Due to the widening availability of the portable tape recorder, during the late 1950’s, producers were awarded more choice than ever before, to go into communities, ‘relying upon the real people...to tell their story simply and directly.’371 Midget recorders were taken across the country, recording hundreds of hours of stories in factories, shipyards, homes, kitchens, canteens, and hospitals.372 Often interviews were recorded at the homes
367 Clayman 2006, p.259
368 Bell & Van Leeuwen 1994, p.1-2
369 Cardiff 1980 and Tolson 2008 have both reflected on the history of this technique. They refer to the ‘Standing on the Corner’ section of Town Tonight during 1939, where the interviewer (Michael Standing) had conducted spontaneous vox pops with passers-by on the Munich Crisis. Until that point the ordinary contributor would be carefully selected, asked to rehearse and almost certainly given a script.
370 Boorman 2003, p.85
371 Parker 1958, quoted in Long 2004, p.136
372 Parker approached gatekeepers, organisations and union members first, requesting permission to interview at places of work.
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of Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, allowing contributors or ‘informants’ to speak “from a place of safety.”373
“There is an ownership in what they’re doing and because they can record, they don’t have to say to an SM, ‘Let’s go and get some actuality of that steam train coming out of there,”
they can just walk across the shed and do it. The authorship belonged to the producers in a new way.” 374
Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl recorded actuality for the Travelling People over the space of three and a half months, visiting fairgrounds, bow tents, harvest fields and roadside pull-ins across the country.375 Seated around the campfires, MacColl recalled how stories were told late into the night “the kids are there during a recording session. If its 2 ‘O Clock in the morning they fall asleep on the floor and then wake up and they’ll tell a few riddles and they’ll fall asleep.”376 Over fifty years later, the newer Ballads were recorded based on these original philosophies where the studio is regarded almost as the enemy. The process of interview pre-production in studios is regarded by both sets of Ballads producers as problematic for the types of material they are looking for. For Vince Hunt, field recordings offer a deliberate benefit to interviewer, where the interviewee has the time, space and opportunity to engage with the process.
“I don’t want to freak people out by taking them into the BBC and then you’ve got to go through all that palaver of sorting out parking and stupid passes and sitting in some horrible studio. I prefer to be able to talk to people at home, where they’re comfortable with the surroundings, so you don’t have to reassure them that they’re OK. ... it’s all about the interviewee and it’s all about getting the interviewee in a place where they feel comfortable and secure enough to cough up the business.” 377
The early midget recorder was still a weighty, unreliable piece of equipment, which often only recorded for a short length of time. As a consequence, interviews frequently had to be stopped or paused, disrupting the rhythm and flow of the interaction.378 This would disrupt the rhythm of questioning, and necessitate that the interviewer must, on each occasion, re-establish a connection and remind what the line of questing is. It would prove a very different experience to that of a live exchange:
373 Telephone Interview, Peggy Seeger, 2013
374 Interview, Sean Street, Bournemouth, 2013. An SM refers to a Studio Manager.
375 Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Dorset, Birmingham, London, Glasgow, Blairgowirie, Montrose and Aberdeen
376 The British Library, Sound Files. Ewan MacColl, oral history interview, 1985 [online]
377 Interview, Vince Hunt, Manchester, 2013
378 During the recording process for Singing the Fishing, all 5 midget recorders were failing, so the team flew out to Lucerne to persuade the maker to sell them a Nagra, a handmade ‘Rolls Royce” of tape recorders. The seller agreed, but only on the allowance it would be used for ‘proper services’.
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Charles Parker to Mrs Axon: Start of Part 2. July 1957: We were just talking about your husband not liking the modern dances. Were there other aspects of the modern age besides dancing and motor coaches he didn’t like? 379
Producers also had to navigate and negotiate with background sound, which could not be controlled to studio quality. In a letter to Ewan MacColl, Parker outlines this new experience of recording his conversations with Mrs Axon at her home.
The recordings at Mrs. Axons home were a bit of a shambles; the television was on when I arrived, the “Daily Express” had just been and, generally, the conditions were not ideal but we did unearth one or two useful bits of detail. In particular, he called his grub his “scoff”, and his sandwiches “butties.” Apart from what is on the tape some interesting stuff came to light after I had run out of tape.380
This letter reveals Charles Parkers apparent fascination with words like “scoff” and “butties” which are included in speech marks. The interview can be seen as a tool to not only start to collect such words, but one to gather evidence of a particular way of life, seemingly alien to Charles Parker. Also relevant is this conflict with other media; the Daily Express and the television, which were competing for her attention and the reality that only a small amount of content could be collected at one time.
