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Appendix A Orality and Presence
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Appendix AOrality and PresenceIn an essay entitled ‘Broadcasting, Speech and Writing’ (1946), the BBC producer Christopher Salmon began a discussion of orality and literacy by quoting passages from two different sources, of equal length; one from a radio broadcast and one from a book. This exercise is worth repeating here to illustrate the discussion that will follow about oral and literate forms or characteristics of language:
‘War Report’ Broadcast in the Home Service, May 1945
‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-88)’ by Gibbon (1737-94) The first passage is a transcription of recorded testimony collected from an anonymous inmate of Belsen Concentration Camp, the other was written by the 18th Century historian Edward Gibbon. It goes without saying that these are two radically different forms of expression, despite their use of the same language, the same grammatical structures and elements of vocabulary. They were also communicated through different media - a radio programme and a printed book. Despite the fact that the two extracts are ostensibly about the same subject (the nature of arbitrary arrest and torture under totalitarian regimes), in juxtaposition they emphasize the complementary attitudes to the question of innocence or guilt in the two ‘regimes’. The first passage is vivid and immediately comprehensible, and works as both prose and (broadcast) speech - however, the second passage could never be broadcast as an example of ‘good’ or stimulating radio (McInerney 2001: 6) due to the fact that it lacks all of the characteristics of oral speech taking place within ‘acoustic space’. The point here is not to suggest that the material technology used to communicate messages and the immediate physical context in which the messages originated determines everything. After all, the kind of extempore and urgent ‘direct speech’ of the first passage can, on occasion, be heard in the reportage of From Your Own Correspondent while a looser and more conversational variant on Gibbon’s discursive and verbose historical analysis can often be heard in the studio discussion of In Our Time, both of which programmes can currently be heard on BBC Radio 4 at the time of writing (and both of which in a sense hark back to the pre-1967 era when such programming was broadcast on the Home Service or the Third Programme respectively). Context is important, and most ‘radio talk’ can be located on a continuum between the two ‘poles’ represented by these extracts; radio talk is more explicit, premeditated, precise, orderly and fluent than spontaneous speech, but nevertheless approximates more closely to speech than to writing (Crisell 1994: 55). Radio talk ‘conceals’ the fact that it is scripted, and often seeks to imitate spontaneous speech, as Crisell has observed: The act of reading implies absence – the separation of addresser and addressee. The addresser has been replaced by a text, so that if a radio listener is aware that a broadcaster is reading he will assume that she is either relaying the words of somebody else or erecting a barrier between herself and her audience. Hence to avoid creating this impression of absence and impersonality much radio talk which is actually scripted…is delivered as if it were unscripted and impromptu (Crisell, ibid, p. 56). Appendix BThe BBC’s Talks on Unemployment During the 1930sA political requirement for creating and sustaining a nation state is that its unifying institutions should have a basis of legitimacy among the mass of the people. In this regard the economic, political and cultural unification of modern Britain can be seen to be coterminous with its linguistic unification (Fairclough 1989: 21-2). The standardization of the language domain of radio was therefore dependent on the maintenance of assumptions that the standard variety was used widely, was ‘the language of the whole people’, and that it was universally held in high esteem (ibid, p. 21).195 According to Gramscian hegemony theory, the winning of consent is achieved when arrangements that suit a dominant group’s own interests have come to be perceived as simply common sense, such as for example, whose language we should speak or write (Talbot, Atkinson et al. 2003: 2). The manufacture of consent that enabled Standard English or RP to dominate broadcasting thus depended to a large extent on the exclusion of articulate ‘ordinary people’ from broadcasting. As (creator of Harry Hopeful) D. G. Bridson remarked of Archie Harding’s (pioneer feature producer and Director of North Region Programmes during the 1930s) advocacy of mass microphone access across Britain: All broadcasting, he insisted, was propaganda; because it did not attack the anomalies of the capitalist system, it became propaganda in tacit support of them. Average