More Than a Music Box: Radio Cultures and Communities in a Multi-Media World 9781782382089

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MORE THAN A MUSIC BOX

Polygons: Cultural Diversities and Intersections General Editor: Lieve Spaas, Professor of French Cultural Studies, Kingston University, UK Volume 1 Reynard the Fox: Social Engagement and Cultural Metamorphoses in the Beast Epic from the Middle Ages to the Present Edited by Kenneth Varty Volume 2 Echoes of Narcissus Edited by Lieve Spaas in association with Trista Selous Volume 3 Human Nature and the French Revolution: From the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Code Xavier Martin Translated from the French by Patrick Corcoran Volume 4 Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places: Rethinking Culture Edited by Fran Lloyd and Catherine O’Brien Volume 5 Relative Points of View: Linguistic Representations of Culture Edited by Magda Stroi´nska Volume 6 Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives Edited by Roger Webster Volume 7 Cultures of Exile: Images of Displacement Edited by Wendy Everett and Peter Wagstaff Volume 8 More than a Music Box: Radio Cultures and Communities in a MultiMedia World Edited by Andrew Crisell Volume 9 A ‘Belle Epoque’?: Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture, 1890–1914 Edited by Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr Volume 10 Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean Catherine A. Reinhardt

MORE THAN A MUSIC BOX Radio Cultures and Communities in a Multi-Media World

Edited by Andrew Crisell

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2003 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2003, 2006 Andrew Crisell First paperback edition published in 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berghahn Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data More than a music box: radio cultures and communities in a multi-media world / edited by Andrew Crisell. p. cm. — (Polygons ; v.8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57181-473-6 (alk. paper)—ISBN 1-84545-046-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Radio broadcasting. I. Crisell, Andrew. II. Series. PN1991.5.M67 2003 384.54—dc22

2003057828 00-059873

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 1-57181-473-6 (hardback) ISBN 1-84545-046-9 (paperback)




CONTENTS

General Introduction Andrew Crisell

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PART I: INSTITUTIONS 1. Look with Thine Ears: BBC Radio 4 and Its Significance in a Multi-Media Age Andrew Crisell 2. BBC Radio 5 Live: Extending Choice Through ‘Radio Bloke’? Guy Starkey 3. U.S. Public Radio: What is It – and For Whom? Bob Lochte 4. Digital Reflections of Finnish Speech Journalism: YLE Radio Peili Marko Ala-Fossi

3

21 39

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PART II: IDENTITIES 5. Indigenous Radio in Canada Valerie Alia

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6. Native American Radio: Wolakota Wiconi Waste Bruce L. Smith

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7. National Public Service Radio in the South Pacific: A Community Loudspeaker Helen Molnar

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Contents

8. You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away: Gay Radio, Past and Present Alan Beck 9. Continuities and Change in Women’s Radio Kate Lacey

127 145

PART III: GENRES 10. ‘Reality Radio’: The Documentary David Hendy 11. Radio and Popular Culture in Germany: Radio Culture Between Comedy and ‘Event-isation’ Andreas Hepp 12. Radio as a Medium for Poetry Mike Ladd 13. A Medium for Mateship: Commercial Talk Radio in Australia Terry Flew 14. Fireside Issues: Audience, Listener, Soundscape Frances Gray

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189 213

229 247

PART IV: NEW TECHNOLOGY 15. Dutch Web Radio as a Medium for Audience Interaction Martine van Selm, Nicholas W. Jankowski and Bibi Kleijn

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16. Speech Radio in the Digital Age Richard Berry

283

Notes on Contributors

297

Index

303




GENERAL INTRODUCTION Andrew Crisell

Until the middle of the twentieth century radio was the major broadcasting medium, a primary provider of information and entertainment to audiences around the world. But with the arrival first of television and then of other, mostly visual, media its role was gradually reduced: for many years and in many parts of the world it has seemed to consist only of various music formats punctuated by ‘capsule’ news. Yet this is not the whole story of modern radio. Communities can be, and are, defined simply by the kinds of music they listen to, but through the spoken word radio still carries other kinds of content which transcend the merely musical, afford a range of gratifications to the individual listener, and define identities and interests in a more explicit way. In this respect it may well be enhanced by the new phenomenon of Internet radio, with its global reach, potential for interactivity and convergence with other forms of electronic communication. As its title suggests, the purpose of this collection is to explore some of these ‘extra-musical’ functions of radio in different parts of our media-saturated globe. It does not attempt to be exhaustive either in the range of places it visits or in the forms of radio it investigates. Its aim is merely to offer a spread of impressions, a snapshot of the needs which radio continues to serve and the uses to which it is put, whether within or apart from the mere provision of music. The reader will quickly be struck by two things. The first is how extraordinarily resilient radio is, notwithstanding its frequent designation

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as the ‘Cinderella’ medium. In the context of convergent tendencies in the mass media, some of the essays attribute its resilience to an ability to preserve its distinctiveness, others to the ease with which it can incorporate new features such as interactivity and visual text. The second thing that emerges is how remarkably eclectic are the scholarly interests and range of expertise that the medium generates. The contributors have backgrounds in literary criticism, creative writing, history, journalism, media and cultural studies, marketing, psychology and social anthropology. Many have experience as professional broadcasters, whether in station management, staff training, scriptwriting, production or presentation. And all of them are enthusiastic and analytical listeners. It is hoped that the overall achievement of this book is to furnish a useful variety of approaches and insights. As the editor, my first role in this introduction is to explain the way in which I have structured the collection. Despite the power which new media technologies have conferred on the individual, sound broadcasting, with its need to fill long and daily schedules for fastidious listeners, remains a collective, highly organised and costly activity. The opening section, ‘Institutions’, therefore focuses on radio institutions, and since our concern is with those which aim at something other than the maximisation of audiences through music formats, it is hardly surprising that none is funded in the conventionally commercial way. I have presumed to open the collection with my study of BBC Radio 4 because this mixed-genre network is not simply a good example of radio’s ability to provide something other than non-stop music, but demonstrates the irreducible advantage it holds over the newer, iconic media of television, video and the Internet. We then consider some other radio institutions and the communities of interest they target: Radio 4’s younger sibling, BBC Radio 5 Live, which attempts what is in some respects an awkward combination of news and sport; a resurgent U.S. public radio system; and the distinctive content and programming conventions of the Finnish digital station, YLE Radio Peili. The second section, ‘Identities’, takes a broader look at some of the identities that radio output is both shaped by and in some degree shapes: the primordial communities of Canada, the United States and the South Pacific; gay and women listeners. But a collection which perceived radio only in terms of institutions and audiences, of social contexts and processes, and failed to give some sense of what it is that audiences actually listen to would be arid and

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inadequate. The third section, ‘Genres’, therefore focuses on some, and only some, of the non-musical genres that radio continues to offer: documentary, comedy, poetry, ‘talk’ and drama. Yet the social dimension is not lost sight of, since the discussion of genres is largely inseparable from a sense of the interest groups they seek to address. The final section, ‘New Technology’, explores new technology, the effect interactivity and media convergence might have on the forms and institutions of radio, as well as on listener behaviour. It begins with a look at the new phenomenon of Dutch web radio and concludes with an assessment of the likely impact of digital technology on speech radio in general. However my second editorial duty is in a sense to dismantle the structure I have created, for while it might give a useful perspective on a diffuse subject it tends to sever the connections that support other possible perspectives. And this is significant, since in one way or another each of these essays transcends its stated theme. The discussion of a radio genre or of a particular radio institution is in some sense inseparable from a discussion of the identity of those who are listening to it. The accounts of digital radio affirm that new technology will lead inevitably to the development of new genres. Hence the second purpose of this introduction is to hint that other structures are possible which might support a different perspective to the one I have offered. One could begin, for instance, by making a rough but workable distinction between those essays which either focus on the special characteristics of radio, or are in some sense informed by a consciousness of these characteristics; and those which are primarily concerned with radio as an historical phenomenon, a social and cultural practice. And while recognising that there is always a considerable overlap between the two, we might describe the former as essentialist and the latter as empirical in approach. Let us begin with those essays which seem to be informed by a strong sense of the quiddity of the medium. Nobody writes more sensitively than Frances Gray about the unique pleasures and significance of the listening experience, or about the interplay between ‘listener’ and ‘audience’. Yet her insights draw their strength from a sense of continuity with radio in a pre-televisual age – as a primary, ‘fireside’ medium with critically alert listeners. The latter make an interesting contrast with the more restless, interactive creatures posited by Richard Berry, and Gray’s notes towards an anthropology of radio forge an unexpected link with the empirical approach of

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Andreas Hepp, who is also concerned to stress the post facto collectivity of the radio audience when it discusses and digests the programmes that its members have heard separately. Both scholars rightly insist that this ‘radio audience’ is still a meaningful entity, even though listening is – and to a large extent always has been – a solitary activity. In showing how well-suited poetry is to radio, Mike Ladd lends weight to my own contention that verbal, not musical, content is the key to the distinctive role that radio can continue to play in a multi-media age. He also offers a timely reminder that poetry was originally not ‘visual’ in the sense of consisting of words on a page but, with its features of rhythm and rhyme, auditory: addressed to the ear. In this sense, as he points out, new technology harks back to ancient practices. Because radio itself is bardic, communal and addressed to the ear, Ladd aims in his role as producer to use it not simply to relay written verse but as a medium for which – and in which – poetry is composed. He thus has much to say that is interesting about radio as well as poetry. Alan Beck is another who treats his theme in such a way as to throw light on the medium itself. In exploring the implications for radio of what he terms ‘queer studies’, he asks how its non-visual character can seek to generate bodily pleasure. Hence, in this fascinating essay queer studies are enlisted in the general effort to understand how radio makes meaning and contributes to the wider culture. Among these essentialist approaches is my own, which takes a conservative view of the medium. Because it is non-visual and primarily verbal, I argue that radio is inherently better suited to intellectual purposes than television is, and that its occasional efforts to emulate the iconism of the latter are taking it down what is (in both senses) a blind alley. In an invigorating and ‘producerly’ discussion, David Hendy makes a helpful transition from an essentialist to an empirical perspective. Outlining the institutional contexts in which spoken word radio programmes struggle to get made, he throws fresh light on the familiar documentary tensions between art and reportage, telling and showing, editorial intervention and ‘objectivity’. As a programme maker Hendy is more at ease with the iconic idiom than is the editor, arguing that radio documentary retains an advantage over its television counterpart in being less technically cumbersome and intrusive and less subject to competitive pressures. Hence the documentarist can create his or her programme in such a way

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as to take the listener on the same journey of enlightenment that he or she experienced in gathering and researching its raw materials. Like Hendy, Bob Lochte focuses on broadcasting practice. His lucid and lively chapter on public radio in the United States is as upbeat about the future as it is informative about the past. Moreover, in a country where the rise of television and thus of music radio began sooner and prevailed more thoroughly than elsewhere, and where the history of noncommercial broadcasting is relatively short, it is interesting that public radio is not only thriving but doing so on a largely mainstream audience. While noting the surprising success of ‘talk’ in commercial formats, Lochte makes a shrewd distinction between ‘commercial speech’ and ‘public discourse’, and in this invites comparison with Terry Flew’s authoritative account of Australian talk radio. Flew warns against taking a facile view of the latter as a channel for democratic feedback, reminding us that the talk show host is a powerful agenda setter who holds the balance between free speech and social responsibility, the public interest and sectional pressures, those with dissident views and those who claim to represent ‘the moral majority’. Flew argues that although the latter are highly vocal they are not necessarily as representative as is assumed and that their constituency needs further research. Three other essays, though all empirical in focus, demonstrate the varying cultural significances of modern radio. In his vivid and fluent account of the genesis of BBC Radio 5 Live, a news and sport network which was soon nicknamed ‘Radio Bloke’, Guy Starkey finds himself obliged to treat radio as a supposedly masculine resource. But his investigation moves swiftly beyond considerations of gender, showing how, in its search for a settled constituency, the network has postulated a range of listener behaviour, from the brief and instrumental to the protracted and passive – yet not necessarily less attentive. These insights repay comparison with yet another kind of listener behaviour explored by Richard Berry and by Martine van Selm, Nicholas Jankowski and Bibi Kleijn. Kate Lacey’s is a feminist perspective. Her concern is whether the gendered discourses which shaped broadcasting in its formative years still resonate in the multi-media world. Hers is a vigorous polemic which challenges, among other things, the categorisations of this book on the grounds that a politics of representation which is based on the labels of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality pre-empts plu-

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ralistic action and tends merely to preserve the status quo. On the other hand, Lacey argues that because it enters the private sphere, radio is a particularly good medium for advancing the interests and expressions of women: it is secondary, intimate and verbal. Nevertheless she insists that these are not to be understood as essentialist feminine qualities. They are ascribed to women simply as a consequence of the gendered demarcation of public and private. Andreas Hepp takes an approach to the cultural impact of radio which is not gender specific. In an absorbing and closely argued study he explores the way in which the interesting new genre of the ‘radio-comic’ has been assimilated into German popular culture, having made that important transition from ‘listener’ to ‘audience’ which is also identified by Frances Gray. He then addresses a remarkable phenomenon which he terms ‘event-isation’ – the way in which a number of radio stations in Germany have created and exploited public events in order to re-connect with their listeners. It can be difficult to determine how far the events owe their success to the stations and the stations owe their success to the events. But the significant point for Hepp is that while the sources of popular culture are often commercial, the public are adept at appropriating these events to their own tastes and turning them to their private advantage. The other essays in this collection could be seen as a renewed warning about the artificial nature of the distinctions we have drawn, since they are empirical studies that in their own ways force us to reconsider what the essential nature of radio might be. In his stimulating discussion of the new digital technology Richard Berry points out that computer reception, lack of portability, wired rather than wireless connections, and visual displays all impugn our traditional understanding of the medium. Pointing to the formidable technical and economic barriers to the development of speech radio on the Internet, he is justifiably cautious about its future. Though Berry by no means neglects the broadcaster’s role, his is largely a listener’s perspective. On the other hand, while Marko Ala-Fossi takes full account of the listener’s experience, his illuminating study of Finnish digital radio seems to be primarily a practitioner’s view. Its on-demand services, web pages and text format are a familiar concomitant of the new technology, but Ala-Fossi is mainly concerned to explore how it creates new programming conventions. Of particular interest is the way in which radio, so long the acolyte of television, can

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draw on televised material for its own purposes, transposing it to new contexts and lending it new connotations. Martine van Selm, Nicholas Jankowski and Bibi Kleijn begin their incisive and lucidly structured account of Dutch web radio by categorising the different types of webcasting and the different kinds of interactive behaviour. They then explore the ways in which web radio challenges the conservatism of broadcasters and listeners alike. On the one hand, radio audiences often retain the expectation of being entertained by ‘stars’ or ‘talent’ in the traditional, passive sense. On the other, the latter are challenged and unsettled when interactivity occurs. The audience can then become the co-producers and even controllers of the programming, reducing the presenters to mere website facilitators or moderators. Sound broadcasting, the writers suggest, is on the cusp of transition, though presently it is too early to say how far the changes will go. It is not incongruous but logical that we should move from the most recent and sophisticated developments in sound broadcasting to a look at radio in three of the primordial or indigenous communities of the world. In their own ways, the essays of Valerie Alia, Helen Molnar and Bruce Smith each demonstrate three things. First and unsurprisingly, these communities depend on radio to a much greater extent than other kinds of community. Second, there is a sense in which the various institutional models of radio have not served them well. And third, these communities are likely to derive especial benefit from new radio technology: primordial needs are also sophisticated needs. Valerie Alia observes that for the Inuit peoples of Canada speech radio is not just an option but a necessity, the only medium adaptable to a life divided between fixed residence at certain times of the year and a peripatetic existence of hunting, gathering and camping. But in their different ways Bruce Smith and Helen Molnar show how unsuited to the lifestyles and values of such peoples the traditional institutional models of radio can be. Bruce Smith makes the important point that because Native Americans hunt, trap and gather their food they constitute societies in which little cash circulates. They are therefore unattractive to advertisers, yet also unable to make the financial donations that would support a noncommercial model of broadcasting. Helen Molnar observes that the subsistence economies of the South Pacific do not support large enough populations to

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be exploited by commercial broadcasters, yet the lack of commercial competition has a negative effect on some of the public service stations. First, it makes them more vulnerable to government control, and second, it allows them to persist with archaic programming conventions which date from the colonial age. The broadcast diet might include indigestible ‘development’ features consisting either of direct homilies to the listener or stilted ‘talking head’ interviews. And this illustrates that in such a community indigenous radio is in a double bind. It is because the population is so scattered that a topdown approach to broadcasting is necessary: yet for the same reason a greater degree of localism and sensitivity to the listener is imperative. This relates to Bruce Smith’s warning that while radio can provide virtual community and even virtual nationhood, it can also be a means by which ethnic peoples simply become more rapidly assimilated into the majority culture. In a more sanguine vein he perceives radio as a potential resource in strengthening the non-literary, oral culture of Native Americans. And this in turn may involve that much more interactive, less ‘top-down’ use of radio which the new technology is helping to bring about. Yet Valerie Alia reminds us that in some sense radio has always combined broadcast with interpersonal or ‘point to point’ forms of communication, and she gives us a vivid instance of its contribution to the democratic process. She remains optimistic about radio as a means of strengthening ethnic identity and cultural diversity. Notwithstanding their highly varied approaches, all the essays in this collection say much the same thing: that radio retains a distinctive and vital role in our multi-media world and is a fascinating, complex and rewarding object of study.

PART I

INSTITUTIONS


CHAPTER 1 

LOOK WITH THINE EARS: BBC RADIO 4 AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE IN A MULTIMEDIA AGE Andrew Crisell

Historical background It has often been remarked that we live in a visual age. Our preoccupation with the appearances of things probably owes much to the rise of those great iconic media, photography, cinema and television.1 Photography developed during the first half of the nineteenth century, although it was not until its incorporation into newspapers in the twentieth that it became a truly powerful medium. Cinema dates from about 1895 and by the 1930s had become a universal social habit: the myth and magnetism of Hollywood are too well known to need rehearsing here. In Britain annual attendances rose from 364 million in 1914 to 903 million in 1934 and to 1,000 million by 1939 (Williams 1998: 81). They peaked in 1945 at 1,585 million (Seymour-Ure 1996: 170). From the mid-1950s cinema was swiftly superseded by television, which could embrace not only the real seeming makebelieve of Hollywood but the visible actuality of the real world, carrying both into the privacy of every home. For many decades now, cultural life has been permeated by the visual – not simply at the obvious levels of display advertising, fashion

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and design but in the preoccupation with political and corporate imagery. A concern with the public presentation of self goes back through several centuries (Chaney 1993): one historian perceives its beginnings in the growing ubiquity of the silvered mirror in the late middle ages: The mirror had important psychological consequences. People who could see a sharp image of their own faces developed a new consciousness. They became more aware of their appearances, and hence of clothes, hairstyles and cosmetics. They were also led to ponder the link between external features and the inner life, in short to study personality and individuality. (Davies 1996: 369)

An assumption that physical appearance reflects psychological reality naturally led to a concern not to ‘give oneself away’. And from self-consciousness it is but a small step to self-dramatisation, to a provision of spectacle not merely in the sense of something innocuous to look at but something interesting to watch. With the rise of television, what happened to radio, the older of the two broadcasting media? In Britain the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) owned a virtual monopoly on the conduct of both. As an organisation dedicated to the ideals of ‘public service’ and imbued with the belief that broadcasting should edify the audience, it recruited its staff from the ranks of the highly educated – the products of the public schools and England’s two oldest universities, Oxford and Cambridge. And to be educated meant, above all, to be literate, to be versed in the world of books. Sound broadcasting was not writing, but it was words – and in the hands of its creative staff the BBC’s radio words could, and often did, assume a para-literary function. However it was a commonly held view among the highly educated that images, in contrast, were passively absorbed and mindless: its very popularity demonstrated that the cinema was a lowbrow, culturally inferior medium. This helps to explain the ignorance, even anxiety, which informed the BBC’s early attitude to television: the tendency to treat it as merely ‘radio with added vision’. Before the Second World War the BBC’s first Director-General, John Reith, thought of ‘integrating’ the two media (Briggs 1965: 608), while in 1949 one of his successors, William Haley, insisted in the BBC Quarterly that ‘television is an extension of [radio] broadcasting. That is the crucial point . . . They are part of one whole’ (Paulu 1981: 54).