For the Big Hewer, the fourth of the Ballads, the team took their tape recorders away from the home and deep into the working lives of their contributors, down to the mines and ‘into the pit-canteens, pithead baths, into pubs and miners’ welfares.’381 Although enthused by the quality of their material, Parker confessed to feeling
‘utterly uneducated’ in the presence of miners, ‘I was absolutely bowled over by the occasion and by its extraordinary sense of an organic, intensely human and civilised organisation. I found it tremendously emotional.’382 Mary Baker who was responsible for editing the Radio Ballads, recalls listening to these raw tapes:
“No one could hear those people speak without your hair standing on end. Because it wasn’t someone saying what it was like being a miner, this was a miner saying what it was like being a miner.” 383
Instead of relying on scripting, expert opinion or on the voices of trained actors, Peggy Seeger, Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker orchestrated an approach which recognised the value of discovering knowledge through the encounter. The interview was used as a means of both finding out what had happened and telling
379 Charles Parker Archives, Birmingham Central Library. CPA 2/64/1/1. Transcript from Parker’s interview with Mrs Axon 4th November 1957
380 Charles Parker Archives, Birmingham Central Library. CPA 4000 64 2/62. Letter from Parker to McColl
381 MacColl 1981 [online]
382 Charles Parker Archive, Birmingham Central Library. CPA 2/78/2/2. 23rd August 1960, letter from Charles Parker to Ewan MacColl
383 Charles Parker Archive, Birmingham Central Library. MS 1913. Mary Baker, 2002. Oral history interview
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a story from the perspective of those who had witnessed an event. This was a unique method, used both as a technique of questioning and as a means of composing music:
“if you don’t know about a subject, and you want to write a song about it, you go along and you interview someone who does know about it, or who has experienced the subject…and you tell them, “I want to use your words because I cannot make a song out of my understanding of this event.” 384
For Peggy Seeger, the experience of the interviewee (or informant) is valued – elevated to a higher position of authority. This distinctive method of prioritising the experiences of the worker was tested in the planning of the second Ballads programme, Song of the Road. Broadcast in 1959 this episode focussed on the building of the M1 (the UK’s first motorway) and would come a year after The Ballad of John Axon, which had been hailed as a triumph by critics. The Sunday Times had proclaimed that it was ‘As remarkable a piece of radio as I have ever listened to’ while the Observer declared ‘Last week a technique and subject got married and nothing in radio kaleidoscopy, or whatever you like to call it, will ever be the same again.’385 But according to Mary Baker and Peggy Seeger, pressure from Denis Morris, (the head of Parker’s BBC department in Birmingham)386 meant that this next Ballads instalment needed to be more balanced – and seemingly less sympathetic to the plight of the working class. The end result had to be a compromise; it must this time prioritise the views of employers and consultants, alongside those of the workers.
There were basic differences in the way in which words were used by our manual workers on the one hand and by the planners and white-collar staff on the other. The latter, though
“educated” and “articular” were, when played back, often boring and over-technical387
In an essay published a year before in 1958, Iris Murdoch had acknowledged that ‘We cannot live without
‘‘the experts”…But the true open society in the modern world is one in which expertise is not mysterious,’
where ideas were not ‘the sole property of technicians.’388 Song of the Road was a site upon which the creative power of the producer was contested; and encapsulated tensions between pleasing BBC bosses, of staying true to the format and the ideal of democratising individual expression, while also struggling to provide information about work processes.
We are the consulting engineers. We are responsible to the Ministry of Transport for the whole design of the road, and we are employed to design and supervise the construction389
384 Telephone Interview, Peggy Seeger, 2013
385 MacColl 1981 [online]
386 According to Mary Baker, 2002 and referred to in a telephone interview with Peggy Seeger in 2013
387 MacColl 1981 [online]
388 Murdoch cited in Collini 2006, p.162–3
389 Song of the Road, first broadcast 5th November 1959
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Sara Parker (daughter of Charles Parker and a feature maker who conducted interviews for the 2006 Ballads series) has proposed that often well trained interviewees hide truth behind their professional facade, which acts as a shield. She believes that the “expert” uses the interview to achieve a goal, often motivated by professional obligations: “The people who think of themselves as experts….they obviously have a set pattern of things that they say about what they do…it makes them feel safe and that nobody can criticise them.”390 Meanwhile the ordinary contributor is conversely regarded by producers as contributing towards a shared national conversation, and rewarded just for taking part.391 This concept of being ‘ordinary’ in the media has become something to be celebrated, connoting images of sincerity, authenticity and entitlement. According to Turner ‘performing ordinariness has become an end in itself, and thus a rich and (or so it seems) almost inexhaustible means of generating new content for familiar formats.’392
It appears that Charles Parker also intentionally adapted his working persona to fit with the supposed needs of his profession. Brown has dated the term ‘personae’ back to the Greek term for stage mask393 – and within the context of the interview this might offer a contributor a sense of protection from fear, of not performing appropriately or promoting an official line thoroughly enough. These “professional interviewees”, require a different approach, where the interview is used to promote an agenda, located now within in a more mediatised, media-trained environment “people are thinking of the sound bites…you don’t get any depth at all.”394 Back in the late 1950’s, Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger became frustrated by the results of Song of the Road395 and were determined that their next Ballad would not focus on the work processes; but instead on people’s responses and attitude towards these processes.396