Ieuan franklin
New Horizons: The Wheeler/Prest Collaborations and The Reunion
Download 1.05 Mb.
|
4.7 New Horizons: The Wheeler/Prest Collaborations and The ReunionWe can now investigate in greater detail some of these ethical issues involved in the broadcasting of oral history, by providing an ‘insider’s view’ of the marriage of radio documentary and radio journalism in a discussion of the production of three series that have met with success from critics and audiences alike. They have benefited from the ‘authorial touch’ and narration of a seasoned journalist, but I will show how they have been constructed in such a way that the stories are predominantly told by the people who lived them – the ‘’originating constituency’ – as a sort of composite autobiography. Namely, I will discuss the three landmark series’ for BBC Radio 4 that radio producer and Whistledown Productions co-founder David Prest produced with the late journalist and television reporter Charles Wheeler - one on child evacuees in World War 2 (Evacuation: The True Story, 1999), one on National Service (The Peacetime Conscripts, 2000), and one on child migrants (The Child Migrants, 2003). Despite having made over four hundred programmes for Radio 4, Prest has never worked with a presenter or reporter who has been so involved in the production process at every stage (Prest 2009); Wheeler undertook interviews, wrote the scripts and narrated the programmes.149 All of the series’ had a common thread, as they all centred on the experience of young people being taken away from their home environment and put in unfamiliar and potentially frightening or threatening situations. Each series was also able to given an impression of the impact of these events thirty, forty or fifty years on. The oral history collected for the Evacuation series (1999) of programmes was unique, as most of the interviewees had never had their experiences recorded or documented before. Documentary histories of the war had not dealt substantially with evacuation, and the stories of evacuation had therefore been told predominantly through the form of plays, novels and television drama. The audience response to the programme was overwhelmingly favourable, and many evacuee listeners recalled long-forgotten experiences as a result of the programme. People said ‘You’ve done such an amazing thing because this is vocalizing things that I’ve felt, and I’ve never heard that stuff before on the radio, the stories of kids of my generation… (Prest 2009). One hundred and twenty evacuees were recorded for the series, and the degree of correspondence between the various accounts of leaving London and travelling to the countryside was such that the resulting actuality could quickly be ‘marked’, ‘blocked’ or ‘sectioned’ up into various subject areas. This was facilitated by the fact that the same questions were asked of each interviewee – ‘what was it like?’, ‘who were you with?’, ‘describe the journey’, ‘what were your feelings?’ and so on. There were sections of all the interviews in which each person described arriving at the train stations; getting on the train; running up and down the corridors; arriving at the reception station; being met by the billeting officer and potential foster-families, and so on. At times the correspondence between the accounts was remarkable: There was the one word which I’d say fifty percent of them used, this phrase – ‘we didn’t know what it was about, it was all one big adventure’. A bell went off every time someone said it. I said to Charles [Wheeler] we should make a point about this, that there is something going on here. That one phrase covers an awful lot. It helps to explain what the parents were thinking when they’d sent them off – they [had] probably said that to them. And in the end of the [final] programme you had someone saying ‘I realized eventually it wasn’t an adventure, it was becoming a nightmare’ (Prest 2009). At first it was an adventure…we didn’t know what was at the other end. An adventure…/We were real east-enders, little cockney children going on an adventure…/We didn’t realise what it would be like, it was quite an adventure…/It was just like a big adventure, as far as I was concerned…/It didn’t really strike to me till maybe two or three weeks after and then I knew the adventure, although you’re only seven, you know the adventure is over (Prest 1999). The finished programmes juxtapose actuality extracts with extracts from archived BBC radio programmes, and this also highlights the way in which a spirit of holiday and adventure was perpetuated by the mass media at the time. Similar to the ‘adventure’ montage sequence in the Evacuation series is a sequence in an episode of The Child Migrants, in which the interviewees described their first experience of arriving in Australia at the docks, of seeing a military band playing, and meeting the Bishop of Sydney. Prest was careful, however, to show that the montaged actuality was intended to present a ‘composite picture’ not through any manipulation of the material, but through the juxtaposition of the discrete testimony of individuals who had kindly consented to being interviewed: I said to Charles [Wheeler], it’s really important to give the name of each person, that we don’t just treat it like a mass. I don’t want it to seem like we are painting the pictures. These are still individuals who witnessed it like this. So at the end of it we’d say – Bob Millerchip, James McNey…remembering their arrival at Freemantle, in 1952. Just to get the sense that actually this was their story rather than what we wanted to say as a whole (Prest 2009). 