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Though television broadcasts began in 1936, it was not until 1955, when the BBC at last faced competition in the form of ITV, that the medium began to realise its true potential as something altogether different from radio. Its rapid seduction of the mass audience gave rise to some key questions. What could radio still do? Who was it for? At first it was thought that radio would survive only for those who would not purchase television sets because they were either blind or poor, or intellectually reactionary. Among the latter was Winston Churchill, who despised that ‘tuppenny Punch and Judy Show’; other contemptuous epithets that seem to date from the early years of television, even though the medium was at that time much less driven by ratings than it is now, are ‘goggle box’, ‘idiots’ lantern’ and ‘chewing gum for the eyes’. However, during the late 1950s and the 1960s, radio’s fortunes were revived by a combination of new technology and new music. The replacement of the wireless valve by the transistor led to the production of radio sets which were lighter, smaller and cheaper than their predecessors and which, since they consumed less power, could make a much more economical use of batteries. At the same time the raucous début of rock’n’roll, and not long afterwards the exploitation of it by the pirate radio stations, attracted a significant social group who had previously shown little interest in the medium: teenagers and young adults. The effect of these developments was that radio was both heard more and listened to less. It was no longer a fixture: having switched on, audiences could take their transistor sets with them pretty much wherever they went. On the other hand, the catchy sounds of the new music demanded a rather less careful attention than the lengthy sequences of spoken word that had characterised much previous radio output.2 The BBC, which after the extinction of the pirate stations still held a near monopoly of sound broadcasting, was obliged to respond to these developments. Between 1967 and 1970, its three mixed content networks, the highbrow Third Programme, the middlebrow Home Service and the populist Light Programme, which between them offered the range of information, education and entertainment that had been required of radio in a pre-televisual age, were streamed into three mostly music channels – Radio 1 (pop), Radio 2 (middle-ofthe-road), Radio 3 (classical) – and just one network which retained a variety of traditional programming: Radio 4. Since the latter became, in effect, the repository of almost all spoken word that did not support music, it could no longer be per-

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ceived as straightforwardly ‘middlebrow’: in style and substance many of its programmes were, and are, as intellectual as those of the old Third Programme.

Hard words and no pictures However spoken word on the radio has its limitations, all of which are associated with its blindness. In their highly conceptual functions – for instance, when describing the problems of philosophy or mathematics – words and their attendant symbols need to be visible and stable, to be set out in the form of a text which the individual can ponder, and if need be return to, as a basis for understanding, speculation and inference. But words also require vision at their other extreme, in their highly concrete functions. Because of their insufficiency as descriptors we need images of the knots they are telling us how to tie, the food they are telling us how to prepare and cook, the model they are telling us how to build. In the former instance we need visible words to help us understand invisible things: in the latter instance we need visible things in order to help us understand the words. But even in the intelligible area between these two extremes, words on the radio can still be difficult to assimilate – something which is also due to its blindness because blindness allows us to treat the medium as ‘secondary’, as a background to other activities that may claim a greater share of our attention. It is hardly surprising, then, that ever since the rise of television radio has largely confined itself to music formats only briefly punctuated by disc-jockey patter and snippets of news and information. The very title of this collection admits a need to explore what other roles are left for the medium to perform. Let us return to Radio 4, which as we have already indicated consists almost wholly of speech content. What sort of speech? It has to be admitted that even Radio 4 is not immune from the visual zeitgeist but feels an occasional need to emulate television by offering an iconism of its own. This commonly takes the form of the narrator-less documentary, a kind of ‘ear on the wall’ soundscape in which a narrative is either supplied by one of the characters within the action or must be assembled by the listener from a sequence of responses by the characters to questions which have been edited out. These responses are often intercut with fragments of sound actuality.

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One such documentary which I happened to hear was Tales from the Back of Beyond (1 August 2000), in which Ben Lawrie and Karl Rees retraced six thousand miles of Che Guevara’s 1952 motor cycle journey across Argentina. The programme had something to say about how shocked Guevara had been by the poverty and exploitation he had encountered, but next to nothing about his political ideas or subsequent activities or his larger historical significance. It focused instead on the actuality of the reconstructed journey – the effort and squelch of motor cycles being pushed through mud, the voices of Lawrie and Rees as they shivered with the cold, their groans and retchings as they succumbed to altitude sickness. Certain other sounds were in themselves hard to identify but broadly evocative of physical hardship. The general aim was evidently to vouch for the reality – to insist, in effect, ‘This programme is not being made in a studio: this is exactly how it was’. The problem is that without vision most of the indexical noises of radio are indecipherable. They require words to identify them – in this case the words of Lawrie and Rees – because for humans hearing is not the primary faculty: sight is (Crisell 1994: 47–8). What Tales from the Back of Beyond illustrated, above all, was that its subject was much better suited to television. It is conceivable that some of the iconic deficiencies of radio will be offset by the new digital technology. Internet radio can offer still pictures, video clips – even printed text to remedy the evanescence of the medium’s spoken words. But the question then arises as to whether this would be ‘enhanced radio’ – radio with added pictures; or ‘reduced radio’ – radio which has been relegated to the status of a soundtrack. Given the primacy of our faculty of sight the latter possibility may seem more likely. Would this mean the end of radio as we know it? And would it matter?

Words for windows We need to begin by reminding ourselves that pictures have their own substantial limitations.3 First, they are, in themselves, inchoate and ambiguous in meaning. We see pictures, still or moving, of aircraft flying into twin skyscrapers. But whose aircraft? In what part of the world are the skyscrapers located? Are the acts deliberate or accidental? And are we watching ‘real life’ or an action movie? The pictures need

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words to explain them, however briefly. Every picture tells a story, perhaps, but not without a caption. Yet while pictures almost invariably need words, words have less need of pictures. We noted earlier that we need to see either ‘text’ as a basis for abstract thought or images of certain objects or processes to which the informative power of words is unequal. But for most other purposes we can do without the visual. Let us return to that most horrifically visual story of recent times: the terrorist attack on the two towers of the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001. Its essential facts can be economically conveyed in words. A small number of persons hijacked two civilian airliners and deliberately flew them into the towers, causing both to collapse and killing thousands of people. What, then, is the point of images? Why did we need to look at those of the terrorist attack – as, without a doubt, the great majority of us irresistibly and repeatedly did? One important reason was surely to test the truthfulness of opaque words against our primary faculty of sight: when we are told of something unbelievable our first impulse is always to try to ‘see for ourselves’. Nevertheless the verifying power of sight is limited: pictures of real life events can be misleading, and in contrast to the patent artifice of the traditional theatre, cinema and television have ensured that there is no prima facie distinction between the images of real life and those of a dramatic fiction. We may also have wished to look at the pictures in order to glean details of the attack that the verbal accounts omitted: the precise topography in which it occurred, the manner of the towers’ collapse, the reactions of the spectators. But in truth the informational content of the pictures – the amount of knowledge they could convey over and above the accompanying words – was limited. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the primary reason we watched, and at one uncomfortable level were impelled to watch – endlessly and in our billions – was emotional. Of course, not all pictures have emotional effects. The image of a reporter in a news bulletin who is standing outside a government department to inform us about a new policy probably leaves most of us unmoved. My point is merely that many, perhaps most, pictures do not greatly add to the informational content of words, and that if they make a significant contribution of any kind it is often emotional. Nor would I wish to suggest that this emotional element is necessarily trivial or reprehensible. We have only to recall the sublime feelings we

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experience when looking at works of art, at sculpture and architecture, or at natural and human beauty. Yet it is often the case that the pleasures of looking seem to snag on moral complexities. We deplore ghouls and voyeurs. But how many of us can resist glancing at the accident we drive past on the motorway or at the passionate embrace of lovers in a doorway? In discussing the terrorist attacks with a group of students, all of whom were inveterate television watchers and only occasional listeners to radio, I was intrigued to hear them say repeatedly that they had felt corrupted by what they had seen. Hence while pictures or images may have strong emotional effects, their informational content would appear to be restricted. But let us return to the way in which words convey information. Because to explain something is in essence to express it in a different form, any but the most naive verbal explanation (‘These are two aeroplanes flying into two towers’) must in some sense ‘go outside the picture’. Even in asserting that these actions were deliberate and not accidental, the minimal account I first offered was obliged to refer to ‘a small number of persons [who had] hijacked the planes’. But these persons were not, of course, visible in the television pictures. And a fuller explanation of the pictures might also refer by way of analogy or causal connection to other incidents which were separated in place and time from this one – the attacks on the American embassy in Kenya and on the American warship in Yemen – or to other matters such as ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ or ‘global capitalism’ for which, since they are abstractions, no pictorial representation is possible. A fuller explanation might also impose value judgements on the pictures by describing the attack as ‘heroic’ or ‘evil’, or it might qualify or deny the apparent meaning of the pictures by alleging that although the scale of the destruction suggested that tens of thousands of people were killed, the actual loss of life was much lower. Words, then, are not just informative or descriptive but analytical and intellectual: part of their role is to insist that pictures are not the whole of the matter – that ‘there is more to this than meets the eye’ and that what is visible is not just incomplete but in some sense misleading. Words are the tools of understanding, and understanding begins with our rejecting the world as it appears. As Neil Postman puts it, ‘Language … is the medium we use to challenge, dispute and cross-examine what comes into view, what is on the surface’ (1986: 73). In a sense, then, pictures or images are inimical to words, and the

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struggle between them can be fierce. Because they gratify our primary sense, the sense of sight, and because they often have emotional effects, images are all too believable. As the expression of intellect, of our ability to weigh evidence and argument, words insist that this man is guilty: but, alas, he looks innocent. This explains why the statue of Justice resists the seduction of appearances by wearing a blindfold and why when we wish to think hard we tend either to close our eyes or stare into space. All this is leading to an assertion that in the context of countless music formats and the prattle of a million discjockeys seems preposterous. If we can use the term intellectual to subsume both our informative and analytical faculties, then, because it is primarily verbal and entirely blind, radio is, potentially at least, a much more ‘intellectual’ medium than television, whose words are often overwhelmed by its images. It is of course true that most listeners can see while they are listening, and also that we need to be able to see words and numbers as a precondition of attempting the more systematic and conceptual kinds of thought. But the intellectual potential both of listening to the radio and looking at symbols on a page lies in the fact that what we can see has no inherent connection with what is being referred to. Our understanding of a radio programme about political refugees and economic migrants, for instance, is all the better for the fact that what is before our eyes is an image not of shabby, anxious people in internment camps but of the road beyond the windscreen or the eggs we are frying in a pan. Likewise, our understanding of a book on the same subject is enhanced by the fact that its printed text, though visible in itself, does not ‘resemble’ what it refers to. Of course, television is not obliged to show asylum seekers, either. It may simply show a discussion on the issue in which there is a good chance that its images would assist rather than distract from our understanding. But it is much more likely to provide more emotive pictorial coverage because pictures are what it does best. Radio, on the other hand, has an advantage even over the printed text in being entirely non-visual and can thus act as a secondary intellectual medium – one through which we can absorb many if not all forms of information and ideas while being free to do something else. Hence far from needing to be mitigated by means of quasi-iconic soundscapes or digital images, or even in some sense to be denied (Crook 1999: 62; Shingler and Weiringa 1998: 1), the blindness of radio should be seen as a precious asset.

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Radio 4 and BBC television: a comparison What I am suggesting, then, is that when television is put to intellectual uses its pictures are at best illustrative – a reinforcement of information and analysis which are essentially verbal – and at worst an irrelevance, even a challenge, to the intellectual content. On the other hand, if its pictures are to be fully exploited they will tend to serve emotional purposes. What follows is necessarily impressionistic: the reader must decide if it is misleading. But when ‘playing to its strengths’ television seems to be largely preoccupied with subjects which will arouse strong feelings in the viewer because they are outside common experience, or at least outside that public sphere in which decorum is imposed by a collective self-consciousness. Within the former category it aims at the aesthetic pleasures associated with the wonders of the animal and natural worlds, the beauties of art, architecture and theatrical performance or the fascinations of archaeological discovery. But in order to generate the excitement of what used to be called, in a pre-televisual age, raree-shows, it may also focus on natural disasters such as earthquakes and tornadoes, on rescues and car chases, or on crashes, accidents and other gruesome sights. Nor is this a preoccupation which is confined to the populist networks. In 2002, the upmarket Channel 4 ran a series called The Anatomists. The episode of 26 March focussed on artist Gunther von Hagen’s ‘Body Worlds’ Exhibition. Featuring ‘“30 corpses and 200 body parts” which have been “skinned, dissected, preserved and mounted”, [it] is “the most popular travelling show on Earth”, having attracted more than eight million visitors across the globe’ (Guardian Guide 2002: 75). It is also the case that the quality networks share an interest in matters that, although within the realm of common experience, are not normally ventilated in the public sphere. Both BBC 2 and Channel 4 have recently carried histories of pornography, erotica and human sexuality. And in the form of ‘talk’ and ‘reality’ shows, ‘crime-watch’ programmes, and certain kinds of holiday documentaries, all the networks are fascinated by people who behave in uninhibited ways because they are drunk, distressed or being viewed in what are normally private situations. Of course one has only to think of certain kinds of phone-ins and ‘shock jock’ programmes to recall that radio is interested in these things, too, and that it is only the lack of a visual dimension that prevents it from taking its interest further.

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Nevertheless one could offer two strong objections to the comparison of television and radio I am making. The first is that the concern of television programme planners to provide essentially emotional experiences for their viewers is an effect of broadcasting politics, of the realities of deregulation and cut-throat competition rather than the inherent character of television itself. In reply, it is worth repeating that the provision of emotional experiences is not necessarily an ignoble aim – that aesthetic (as well as voyeuristic) experiences are of their nature ‘emotional’ and that while, for instance, we may be intellectually aware of the existence of suffering and deprivation in the world, it is often the emotional experience of seeing images of these things that prompts us to redress them. But even if the kinds of programming I have instanced are a direct consequence of competitive pressures, it is precisely the latter that will encourage an exploitation of the unique powers that the medium possesses – and because they are visual I would argue that these powers are primarily emotive rather than intellectual. The second objection is that by no means the whole of television’s output consists of the kinds of programming I have instanced – that my comparison of radio and television is a highly selective and tendentious one. I could instead have tried to prove that television is more intellectual than radio by contrasting its current affairs, arts and documentary programmes with radio’s vacuous hours of DJ patter and undemanding music. Yet in reply, one could point out that even these serious television genres readily exploit the emotive possibilities of pictures. A documentary on rail safety, for instance, is more likely than not to contain footage of recent train crashes, even though this is, strictly speaking, otiose – perhaps even hostile – to a dispassionate consideration of the economics and technology of accident prevention and the frequency with which such accidents occur. But the case I am making is, I admit, rather more theoretical than empirical: that if we wish to broadcast informative and analytical material, then having regard to the innate character of radio and television and starting, as it were, with a tabula rasa, we will find it more effective to do so through the blind medium of radio than through the pictorial medium of television. However, I would suggest that what gives my case some empirical respectability is the existence of BBC Radio 4, despite its occasional and unsatisfying attempts to emulate the iconism of television.

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Over the week of 23 to 29 March 2002 I therefore compared Radio 4 with the BBC’s network terrestrial television in respect of content which by offering information and analysis could claim to be ‘intellectual’ in the broad sense in which I have defined it. I looked only at the BBC because no other single organisation operates both radio and television networks in Britain, and because, in spite of its obligation to cater to a wide range of tastes, BBC television shrinks from the more extreme populist content to be found on Channel 5 and some satellite channels. In a further attempt to do justice to television I included both BBC 1 and BBC 2 in the comparison. Radio 4 is a specialised, spoken word channel which can satisfy pretty well all the intellectual needs of the listening public. But BBCs 1 and 2 are generalist channels: we might therefore encounter ‘intellectual’ programmes on both. Nevertheless, there are two categories of intellectual programming which I have not included: straight news bulletins and Open University broadcasts. The way in which television news has been made more spectacular for emotive purposes has already been explored (Franklin 1997), while Open University broadcasts are not intended for the general public, as is attested by the fact that they are transmitted outside ‘normal’ viewing hours.4 Saturday 23 March Television Timewatch (BBC2) – a history of the Empire State building. BritArt (BBC2) – the controversy surrounding Charles Saatchi’s ‘Sensation’ Exhibition. House Detectives at Large (BBC2) – archaeology programme investigating claims that the fourteenthcentury owner of Wigmore Abbey is buried in its grounds. Radio 4 From Our Own Correspondent – current affairs reports from around the world. Money Box – programme about managing personal finances. Any Questions – discussion forum on issues of the day. Woman’s Hour – discussions and features thought to be of interest to women. Back Row – discussions, features, reviews pertaining to the world of cinema. The Moral Maze – discussion of ethical issues behind the week’s news.

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Sunday 24 March Television Panorama (BBC1) – documentary asking whether Hollywood took the threat of terrorist attacks more seriously than the U.S. government did. Dirty Work (BBC1) – the lives of domestic staff at Beaulieu. For Love and God (BBC1) – insight into the lives of gay and lesbian Jews. The Century of the Self (BBC2) – how the CIA and the U.S. government believed that Freud’s theories could be adapted to ensure that society remained stable. Radio 4 Letter from America – Alastair Cook talks on current issues. The Food Programme – issues relating to the preparation, politics and economics of food. Law in Action – how the Internet can undermine British law. Analysis – is support for Britain’s welfare state in decline? Monday 25 March Television Holiday 2002 (BBC1) – the Isle of Man and Hawaii. Hard Cash (BBC1) – investigation into holiday bargains. Life Etc (BBC2) – about a man whose prolonged death from bowel disease left his parents questioning the law. Newsnight (BBC2) – discussion programme about issues behind the news (also runs for the next four nights). Radio 4 Start the Week – discussion about the writer Primo Levi, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz during the Second World War. Front Row – discussion programme about the world of the arts. Crossing Continents – the controversial history of the Danish educational organisation, Tvind. Tuesday 26 March Television Watchdog (BBC1) – investigation of a camera shop claiming to be part of a high street chain. Booze (BBC1) – looks at the problems of Britain’s drinking culture.

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Food and Drink (BBC 2) – holiday dishes. Gary Rhodes: The Cookery Year (BBC2) – simple dishes from the early summer harvest. In Search of Happiness (BBC2) – three people sign up to a psychology course to help them with their problems. You and Yours – magazine programme on consumer issues. Ancient Voices – explores the history of medieval music. Shop Talk – the world of business. Exploring Local History – the secrets of the medicine cabinet.

Wednesday 27 March Television How To Be a Gardener (BBC2) – programme describing gardening techniques. Celtic Causeway: A Meet the Ancestors Special (BBC2) – archaeological dig investigating an Iron Age site. Radio 4 Thinking Allowed – interview with feminist academic Judith Butler exploring issues of gender, sexuality and identity. All in the Mind – a programme about psychology featuring an interview with the President Elect of the Royal College of Physicians. Apathy and Antipathy – people’s relationships with one another and with institutions, presented by sociologist Richard Sennett. Elements of Surprise – an account of the discovery of nickel. Thursday 28 March Television UK’s Worst – Restaurants? (BBC1) – undercover investigation. Weird Nature: Devious Defences (BBC1) – how creatures disguise and defend themselves. Crimewatch UK (BBC1) – re-enactments of crimes and appeals for witnesses in unsolved cases. Scar Stories (BBC1) – interviews with four people who have been scarred in different ways. Regional Documentary (BBC2) – documentary. Lifting the Bonnet (BBC2) – motoring programme. Wrong Car, Right Car (BBC2) – motoring programme.

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Horizon (BBC2) – the recent discovery of a dinosaurs’ graveyard could be one of the most significant finds ever. Check Up – medical programme about hernias. What If? – counterfactual history. Analysis – an exploration of freedom of expression. Leading Edge – how the theory of ‘bubble fusion’ may provide a solution to the world’s energy needs.