people everywhere were painfully inarticulate; but how much less articulate than most were the average people here in the North? As he saw it, that was hardly an accident. For where economic collapse had brought the people so much hardship, continuance of the system required that the people should remain unheard. As part of the system itself, he maintained, the BBC had been careful to see that they did (Bridson 1971: 30). In April 1934 the Talks Department launched a major series on unemployment called Time to Spare, a 12-part series of documentaries on unemployment. The series was unprecedented in that it did not rely on a narrator/interloper figure; instead the unemployed themselves were invited to the microphone to describe the human consequences of unemployment. The series was produced by Felix Greene, who toured the country in search of unemployed speakers for the programme. Greene hit upon a novel approach to obviating the inhibition that scripting induced amongst non-professionals: He met the unemployed in their homes and clubs and sat up into the night talking with them. He selected the speakers from the hundreds he met, not because they were the saddest cases, but because they were the most typical and representative. Some found it difficult to write down their story, though they could tell it well. When Greene tried to copy down what they said he found they spoke less freely. So he invited them to Broadcasting House, took them into the studio, and got them talking. Meanwhile, unknown to them, their words were transcribed by secretaries in another room listening to them over a loudspeaker. There was no censorship, Greene claimed. The BBC altered or deleted nothing that the speakers wished to say (Cardiff and Scannell 1991: 64).196 The resulting programmes were ‘framed’ by editorial input – each of the eleven fifteen-minute talks were introduced by S. P B. Mais (who had presented a series on unemployment, S.O.S., in 1933) and followed by a short postscript delivered by a suitably official representative to point to the moral of the tale. However, these representatives were people engaged in practical work for the unemployed, and therefore their talks were aimed to ensure that public sympathy was made effective through practical means, by encouraging listeners to participate in forms of public service (Bailey 2007: 472). As Scannell and Cardiff have observed, due to the fact that the testimonies of the unemployed only survive in printed form in The Listener, the idioms of speech and the traces of working-class accent or dialect of the speakers “are all lost and beyond conjecture” (Cardiff and Scannell 1991: 143-4). It is also therefore difficult to assess to what degree the speakers were ‘helped’ by Talks producers in the production of their scripts, “but the occasional literary turn of phrase arouses suspicion” (ibid, p. 144). As with the earlier (1930) series The Day’s Work, in which individuals such as a taxi driver, postman and Covent Garden porter described their jobs, these programmes were broadcast live from the BBC’s London studios, whereas the impulse of documentary is to show people in the course of their everyday lives. Nevertheless, these transmissions were amazingly outspoken for their time and their source (Winston 2005: 285). A reference to contraception in a talk by Mrs Palace, a mother of 5 children on unemployment benefits, provoked a great deal of controversy, and extracts from the talks were read out in parliament in the run-up to the 1934 unemployment bill. Documentary scholar Brian Winston has argued that the documentary films being made by the Grierson group at the General Post Office Film Unit at the time have become better known, but are “far less committed” (ibid.) than such BBC broadcasts, which were also quicker to respond to the slump than even Mass Observation and the New Left Book Club, which (unlike the BBC) were characterised by a self-selecting audience. As Bailey has recently shown (2007), it quickly became apparent that, in order for unemployment talks to be effective, it was necessary for the BBC to know more precisely what the unemployed actually wanted. For example, in a response to Mais’ ‘Clubs for the Unemployed’ S.O.S. broadcast, an editorial for The Listener (2nd August 1933) recognized that there was still insufficient material to be sure of the needs of the unemployed, to elicit opinion as “an indispensable preliminary to the discovery of the new policy we require for the reconstruction of the future lives of the sufferers from unemployment”. As Bailey has summarised, In trying to represent the ‘nation’, the BBC was trying to be inclusive and thus invited the otherwise excluded unemployed to participate in the construction of the nation – albeit on their terms, of course. Notwithstanding the limited dialogue between broadcaster and audience, this apparent invitation to the audience to ‘improve’ talks for the