150 This kind of attention to detail was characteristic of all of the Wheeler/Prest collaborations, as it is of the vast majority of the BBC’s documentaries and features. When actuality is recorded for a radio programme it must conform to the BBC’s high standards of sound quality,151 and the inclusion of actuality extracts within a programme will usually occur only after a fairly thorough appraisal by the programme-makers of its thematic and semantic permissibility and significance within the context of the programme. Prest has suggested, If you were doing that [Evacuee] project for the Imperial War Museum archive or a local history archive and you were interviewing thirty people about their experiences, you wouldn’t as a person listening to those interviews probably pick out that phrase [‘it was like a big adventure’] in the way that I as a radio producer picked it out as something extraordinary that typifies the whole thing (Prest 2009). The implication here is also that the radio producer makes use of his/her imaginative empathy, that they are attuned to emotion and sensation, and alert to the ‘telling phrase’ that encapsulates an experience, both in the interview and during the editing process. The ability of the programme-maker to identify opportunities for the promotion of empathy with the interviewees might be thought of, therefore, as one strength of the ‘editorial packaging’ of oral history. There is, however, no reason why the oral historian would not also possess these skills, particularly one who also has a role in editing the oral history for public use. However, in areas where radio production training might be expected to overlap an oral historian’s – such as the basic techniques of interviewing – different ends often result in different procedures: Radio producers work with action, sensation, emotion and audio presence; the oral historian, with objectivity and verisimilitude. Both pursue truths, on different roads…The radio producer is taught to conduct an interview on a moment’s notice, under adverse circumstances, and to ferret out a story, overcoming the reluctance of the subject with a combination of bravado, cunning, and persistence. He or she reaches the controversial points fast, evokes a show of emotion, and presents the material all in a short time frame (Dunaway 1984: 82, 80). This is the obverse of the oral historian’s approach, which often seeks to minimise intervention and encourage reflection and digression over repeated visits where the timescale allows, in order to build trust and to create a relationship of equivalence with the interviewee. In an interview with the present author, Prest told an anecdote about one of the interviews conducted by Charles Wheeler (who was renowned for his skills as an interviewer) for The Child Migrants, which emphasized the need of the interviewer to guide or prompt during the interview in order to structure it and get the most engaging results. A woman was discussing her experiences of a journey across continents as a young child migrant, and her account was detached and unemotional. There was a certain amount of distanciation – as if the experiences she was relaying had happened to someone else. After she had given her account, Wheeler took a long pause, and confronted her with a summary of her own scenario at that time: ‘You were going to a country that you’d never been to before, you were confused - you didn’t even know where you’d just come from. It was a new environment, everything smelled different. What was it like?’ (Prest 2009)
Secondly, we can observe of the Wheeler interview anecdote that people ‘compose’ memories that help us to feel relatively comfortable with out lives, to give us a feeling of composure. We remake or repress memories of experiences which are still painful and ‘unsafe’ because inherent traumas or tensions have not been resolved (Thomson 1998: 301). Karpf recently discussed listening to an interview with the Holocaust survivor Edith Birkin, which was characterized by a matter-of-fact tone, in which “you can hear the control”. There was a sense that she has had to tell the story before, to construct a narrative or to actually “internalise the narrative demands of the archive” (Karpf 2009). Radio producers are often disinterested in the constructed, safe, ‘archive-ready’ narrative – and if they seek to provoke another version of the same account they may contravene the ethical standards of the oral historian. The radio producer is compelled to find a balance between being both empathetic and strategic during the production process by the exigency of the deadline and the dictates of the larger programme narrative. By contrast, the oral historian who is interested in entire life histories might pay less attention to the specific choice of words by which the interviewees relate their experiences, and the social or ideological import of these choices. For example, the interviewer who is paid by the hour to collect oral history to expand a deficient section of the oral archive by an institution may not be induced to operate in an efficient or discriminating manner, or to constantly reflect on how the listener (to the interview) will receive what has been said. However, we should be careful not to exaggerate these distinctions; oral historians often demonstrate an acute attention to semantic detail, and an interest in the relaying of sensory experiences does not contravene oral history methodology: If it is a really important point, you can encourage at length: ‘All right, so you’re in ---. Shut your eyes, and give me a running commentary – what you see, hear… (Thompson 1988: 201). The key concerns of the radio producer and public historian who work to recontextualize verbatim speech into expressive forms of representation (i.e. a radio programme or an exhibition) are broadly similar. For example, David Prest and Charles Wheeler were faced with ethical dilemmas during the making of several of the series’, which occasionally led Prest to question his own interventions - ‘who are you to judge whether their testimony is correct?’ (Prest 2009)152 Prest was also led to consider, as oral historians often do, the subjective nature of memory. The Peacetime Conscripts (approximately one hundred interviews were conducted for this six-part series) showed the darker side of the experience of National Service, which had not been previously publicised – for example, the instances of suicide in training camps. This resulted in a wide range of contrasting audience responses: There was lots of mail from people who said [listening to the programme] was an incredibly cathartic experience. One particular letter was very emotional, from someone quite senior in the army, who’d had to pull his car into a lay-by because he was shedding tears listening to the programme…I had one phone call from a guy who had written his own personal story of National Service. He said, ‘Why did you focus on the suicides? For many of us it was the best years of our lives…” - which was the great cliché about National Service. We talked about it, and I explained why we wanted to show all the different aspects…I knew from reading his book that he’d been at the RAF camp [which had a high rate of suicide]. So I said ‘do you remember any incidents of suicide?’ ‘Oh yeah, there were a couple’. ‘So there were 2 out of the 250 men there at the time, do you know what the national suicide rate was at the time?’ So eventually he realized he’d been shutting down the fact that there had been these suicides since he’d been there. In his head, he hadn’t wanted to include that as part of the story (Prest 2009).153 Prest felt that the Evacuation series had taken place at just the right time – the former child evacuees were now in their late sixties, and many had become - or were about to become – grandparents. Therefore they had a deeper understanding of the difficulties their parents had had in letting them go. The experiences of attending, with Charles Wheeler, an evacuee reunion, and a reunion of Korean War (sometimes termed the ‘forgotten’ war) veterans gave David Prest the idea for a regular programme, which would become the award-winning Radio 4 series The Reunion: We went to a Korean War veteran reunion, and I saw these people who’d been in the war, who felt anger that they hadn’t been able to tell their story, they were gathering together and pouring out their stories to each other. I remember saying to one guy, do you tell your stories outside of these occasions? He said ‘Never – I’ve never told my wife this stuff’. That was the germ of the idea. People talking passionately in their own circle… (Prest 2009). The idea of The Reunion is to reunite in the studio a group of people (typically five) who are linked due to their having undergone a particular experience together in the past, which in some sense made history. There have been programmes on a number of topics, including the siege of Sarajevo, the sinking of the Marchioness, the privatization of British Rail, and the birth of breakfast television.154 Although The Reunion is a studio-based format, it utilizes archival recordings, which are ‘dropped in’ at the appropriate moments. In this way the reporting of events by the media can be juxtaposed with first-hand eyewitness accounts of what happened. This format presents greater scope for the revisiting of the past through precise eyewitness testimony than in most radio programming, where the coverage of history tends to become overly generalized or simplistic, shaped by or contingent upon current attitudes or preoccupations. As CBC producer Bill Doyle noted in a discussion of “Oral History and the Electronic Media”, A recent example of this was evident in the Remembrance Day coverage of the Five Fighting Sullivans on ABC’s “Good Morning America”. The theme of the story on the five brothers who perished on the same ship in World War II showed how the passage of time made people forget. In 1942 the theme would have been a concern of the people at the time – such as allowing five members of the same family on the same boat (Kipping and Doyle 1981). The majority of The Reunion consists of interaction within the studio, and this innovative format provides a model of best practice for how studio-based (rather than actuality-based) oral history programming might attract listeners in the future. This is an important point to make, as it demonstrates that the broadcasting of oral history is not contingent upon the use of portable recording equipment. Secondly, those who advocate the inclusion of a greater proportion of oral history in BBC programming must consider how to deal with the argument that the Corporation’s studio-based ‘magazine’ programmes already contain or represent oral history: One of the difficulties is - the broadcaster says, ‘Well we do oral history anyway.’ What I call oral history, what you call oral history, may be different to what [BBC} Radio 4 calls oral history. They might say ‘Listen to Woman’s Hour, listen to You and Yours – there’s people talking about stuff. What makes them any different?’ Is that oral history? ‘Mid-Week – they’ve written a book to get on it, but they’re talking about themselves’. So that’s a difficult dilemma to face. How do we convince the broadcaster that what we need is something a little bit different to what we do already? (Dein 2008) Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
|