Friday 29 March Television Rogue Traders (BBC1) – pensioners who are persuaded to buy inadequate security systems. This Land (BBC2) – Dartmoor. Country House (BBC2) – a portrait of a country house. Gardeners’ World (BBC2) – gardening programme. The Trench (BBC2) – present-day volunteers from Hull follow their forefathers and live in the First World War trenches. Radio 4 The Saving Body – a discussion of how Michaelangelo and Velazquez interpreted the passion of Christ in their paintings. Law in Action – legal issues forum. The Message – media issues. Some tentative observations We should be clear from the start that outline descriptions of the subject matter of these programmes are of limited value: what is important is the way in which that subject matter is treated. We can be fairly sure of radio’s approach because its options are limited. Since the medium is primarily verbal its informative content can only take the forms of narration, interview and discussion. Television’s options are wider. But we might safely assume that its subjects will as far as possible be shown rather than merely talked about, even though the ‘talking heads’ of Newsnight should warn us against jumping to conclusions. And notwithstanding the informative intentions of the television programmes I have listed, their subjects do seem to have been primarily chosen with an eye to their visual potential. The motoring, cookery and gardening shows are hugely popular precisely because they act as practical guides in which the descriptive power of words is largely insuf-

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ficient. And though the programmes about the countryside and country houses do not have practical intentions it is unthinkable that modern television would cover such things without showing them in detail. If these programmes do not afford visual pleasures it is difficult to know what other purposes they might serve. However in many of the remaining programmes the visual element is perhaps less essential and more illustrative – used to provide emotional gratification rather than to add to the informational or intellectual content of the words. I might hesitate to make this claim about the documentary programme Panorama were it not for the following day’s review of it in The Guardian: the fall of Panorama from serious news programme to flimsy infotainment is now complete … [W]e were given a montage of apocalyptic clips of exploding planes, exploding buildings and exploding buses from action movies. That some of these movies featured Islamist fundamentalists, planes being used as weapons, and baddies who easily put entire cities in jeopardy was enough evidence for Panorama to proclaim Hollywood’s prescience and Washington DC’s myopia … Panorama failed to address why we find exploding buildings entertaining and if our appetite for destruction has waned since September 11, why baddies need to be Other to the West … Of course, that would have required analysis, something sorely lacking in this shameful piece of television. (McLean 2002: 18)

It seems reasonable to infer that in Booze the visual pleasure is derived from shots of drunken behaviour; in Life Etc from perceiving the courage or distress of the victim’s parents; in The Trench from witnessing the hardship of the volunteers; and in UK’s Worst from the covert observation of wrongdoing followed by the discomfiture of the wrongdoers – while Weird Nature and Horizon show exciting things that are outside normal experience. It is, of course, true that all of these programmes have words that can mitigate their pictures, generalise them, abstract from them, and if need be, contradict them. But we saw earlier that pictures are likely to make the stronger impression. Having little other than words radio can perform these essentially intellectual activities in a more unimpeded way. Indeed Radio 4’s counterfactual history programme What If? is by definition a rejection of the actuality that pictures are obsessed with, though this is not to deny that hypotheses can be represented visually.

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Since television’s pictures cannot generalise, it is not surprising that the programmes listed above seem to focus on concrete, physical phenomena – on specific objects and places such as gardens, Wigmore Abbey, the Empire State Building, motor cars, food and drink. Specifics are by no means absent from Radio 4’s programmes – hernias, nickel, Michaelangelo and the Internet are among their themes – but their approach seems somewhat more abstract, more concerned with issues and generalities in the realms of current affairs, science, ethics, feminism, the law, the arts, psychology and aesthetics, the media. We must remind ourselves that much depends on the way in which these issues are treated: it is quite possible that they are sometimes considered in the light of particular instances. But on radio, at least, the abstract and generalising potential of words will not be confuted by images.

Conclusion Broadcasting serves a variety of purposes, not just the informative and analytical purposes we have termed ‘intellectual’. But if it is to continue to be taken seriously as a cultural force its intellectual role is vital, and I have adduced the programmes of BBC Radio 4 to argue that sound broadcasting is better equipped for this role than television is. As the more popular of the two media, television has to some extent been vitiated by fierce competition: in a previous and more regulated world it could – and did – attempt serious intellectual themes, for example with its thirteen-part philosophical treatise, The Ascent of Man (BBC 2, 1972–3). But I would suggest that even when it does, this is always in some sense ‘to go against the grain’ of the medium because it involves a restraint rather than an exploitation of its visuality. Perhaps, then, the early distrust of television felt by the BBC mandarins, with their background in the written and spoken word, was not so absurd after all. It is not musical diversity but intellectual potential that is the primary reason we must keep faith with radio in this multi-media age.

Notes 1. In the course of this chapter I shall make use of three elderly but serviceable terms taken from semiotics or the study of signs

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(Hawkes 1977; Peirce 1960). An iconic medium is one whose signs resemble that which they represent; in an indexical relationship the signs are directly and often causally linked with what they represent; and symbolic signs bear no resemblance to, and have no inherent connection with, the things they represent. 2. I offer a fuller account of these developments in Crisell 1994: 28–31; 2002: 137–44. 3. For a more detailed version of the following argument, see Crisell 2002: 154–61. 4. It may, however, be significant that in an early study of the Open University’s radio and television strategy (Bates 1984), broadcasting was perceived as being of fairly marginal use in what is presumably the ‘intellectual’ activity of studying.

References Bates, A. (1984) Broadcasting in Education: An Evaluation, London: Constable. Briggs, A. (1965) The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume II – The Golden Age of Wireless, London: Oxford University Press. Chaney, D. (1993) Fictions of Public Life: Public Drama and Late Modern Culture, London: Routledge. Crisell, A. (1994) Understanding Radio, London: Routledge, 2nd edn. —- (2002) An Introductory History of British Broadcasting, London: Routledge, 2nd edn. Crook, T. (1999) Radio Drama: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. Davies, N. (1996) Europe: A History, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Franklin, B. (1997) Newszak and News Media, London: Edward Arnold. Guardian Guide (2002) March 23–29. Hawkes, T. (1977) Structuralism and Semiotics, London: Methuen. McLean, G. (2002) Television review, Guardian G2, 25 March. Paulu, B. (1981) Television and Radio in the United Kingdom, London: Macmillan. Peirce, C.S. (1960) Collected Papers, vols I and II, Hartshorne, C. and Weiss, P. (eds), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Postman, N. (1986) Amusing Ourselves to Death, London: Heinemann. Seymour-Ure, C. (1996) The British Press and Broadcasting since 1945, Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn. Shingler, M. and Weiringa, C. (1998) On Air: Methods and Meanings of Radio, London: Edward Arnold. Williams, K. (1998) Get Me a Murder a Day! A History of Mass Communication in Britain, London: Edward Arnold.


CHAPTER 2 

BBC RADIO 5 LIVE: EXTENDING CHOICE THROUGH ‘RADIO BLOKE’? Guy Starkey

Preamble Born on 28 March 1994, BBC Radio 5 Live was conceived of the Gulf War and the then Director-General’s penchant for news and current affairs. Under John Birt and his News and Current Affairs Directorate (Weir 1994: 2) resources were controversially diverted into journalism from other areas of programme making – so the creation of a national radio network for round-the-clock news coverage became inevitable. Industry recognition was swift: in 1995 Radio 5 Live beat Radio 4’s longestablished Today programme to the Sony award for Best Response to a News Event – and in 1996, Radio 5 Live won the Sony award for Station of the Year (Culf 1996). Although the BBC was correct in proclaiming the station one of the most successful media launches of the decade, not everything about the new arrival was without controversy. Its creation was even to the detriment of the most disadvantaged of audiences: children and teenagers, for whom this was definitely not the ‘extending choice’ that Birt had promised.

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Origins In 1994 the BBC already had a fifth national network, which had been broadcasting since August 1990. That original Radio 5 was called a ‘dumping ground’ (Crisell 1994: 39; 1997: 218) because it was created to accommodate the disparate residues of past reorganisations at a time when the popularity of the VHF (FM) broadcast band was growing. At the end of the 1980s, as listeners were discovering the better sound quality of FM, the radio industry had moved quickly to end the rather wasteful simulcasting of BBC and Independent Local Radio services on AM and FM (Donovan 1992: 218). Until then, programmes for schools had been quite easily accommodated within the Radio 4 schedule as an FM ‘opt-out’, but now they had to be found another home. Similarly, much of BBC radio’s sports coverage had been broadcast by Radio 2, on its AM frequencies of 909 and 693 kHz, while its majority output of light and middle-of-the road music continued on FM. It was relatively easy, then, to create a new, and separate service by taking over Radio 2’s AM frequencies full time, retaining the sport and drawing in the schools programming. So in August 1990, almost by default, Radio 5 became the BBC’s new network for children and – incongruously – sport. Choosing a five-year-old to make the station’s opening announcement, the BBC made a ‘symbolic recognition that part of its brief is to win the young back to speech radio’ (BBC 1991: 40). While such ideals were widely welcomed, the programme schedules explain the difficulty that the original Radio 5 had, in establishing a coherent and sustainable audience. The established schools programmes were complemented by four hours per day of new fiction, games, quizzes, magazines and phone-ins produced for children. They were made possible by changing the brief of each of two separate BBC production departments, School Radio and Continuing Education, who were both asked to produce more general programmes for young audiences. Four hundred and fifty hours of drama and stories were broadcast per year – most individual programmes running for less than thirty minutes on an assumption of shorter attention spans. Other genres were in evidence – for example, On Your Marks was a three-hour Saturday morning magazine programme for school-age children, and 1,2,3,4,5 was light entertainment for pre-school listeners. During school holidays, other new programmes filled the gaps

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the holidays created in the schedules – including a daily ninety-minute magazine, Take Five. Elsewhere there was evidence of an often thinly-veiled didacticism in the children’s programming: an unusually international outlook afforded a weekly review of the French pop charts – with some of the presentation being in French, to help listeners ‘become more familiar with the language’. The Vibe-line was a telephone advice line for teenagers, such as thirteen- and fourteen-yearolds choosing curriculum options and older pupils receiving GCSE and A-level results. In retrospect, Radio 5’s programming for children and teenagers was ambitious, exciting, stimulating and often original. As early as 1992, the BBC was claiming for the service a regular audience of 1.5 million schoolchildren during termtime, with 750 thousand teen and pre-teen listeners tuning in to the stories, plays and serials broadcast in the evening. The larger audiences, though, were for the sport. Much of the station’s sports coverage was highly acclaimed, increasing radio’s output in terms of both amount and variety: for example, ice hockey results were read out in addition to the more usual football scores. It included over 1,200 hours per year of live commentary, in addition to sports news bulletins, which were broadcast almost hourly. It was on Radio 5 that Desmond Lynam hosted a new light entertainment sports quiz, They Think It’s All Over – a format which was later to play to larger audiences on BBC1 television. Notable ratings successes included an overnight audience of 2.5 million listeners to Radio 5’s coverage of the cricket World Cup final. For its sports coverage to be credible, the network had to be able to respond to the international sporting agenda, which meant scheduling clashes would inevitably occur – particularly during the schools’ and the children’s slots. The BBC had created for itself a dilemma: how could a schools programme be interrupted or displaced for a race meeting without being accused of disadvantaging one audience for the other – or, worse, encouraging school children to gamble on horses? In effect, programme planning was constrained by the need to schedule for schools in regular daytime slots that would suit the school timetable – without interruptions other than those produced by the academic year. There were other problems, too. Costing £32.8 million to run (in 1991–2), compared with the £37 million spent on the popular music station Radio 1, Radio 5 was speech radio on a very tight budget. In the same

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year, Radio 4 cost the BBC more than twice as much: £67.8 millions – and the difference between the sums spent on the two speech networks showed in Radio 5’s schedules. The need to find additional programming – to fill the gaps between the schools programmes and the sport – meant the network had to rely on some relatively low-cost sources, while seeking to cater for a number of different audiences who shared few common interests. Statements in successive editions of the BBC’s Annual Report and Accounts reveal why the corporation would inevitably later take Radio 5 away. In 1991 the network was ‘still emerging, but it has targeted several distinct audiences’ (p. 41). In 1992 it was ‘still evolving, encouraged by the fact that its different audiences showed a growing familiarity with the pattern of its output’ (p. 38). By 1993 it continued ‘to work in a difficult situation. Its division into several groups … means it is hard for a programme to inherit an audience’ (pp. 36–7). This was a recognition that the audience was fragmented beyond the superficial and well-publicised division between children and sports fans, and as we have acknowledged, the children were themselves sub-divided into pre-school, primary and secondary age groups. In order to sustain broadcasting throughout the day, there was also some original programming for adults, which was not sports-orientated – such as a magazine entitled Education Matters, a more general breakfast show called The AM Alternative, and the Kitchen Cabinet, ‘with six women from a London housing estate gathering in one of their kitchens each week to express their views on current issues’ (BBC 1992: 38). Then there were relays of BBC World Service programming, such as the arts magazine Meridian, the International Money Programme and an environmental issues digest, Global Concern. The appeal of this additional strand to domestic children and sports enthusiasts was probably rather limited: the style of the World Service’s output is somewhat deliberate, being aimed at audiences whose first language is likely to be other than English. In 1991 a further constituency was added, with the introduction of a daily lunchtime ‘link-up’ programme supplied by the British Forces Broadcasting Service and anchored by Simon Guettier in the style of the Two-Way Family Favourites popularised decades earlier by the former Light Programme. Ironically, it was the corporation’s two-year-long review of its services, culminating in a final report entitled Extending

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Choice (BBC 1992a), which destroyed Radio 5 in its original form. Perhaps wisely, considering the document’s title and the inevitable consequences of using 909 and 693 kHz for the new news service it promised, Extending Choice did not explain which part of the frequency spectrum such an innovation would occupy. Birt merely wrote somewhat obliquely – and incorrectly – that ‘the news service will increase listeners’ choice and not reduce it’ (BBC 1993: 37).

News – ‘on demand’ The BBC had flirted with the concept of ‘rolling’ news on radio since the early 1980s, even proposing a new ‘rollercoaster’ version of Radio 4. Then, reversible car stickers were given to Radio 4 listeners who could indicate their support or otherwise for the idea by choosing which way to display the image on it – a hand giving a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’. Rolling news was a very successful format in the United States and it existed elsewhere. For example, France Info (‘le self service de l’actualité’) had joined Radio France’s three other state-owned national networks on 1 June 1987 – and it was on FM (Woodrow 1987).1 However, in the United Kingdom only the first independent local radio station for London, LBC, had provided such a service, albeit diluted with phone-ins and softer magazine items. The concept was simple: rather than interrupt a station’s majority output (most often music) for regularly updated and refreshed news bulletins on the hour or the half-hour, rolling news meant that news was itself the main content of the station, reported in greater depth and for longer durations, while itself also being revised and augmented at regular intervals. For its 1980s rollercoaster news variant of Radio 4, the BBC had proposed using the network’s long wave transmitters, but a powerful mixture of popular protest and political lobbying had forced it to abandon the plans, partly on the pretext that FM coverage of the U.K. was incomplete, especially in rural areas. So The Archers, Desert Island Discs and the rest of Radio 4’s mixed diet of arts, drama, discussion and light entertainment would, illogically, continue to be simulcast on the long wave band. Despite the shelving of those original plans, the firing of the first shots of the Gulf War in January 1991 provided the News and Current Affairs Directorate with a welcome opportunity to demonstrate the ‘worth’ of rolling news.

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For the duration of the conflict, the Radio 4 FM frequencies were taken over by ‘Gulf FM’, a continuous service of extended news bulletins and in-depth reporting of the war. Jenny Abramsky, the BBC’s Editor, News and Current Affairs, Radio from 1987 to 1993, set up the temporary service, (nicknamed ‘Scud FM’ after Saddam Hussein’s most notorious weapon). Gulf FM was pitched at the Radio 4 audience, carrying that network’s existing news and current affairs sequences (Today, The World at One, PM and The World Tonight) and filling the intervals between them with broadly similar, if less wellresourced, sustaining material. A Today reporter described how ‘volunteers’ created Gulf FM at very short notice, and how he and his colleagues expected a future full-time rolling news station to be established in its wake – also in the style of Radio 4 (Luckhurst 2001). However, from other perspectives the experiment was not an unqualified success, not least in the opinion of those Radio 4 listeners who feared that the rest of their mixed programming might now permanently lose its FM transmissions. Both the BBC and the Joint Industry Committee for Radio Audience Research (JICRAR) reported increases in total radio listening during the period, but unfortunately, while the shorter attention spans of listeners in the United States lend themselves to all-news radio which is updated and, inevitably, mostly repeated several times an hour, real audience ratings success requires listeners to either listen in very frequently or to be detained for much longer periods than the format can sustain. Despite the superficially great journalistic potential inherent in a war, the hard realities of distance and danger meant that much of Gulf FM’s programming consisted of live coverage of military briefings and a range of ‘armchair generals’ pontificating from the comfort of the studio about possible strategies and outcomes. Many of the military briefings carried live were dominated by the showing of video footage captured by cameras on board fighter aircraft – and, hence, not well suited to radio. However, with the war ‘won’ and the news agenda restored to a putative normality, within the BBC hierarchy the appetite for rolling news persisted. Later, the advent of digital television suddenly increasing the availability of channels was to allow the creation of BBC News 24 on 9 November 1997. With analogue radio frequencies still scarce, though, if a radio news service were to be found a home, some compromises would have to be made. The Gulf experience had shown up some of the

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limitations of carrying news alone, and so dawned the idea of combining news and sport: a twinning already familiar both in broadcast bulletins and within the pages of broadsheet and tabloid newspapers. The news element was to be sustained by news-oriented talk and softer feature material – and there would be a lot of sport, especially in the evenings and at weekends when newsrooms usually fall quiet. So, in March 1994, Radio 5 was re-branded as ‘Radio 5 Live’ – a subtle change of name intended to convey some of the ‘urgency’ and authority of the news output, and the real-time sports commentary. While the audiences for the sport on Radio 5 were well catered for, the greatest sacrifices were to be made by the youngest listeners whom the BBC had been seeking to serve: the programmes for children and teenagers were simply axed, the schools programmes were consigned to the early hours of the morning, and schools were encouraged to record them.2

New beginnings So the BBC’s latest offspring entered the world – and it was definitely a boy. From the beginning, in fact, it was a grown-up boy with already well-developed interests in the world around him: interests which included, of course, football, boxing, cricket and horseracing. The Radio 5 experience had demonstrated the need to identify – and to serve – a single, coherent audience. It made little sense, though, to target someone else’s audience. Network controller Jenny Abramsky’s background was in Radio 4’s daily news and current affairs sequences, but the Today team’s expectations of a Radio 4 spin-off like Gulf FM were wrong. Such expansionist ambitions were thwarted, and initially Radio 4’s journalists resented the arrival of a new – and in some respects, competing – radio news service (Luckhurst 2001). The reason for the change of plan: the middleaged middle classes were already well served at peak times of the day by Radio 4’s Today, The World at One, and PM, as well as by The World Tonight, so there was little to be gained from a new service duplicating their output. The BBC’s own research told it the average Radio 4 listener is fifty-three, ‘upmarket’ (meaning ABC1), and living in the south of England (supposedly because more ABC1s live in the south). They tend to read broadsheet newspapers (particularly The Guardian) and they are more likely than most to read spe-

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cialist publications such as New Scientist, Which?, The Economist, and National Geographic. Watching less television than average viewers, Radio 4’s listeners are ‘more likely than average to watch news programmes, documentaries and arts and travel programmes’ (BBC 1997). This relatively small section of the population was already being ‘super-served’ by Radio 4. Sensitive to such arguments, the BBC was quite rightly concerned that it should appeal to a range of audiences, and it was feeling the heat of increased competition from the commercial sector (Starkey 2003). John Birt had already suggested (BBC 1992a) that the new service was to be for twenty-five to fortyfour year-olds – but Radio 5 Live would also have to pitch itself at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. Its listeners would be more likely to read tabloid newspapers, they would be younger, and the chances of them regularly reading The Economist would be somewhat remote. The way the new network’s terms of reference were framed made it inevitable that it would be of greatest appeal to a predominantly male market. Since the biggest audiences for the popular mass-market sports are mainly male, the rest of the media were quick to stereotype the new network’s target listener – and so even before it launched, Radio 5 Live became known as ‘Radio Bloke’. This was in spite of Abramsky’s ‘absolute and deliberate decision … to have as many female presenters as male’ (Lamerton 1996). Others of the presenters seemed to mirror imagined typical listeners, such as the brash, ‘straight-talking’ cockney, Danny Baker, inherited from the original Radio 5. Soon former minister David Mellor was also presenting a football phone-in, having been pictured controversially in the tabloid press wearing a Chelsea football strip in politically compromising circumstances. Another former Conservative minister, Edwina Currie, also became a phone-in presenter, having gained a reputation for speaking her mind over salmonella in eggs. Over time, the presence of columnist Richard Littlejohn of the Sun newspaper, former Radio 1 disc-jockeys Nicky Campbell and Simon Mayo, and Peter Allen with his ‘gossipy, brutal approach’ have given the station a distinctly tabloid character – perhaps more appropriate to a ‘Sky Radio’ than the BBC (Morton 1998). In case anyone were still about to confuse this new progeny of the country’s foremost public service broadcaster with Radio 4, the first programme schedule included the mildly suggestive title, Up All Night. It would be wrong, though, to denigrate the network as being somehow inferior to Radio 4. It simply has a different remit. The hourly news bulletins are often longer, and