unemployed was something of a contradiction in that it was a departure from the usual paternalism espoused by the BBC, which normally forbade the lay-public (i.e. non-professionals) speaking to the nation (Bailey 2007: 470-1). Bailey has recent argued (2007) that the changing relationship between the BBC and its listening public as exemplified by the broadcasting of talks such as Time to Spare in the mid 1930s was bound up with the BBC’s capacity for information gathering (or ‘need to know), which facilitated its exercise of power. Inducing the unemployed (or general listener) to impart information about themselves – their social conditions, cultural habitat, tastes and preferences – was, according to Bailey, “a means of entering their individual lives into discourse”: It was a means of getting them to confess. Of course, there was nothing coercive about this technique. Rather the participants were invited to undertake a voluntary self-examination of their experiences and consciousness; in doing so they and the populace they were representative of became more amenable to government. In other words, the interviewees were not the final arbiters of their own discourse. The discourse was entered into a domain of specialist knowledge to be interpreted by experts and professionals so that it could be acted on and, more often than not, institutionalised (Bailey 2007: 471). In the context of the enforced leisure of the unemployed, the BBC “sought to police the problem of enforced leisure by cooperating with a number of other functionaries of the newly emerging welfare state” (Bailey 2007: 464). The introductions to Time to Spare by S. P. B. Mais encouraged listeners to use their own spare time to help to stimulate, occupy and show solidarity with the unemployed. In the previous series S.O.S. the Prince of Wales had urged the (working) public to respond to the problem of unemployment in terms of practical measures (e.g. the provision of sporting facilities, allotments, or materials for occupations such as carpentry and cobbling); “measures that would forge contacts between different social classes” (Bailey 2007: 469). Thus the BBC was acting as an arm of the welfare state for a mass audience that had always been urged to look to radio broadcasting to provide an advisory function, especially in times of economic or political crisis. Mais’ introduction to the first broadcast in the series SOS (1933) makes this clear: Here is an S.O.S message, probably the most urgent you will ever hear and it vitally concerns you. You are called upon to create an entirely new social order…There is plenty for you to do and you must do it at once if you care about your fellow countrymen (quoted in Winston 2005: 285). The direct address constituted in this public service information is appropriate given that the cohesive community identity of the unemployed as a ‘subsistence class’ was constituted by the state in the first place. These programmes were more often than not addressed a middle-class audience, urging them to volunteer their (non-enforced) leisure time for public service. When the unemployed were addressed, they were encouraged to participate in gainful and rational recreation, and thus “made to defer to middle-class values, not least those that pertain to cultured citizenship” (Bailey 2007: 470). In Ralph Bond’s classic documentary film To-day We Live (1937, Strand), about new social services for miners, a Welsh unemployed miner decides to make an application for funding for a social centre after hearing a BBC talk for the unemployed in his local café. Where the film departs from the BBC’s treatment of unemployment is in the inclusion of criticism from another unemployed man: It’s only killing time. All the pits are closed down…We can make wireless sets, grow cabbages, and do physical jerks until we are blue in the face. But it isn’t paid work… (Bond and Grierson 1937). Although he is positioned as a cynic, this man’s testimony is supported by the narration during the last minutes of the documentary, which asserts that “social service schemes cannot do everything”, and which refers to the “fundamental problems which strike at the very root of our existence” (ibid.). Such allusions to inequality and social injustice (we must remember that the director Ralph Bond was a committed socialist) were not voiced in equivalent BBC programming of the period, but nevertheless a parallel exists between the British documentary film and the BBC radio talk or feature of the period (particularly the work of the Matheson/Siepmann Talks Department and the type of work carried out by D. G. Bridson and Olive Shapley in the North Region). In fact there was a collaborative effort and sharing of material for film and radio between the BBC and the GPO Film Unit during the late 1930s (Shapley 1996: 57). Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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