention of the ‘montage interweaving’ of speech, music and ambience. In a letter of 3rd February 1972, Parker replied to a memo (of 24th February 1972) from Anthony Whitby, the Controller of Radio 4, who had criticised the ‘unintelligibility’ of Snowballs in Calcutta (1972) for its combination of music with ‘difficult speech’ in the programme’s opening. Parker wrote, I am quite certain that what is at issue here is more than a simple matter of ‘unintelligibility’. It is a complex question of apparent, as opposed to potential receptivity, in an audience, which in turn is bound up with the conventions they are led to accept as the agreed technical language of the medium. If the conventions atrophy, the audience atrophies, their potential remains unrealised, the presumptions they bring to listening and the stances they adopt to the work being presented can utterly inhibit their capacity to respond to anything that makes demands upon them.143 Parker believed that the underestimation of the listener’s ability to process auditory elements was limiting possibilities for experimentation within the medium.144 His articulate argument is persuasive, but we must weigh this against the criticism that met some of Parker’s late period work. Even the critics, who held Parker’s work in great esteem, occasionally objected to his proclivity for montage: I’m glad to say that Snowballs in Calcutta was one of Charles Parker’s more restrained…Not only did he employ a soft-spoken narrator…but it was possible to understand almost everything everyone said: some of them were even allowed to utter several sentences on the trot (David Wade, quoted in Cox 2008: 225). Parker’s late period work also included collecting a great deal of actuality for the epic BBC Radio 4 series The Long March of Everyman (1971-1972), which will also discuss in Chapter 5.1. Like Gould’s ‘contrapuntal radio’ trilogy, this was a multi-layered series, which exploited the possibilities of new stereo technology to the full. Unlike Gould’s work, however, it featured an eclectic mix of actuality, drama, folk song, historical documents, poetry, prose, music and ambience (created in collaboration with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop). Unfortunately the vast majority of Radio 4 listeners received the station on low-fidelity, ‘monophonic’ equipment, and were unaccustomed to such experimental work being broadcast amongst otherwise homely and familiar Radio 4 favourites: For many Radio Four listeners, the whole design of the programme was intrinsically baffling. Its ‘montage’ technique of piecing together actuality and music and sound effects without the comforting presence of a narrator was something that did not sit easily with them, coming as it did on a network dominated by more conventional and restrained programme styles. Whitby was sensitive enough to this undercurrent of anxiety to warn his producers that montage demanded ‘a special attitude of mind’, and would thus remain a minority pursuit (Hendy 2007: 66). The ambition of the series to correspond to and honour what the programme-makers and historical consultants interpreted as the aesthetics and values of the “originating constituency” (Worpole, quoted in Johnson and Dawson 1982: 215) (from which much of the historical material was sourced) cannot be doubted, but nevertheless the series was criticised for being a producer’s production rather than a listener’s production (Hendy 2007: 66). As a ‘history from below’ it was truly imaginative - but not very accessible. As Hendy has explained, Here is a case, then, where the time and energy spent on adding an ambitious layering of textures and clever impressionistic segues did not just end up being aesthetically displeasing to its intended audience but may even have undermined the underlying mass social-democratic goals of the documentary-maker (Hendy 2004: 184). Whitby supported and defended the series with some passion (Hendy 2007: 66), and the fact that he chose to blithely ignore the series’ conspicuous lack of ‘labelling and footnoting of material’ - one of his key justifications for refusing to accept Parker’s single documentary Siege in Ceylon for broadcast145 (see below) - would appear to indicate double standards. This disparity is most likely attributable to the broad historical scope of the former, and the topicality of the latter, which meant that the latter began to ‘shade into’ the area of BBC Current Affairs. It is also attributable to the sizeable investment of Radio 4 in The Long March of Everyman, both in terms of finance, and in terms of reputation. Concerns about finance and developing reputation were also the ‘two prongs’ of pressure on Charles Parker within the BBC at the time. Some of the internal criticism of Parker was prompted by the relative expense of his productions (Cox 2008: 118-119), but was also bound up with the way in which the controversial topics which Parker and journalist Dilip Hiro investigated in the late 1960s and early 1970s reinforced his reputation for commitment to radical politics.146 Whitby had a reputation as a rigorous monitor and ferocious critic of the Network’s output (Hendy 2007: 61), and due to their topicality he decided to assess the Parker/Hiro programmes by the same standards that were applied to BBC current affairs programmes. This was symptomatic of the gradual reconstitution of much radio documentary (barring a prestige series such as Long March) as an extension of journalism, in line with “a widespread concern for impartiality, ‘balance’, and ‘neutrality’ across the whole of factual output” (Hendy 2004: 171). Thus Whitby asserted that Parker and Hiro’s “impressionistic techniques” had no place in current affairs, and objected to the lack of both a reporter/narrator figure.147 The formula he offered Parker for making radio documentarieswas as follows: Here is the recipe that has proved palatable. Take a subject of immediate importance in British or International affairs, select a manageable aspect of it and throw the rest away. Clean and chop into small pieces. Add a large measure of intelligence, a general dash of wit, a tongue and a little heart. Allow to marinate for 2-3 weeks and serve very cool (Cox 2008: 226). Whitby justified the rejection of Siege in Ceylon (a programme about Sri Lankan terrorism) according to such standards – predominantly because Parker did not use a voice of authority to ‘authenticate’ the actuality of torture (Cox 2008: 226). Whitby clearly faulted the programme for lacking the ‘forensic’ style of narration which characterised much current-affairs output, whereby the measure of the narrator’s trustworthiness is their prudence in not claiming “more than is hearably claimable from the ‘evidence’ presented” (Hendy 2004: 172).148 With the publication of the Broadcasting in the Seventies report (of 1969), the BBC management became more concerned with the cost-efficiency and impartiality of output than with creative forms of speech radio, and therefore expanded news and current affairs and marginalized drama and features. For Parker, who would be manoeuvred into ‘early retirement’ the following month, this only served to confirm his feeling that, despite all the advances that had been made since the Radio Ballads, the only people permitted to speak over the airwaves were still predominantly the presenters, announcers and experts - those who possessed an established authority – rather than the mass of people whose lives were affected by the social and political changes reported (on) in the BBC’s factual output. Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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