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they are followed by self-contained sports news bulletins. There are extended news and sport updates on the half-hour – also including actuality in the form of audio cuts – and national travel reports during the daytime at quarter past and quarter to each hour. Four entertainment news bulletins are broadcast daily, and there are fixed slots for weather forecasts which are both detailed and authoritative, because they are delivered by regular BBC forecasters who will also be familiar to television viewers. Early sporting highlights included much more than the inevitable football: among them the Ryder Cup and the Bruno/Tyson fight in Las Vegas, to which three million boxing fans are supposed to have listened live at four o’clock in the morning. These audiences were achieved, of course, without the benefit of FM transmissions. Closer scrutiny, though, demonstrates the ambiguity of 5 Live’s ratings over a period of time, as opposed to those for individual events, which are, inevitably, the peaks. Superficially, the industry’s official audience figures attest to the new network’s success. While, in the final quarter of 1993, Radio 5’s share of ‘all listening’ in the U.K. was only 1.7 percent, in its first few weeks on air Radio 5 Live achieved a significantly larger share of 2.1 percent (Q2 1994). In fact, JICRAR’s successor, Radio Joint Audience Research (RAJAR), showed that the new station had only 200,000 more listeners than the old, but the larger share is explained by the fact that they were listening longer – an average of 4.2 hours per listener in Q2 1994, instead of 3.6 hours in Q4 1993. Given time to become established, Table 2:1 shows how, seven years later, 5 Live had more than doubled its share to 4.6 percent, while the average hours it was listened to had nearly doubled to a respectable 8.1 hours per listener. However, analyses which quickly proclaimed 5 Live a stunning success (Culf 1995b) missed an important point: these statistics only include persons aged fifteen and over, so the ‘hidden’ audience of under fifteen-year-olds the BBC claimed had previously been tuning in to Radio 5, are unrepresented in the data. Given the dramatic change in the programme content, it is reasonable to assume the apparent increases described above are not so positive as on first inspection. The weekly reach figures indicate a different dimension to audience measurement: that is, the percentage of the population over fifteen years, listening at least once a week. With a reach of 9 percent both before and after the launch of 5 Live,

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Table 2.1: Audience figures, fourth quarter 2001 (period ending 16 December). Source: RAJAR Reach Average Share of (percentage) weekly listening hours (percentage) listened (per listener) National networks on AM BBC Radio 5 Live 13 talkSPORT 5 Virgin (excludes FM simulcast) 5 The New Atlantic 252 (long wave) 2

8.1 7.2 5.2 6.0

4.6 1.6 1.1 0.6

National networks on FM BBC Radio 1 BBC Radio 2 BBC Radio 3 BBC Radio 4 Classic FM

9.2 13.5 6.1 13.2 7.3

9.1 15.2 1.1 12.0 4.5

22 25 4 20 14

RAJAR’s figures suggest the young audience largely disappeared without being immediately replaced in significant numbers. Changes in methodology render longer-term comparisons of listening figures less satisfactory, but with a reach of 13 percent in 2001, around its peak 5 Live’s adult audience may not be much larger than Radio 5’s audience of adults and children was before the changes. It is important, though, to acknowledge that the U.K. radio market was fiercely more competitive in 2001 than it was in 1994, with almost twice as many commercial stations operating than at the launch (Starkey 2003). While it had a much larger reach and share than the three other national stations on the long and medium wavebands (AM), 5 Live is well behind Radios 1, 2 and 4 on FM. Luckhurst suggested that, if given Radio 3’s FM transmitters, 5 Live could seriously challenge Radio 4’s status as the U.K.’s leading speech network, describing the station he helped launch as more in tune with its listeners (1997). For many who make such assertions, the issue is formality – 5 Live being less ‘stuffy’, as well as less likely than its elder sibling to put interviewees on the defensive (McCann 1998). Although a public service broadcaster, the BBC cannot ignore audience figures. Radio 5 Live’s competition included

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talkSPORT, TeamTalk 252,3 and the ILR stations also on medium wave – such as Capital Gold – which switch from playing golden oldies to sports reports and football commentary on Saturday afternoons. The competition is not just for audiences, but also for commentary rights, the cost of which has been increasing as satellite has been a catalyst for escalating fees in television (Culf 1995a). While the national commercial station Talk Radio had failed to dent 5 Live’s audience with a topical phone-in format, its re-launch as a sport station was a calculated challenge for the sports audience, backed by big money for key events. Neither talkSPORT nor TeamTalk 252 can afford to outbid the BBC very often, though, and the High Court ordered talkSPORT to stop pretending on air that its ‘live’ Euro 2000 commentary was originated from the stadium. Operating without the broadcast rights, talkSPORT’s commentators were reduced to watching the games on television, and describing what the camera showed.

An uneasy relationship Appropriately, the first words on Radio 5 Live were spoken by newsreader Jane Garvey, who later became a regular presenter alongside other experienced journalists such as John Inverdale and Peter Allen. News takes precedence over sport most of the time. There are moments in the regular programme schedule when sport predominates, such as on Saturday and Sunday. Then, in Sport on Five, listeners may hear whole afternoons of almost uninterrupted sport: live commentary on one of the day’s ‘top’ football matches, regular reports from other games, and even brief references to some other sports, such as rugby union. This is followed by Six-OSix, in which callers telephone in opinions on the afternoon’s events to opinionated presenters such as David Mellor and Richard Littlejohn. Sport on Five reappears on weekday evenings, commonly from 7 to 10pm, depending on the availability of match commentary. These, though, are not the network’s prime slots. Occasionally, the importance of a significant sporting fixture will enable it to displace the news and current affairs – but this is rare. An example would be the weekly live retransmission of the half-hour-long Prime Minister’s Question Time from the House of Commons being replaced by a prestigious race meeting. Such a disruption to a regular fixture – in a

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medium which sanctifies consistent, recognisable, ‘slots’ for recurrent items – can be a source of frustration to listeners whose interests lie more discernibly with politics. Such tensions are an inevitable consequence of the station’s split personality, itself a result of the lack of alternative frequencies (Brown 1996). Conversely, news events may displace sport: the station regularly reacts to breaking news by carrying live press conferences or speeches, supplemented by question and answer sessions between the presenter and a BBC correspondent. While sports events, and the people who compete in them, do often make the news, most sports coverage is routine, and would not appear in the news pages of even the tabloid press. On 5 Live, the two are mixed together, and the listener may not simply turn a page to avoid one out of a preference for the other. Abramsky herself told Broadcast: ‘If I have any hope for 1996, it’s that the general election does not clash with a major sporting event’ (5 January 1996). Only the advent of more frequencies will resolve this problem. The introduction of DAB allowed the creation of 5 Live Sports Extra, (on 2 February 2002), on which ‘under-exploited’ sports rights could now find a new outlet, as an opt-out from the main service. Until DAB reaches a mass audience, though, it cannot be a satisfactory solution. Acutely conscious of its identity, 5 Live seems to understand the uneasy relationship between these two different aspects of its output, and even how those who tune in for one may be affected by inadvertently hearing the other. This unlikely juxtapositioning could in some way be achieving the kind of Reithian conversion envisaged by the promotional video Football Fan which was broadcast on BBC television as part of 5 Live’s 1999 marketing campaign: Lorry driver (Dave) talking to mate in cab; 5 Live plays in background. Dave: If I’m not mistaken, right, we’re going to be right up there. Mate: You were saying that about three seasons ago, mate. Cut to reception of large city firm; Dave is delivering drinking water on a trolley, while two men in suits are trying to remember a name. 1st man in suit: He’s the guy who overthrew the Prime Minister of Pakistan. 2nd man in suit: What, recently? 1st man in suit: Yeah, yeah. A few weeks ago. 2nd man in suit: In the coup you mean? 1st man in suit: Yeah, the, the military guy …

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Dave (under breath): General Pervez Musharraf. 1st man in suit (turning to Dave): That’s it. Well done. Dave: Excuse me? 1st man in suit: General Pervez Musharraf, the leader of the military coup in Pakistan. Cut to canteen, where the conversation is about different countries’ football teams. Man: Spain – the Spanish have got to be up there. (Laughter) 2nd man: And the French. There’s one team you’ve forgotten about – Germany of course. Dave: Germany are a good team. But elsewhere in Germany attention has turned to politics and the fate of the Christian Democrat Party, after revelations that its leaders Wolfgang Schäuble and Chancellor … Man: Blimey Dave, you all right, mate? Cut to Dave’s sitting room as he arrives home and sits down. Woman: Good day was it? Dave: Yeah, brilliant, we won two-nil. Spurs and Villa both lost, and the Prime Minister of Italy made a pledge to inject twelve billion into overseas aid – five percent in real terms per annum … Woman: David, what’s happening? Where’s all this coming from? I’m worried about yer, poppet. Caption: BBC Radio 5 Live. 909 and 693 kHz. Sport and news. (BBC, 1999, reproduced by permission of the BBC.)

The advertisement is clearly intended to be a joke: this is bluntly signified by an amusing music track playing under it. Whichever models of audience behaviour one prefers, it is unlikely that there are many such men who are as affected by listening to 5 Live’s output as Dave – just as there are probably few fishing crews who have become extraordinarily sensitised to the kind of women’s perspectives given extensive coverage on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, sandwiched as it is between that network’s shipping forecasts and its impromptu gale warnings. However, it is also worth noting that the news and current affairs content suggested in Football Fan is really not typical of 5 Live. Each of the three stories recalled in the video is an international story. Paradoxically, Dave is more likely to hear domestic stories discussed on the network – especially if they are discussed in any great detail. For example, in the second week of January 2002, the Nicky Campbell phone-in at the start of the morning magazine programme chose to highlight the following stories: Monday:

Should we worry about crime – or is fear of crime the bigger problem?

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Tuesday:

How can bereaved parents cope with the death of a child? Wednesday: What can be done to improve the U.K.’s public transport? Thursday: Who best represents (the British) in the 21st century: the Queen or Tony Blair? Or neither? Friday: Do unruly football players encourage football hooliganism? Dubbed ‘the nation’s conversation’, typically Campbell’s first hour pitted two authoritative studio guests with contrasting views against a range of callers responding to the studio discussion and to each other. Other listener reactions via e-mail are read out, and (symptomatic of the station’s informality) this can be by the traffic and travel reporter or by the weather presenter. As if to demonstrate a key difference in tone between Radios 4 and 5 Live, the arrival of the network’s second controller, Roger Mosey (from the editorship of Today), at first placed the phone-in element in jeopardy (Smith 1997), but the genre survived in regular slots such as Campbell’s. If, despite the inherent compromise of the news/sport mix, 5 Live has a stable, coherent audience – who are they? RAJAR found each year that the steadily growing audience for ‘Radio Bloke’ was indeed predominantly men. In Q3 2001 the weekly reach was 4 million males to 1.7 million females. However, expectations of a youthful audience have not been fulfilled: more thirty-five to forty-four year-olds were listening than any other age group, there were almost as many forty-five to fiftyfour year-olds, and then the next biggest group of listeners were the over sixty-fives. With two-thirds of the audience being defined as ABC1s, 5 Live could well be more of a threat to Radio 4’s news sequences than Birt and Abramsky intended – although there is not such a south-east bias. For many commentators it has been in its responses to breaking news events that 5 Live has most consistently demonstrated its worth, with the November 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin among them. Abramsky described how such early tests of the station’s ability to quickly abandon scheduled programming and go into ‘news mode’ (Lamerton 1996) accord with its style and the expectations of the audience. It takes a dedicated team and a commonality of purpose to summon up a credible news response late on a Saturday night. Of course, it was the 11 September 2001 attack on the New York World Trade Centre’s twin

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towers that tested them to extremes. Breaking in the daytime, as the catastrophic consequences of the attacks became clear, 5 Live was uniquely placed among U.K. radio stations to react quickly and authoritatively to the unfolding story (Stewart 2001). The formula in such circumstances is a familiar one, but one which lends itself well to radio because often words can be sourced more quickly than pictures. Initial reports arrive from BBC correspondents or other news services, such as Reuters, AFP and the Press Association. As details are checked and eyewitness statements sought, expert comment can be arranged either over the telephone, in the studio or via a remote link to another studio or a radio car. Often, the difficult decision is how much attention should be paid to other events. In the case of the twin towers attacks, 5 Live did not return to live sports coverage until five days later (Stewart 2001). Because phone-in comments from listeners are a staple of the station’s diet, they can be used to bolster coverage of breaking news, without seeming incongruous. This extra dimension can add perspectives that enrich the output at little cost to the BBC – for instance, in September 2001 Internet listening allowed a number of American citizens to phone in to 5 Live and take part in ‘what would have been viewed as dissenting and treacherous conversations’ if they were held on U.S. radio (Henderson 2002). In the weeks that followed, 5 Live was able to revisit some of its Gulf FM origins, reporting the military response and reactions to it – both for and against.

Conclusion The creation of Radio 5 Live, then, has been a notable, but qualified success for BBC radio. Extending radio listening choices for some, yet curtailing them for others, this development has increased the audiences to two AM frequencies, which, if merely used for gold music services, could well have fallen into neglect. The unfortunate demise of the corporation’s brave attempt to win children back to speech radio, and its successor’s often awkward accommodation between news and sport both suggest a better future through digital broadcasting – of whatever kind. Radio 5 and 5 Live have together demonstrated that if frequencies can be found – and the funds to support them – there will be audiences for separate rolling news, news talk, sports

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talk, sports commentary and children’s programmes. Each audience will be smaller, but more coherent and easier to serve – if not always to please.

Notes 1. Coincidentally, France Info was also created at the expense of a national youth service, taking over the studios, frequencies, staff and budget of the former Radio 7. 2. By 1998, 84 percent of primary schools were ordering BBC schools programmes on cassette tape. Nonetheless, Phil Woolas MP opened an adjournment debate in the House of Commons with the observation that ‘… children, who represent 20 percent of the population, are excluded from BBC provision’ (Hansard, 12 January 1998). 3. The youth music station, Atlantic 252, broadcasting on long wave to the U.K. from the Irish Republic, was re-launched as TeamTalk 252 in February 2002, only to close six months later.

References BBC (1997) Invitation to Tender, London: British Broadcasting Corporation. BBC (1991, 1992, 1993) Annual Report and Accounts, London: British Broadcasting Corporation. BBC (1992a) Extending Choice, London: British Broadcasting Corporation. Brown, M. (1996) ‘Rebel at the heart of the revolution’, Daily Telegraph, 15 June. Crisell, A. (1994) Understanding Radio, London: Routledge, 2nd edn. —- (1997) An Introductory History of British Broadcasting, London: Routledge. Culf, A. (1995a) ‘Radio warns of spiralling costs’, Guardian, 21 June. —- (1995b) ‘Radio 1 audience figures recover’, Guardian, 21 October. —- (1996) ‘“Radio Bloke” seals BBC day of triumph’, Guardian, 1 May. Donovan, P. (1992) The Radio Companion, London: Grafton. Henderson, N. (2002) ‘The Henderson Interview: Fi Glover’, Radio Magazine, 12 January. Lamerton, J. (1996) ‘Positively Live’, Broadcast, 23 February. Luckhurst, T. (1997) ‘Are you listening, Mr Birt?’, Scotsman, 23 October. —- (2001) This is Today, Oxford: Aurum. McCann, P. (1998) ‘Magic on the air at Radio 5 Live’, Independent, 11 May.

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Morton, T. (1998) ‘Raising the Jolly Roger’, Scotsman, 3 April. Radio Joint Audience Research (RAJAR), Quarterly Survey, London: RAJAR, various dates. Smith, C. (1997) ‘Young achiever’, Broadcast, 17 January. Starkey, G. (2003) ‘Are radio audiences choosing to reject greater choice?’ in Ralph, S., Lees, C. and Manchester, H. (eds) Anarchy or Diversity, Luton: University of Luton Press. Stewart, P. (2001) ‘Views on radio news’, Radio Magazine, 20 October. Weir, S. (1994) Bad Timing – Political Constraints on BBC Journalism, London: Charter 88. Woodrow, A. (1987) ‘“France Info”: première radio d’information continue’, Le Monde, 30 May.


CHAPTER 3 

U.S. PUBLIC RADIO: WHAT IS IT – AND FOR WHOM? Bob Lochte

Background American radio stations do not produce programming. They produce audiences. In commercial radio, those audiences are the ones that advertisers want to reach. In noncommercial, or public radio, the audiences comprise people most likely to contribute financially or politically to keeping this segment of the radio business solvent. Programming is the central effort in this task. Because the American radio audience has so many choices of signals, it is understandably fragmented. In a large metropolitan market, it is unlikely that even ten percent of listeners will tune into a single radio station. Yet if these small audiences are loyal to the station and demographically desirable, substantial revenues are possible. Appealing programming that gets listeners to tune in, stay tuned, and enjoy making a radio station part of their daily lives, especially at the exclusion of all other radio stations, is the core of the marketing plan for any successful American radio station. Three common terms help describe programming and audience development strategies. The first is target audience. Traditionally defined by demographics, a target audience is the portion of the listening public that a radio station wants to

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reach and satisfy. Whether the target is women aged eighteen to forty-nine, men aged twenty-five to fifty-four, or persons aged twelve to twenty-four depends on several variables including the programming expertise at the radio station or group, competition for a particular target audience, revenue potential, and more. Three recent trends in targeting strategy are noteworthy. As the number of competing signals has grown, targets have got narrower. It has become common to hear about the importance of males aged twelve to eighteen, women aged twentyfive to thirty-four, and other small segments. Radio stations often define their targets psychographically as well, with terms like ‘working’, ‘upscale’, ‘educated’, or ‘informed’. These distinctions explain differences not apparent in gender-age demographics and often attempt to prove that smaller audiences might be more valuable. As the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has deregulated station ownership limits and an individual company may control up to eight radio stations in a single city, programming strategists now seek complementary rather than competitive targets. The goal is for the group of radio stations to maximise audience across all attractive demographics. Although this particular programming scheme seems most useful in commercial radio, noncommercial radio stations can also seek complementary target audiences with favourable results (Eastman and Ferguson 1997). The second term is format, one that is often misunderstood. The format is the programming strategy designed to deliver the target audience, and only the target audience, throughout the programme day. Although a successful format is a blend of music, information, personalities, and promotion, its name usually describes only the genre of music. Music alone is not enough to attract and retain loyal listeners, but most American radio stations, for reasons discussed below, primarily play music that their audiences want to hear. So they name their formats Adult Contemporary, Urban Contemporary, Contemporary Hits, Modern Country, Solid Gold, Smooth Jazz, Alternative Rock, Christian Rock, and so on. In fact, as formatting has progressed over time, the names have become less descriptive of the music itself and more connected to marketing effort. Adult Contemporary, a very popular format, is a perfect example. It is an appealing label to put on the station’s audience, but says little about the actual playlist of music. Two non-music formats are germane to this essay. The first, a surprising success in American commercial radio, is News/Talk.

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The second is the eclectic mix generally known as Public Radio, the favourite of noncommercial operators. The final term is counter-programming. This competitive strategy entails identifying target audiences that are either not served or under-served by existing radio stations in a particular market. Once market research reveals this alternative audience, the next logical steps are to design a format that appeals to these listeners and to launch a promotional campaign to encourage them to sample it. Development of format radio Crassly commercial as American radio is, policymakers consciously chose this structure for the industry in the 1920s (McChesney 1999). This regulatory philosophy partially resembled the way that the U.S. government promoted the transcontinental railroad business in the nineteenth century. As the railroad companies received grants of large tracts of land, so did radio entrepreneurs get licences for spectrum space, at no charge. In each case, the government made vague and general public service requirements, demanded evidence of financial accountability, and left the conduct of business up to the grantee or licensee. The major difference in the licensing procedure for radio was a concept called localism. For political reasons, the FCC thought it desirable that as many cities, towns, and communities as possible have their own radio stations, and that local, first-time station owners be given preference for licences. So the FCC divided the AM, and later the FM, band into hundreds of mostly low-power channels for local signal propagation. The result is that today, the U.S. has nearly twelve thousand radio stations. Although there was considerable complaint from the listening audience about commercial interruptions, when faced with the choice to pay for radio programming themselves or to have someone else do so, most Americans chose to keep their wallets in their pockets. So commercial radio, supported by advertising, quickly became the dominant economic model. This suited the FCC because it meant that radio became a viable business and rapidly diffused from coast to coast at no cost to the government. The minority who advocated public service, noncommercial radio broadcasting were poorly financed, had no clear strategy, and bickered among themselves. They were split into two camps, one who demanded that the FCC allocate channels specifically for public service, and one who wanted to rely on the commercial broadcaster’s

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legal obligation to operate in the public interest, necessity, and convenience. By the mid-1930s, this movement had dissipated. Moreover, many of the early noncommercial broadcasters, mainly universities and colleges, had ceased operations due to budget problems brought on by the Great Depression. Station owners quickly realised the value of network programming. Networks provided good quality programmes, enough to fill the majority of the schedule, that people wanted to hear. The combination of available spots for local commercials within breaks in network programming and compensation paid to the station from the network brought steady income. The stations then could concentrate local programme efforts on news and entertainment of specific interest. This quickly became the common programming scheme. Network programme strategies, unlike formats, sought to reach the entire audience at some time during the week. The schedule included blocks of programming targeted at specific audiences during different day-parts. For example, it made no sense to offer programming for working men on weekdays, but housewives were at home and able to listen during those hours. By analysing audience flow, network programme directors attempted to make the programme blocks flow accordingly. These same strategies later became standard for network television. Spoken word programmes comprised the majority of network offerings. From drama, comedy, and other popular entertainment, to news, public affairs and sports, to local chitchat, information, and advice, during the network era radio listeners heard people talking for most of the time. News broadcasts during the Second World War drew especially large audiences. Music was usually performed live or came from transcription recordings of live broadcasts. The recorded music industry was still wary of the radio business, regarding it largely as competition. But musical variety shows, revues, and big band broadcasts from hotel ballrooms were quite popular. All of this changed dramatically during the decade after the Second World War, due to two factors. First, the major networks, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), decided that their financial futures lay in television. So they systematically devoted financial resources and moved on-air talent to the new medium, dismantling radio network programme schedules in the process.

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The audience, especially in the evening, also moved along to television. Second, there was substantial growth in the number of radio stations on the air. In 1945, there were fewer than a thousand radio stations in the United States; by 1955, that number was nearly four thousand. Most of the new stations were low-power AMs in small towns. Faced with burgeoning competition for a declining audience and networks that were rapidly becoming little more than once-an-hour news services, the radio business became somewhat chaotic. The first issue was what programming would replace the big holes left by the networks. This was the impetus for the development of format radio. The least expensive programming to fill large blocks of time was recorded popular music. Fortunately, the music and radio industries had buried the hatchet and now eagerly pursued the profitable, sometimes shady, symbiotic relationship that endures today. The problem then became how to select the music and construct the playlist rotation. An apocryphal tale states that the solution was revealed to a station owner and programme director one evening while drinking beer at a tavern. They noticed that the barmaid kept putting coins in the jukebox and playing the same tunes over and over, without complaint from the clientele. It struck them that listeners might become very loyal if only the station would play a short list of popular tunes with a similar tight rotation so that they could hear their favourites every hour or two. How many tunes should they include on the playlist? They counted the number of selections on the jukebox, and Top 40 was born. Over the next thirty years, most American radio stations essentially became music boxes. The emergence of FM radio in the 1960s accelerated this trend. Some FM operators also owned AM stations and merely aired the same schedule (simulcasting) on both bands. Others wanted to take promotional advantage of the superior sound. Broadcasting highfidelity stereophonic music was the perfect vehicle. Low-cost automation equipment and syndication services made it possible for FM stations to pump out ‘beautiful music’ for twentyfour hours, by changing eight-hour tapes twice a day. Mercifully, most FM stations switched to live operations and more au courant music by the late 1970s. Meanwhile, many AM stations were blaring out rock ‘n’ roll for teenagers, the original demographic target. In the 1970s the National Association of Broadcasters voluntarily withdrew its programming code to avoid antitrust

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action, and the FCC dropped the requirement that stations submit programming plans and logs as evidence of news and public service programmes at licence renewal. The upshot of these two actions was that many radio stations stopped doing any news or spoken word programming. The emergence of news/talk radio Although American radio in the 1980s was mostly music, traditional AM stations in big cities which still programmed news and information remained popular with mature adult audiences whom advertisers wanted to reach. To a certain extent, AM stations in small towns enjoyed a similar image of stability and reliability. But programming nothing other than news is problematic. It is very expensive, especially compared with music that is free. And All News stations do not sustain listeners over long periods of time, a behaviour favoured by advertisers. Because news programming is repetitive, listeners tend to tune in to hear the latest, then tune out or switch stations for some music. At best, All News radio stations tend to be the second favourite for most listeners. On the other hand, radio talk shows can encourage both listener loyalty and sustained listening. The marriage of news and talk radio is a natural one, if talented talk radio personalities are available and affordable. For traditional stations in the fifteen or twenty largest U.S. cities, the latter was not a problem. In smaller markets and in small towns, the talent issue was a major impediment for News/Talk radio – until the satellite era. When satellite distribution became available in the late 1970s, radio networks experienced rebirth. With programming live via satellite, radio stations in smaller markets could afford to have a major market sound twenty-four hours a day. How to localise the programming remains problematic for music stations. But News/Talk stations have fewer obstacles because much of the news is national and international anyway and the talk shows are more exciting for the listeners because they can actively, via telephone, or vicariously participate in a national event. By adding local newscasts during drive time, a phone-in chitchat show in the daytime, and a sports talk hour in the evening, stations can easily supplement the national programming and please local audiences. At present, News/Talk is one of the three most popular radio formats in America. Yet that format may not be as successful as it looks. Most of the audience is concentrated in a few large

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cities and is attributable to a handful of very popular radio stations. News/Talk radio is almost entirely AM, and that band has less than 20 percent of total listeners. More important, AM radio listeners are mostly in the older demographics with a substantial portion over the age of sixty-five. Almost no teenagers and young adults listen to AM radio, or even know where the band is, so AM is unlikely to replace its ageing audience as it dies off. Nevertheless, the hosts of nationally syndicated radio talk shows are among the most recognisable and highly paid people in show business. Unlike the news commentary, public affairs, and live events of the network era, contemporary radio talk shows are slickly produced entertainment vehicles designed to deliver target audiences to advertisers. Whether it is Rush Limbaugh spewing right-wing political diatribe, Tom Joyner addressing the African–American community, Dr. Laura dishing out tough love advice, or Howard Stern doing his part for gender and racial equality by insulting everybody, these are performers. Like Rick Dees, Wolfman Jack, Cousin Brucie, and their colourful disc-jockey counterparts, every talk radio host puts on a costume and does a show. This is commercial speech, not public discourse.

National Public Radio and Public Radio International For three decades, the movement to establish a national system of public service broadcasting in the United States basically lay dormant. Yet during these Dark Ages from the 1930s to the 1960s, there were several quietly significant developments (McCourt 1999). When the FCC created the FM band, it reserved specific channels for noncommercial educational use. It repeated this action in 1945 when it moved FM to its present spectrum location, giving public radio a home on twenty channels from 88–92 MHz. At the time, there were virtually no FM receivers in the country. The FCC also authorised transmission power as low as ten watts and allowed stations to broadcast abbreviated daily schedules and even go off the air for extended periods, like school vacations. So institutions could put radio stations on the air and operate them at minimal expense. From 1936 to 1969, noncommercial radio grew from 36 stations to 412, and evolved from an AM service to one that was primarily on FM. About half of the signals in

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1969 were low power, reaching minuscule audiences with no universal programming strategy to compare with the formats of commercial radio (Witherspoon and Kovitz 2000). The nature of the licensees evolved as well. Although colleges and universities, particularly large land grant schools, held most of the noncommercial licences, a growing number were awarded to city governments, state and local school systems, public libraries, religious institutions, and non-profit foundations established for the purpose of educational broadcasting. In the latter group, the Pacifica Foundation, based in Berkeley, California, is notable for its emphasis on volunteerism, public access, free speech, and community service broadcasting. Pacifica also originated the idea that contributions from listeners should be the major source of funding. Slowly but deliberately, public discourse was returning to the airwaves. There were examples of quality public service broadcasting during this era. For the most part, however, programming on these radio stations was amateurish, often consisting of college students playing any music they chose for a small group of friends whom they hoped were listening. With limited reach and unmeasurable audiences, there were no sources of external funding beyond a small pool of loyal donors. With few viable programme options to increase the audience and donor base, most licensees had little incentive to invest in more powerful transmitters, better production equipment, and professional staff. But the environment changed with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the means to channel public funds into educational radio and television. Supporters of this legislation, including the Ford and Carnegie Foundations, preferred using the term public rather than educational or noncommercial because it communicated a sense of public service, expression, and involvement. Although the objective for this legislation was the improvement of educational television programming, Senator Robert Griffin of Michigan added radio to an early draft of the bill. So the establishment of a viable public radio service was an unintended consequence (Witherspoon and Kovitz 2000). Under this plan, the CPB issues grants to qualified noncommercial radio stations to pay for programming. To qualify, the licensees must provide funding for a core professional staff, studio and transmission facilities, and broadcast at the maximum allocated power every day. At the same time, the

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Department of Commerce began to issue grants to qualified licensees to pay for equipment upgrades. Over time, American public radio has developed a funding formula that includes revenue from these sources – CPB grants, a budget from the licensee, donations from listeners, and underwriting. By 1970, supporters of public service radio in the U.S. had achieved two important objectives that had eluded their counterparts of the 1930s. They had channels reserved for noncommercial educational radio stations and a small but reliable source of public funding. Today more than 700 radio stations get programming grants from CPB. The missing element was programming that would let them attract audiences beyond the eclectic group of intellectuals, students, counterculture types, and people-who-just-didn’t-want-to-hear-commercial-clutter who comprised the core group of listeners. National Public Radio (NPR), based in Washington DC, filled that void. From the outset, NPR has been an interesting case study in counter-programming strategy. It was a network concept at a time when commercial radio networks had lost most of their brand identity. Its affiliates were mostly FM stations when the majority of radio listeners did not own FM receivers. And the core of NPR programming was long-form news, public affairs, and other spoken word programming while commercial radio was mainly music with occasional interruptions for information bites. Although NPR began by distributing tapes of the Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts, its first live broadcast was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on ending the Vietnam War in April, 1971. A month later, NPR added its flagship programme, a daily news hour called All Things Considered. The programme has since expanded to two hours, and is heard on virtually all NPR affiliates in afternoon drive time. A few years later, NPR added a similar morning news programme, Morning Edition, then gradually extended both programmes to the weekends as well (Witherspoon and Kovitz 2000). From the outset, the producers at NPR news wanted these two programmes to be more than hard news devoted solely to politics, economics, national and international affairs. The extended time frame gave producers the opportunity to explore issues in depth with features, multi-part series, and audio documentaries. Fine arts and popular culture have always been major subjects. There were no East Coast–West Coast restrictions so apparent in most American national media content. With no advertisers to irritate, NPR was also

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not afraid to air commentaries, controversial stories, and quirky features on oddball facets of American life (McCourt 1999). Although NPR and local stations offer music and entertainment programming, these two daily news programmes define public radio for many listeners. They are also a valuable hook for marketing the concept. Today, a listener can be almost anywhere in the U.S., scan the FM spectrum between 88 and 92 MHz during morning or afternoon drive time (the two peak listening periods Monday to Friday), and find a local public radio station airing Morning Edition or All Things Considered. Commercial radio has nothing to compare with this easy access. The other major source of national programming is Public Radio International (PRI), a service created by Minnesota Public Radio for the distribution of programmes not carried by NPR. PRI began as American Public Radio in 1981 by distributing the popular live musical variety show A Prairie Home Companion on Saturday nights. PRI changed its name a few years later when it added programmes from the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and other international public broadcasters to its weekly schedule. Although PRI complements NPR programming by emphasising music and entertainment, it also competes with NPR by providing a substantial number of high quality spoken word programmes. Public radio programming For most American radio listeners, public radio means local stations affiliated with NPR and PRI. There are many noncommercial licensees, however, that do not purchase programming from these two sources. There are community radio stations that function solely with volunteers who create the programming and donations from listeners. Many colleges and universities operate radio services programmed for and by students. There are ethnic groups, like Native Americans, who originate special interest programming, sometimes in languages other than English. And religious institutions and individual congregations have claimed a growing number of the noncommercial licences. In 2000, the FCC created a new class of noncommercial FM service at very low power, called microradio. Licensees on the new channels will likely focus on local public access rather than national programming. While this variety of noncommercial radio programming is interesting, it is the subject for another essay. Is there a public radio format? Perhaps, but not in the sense that commercial radio stations use that term. Whereas the

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concept of the target audience is relatively new in public radio, the idea of basing programming decisions on feedback from listeners, or airing what your audience wants to hear, is fundamental. In making these decisions, public radio stations have better direct communication with their listeners than their commercial competition because they contact them twice a year to beg for money (Eastman and Ferguson 1997). Most public radio stations devote many hours a day to good music that is outside mainstream commercial radio formats, often produced by local volunteers. Typically, the music choices are classical, jazz, folk, blues, new age, Adult Acoustic Alternative (Triple-A, a music format unique to public radio), or a combination. As in commercial radio, the music is a big audience draw. But it is the spoken word programming, largely from NPR and PRI, that makes public radio unique, sustaining the audience and donations. Considering the size and value of the public radio audience, as described below, if the music were the main attraction, commercial radio stations, with their superior promotional skills and deeper pockets, would be programming it and stealing the listeners. In rural America where listeners may only receive one public radio station, the programming tends to be as eclectic as the audience, offering a core of network news, information, and popular features with a variety of different music styles to suit segments of the audience. This something-for-everyone approach is in many ways a throwback to the network era of commercial radio. In urban areas, however, listeners can receive several public radio signals, as well as other noncommercial stations. Here, public radio programme directors tend to be more format-oriented and counter-programme each other. Although the stations may air some of the same network shows, one may be all classical music, one all jazz, and another all news and public affairs outside of the network hours. To accommodate the needs of their local affiliates, some of which are 100 percent spoken word, both NPR and PRI have increased the amount of non-music programming they offer. Some of these shows are produced by the national networks, but others originate at state networks and local affiliates and still others come from independent producers. The following are indicative but not exhaustive lists of these offerings. Monday to Friday, NPR has Morning Edition and All Things Considered, each two hours long. Many affiliates opt to repeat all or part of these programmes. There are several hour-long public and cultural affairs programmes, some of which can be

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carried live with listener call-ins. They include Fresh Air, The National Press Club, The Diane Rehm Show, and Talk of the Nation. Overnight, NPR packages six hours of English language news programmes from international public broadcasters under the title World Radio Network. On the weekends, NPR offers daily versions of its two newscasts, Weekend Edition and Weekend All Things Considered, the latter abbreviated to one hour. These shows have different anchors from the weekday ones and tend to emphasise features rather than hard news. The network also distributes many once-weekly programmes that affiliates usually schedule on Saturday or Sunday. The most popular is Car Talk, a phone-in show ostensibly about automotive repair. Hosted by two wisecracking brothers from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Car Talk began as a feature on a local station in Boston, then became a regular segment on Weekend Edition, and finally emerged as a live network hour on Saturday mornings. There is a one-hour sports programme, Only A Game. Weekly Edition is a summary of the week’s news, and NPR Playhouse is a radio drama series. Half-hour programmes include game shows like Says You and Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me, and ethnic features like Latino USA. PRI weekday programmes emphasise international and business news. The World, a co-production with the BBC, is a news hour that originates in Boston. BBC Overnight provides six hours of news and features from the U.K. Marketplace, a production of Minnesota Public Radio and KUSC, Los Angeles, is a half-hour summary of national and world business activity. The same team produces The Marketplace Morning Report, a tenminute feature designed for insertion into morning newscasts. The most popular weekend programme from PRI is A Prairie Home Companion, also from Minnesota Public Radio. Although this two-hour live broadcast is technically a musical variety show, its content is largely old-style radio comedy skits and spoof commercials, with live sound effects. The programme culminates each week when host Garrison Keillor reads ‘The News from Lake Wobegon’, a letter from home in a fictitious community ‘where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average’. WBEZ, Chicago produces This American Life, a weekly hour of features on lifestyles and popular culture, hosted by Ira Glass. Another popular feature is Zorba Paster On Your Health, a medical advice show from Wisconsin Public Radio which includes live telephone calls from listeners.

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With the wide array of network programming available, local public radio stations can easily fill up their schedules and create a programme schedule that will appeal to audiences. This is precisely what the networks wish all stations would do. But many programme directors feel that becoming only a network outlet would rob their stations of local appeal by de-emphasising the quirky nature of public radio rooted in the early days of all-volunteer programming. The challenges for local stations lie in coming up with the funds to pay for the network feeds, retaining the human and financial resources to produce the local programming that makes the stations unique within their markets, and doing so without pandering to the growing number of ‘enhanced underwriters’ from the private sector. (‘Underwriters’ are the commercial organisations that provide financial support for American public radio and that could originally be identified on air in name only. But recently the FCC has permitted ‘enhanced’ underwriting, the publicising of further details about the underwriters which must not, however, extend to the prices of their products or a call to buy them.) Here is how one station, KUOW, Seattle, integrates network and local programming. Please note that this station is in the Pacific Time Zone, so live network programmes begin two to three hours early. Programmes listed as KUOW’s are local productions. Monday to Friday 1:00 a.m. BBC Overnight 3:00 a.m. Morning Edition (repeated twice) 9:00 a.m. KUOW’s Weekday with Steve Scher 10:00 a.m. KUOW’s Weekday with Steve Scher 11:00 a.m. Talk of the Nation 1:00 p.m. KUOW’s the Conversation with Ross Reynolds 2:00 p.m. KUOW’s the Beat with Marcie Sillman and Dave Beck 3:00 p.m. Fresh Air with Terry Gross 4:00 p.m. NPR’s All Things Considered 6:30 p.m. Marketplace 7:00 p.m. Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me 8:00 p.m. The World 9:00 p.m. BBC News 9:30 p.m. Literary Programming 10:00 p.m. Loose Leaf Book Company 11:00 p.m. To the Point 12:00 mid The Diane Rehm Show

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Saturday 12:00 mid 5:00 a.m. 9:00 a.m. 10:00 a.m. 10:30 a.m. 11:00 a.m. 12:00 p.m. 1:00 p.m. 3:00 p.m. 4:00 p.m. 5:00 p.m. 7:00 p.m.

Sunday 12:00 mid 4:00 a.m. 5:00 a.m. 10:00 a.m. 11:00 a.m. 1:00 p.m. 2:00 p.m. 2:30 p.m. 3:00 p.m. 4:00 p.m. 5:00 p.m. 6:00 p.m. 6:30 p.m. 7:00 p.m. 9:00 p.m. 10:00 p.m. 11:00 p.m.

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BBC Overnight Weekend Edition with Scott Simon Car Talk KUOW’s Rewind with Bill Radke Says You This American Life Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me American Routes * Alternative Radio Weekend All Things Considered A Prairie Home Companion KUOW’s The Swing Years and Beyond with Cynthia Doyon *

BBC Overnight Weekly Edition Weekend Edition with Liane Hansen St. Paul Sunday * A Prairie Home Companion Car Talk KUOW’s Rewind with Bill Radke What’s the Word Selected Shorts Weekend All Things Considered On the Media Soundprint Latino USA KUOW’s Voz Latina with Lisa Levy Living on Earth New Dimensions Alternative Radio

* These programmes are primarily music.

The public radio audience Being relegated to the obscurity of FM in the 1940s turned out to be fortuitous for public radio in the 1970s. In that decade, Americans began to buy AM/FM radios and to discover the new band. Often, listeners who sampled FM had a choice limited to simulcast AM programming, Beautiful Music, and a local public radio station. Against that competition, public radio stood up quite well. By 1977, its audience was large enough for Arbi-

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tron, the primary radio research source, to begin audience measurements (Witherspoon and Kovitz 2000). The national audience for U.S. public radio is now more than twenty-one million listeners, or about 10 percent of the total audience. More than half the listeners are adult men, and three-quarters are age thirty-five or older. Nearly twothirds have college degrees, and the median household income is about $60,000, placing the public radio audience high on the SES (socioeconomic status) spectrum. They listen more than eight hours per week on average. This is more than a collection of hippies, tree huggers, highbrows, and cranks. It is a substantial slice of mainstream America, as conservative politicians learned when they tried to eliminate funding for CPB in the early 1990s. There are few commercial radio formats that generate larger national audiences and none that reach mature, educated, wealthy Americans as well. The audience has grown seven-fold since 1977. What is most remarkable is that this has happened with a minimum of the promotional hype, like contests and other incentives, that characterises commercial radio. It is almost as if public radio listeners found out about the medium by word of mouth. There is another intriguing inference from these data. Although a core of listeners still mention not having to put up with commercials as a reason they choose public radio, that alone cannot establish listener loyalty to this extent. Listeners return because they like what they hear. Radio stations that can offer an exclusive provision of this sort of programming attract and retain listeners in a competitive environment. What public radio has, not what it lacks, is most important to its audience. And what it has that one cannot find on commercial radio is top quality news, public affairs, features, and other spoken word programming.

Conclusion In the U.S., radio is a local rather than a national or regional medium. There are nearly 12,000 radio stations in the U.S. The medium is very competitive, and individual station audiences are relatively small. National network programming exists because it is a cost-effective means for local radio stations to attract audiences. American radio is, by design, primarily a privately owned, commercial business, supported by

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advertising. Attempts to create an alternative noncommercial radio system were frustrated by a variety of factors until the late 1960s. By then, the marketplace model for radio, stressing target audiences and formats, was well established in America and is still the dominant structure for the industry. Spoken word radio programming in America has a long heritage, dating back to the network era of the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1970s, however, the commercial radio networks had become short-form news services and most formats consisted of popular recorded music. National Public Radio and Public Radio International attempted to fill the void by offering spoken word programming to the growing number of radio stations receiving funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Public radio stations must compete in local markets by targeting listeners, who in this case must be donors as well, and by creating programming strategies, or formats, to attract and retain the target audience. To do this, they must counter-programme commercial radio and frequently other public radio stations. Public radio has been successful at this task because local stations are easy to find on the FM band, their noncommercial policy and musical programming appeal to a core audience, and spoken word programming from the networks helps create a unique selling proposition to attract a larger audience. Although public radio in America faces continuing funding challenges, its audience has grown dramatically in the last two decades and includes mature listeners with education and income level well above national medians. Because the listeners gravitated to public radio by choice rather than by promise of some financial or psychological reward, they are loyal to their local radio stations, their favourite network programmes, and to public radio in general.

References Eastman, S.T. and Ferguson, D.A. (1997) Broadcast/Cable Programming: Strategies and Practices, Belmont CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 5th edn. McChesney, R. (1999) Rich Media, Poor Democracy, Urbana and Chicago IL: University of Illinois Press. McCourt, T. (1999) Conflicting Communication Interests in America: The Case of National Public Radio, Westport CT: Praeger Publishers.

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Witherspoon, J. and Kovitz, R. (2000) A History of Public Broadcasting, Washington DC: Current Publishing, 2nd edn.

Internet resources http://www.arbitron.com http://www.kuow.org http://www.npr.org http://www.pri.org http://www.rab.com


CHAPTER 4 

DIGITAL REFLECTIONS OF FINNISH SPEECH JOURNALISM: YLE RADIO PEILI Marko Ala-Fossi

Historical background Radio Peili (‘Radio Mirror’), the first digital radio channel on Finnish national public service radio, Yleisradio (YLE), has made a virtue out of necessity in a very effective way. Adapting and repeating radio and television programmes that were formerly broadcast only once is an economical way of producing content which is both journalistically attractive and of high quality. At the same time Radio Peili can offer the listeners a totally new radio and multi-media service, which at its best is much more than the mere sum of its parts. This unique talk-radio channel provides its listeners with a compilation of public service speech journalism from all the YLE Finnish-speaking radio and television channels. It delivers this programming to Finland through the DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) network and all over the world via the Internet. However for those listeners who have analogue radio sets, Radio Peili is available only in a few towns in Finland and even there only at certain times of the day.1 Since the infancy of YLE in the late 1920s speech-based journalism has enjoyed a strong tradition in Finland. Although no single YLE channel was dedicated to speech, the organisation’s mission to enlighten and educate meant that serious talk and

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intellectual discussion were its determining paradigms. However, until 1963, speech and music were broadcast in equal amounts on two Finnish-speaking national public service channels. In that year YLE increased its light music programming as a counter-measure against the ‘pirate’ radio stations (Alitalo 1993: 95–7; Kemppainen 1996: 71; Lyytinen 1996: 52–5, 122–5; Nyman 1992: 172; Tulppo 1976: 333–5). YLE’s radio monopoly was broken in 1985, when the first commercial local stations were launched. Despite the fact that it was originally hoped that these stations would be promoters of free speech and the providers of a new forum for civic conversation, most simply sought to maximise their audiences – and their profits – with music-based programming (Tuominen 1993: 151). The new kind of competition with local radio stations prompted YLE to launch a ‘radio reform’ in 1990 which involved targeting its channels at different audience groups. The serious Yleisohjelma was replaced with the high-culture Radio Ylen Ykkönen (YLE R1); the slightly lighter channel called Rinnakkaisohjelma was replaced with a new youth and popular culture channel called Radiomafia (YLE R2), as well as with Radio Suomi (YLE R3) which was dedicated to news and current affairs, regional output and Finnish music. This radio reform created many new types of talk programming, for example on popular culture, but at the same time it also meant that YLE talk-radio journalism was dispersed among more channels than ever before (Salokangas 1996: 375–84). After 1990, the growing popularity of the restructured YLE channels hit commercial radio hard and at the same time an economic depression intensified the competition yet further. The last of the few original local commercial stations with journalistic ambitions, Radio Ykkönen, vanished from Helsinki in 1995. A new station called Radio Stadi tried to continue making ‘talk radio for adults’ in Helsinki, but was also unsuccessful (Ala-Fossi 1999: 41). At this time discussions about a new commercial news station began: the first application for a new national analogue licence was submitted in the Spring of 1994. In September 1996, after two years of political gestation, the Finnish government granted a licence to an operator called Oy Suomen Uutisradio Ab (Finnish Newsradio Ltd), which was owned by several Finnish media companies (Ala-Fossi 1999: 24–7). The new channel was expected to be a tough competitor for YLE Radio Suomi on the basis of its promise to offer lots of news and current affairs programming along with Finnish music. However, the emphasis on news journalism and talk

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programming turned out to be nothing more than rhetoric devised to meet the needs of the licence application: the new channel, called Radio Nova, was launched in May 1997 and its programming consisted mostly of soft adult contemporary music. It also carried some news and speech to create a favourable image for itself, but the listener’s attention was drawn more to its carefully designed and slickly engineered channel sound than to the richness or diversity of its content (Puro 1999: 182–4; Teinilä 2001: 53–65). This newcomer soon captured one-fifth of the total radio audience and a quarter of all radio advertising in Finland. After all, its listeners regarded it as the most entertaining of all the radio channels (Ala-Fossi 1999: 167–71).

‘YLE’s greatest idea for twenty years’ Hence there was no radio station in Finland which concentrated on speech journalism until October 1998, when YLE’s first digital station arrived. Despite its working title ‘Speech Radio’, the new channel called Radio Peili also played music by night. Non-stop, fully automated jazz supplied low-priced programming for night time and there was space for classic jazz in particular on the YLE radio music spectrum. In a departure from previous YLE practice Radio Peili was launched with an impressive and expensive advertising campaign not merely on YLE’s own channels but on a range of media. The slogan for the new station was: ‘Meaningful talk by day, jazz by night’. In addition to the digital broadcasts, and as a kind of introductory offer, Radio Peili transmitted for seven months (October 1998 to April 1999) on a single analogue frequency to the Helsinki region (Peltonen 2001; 1998). The main aim of this temporary analogue service was to get the audience to buy the new DAB receivers and thus speed the transition to a new digital age of radio. Of course there is no point in buying an expensive new digital receiver unless it provides services that are not available on analogue. However, from the perspective of YLE analogue radio it became clear that the closure of this temporary and experimental Radio Peili service and the allocation of the frequency to the next new YLE digital channel, which merely played classical music, was a strategic mistake. There were already two stations in Helsinki playing classical music – Radio Ylen Ykkönen and a commercial station – but

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no other channel like Radio Peili. The disappearance of alltalk radio from the analogue spectrum was like a slap in the face for the many people who had finally found a station just for their needs (Roos 1999). For them Radio Peili’s restriction to the DAB network and the Internet was equivalent to closure because they could no longer find it on their home receivers. As one listener said: ‘This was YLE’s best idea for twenty years, and now it’s going to end’. Radio Peili was flooded with protests from listeners in the capital region, who demanded that the analogue transmissions should continue. Their protests fell on deaf ears. Despite this setback Radio Peili still had some analogue coverage in the capital region. Its broadcasts could be heard during the late night hours on the analogue frequency normally used by YLE’s third digital channel, Radio Aino.2 In addition, Radio Peili can be heard in Turku, Kuopio and Lahti via YLE’s three analogue local educational radio stations. However, these stations use their frequencies and transmitters for their own purposes in a rather independent way. This means that listening to Radio Peili is possible only at certain times of the day and it is thus unable to provide a full service to its listeners.

An upgrader or just a digital recycler? Several traditional public service ideals seem to be embodied in Radio Peili’s programming. According to the recently retired Director of YLE Radio, Tapio Siikala, ‘a channel specialising in significant talk and news is part of the core public service idea’ (Siikala 2001). Speech is still a determining paradigm of public service even if it no longer characterises the whole of Finnish radio. Radio Peili’s output consists entirely of spoken word journalism conducted according to the basic principles and values of Finnish public service broadcasting: it does not really matter whether this output has originated on television or radio. Radio Peili aims not merely to operate as a re-run service for other channels. It strives to upgrade talk journalism on YLE by reworking the programmes already heard on other channels and offering them as a new kind of content in a new kind of context. Its aim is to make stories sound even better than in the original (Lahti 2000b: 28) and in so doing to operate as a kind of public service Reader’s Digest of the digital age.

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When Radio Peili is unable to rework programme material it offers something that has already been heard, or seen and heard, in its original audio package. If it cannot condense or improve the original programme or story – or the latter gains no extra value from its new broadcasting context – there might be no justification for the re-run other than to fill the daily programme schedule. In this respect Radio Peili fails in its aims and becomes nothing more than a digital recycler of spoken word journalism (Heinonen 1999: 8; Hendy 2000: 224). However, this re-run service has its own value for those listeners and viewers who were unable to catch the programme when it was first broadcast. A tip about an interesting programme from a friend or neighbour can guide the listener to Radio Peili, where the programme might be heard as a rebroadcast in digital form or as part of a free on-demand service on the Internet.

The digital working day3 The editors and journalists who produce the digital output of Radio Peili consist of only a dozen people (Lahti 2000a: 10). This means that each member of the team performs tasks which were formerly divided among many. Everyone has to be able to edit, create different versions of both audio files and text, and act as his or her own sound engineer – and in addition everyone must be able to write and present scripts (Korhonen 1998: 12). The stories which Radio Peili picks up from other YLE channels are not altered just for the sake of it. In general, they are slightly reduced in order to fit into the programme schedule. According to the staff the essence of a story is usually left unchanged, although magazine programmes might be cut and reassembled in a different way: it is more about re-editing, condensing and creating variation than making radical changes. Completely new versions are made only when a story or programme has to be adapted to the needs of its new broadcasting medium or given a perspective which differs from that of the original programme. This happens, for example, when a television programme’s audio file is modified so that it can be understood on radio without the visual information (Korhonen 1998: 13; Lahti 2000b: 28; Veräjänkorva 1995: 8–10). The digital working day on Radio Peili begins at 6 a.m. in exactly the same way as on the two YLE analogue channels,

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Radio Suomi and Radio Ylen Ykkönen: with the live broadcast of a ten-minute news magazine called Aamun peili (‘The Morning Mirror’). The first three hours of the morning have a recurrent pattern: new live Aamun peili on the hour is repeated once in similar form and once or twice more after re-working. Between the repeated and re-edited news magazine broadcasts one can also hear Mielipidelehtikatsaus (‘Dissident Press Review’) and Aikakauslehtikatsaus (‘Magazine Press Review’), both of which are original to the station. The early morning, which is characterised by rolling hard news, turns to day-time with a short programme called Sirpaleet (‘Fragments’). This consists of short bits of other programmes and interviews with well-known people. These bits are rearranged into a totally new form. At its best, this programme puts topical questions into a new and interesting perspective. Sirpaleet is, in the words of the former superintendent of the Museum of Art and Design, Kaj Kalin, ‘a radio comic strip’ (Lahti 1999: 2). The first full morning programme lasts almost forty minutes: Peilinen (eilinen means ‘yesterday’). It consists of the most interesting and important YLE speech items taken mainly from the previous evening’s radio and television programmes. Before the 10.30 a.m. news there is a review of the morning newspapers and then the channel offers the thirty minutelong Tänään (‘Today’) programme, which collates the most important topics from the morning’s radio and television output. During the daytime Radio Peili broadcasts short live news on the hour and re-runs talk programmes which were originally broadcast on Radio Ylen Ykkönen. Before noon it also repeats its own content in the form of Sirpaleet, Sanomalehtikatsaus (‘Press Review’) and an updated version of the magazine programme, Tänään.

Compilations of daily and weekly current affairs After 3.30 p.m. the tempo of rolling news quickens and Radio Peili broadcasts short two-minute news flashes every fifteen minutes. Between these are new Tänään collages edited to just the right length. At 5 p.m. it is time to loosen up a bit and make space for a new twenty-five-minute edition of Tänään. The flagship programme of YLE Radio News, the twenty-five minute long news magazine Päivän Peili (‘Daily Mirror’), is broadcast twice on Radio Peili during the early evening – the

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first time as a live broadcast at 5.30 p.m., the second time in a modified version. The frame for the evening programming is provided by the themed magazine programmes which are produced by Peili’s own team: Talouspeili (‘Economics Mirror’) and Kulttuuripeili (‘Culture Mirror’). The economics magazine is based on television’s specialist economics news of the same evening, on Peili’s own stock exchange report, and on different stories about the economy and the stock markets picked up from YLE TV and the radio news and current affairs programmes of the same day. The two different Kulttuuripeili-magazines are based on Kulttuuriuutiset (‘Cultural News’) and Musiikkiuutiset (‘Music News’) on Radio Ylen Ykkönen, but they also use cultural stories from other channels and Radiomafia’s Pop-uutiset (‘Pop-news’). In the evening there is also Ulkomaanpeili (‘Foreign Mirror’), concentrating on daily foreign issues, news on the hour and re-runs of long speech programmes. The last and almost sixty-minutelong Tänään-magazine of the day is broadcast at midnight: it covers all the most important topics of the past day. With this conclusion Radio Peili stops talking and offers classic jazz with no speech elements until six the following morning. At weekends, the characteristics of the evening programming are different from weekdays. Radio Peili then broadcasts Viikkopeili (‘Mirror of the Week’) – magazines covering general topics and offers themed compilations of items on nature, health, the economy, domestic affairs, foreign affairs and culture. The weekday theme magazines are used as source material for these weekly digests. Hence the listener can gain a comprehensive view of the most important topics of the past week by tuning into Radio Peili on Sunday evening. Compilations of daily Mielipidelehtikatsaus and Aikakauslehtikatsaus are also produced for the weekend. On Sunday evening Viikon aihe (‘Topic of the Week’) features the most interesting story of the past week which is assembled out of material gathered from several different radio and television channels. Besides all this, Radio Peili produces some individual programmes for other YLE radio channels. For example Sirpaleet could also be heard on Radio Aino, Mielipidelehtikatsaus on Radio Suomi, and Talouspeili and Tänään on the YLE Foreign Service, Radio Finland. In addition to its normal output Radio Peili relays the most interesting plenary sessions of the Finnish Parliament both on the DAB network and over the Internet. Parliamentary question times can also be heard as an ondemand service via the Internet.

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The very best of Radio Peili During long national holidays Radio Peili has utilised YLE’s vast sound archive in a very inventive way and made very rare material from past years available to its listeners and users. On Finnish Independence Day 1998, Radio Peili broadcast eighteen hours of historic speeches made by former presidents of the republic. On New Year’s Day 1999 it broadcast eighteen hours of speeches made by the greatest Finnish philosophers and on the following Good Friday it gave reports on historic funerals in Finland – as original recordings (Radio Peili 2001). At present, Radio Peili also offers all kinds of YLE sound archive materials as an on-demand service via the Internet. The repeats of Peili’s own programmes and the re-broadcasts of radio and television programmes that its audience might have missed on their original channels provide a valuable service. But the most interesting are those programmes in which Radio Peili is able to create something completely new and unheard – either from totally original material or by reworking and conflating stories from previously used material. Perhaps the best of Radio Peili’s original output is its daily Mielipidelehtikatsaus which explores all varieties of opinion and what might be termed ‘subcultural publications’. Yet it also refines and enhances the output of other YLE radio and TV channels, especially in the thematic compilations at weekends, for example in Kulttuurin viikkopeili. Likewise, Viikon aihe offers a complete re-working of old materials. For example, in August 2000 the Hell’s Angels arranged their international meeting in Hämeenlinna, Finland. The meeting lasted only for a weekend but it raised a lot of discussion in the media before and during the actual event. The story was widely covered on several channels and from many different perspectives. Viikon aihe on Radio Peili reworked this topic by using part of a background story which had been produced the previous Tuesday for the youth channel Radiomafia. Then it featured the ordinary people from Hämeenlinna, who had been interviewed by Radio Suomi on Wednesday or Thursday, and finally it carried actuality from the Friday morning television report of the preparations for the meeting. To gain full coverage of this story without Radio Peili one would have had to listen to two different YLE radio channels and watched at least one television channel on three separate days of that week.

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Some special characteristics of the Radio Peili soundscape In a sense Radio Peili operates on a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ principle: during the day it plays no music, but at night this news and talk channel turns into a veritable jazz monster. In its use of speech and sound it is related, for example, to American news and talk radio. However, the latter has a more flexible relation to music because American stations consciously utilise melodies in their jingles and promotional tracks. Radio Peili, on the contrary, has defined the characteristic sound of its prime-time programming mostly by a lack of music. In its promotional tracks and other material which are intended to create the channel soundscape the station uses only non-melodic, mostly synthetic sounds with no established cultural meaning (non-music), although most of its content is speech and other natural sounds with a certain cultural meaning. The purpose of this negative sound definition is to create a certain brand for Radio Peili by means of an original and recognisable soundscape and a distinctive station sound (Lahti 2000b: 29; Lindholm 2000). But, in spite of this conscious choice not to use any music, the day-time programmes of Radio Peili contain some music that drifts in with programming from other channels. Youth channel programmes may have music beds even in telephone reports and also the signature tune of the newscast is regularly repeated on the channel. Another aspect of Radio Peili’s sound which differs from that of all other radio stations is its use of material that was originally made for television. The absence of vision gives a really different character to this material. A news story made for television may sound like acoustic fireworks when heard on Radio Peili. Sound heard on television is much more varied than on radio, because most television speech, for instance, is heard in the acoustic of the location and not of the studio. Sounds may advance the story and they are interwoven with each other according to the different locations and images. But many radio stories are constructed only by linking entirely disparate elements. On the other hand, an absence of vision may cruelly expose the lack of substance in certain television stories. When heard on Radio Peili many studio interviews which were originally made for morning television sound like vacuous prattle in a bad acoustic. It is only the addition of a picture that makes them tolerable (Lindholm 2000).

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Its acoustic transitions are the weakest part of Radio Peili’s sound. It is only on the channel’s promotional tracks that the different sounds and acoustics are neatly cross-faded. Elsewhere the listener is moved from one acoustic to another either by abrupt transitions or by way of unintended pauses. This is partly the effect of rigid automation. For example, if a newscast is only five or ten seconds longer than was originally intended, recording stops in the middle of the closing theme, chopping it in a totally unnatural way.

Time-shifted programme presentation Although transmissions from the Radio Peili studios are fully computerised, each programme has a presenter. But its operations impose special conditions on presentation. The station seeks to avoid traditional radio announcements of ‘on the one hand and on the other’, the means by which disc-jockeys on music radio seek to make the programme flow. Here, the main aim of the presenter is to develop the news story and help listeners to understand the bigger issues, including the extent to which the news is interconnected. Because most of Radio Peili’s programme content takes the form of recordings, and because a certain time has elapsed since they were first heard, it is not a ‘present-tense’ medium like much conventional radio: the one exception is the live newscasts which are simulcast with the analogue channels. The presenters are not confined to a certain time and place like speakers in live broadcasts on a traditional radio station, nor do their words or acts create the ‘dramaturgy’ of the programme in the same way. All the speech elements on Radio Peili are pre-recorded before transmission time. They are also recycled and re-run in the broadcast rotation with the original story audio files. This is why the speech that precedes a single story cannot refer to anything other than that story. The speech elements on Radio Peili are in many ways more like first paragraphs of newspaper stories than traditional radio announcements: they belong more to a spatial than a temporal medium. In addition, an audio file which is digitally broadcast via the Internet or the DAB network always needs brief text–format information or ‘programme associated data’ (PAD) with it – just as a story in a newspaper needs a headline. Accessing on-demand stories via the Internet (where one can listen to or read what one wants when one wants) is just like

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reading a newspaper: it does not depend on the time of transmission. And as with a written text, the outcomes of the stories which are heard on audio-on-demand are known before they are broadcast (Crisell 1994: 42; MacFarland 1997: 33). One could assume that the digital production and transmission of programmes would result in a sound which would be free from all interference (Puro 1999: 185–91). This is not the case with Radio Peili. The sound level of the speeches varies a lot and one can hear all kinds of background noise: squeaking doors, people talking to each other. In this case pricking the hermetic bubble of the studio does not help to reduce the distance between the presenter and the listener because they never exist in the same continuum (Teinilä 2001: 61–3). Moreover the presenters tend to correct their speech by digital editing instead of re-recording and this usually results in ‘bumps’ in the sound. Is this because they are in a hurry – or do they believe that the content of the programme is all that the listener is interested in? Yet in its way the pitilessly high quality of the new technology sets higher standards for sound production than ever before (Rudin 1999: 16). Who needs the CD quality sound of DAB-radio in one’s own home merely in order to hear all the background noise of a large newsroom and the glitches that occur during programme production?

Programming the other way round Nowadays the planning of a new station or channel in radio or any other medium, whether in the commercial or public service sector, will involve market research. Instead of creating content which represents its objectives and offering it to the audience, station planners now try to research what kind of programming already exists on the market and what their possible target audience would expect to get. The strategies in selecting the final target audience still differ somewhat between the commercial and non-commercial sectors because commercial channels need only reach those groups that are most attractive to the advertisers (Ala-Fossi 1999: 15–18). It is only after this phase that choices can be made about the content, structure and design of the new channel. These choices are adjusted and processed according to the known and established preferences of the selected target audience. For example YLE’s third digital radio channel, Radio Aino, had

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first identified its target audience through market research, and both the content and sound design of the channel were then selected using this information about audience. The channel profile of Radio Peili has been built the other way round. One could even say that this was the traditional public service approach since the channel was not designed for the needs of a pre-identified audience. Radio Peili was launched more as YLE’s own experiment, a tool for developing new modes of operation in an age of digital convergence. However, because the channel has concentrated only on Finnish spoken word journalism by day it excludes all the ethnic and linguistic minorities in Finland along with those who use day-time radio only for entertainment. Also the night-time programming has been chosen mostly for the channel’s own needs. In this instance channel content and design came first and the actual audience came second.

Music haters, news freaks, jazz lovers and wired Finns Audience feedback during its first two years suggests that many listeners to Radio Peili think that music on the radio is either thoroughly irritating or totally trivial. This station offers them an escape from musical ‘force-feeding’ and vapid talk between songs. These people believe that ‘at last we have a station which does not rely entirely on music and inept links between songs’. Another significant audience group is the ‘news freaks’. Whenever they happen to have time, for example in the evening while they are at home, they particularly appreciate the chance to listen to reruns and digests on Radio Peili of daily newscasts which originated on other channels: ‘Your concept is excellent: this way we working professionals can listen to speech programming from several different sources’. This group includes many visually handicapped people who have been very pleased with the way in which Radio Peili has adapted television programmes for audio use. Indeed some listeners with full visual ability have also felt that leaving out the picture has improved many television programmes. The third audience group with well-defined programme tastes enjoy the classic jazz programming in Radio Peili which is broadcast at night-time and on national holidays: ‘Thank

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you for the marvellous jazz programmes over Christmas’. A fourth group can be defined according to the distribution channel it uses and its way of listening to Radio Peili. Besides domestic Internet users many Finns living abroad also tune into Radio Peili’s broadcast stream and on-demand programmes. As well as professionals on business trips or assignments in foreign countries, there are descendants of Finnish immigrants in North America. For such people it is important to be able to hear up-to-the-minute news from their ancestral country whenever they want to: ‘It’s great that here in Beijing I can listen to the latest news – and to well-edited news – from Finland’. In sum, Radio Peili’s audience consists of people who are especially interested in Finnish society, politics, and culture as well as the latest domestic and foreign news. These include people who love spoken word and/or dislike music, people who listen to music only from their own record collections, and people who are really enthusiastic about classic jazz. Listener feedback reveals within Peili’s audience many people of influence, opinion leaders in both the political and economic worlds and also some leading researchers. In fact, Radio Peili has an audience similar to that of the Pori Jazz Festival in western Finland, which is favoured by the top names in Finnish politics and economics – and that means the leading decision-makers and jazz aficionados.

Many channels for digital distribution YLE’s terrestrial DAB transmission network already covers about 40 percent of the Finnish population (Österlund– Karinkanta 2000: 5). However, most Finns cannot receive the digital radio broadcasts. By February 2001 only about 200 DAB receivers had been sold in Finland (Lehtipuu 2001), and a significant number of these had been bought for YLE and its affiliate Digita. Hence while one cannot claim that DAB radio has no audience in Finland at all, it is not at present a significant distribution channel. Nevertheless, the problems of marketing a single digital distribution channel will not stop the eventual digitalisation of the radio medium in Finland or anywhere else in the world. According to Jari Lahti, the first Head of Programmes at Radio Peili, radio channels must in the future be able to operate as terminal-independent concepts. So far, Radio Peili’s main

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means of delivery is the Internet. Internet services have been under intensive development and the Internet will also be the target of the most important development projects in the near future. Although the coverage area of the Internet is the whole world, the number of people who can simultaneously use the same Internet audio service while on-line is always limited because of the technical capacity of the webcaster. Moreover telecoms operators in Finland charge the users by the minute for Internet connections via the telephone network (Lahti 2000a: 9–13). On the Internet one can receive Radio Peili’s normal broadcast output and use the additional services, as well as listen to the news or themed programmes whenever one wants to. Its on-demand service also offers the most important single news stories under their appropriate theme, while in addition the Radio Peili web pages (http://www.yle.fi/radiopeili/) provide the latest headline news and actual news stories in text format. Radio Peili’s DAB services are produced simultaneously – as a by-product – with its Internet services. As well as all this, in 2001 Radio Peili was planning to launch a news service in text format for WAP mobile phones. Audio and video programme services for mobile phones were expected to be launched when the third generation UTMS mobile phones were brought into use (Lahti 2000a: 12; Tacchi 1999: 4–8).

A great mission – but only a small audience? It is rather difficult to gather information about Radio Peili’s audience. In conventional radio audience research the reach of Radio Peili’s programming on the analogue channels is credited to the latter. And because of the small number of DAB receivers in Finland there has been no research into digital radio listening. However, there is quite detailed quantitative information about Radio Peili’s Internet listeners. For example, in February 2001 YLE counted a total of 518,932 usage times for Real Media audio and video files for all its webpages, of which 23,803 were counted for the Radio Peili webpages. This meant that Radio Peili was YLE’s sixth most popular Internet audio service. Moreover, during the same month Radio Peili’s broadcast stream attracted 20,453 listeners via the Internet (Hirvensalo 2001). The so far inadequate sale of DAB receivers has placed Radio Peili in the unfortunate position of having a needlessly

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indeterminate relationship with its audience. Despite this it is still part of public service radio and to justify its status should be able to provide a proper service to the payers of the licence fee. The public service mission and audience size are not unrelated, because if you have no audience you cannot fulfil the mission (Avery and Stavitsky 2000: 98–9). If, as Tim Wall does, one examines radio in the digital age not from a technological perspective but as a set of social practices, the absolute need of the audience becomes particularly apparent. From this point of view, producing audio programming with different technical equipment and transmitting it via some network is not yet ‘creating radio’. It is merely an instrument for refining electric current and moving digits around different networks – until the audience redefines it by using the resulting audio product in their everyday life in the way that they would use radio (Wall 1999: 4–5). This way an audience is actually the most important factor in defining what modern radio really is, and the definition is not tied to any single technology.

Notes 1. Since April 2002 YLE has also broadcast Radio Peili programming on an analogue (AM) frequency: 558 kHz. These broadcasts can now be heard in southern Finland and in the Baltic Region during daytime, but in the evening the signal can be received as far north as Oulu. Moreover the owners of digital television receivers in Finland can now listen to all the YLE digital radio channels: YLEQ (formerly Radio Aino), Radio Peili, Ylen Klassinen and the Swedish language Vega+. 2. This was the situation before a further YLE radio reorganisation in January 2003. The short-lived Radio Aino was then replaced by a new channel called YLEQ, which does not broadcast any of Radio Peili’s programmes. (This is also true of YLEX, which replaced Radiomafia.) On the other hand, since the changes, Radio Peili has produced a daily live late-night news programme, Päivä tunnissa (‘A day in an hour’), for YLE Radio Suomi, as well as a weekly historical programme, Mennyt maailma (‘Past world’) for YLE Radio 1 (formerly Radio Ylen Ykkönen). 3. The following sections describe the programming schedules before January 2003. However, most of the significant changes in programming have been made on YLE radio channels other than Radio Peili.

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References Ala-Fossi, M. (1999) The Cold Shine of a Star: How the Market Entry of Radio Nova Affected the Operation of Commercial Local Radio in Finland [Tähden kylmä loiste. Radio Novan markkinoilletulon vaikutus Suomen kaupallisten paikallisradioiden toimintaan], licentiate thesis in Journalism and Mass Communication. Tampere: University of Tampere, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Publications, Series A92. Alitalo, S. (1993) ‘From speech to listening’ [‘Puheesta kuunteluun’] in Hujanen, T. (ed.) Towards Radio Studies [Radiotutkimusta kohti], Tampere: University of Tampere, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Publications, Series C18. Avery, R. and Stavitsky A. (2000) ‘Mission v. market’ in Witherspoon, J., Kovitz, R., Avery, R. and Stavitsky, A. (eds) A History of Public Broadcasting, Washington DC: Current Publishing, 2nd edn. Crisell, A. (1994) Understanding Radio, London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edn. Heinonen, A. (1999) ‘Eagerness, dedication – and efficiency’ [‘Into, antaumus – ja tehokkuus’] in Maasilta, M. (ed.) The Merry-GoRound of Changing Journalism [Journalismin muutoskaruselli], Tampere: University of Tampere, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Research Unit of Journalism. Hendy, D. (2000) ‘A political economy of radio in the digital age’, Journal of Radio Studies, 7. Hirvensalo, J. (2001) YLE broadcast watching / listening via the Internet in February 2001 [Yleisradion lähetysten kuuntelu/katselu Internetissä helmikuussa 2001], Helsinki: Finnish Broadcasting Company, internal YLE report, 8 March. Kemppainen, P. (1996) ‘The old and new order of radio’ [‘Radion vanha ja uusi järjestys’], Lähikuva, 1. Korhonen, R. (1998) ‘Work in digital media’ [‘Työ digimediassa’], mediaVIRTUOOSI, Winter. Lahti, J. (1999) Developing Radio Peili [Radio Peilin kehittelyä], Helsinki: Finnish Broadcasting Company, Radio Peili internal memorandum, 4 August. —- (2000a) ‘Being digital radio’, Intermedia, 28. —- (2000b) ‘Creating different options for radio markets by profiling’ [‘Profiloinnilla luodaan vaihtoehtoja radiomarkkinoille’], mediaVIRTUOOSI, Spring. Lehtipuu, U. (2001) ‘YLE is still alone in DAB: commercial radio no longer interested in digitalization’ [‘Yle yhä yksin digiradioaalloilla. Kaupallisten radioiden into digitalisointiin lopahti’], Kauppalehti, 22 February.

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Lindholm, R. (2000) Radio Peili: Listening Notes [Radio Peili. Kuuntelumuistiinpanot], Helsinki: Finnish Broadcasting Company, RTI Radio Workshop internal memorandum. Lyytinen, E. (1996) ‘From foundation to the Winter War’ [‘Perustamisesta talvisotaan’] in Lyytinen, E., Vihavainen, T., Salokangas, R. and Ilmonen, K. (eds) The History of the Finnish Broadcasting Company [Yleisradion historia, 1.osa 1926–1949] Helsinki: Yleisradio, vol. 1. MacFarland, D. (1997) Future Programming Strategies: Cultivating Listenership in the Digital Age, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Nyman, J. (1992) ‘YLE’s share of popular culture’ [‘Populaarikulttuurin Ylenantia’] in Alm, A. and Salminen K. (eds) The Sound Box: Music as a Competitive Resource in Radio? [Toosa Soi. Musiikki radion kilpailuvälineenä?], YLE, Department of Planning and Development, Research Report 1. Helsinki: Oy Yleisradio Ab. Österlund–Karinkanta, M. (2000) Current Media Policy Issues in Finland, Helsinki: Finnish Broadcasting Company EU and Media Unit. August. Peltonen, H. (1998) Digital Radio Will Launch Next Autumn [Digitaaliradio liikkeelle ensi syksynä] URL http://www.yle.fi/dab/finhtml/ pro/articles/peltonen180298.htm Consulted 8 January 2001. —- (2001) ‘Radio Peili/Jazz’, e-mail message to the author, 15 June. Puro, J-P. (1999) ‘Speech in the digital (radio) world’ [‘Puhe digitaalisessa (radio) maailmassa’] in Saarikoski, P., Suominen, J. and Nieminen, H. (eds) New Media and Everyday Life [Uusi media ja arkielämä], Turku: University of Turku, Department of Research of Arts, Communications, Series A, Number 41. Radio Peili (2001) The History of Radio Peili [Historiaa] URL http://www.yle.fi/radiopeili/html/static/peili_swf2/hissa.htm Consulted 8 January 2001. Radio Peili broadcasts, August 2000 to September 2000. Radio Peili listener feedback, October 1998 to August 2000. Roos, J-P. (1999) Radio: The Abandoned Ancestor of Yleisradio [Radioyleisradion heitteillejätetty alkuäiti] URL http:// www.valt.helsinki.fi/ /staff/jproos/yle.html Consulted 23 March 2001. Rudin, R. (1999) ‘Eureka 147 – digital diversity or radio restriction?’, conference paper delivered at Radiocracy: Radio, Democracy and Development, conference held at Cardiff University, U.K., 26–28 November. Salokangas, R. (1996) ‘Resembling its own time’ [‘Aikansa oloinen’] in Lyytinen, E., Vihavainen, T., Salokangas, R. and Ilmonen, K. (eds) The History of the Finnish Broadcasting Company [Yleisradion historia , 2.osa 1949–1996], Helsinki: Yleisradio, vol. 2. Siikala,T. (2001) Speech delivered at the annual strategy seminar of the YLE Radio Division. Helsinki, 22 March. Tacchi, J. (1999) ‘The need for radio theory in the digital age’, conference paper delivered at Radiocracy: Radio, Democracy and Devel-

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opment, conference held at Cardiff University, U.K., 26–28 November 1999. Teinilä, J. (2001) ‘The elementary metaphysics of the soundscape: why radio needs the world’ [‘Äänimaailman metafysiikan alkeet. Mihin radio maailmaa tarvitsisi’] in Nieminen, H. and Sihvonen, J. (eds) Media Research: Perspectives and Explorations [Mediatutkimus. Näkökulmia ja kartoituksia], Turku: University of Turku, Department of Arts and Media Research, Series A , no. 47. Tulppo, P. (ed.) (1976) From Radio Amateurs to Consciousness Industry [Radioamatööreistä tajuntateollisuuteen], Helsinki: WSOY. Tuominen, H. (1993) ‘Music as a competitive strategy for local radio stations’ [‘Musiikki paikallisradioiden kilpailustrategiana’] in Hujanen, T. (ed.) Towards Radio Studies [Radiotutkimusta kohti], Tampere: University of Tampere, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Publications, Series C18. Veräjänkorva, A. (1995) An Essay about Making Versions [Essee aiheesta versiointi], Helsinki: Finnish Broadcasting Company, internal memorandum for Radio Suomi, 9 October. Wall, T. (1999) ‘The illusive object: general theories of radio communication’, conference paper delivered at Radiocracy: Radio, Democracy and Development, conference held at Cardiff University, U.K., 26–28 November.

PART II

IDENTITIES


CHAPTER 5 

INDIGENOUS RADIO IN CANADA Valerie Alia

Prelude In the mid-1980s in Pangnirtung, a community of about a thousand people on Baffin Island in the Canadian eastern Arctic, the distinguished midwife, Annie Okalik (whose son, Paul Okalik, would become the first Premier of Nunavut Territory, in 1999), described the experience of assisting at a longdistance birth, using radio communications to guide the couple, who were stranded while hunting on a remote island. At about the same time, in Yukon Territory in Canada’s far northwest, Yukon newspaper publisher and former territorial Commissioner, Doug Bell, witnessed a more public moment in emergency broadcasting. The territorial election was tied between the New Democratic Party and the Progressive Conservative Party. The telephone lines were down in Yukon’s northernmost town, Old Crow, home of the 275 members of the Vuntut Gwich’in First Nation.1 It was a cliffhanger: Old Crow’s votes would turn the election. ‘We got the vote from a ham radio operator in Alaska,’ Bell recalled. The ham operator picked up the election results, radioed from an aeroplane flying over Old Crow, and relayed them to the airport at Whitehorse (with a population of about twenty thousand, Yukon’s capital and only city) (Alia 1999: 132). In the Canadian north people are used to improvising. A communications breakdown can mean not only the loss of an election, but also

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loss of life. Radio and telephones are the primary means of communication, and survival.

Geography, history, ‘civilisation’, and early radio Canada is a radio country. This is not unrelated to its geographic reality – as a collection of regional and cultural communities strung across an east-west expanse, each region stretching northward into vast and sparsely populated lands. In a country dotted with remote communities, radio is the friendliest, most useful, and most available medium. In 1901, Marconi received the first transatlantic ‘wireless’ signal from Cornwall, England, at St. John’s, Newfoundland. In 1919, the Marconi Wireless Company launched XWA (later CFCF) in Montreal. It is ‘widely regarded as the oldest station in the world’ (McNeil and Wolfe 1982: 11). Canada’s official bilingual status and multicultural and multilingual policies and programmes, combined with the fact that most indigenous people live in small and remote communities, help to explain its position as world leader in indigenous broadcasting. Radio broadcasting in Canada began in the 1920s. According to Bill Anderson, one of the early broadcasters, pre-1958 northern radio was ‘a “sometimes” thing. There’d be an occasional programme on shortwave from southern Canada or Russia, or programmes put together by people with amateur sets, but for the most part there was nothing – certainly nothing in the daytime …’ (McNeil and Wolfe 1982: 112). In northern and remote communities most early radio stations were run by volunteers, with bush pilots sometimes adding brief newscasts ‘about things they had picked up in their travels’ to the information transmitted over their radios. Dawson City, Yukon, was one of the first northern communities to have radio, which accompanied the arrival of a branch of the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. Although within Canada in general, Yukon Territory is the smallest and most marginalised political region, its Aboriginal communications society, Northern Native Broadcasting Yukon (NNBY) holds a key national position. Since 1990, I have visited most of the Yukon communities. Wherever one goes – in offices, homes, schools, and out on the land – people are tuned in to CHON-FM, the indigenous radio outlet based at NNBY’s headquarters in Whitehorse. Its call letters are probably derived from Tutchone, since Northern and Southern Tutchone first nation’s people are among

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NNBY’s major creators and supporters. Most communities have volunteer reporters who telephone local newscasts for live or taped broadcast, Yukon-wide. The development of media in Yukon is reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz. Inventive Yukoners with minimal facilities and resources manage to magnify their assets to give this small territory a larger-thanlife presence in the outside world. A 1931 advertisement for Burgess batteries headlined, ‘Arctic Nights aren’t so lonely now!’ informed the reader of CNR (Canadian National Railway) Magazine in typically colonialist terms, that ‘Burgess aids the northward course of civilization’ by aiding ‘RADIO … the marvel of the age’ in ‘breaking the centuries-old silence of the Arctic’. In this depiction of the Inuit-dominated Arctic, there is no acknowledgement of the centuries-old indigenous civilisation. As in most twentieth century media representations, indigenous inhabitants are portrayed as exotic, educable innocents. The advertisement features a photograph of an Inuk boy and girl in the Baffin Island community of Pond Inlet, listening with headphones to a broadcast concert.2 The Inuit are depicted as passive and fortunate recipients of ‘civilisation’ in the form of EuropeanCanadian innovation, technology, and entertainment. The batteries were produced in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Niagara Falls, Ontario. The potential consumers of battery-operated radio were from Outside (the term northern Canadians and Americans use to refer to regions below their Arctic and SubArctic homelands. The Outside perspective is underscored by the text: ‘In the far north – and here at home [my italics], Burgess gives longer and better service’. Clearly, ‘here at home’ is not the northern homeland of the Inuit children in the photograph, but the southern urban home communities of the implicitly omnipresent European-Canadians. Such texts and imagery distorted reality and contributed to the prevalence of a dominant-culture-driven missionary mentality. Contrary to this image of Inuit as passive recipients of European culture, indigenous broadcasters – and particularly Inuit – were a central part of the picture from the start. They wore headphones, not only to lounge and listen, but also to broadcast from studios to a multicultural array of listeners. In ‘My Little Corner of Canada’, his column for the eastern Arctic weekly, Nunatsiaq News, the Inuit leader and ‘father of Nunavut’, John Amagoalik praised ‘pioneers like Elijah Menarik and Ann Pudlo from the early days of radio in Canada’s North [and] Jonah Kelly who has lived the history of

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radio in the Arctic’. He considers radio an essential social and political tool: ‘Northern radio continues to promote our language, culture and traditions’ (Amagoalik 1996: 9). Despite their prominence and innovative use of the medium, indigenous broadcasters are invisible in accounts of Canadian radio history. Even after several decades of running their own stations, the dominant literature omits their contribution. In today’s North, national, regional and international programming is carried over the outlets of the Northern Service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and northern, regional and local programming is broadcast on CBC and an array of private and public stations. In tandem with highly sophisticated new broadcast technologies, northern radio remains intimate, informal, experimental and ubiquitous. Much of indigenous radio remains rooted in the efforts of amateur operators working in limited broadcast areas. It includes informally run single-community stations, pirate stations, ham and citizens’ band networks. The flexibility and mobility of such stations is not unique to northern or indigenous radio, and should be seen in context. According to a Canadian Press wire service story carried in the Toronto Globe of 15 April 1912, survivors of the Titanic owed their lives to messages sent by wireless from the ship to Montreal (McNeil and Wolfe 1982: 22). The national broadcaster, CBC, began in the 1920s as a service on Canadian National Railway trains.

Indigenous voices, airwaves, and frontiers The first indigenous broadcasts in North America were heard on Alaskan radio in the 1930s, but the United States has been slow to support indigenous media and today has only about thirty Native American radio stations nationwide, as compared to several hundred in Canada. It was not until 1971 that KYUK-AM in Bethel, Alaska – the first Native Americanowned and operated radio station in the U.S. – began broadcasting. Its call letters are derived from the Yup’ik Eskimos of the Yukon-Kushokwin Delta, KYUK’s founders and primary audience. Despite the enthusiasm of audiences and the continuing need for indigenous media outlets, the government of Alaska ‘has been steadily reducing its commitment to public broadcasting in the state, to both Native and non-Native stations’ and rural Native stations ‘with few other options for

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raising money feel the squeeze most acutely’ (Smith and Cornette 1998: 31). Canada’s first indigenous language radio programme went to air in 1960. It was broadcast in the Inuit language of Inuktitut by CBC Northern Service via short wave and re-broadcast to northern communities from CBC’s studios in Montreal. A year later, Inuit in the eastern Arctic begin their own regular radio broadcasts. In 1967, the ‘Frontier Package’ brought radio into seventeen communities in the western Arctic. That same year, Kenomadiwin Radio began broadcasting in northern Ontario from a travelling van, a development less surprising given the fact that in northern and remote communities news media often begin as alternative services. Also in northern Ontario, the Wawatay Communications Society started as a trail radio rental service to trappers out on the land, with the small, high frequency transmitters forming a communitybased emergency communications system. In addition to several hundred local radio stations Canada now has eleven regional networks and a national network. Most technological and programming breakthroughs have been in the north – in Yukon Territory, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut Territory, and the northern regions of the provinces (Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Labrador – the northern part of Newfoundland). Typically, volunteers supplement paid staff or run the radio stations themselves. The following are two examples of volunteer-driven radio in the Northwest Territories. Founded in 1970, the station at Tuktoyaktuk is run entirely by volunteers who are supervised by elected officers of the Tuk-Tuk Communications Society. It broadcasts in English and Inuvialuktun, the language of Inuvialuit (western Inuit). The community radio station at Fort McPherson is run by a group of volunteers guided by a volunteer committee. Founded in 1983, it is linked to the regional Native Communications Society of the Western Arctic and broadcasts in Gwich’in (the language of the community’s indigenous majority) and English. Its annual budget of approximately $6,000 (Canadian) is raised through bingo games, with a regular Monday evening radio bingo helping to fill the pot. Radio bingo is a familiar and favourite institution in many indigenous communities, and typically, all other activity stops during the weekly bingo broadcast. Peter Raymont’s documentary film, Magic in the Sky (1981), focuses on the decision of the Inuit in Igloolik, a high-arctic community in the eastern Arctic, in what is now Nunavut, to refuse to

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allow CBC or any other Outside television into their community. Igloolik was the last holdout against non-indigenous ‘southern’ media influence, voting ‘no’ again and again in annual referenda, until finally, the launch of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) gave them some control over their own programming. The filmmaker’s camera enters several homes to observe Inuit families on a midwinter’s bingo night, clustered round their radios. When the winning number is called, the winner rushes out by snowmobile to the radio station to verify the numbers and claim his prize. This is possible because, like most northern indigenous communities, Igloolik can be traversed in a matter of minutes. In Fort McPherson regularly scheduled broadcasts are supplemented by programming developed by the indigenous organisations, providing music and messages to people who are ‘out on the land’. This, too, is a role which radio uniquely plays in indigenous Canada, as the only medium adaptable to life divided between residence in communities and huntinggathering-camping in remote wilderness locations. Although Canada has subsidised all of the media, broadcast projects have received the most consistent commitment from government funding sources and have tended to be the most durable. In 1970, the Native Communications Society of Nova Scotia was founded and the Alberta Native Communications Society received funding from the federal government. A year later, the Northern Pilot Project set up Aboriginal radio experimental projects in the Keewatin (formerly in the eastern part of the Northwest Territories, now in Nunavut) and northern Ontario, with funding from the federal Department of Communications. Also in 1971, Canadian Radio–Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) licences were granted to community radio stations in several other Inuit and First Nations communities. The federal government continued its project of strengthening northern and Aboriginal communications with the creation of the Native Communications Programme (NCP) in 1973, the same year it launched the CBC northern television service, and in 1974, the Wawatay Native Communications Society began operating in northern Ontario. The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation was founded in 1981 and officially launched in 1982. Some of its units preceded the official start date. Established in 1978, the unit at Salluit, in Northern Quebec (the Inuit portion of which is now called Nunavik), was the ‘first native-language radio production

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facility in the Arctic. It began distribution by mailing copies of its programs to other stations, to be used at their discretion’ (Giuliani 1983: 17). When IBC began operating it provided both radio and television broadcasts and became the first Aboriginal television network; 1981 also saw the start of a satellite radio service in the Northwest Territories and Yukon. The arrival of satellite-transmitted television in the 1970s marked an international breakthrough: using Telesat’s Hermes Anik satellites Canada became the first country to develop a domestic telecommunications satellite system. Indigenous people were among the first to explore and develop effective ways to use it. Early projects included crossovers such as the experimental interactive audio project carried by satellite across Northern Quebec (Nunavik) which linked eight radio stations, run by the Aboriginal Communications Society Taqramiut Nipingat Incorporated (TNI), then affiliated with a land claims lobby group, the Northern Quebec Inuit Association. The 1977 document, Ikarut Silakkut: Bridges-Over-the-Air, ‘described a new cross-cultural contact space’ for Inuktitutspeakers of the circumpolar countries, a circumpolar cross-border short-wave radio service (Roth 2000: 251–2). In 1978, the Anik B satellite carried programmes developed by Project Inukshuk – the start of Inuit-produced television. In 1980 the CRTC formed a committee to consider proposals for satellite television services in northern and remote communities. Headed by Francois Thérrien it included John Amagoalik, who would become the first indigenous leader in Canada to help set national communications policy. The committee emphasised the role of broadcasting in preserving and maintaining Aboriginal languages and cultures and sought nothing less than a ‘New Broadcasting Universe’, declaring the need for immediate action to meet the needs of Canadians who saw themselves as broadcasting’s second-class citizens: ‘We cannot stress too strongly the immediacy of the problem: alternative television programming must be provided from Canadian satellites with no further delay’ (Canadian Radio– Television and Telecommunications Commission (The Thérrien Report) 1980: 1). The ‘Thérrien Report’ set the stage for a new era in Aboriginal broadcasting. The government responded by funding Inuktitut programming in Northern Quebec and the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation in what is now Nunavut, and the CRTC licensed the private satellite distribution service, Cana-

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dian Satellite Communications Inc. (CANCOM) with the stipulation that it make a substantial contribution to indigenous programming. A concerted pressure group strategy by indigenous communities and their supporters led to the 1983 launch of the Northern Broadcasting Policy and Northern Native Broadcast Access Program (NNBAP) with a commitment to fund thirteen Aboriginal Communications Societies. Linked to an umbrella organisation, the National Aboriginal Communications Society (NACS), they would become regional centres for radio, television and print media services.

Mixed blessings: changing policies and programmes Over the years, Canada’s commitment to enabling Aboriginal media has been inconsistently bolstered by funding. Indigenous community radio has had to struggle against the temptation to rely on whatever funding happens to come its way at whichever moment. It has come to depend on minimal staffing, low wages, volunteer personnel to supplement paid staff (where it exists at all), and other forms of assistance from within the community. Along with the stations formally approved by the CRTC, ‘pirate’ and ‘trail’ or ‘moccasin telegraph’ stations continue to thrive. In 1990 there were substantial cutbacks to the government funding of indigenous media which had devastating effects on some of the media outlets. New CRTC policy, set in September 1990, offset some of the losses and fostered greater independence by permitting indigenous radio stations to earn advertising revenues; for those without competitors – almost unrestricted advertising, up to 250 minutes of sales spots per day. Not everyone considers the advent of advertising in a positive light. I was in Whitehorse, tuned in to CHON-FM, the radio station of Northern Native Broadcasting Yukon (NNBY), the day it shifted from a no-advertising policy to a broadcast day filled with ads. The effect was jarring. At the time, many people expressed concern about the intrusiveness of advertising, but most NNBY staff members expressed relief that the station would survive the funding cuts and continue to serve its listeners (Alia 1999). Helen Fallding, who worked at CHON-FM at the time, was unsure about the wisdom of the move to commercial Aboriginal radio. During her time at CHON-FM, she had observed an increase in ‘white business “expertise” at the management and

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advertising sales level, aimed at increasing the station’s commercial viability’. Her concern was that ‘the people hired had no clue about aboriginal culture or values and didn’t seem interested in learning anything’, which led to ‘some terrible decisions’. One administrator saw CHON-FM as ‘a country-andwestern station whose target audience should be C and W listeners, not aboriginal people’ and the station aired advertisements for a strip show at a local tavern. ‘Perhaps these were growing pains and the board has taken back control’ (Fallding 1995). In purely economic terms, CHON-FM is a stunning success. In 1998 the Yukon-wide service kept its seventeen community stations occupied with programming supported by $250,000 in advertising revenues. Stephen Barnard suggests the reason the station may have been able to avoid being co-opted: Community radio does not eschew advertising, but the principle is to use advertising revenue to directly fund programming or running costs, not as a source of profit. The idealism behind this is best summed up by a community radio broadcaster from Ecuador, Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil: ‘… Community radio stations are not looking for profit but to provide a service to civil society. Naturally, this is a service that attempts to influence public opinion, create consensus, strengthen democracy and above all create community’. (Barnard 2000: 71–2)

Canada’s Aboriginal Communications Societies evolved into comprehensive communications service units, consolidating and coordinating print, radio, and television programming. Over time, each society has developed its own priorities and personality. Radio remains at the core of each of the communications societies. The following catalogue of community radio in the indigenous communities of Canada’s north demonstrates radio’s importance to small, remote, and often otherwise under-served communities.

Catalogue of northern community radio: Tables 5:1 to 5:3 The communities are listed by region. In addition to community radio, the nationally and regionally based CBC Radio and Television are available in most communities. The tables include information on the languages spoken in each community; population figures are based on the 1996 Canadian Census. Source: adapted from Alia (1999: 174–7)

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Table 5.1: Nunavut Community

Popula- Languages tion

Media

Arctic Bay

639

Inuktitut, English

Arviat Baker Lake Bathurst Inlet Broughton Island

1,559 1,385 80 488

Inuktitut, English Inuktitut, English Inuinnaqtun, English Inuktitut, English

Cambridge Bay

1,351

Iniunnaqtun, English

Cape Dorset

1,118

Inuktitut, English

Chesterfield Inlet

337

Inuktitut, English

Clyde River

708

Inuktitut, English

Coral Harbour Gjoa Haven Grise Fiord Hall Beach Igloolik Iqaluit (Frobisher Bay)

669 879 148 543 1,174 4,220

Inuktitut, English Inuktitut, English Inuktitut, English Inuktitut, English Inuktitut, English Inuktitut, English, French

Kimmirut (Lake Harbour) Kugluktuk (Coppermine) Nanisivik

397

Inuktitut, English

956

Inuinnaqtun

Community radio, equipped by IBC Community radio Comunity radio HF radio Community radio, Community Airport Radio Station (CARS): weather + communications Community radio, LPAM Inuit Radio Society Community radio, CARS Community radio, CARS Community radio, CARS Community radio CARS Community radio Community radio CARS Radio & TV centre for Nunavut, IBC production centre, satellite uplink Community radio, CARS Community radio

317

Pangnirtung

1,243

Inuktitut, English, French Inuktitut, English

Pelly Bay

496

Inuktitut, English

Pond Inlet

1,154

Inuktitut, English

Rankin Inlet

2,058

Inuktitut, English

Resolute Sanikiluaq

198 631

Inuktitut, English Inuktitut, English

Whale Cove (Tikirarjuaq)

225

Inuktitut, English

Community radio, CARS Community radio, CARS Community radio, CARS Community radio & TV, CARS Community radio, IBC production centre CBC only Community radio, CARS Community FM radio, CARS

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Table 5.2: Northwest Territories Community

Popula- Languages tion

Media

Aklavik

727

English, Inuvialuktun

Colville 90 Lake Colville, Lake Band (Dene) Deline (name 616 changed from Fort Franklin, 1993) Detah 190

North Slavey, English

low power FM station HF radio

North Slavey, English

No radio

CJCD radio (microwave) NorthwesTel VHF radio/phone Community radio, CARS, NorthwesTel radio/phone Community radio – Fort Liard Dene Band, CARS CARS, community

Enterprise

86

Dogrib, Chipewyan, English English

Fort Good Hope

644

North Slavey, English

Fort Liard

512

South Slavey, English

Fort McPherson Tetlit Gwich’in Band Fort Providence

878

Gwich’in, English

748

Fort Resolution

536

English, South Slavey, French English, Chipewyan

Fort Simpson Fort Smith

1,257 2,441

Hay River

3,611

Hay River Reserve

253

Holman Inuvik

423 3,296

Jean Marie River

53

Kakisa

29

Lutselk’e (Snowdrift) 304 Nahanni Butte 75 Norman Wells

798

Paulatuk

277

English, South Slavey English, Chipewyan, Cree English, South Slavey, Chipewyan South Slavey, Chipewyan, English Inuinnaqtun, English English, Inuvialuktun, Gwich’in, North Slavey South Slavey, English

radio VHF radio/phone VHF radio/phone, CARS VHF radio/phone VHF radio/phone VHF radio/phone CBC radio

CARS VHF radio/phone, CKEV-FM NorthwesTel mobile radio/phone South Slavey, English NorthwesTel mobile radio/phone from terminal outside community Chipewyan, English CBC only South Slavey, English NorthwesTel mobile radio/phone English, North Slavey, VHF radio/phone, Dogrib community radio Inuvialuktun, English CARS

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Table 5.2 (continued) Community

Popula- Languages tion

Rae-Edzo

1,662

Rae Lakes Repulse Bay

256 559

Sachs Harbour

135

Snare Lake

135

Taloyoak (Spence Bay) Trout Lake

648

Tsigehtchic (Arctic Red River) Tuktoyaktuk Tulita (Fort Norman) Wha Ti (Lac La Martre) Lac La Martre Band Wrigley Yellowknife

162

68

943 450 413

167 17,275

Media

Dogrib, English, French Community radio, Beacho Kho Radio Society Dogrib, English mobile radio/phone Inuktitut, English Community radio, CARS Inuvialuktun, English Community radio, CARS Dogrib, English radio/phone, no CBC, no other service Inuktitut, English Community radio, CARS South Slavey, English NorthwesTel mobile radio/phone Gwich’in NorthwesTel VHF radio/telephone Inuvialuktun, English Community radio North Slavey, English VHF radio/phone, community radio Dogrib, English Community radio

South Slavey, English English, French, Dogrib, North Slavey, South Slavey, Chipewyan, Cree, other languages

VHF radio/phone VHF radio/phone; CFYK-AM, news/ information, CBS affiliate. CJCD-AM (music, news, public service, sports), private ownership; re-broadcast in Hay River. CKLB-FM, country & western, owned by Native Communications Society. Re-broadcast in Aklavik, Deline, Detah, Ft. Good Hope, Ft. Liard, Ft. McPherson, Ft. Providence, Ft. Resolution, Ft. Simpson, Ft. Smith, Hay river (CKNM), Inuvik, Iqaluit, Jean Marie River.

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Table 5.3: Yukon Territory Community

Popula- Languages tion

Media

Whitehorse

23,000

Pirate and bush radio (various locations). CFWH-AM, varied programming (CBC affiliate) English, with occasional broadcasts in other languages. CHON-FM, country & western, news, public service, sports, owned by NNBY, English, Southern & Northern Tutchone, Gwich’in.

English, French, Northern Tutchone, Southern Tutchone, Gwich’in, Tlingit, other languages

In addition to its coverage of Alberta, CFWE-FM, ‘Alberta’s Aboriginal Voice’, broadcast by the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta (AMMSA) from Edmonton, covers some northern regions of provinces and Yukon.

New rights and wrongs: talk radio, crisis intervention, and cultural survival While Canada has a longstanding alternative tradition of what Liora Salter calls ‘constituency-based services’, it has shifted from a regionally inclusive ‘right-to-receive services’ approach to enshrining the rights of women, First Nations (indigenous) peoples, multicultural and multiracial (‘visible minority’) communities. The 1991 Broadcasting Act specifies the right of all Canadians to be fairly portrayed and equitably hired in public, private and community broadcast media (Roth 1996; Salter 1980). Radio is the most grassroots of news media, well-adapted to oral cultures and nomadic life. In particular, talk radio provides a forum for social and political dialogue. According to Conway Jocks, the founder and former station manager of CKRK-FM in the Mohawk First Nation of Kahnawake, Quebec, talk radio ‘forges the communication links in ethnic neighbourhoods, small towns and aboriginal communities from the farthest Arctic coasts to the outskirts of major Canadian cities, sending hundreds of languages through the air’ (Jocks 1996: 174). Most North American talk radio is AM, but in indigenous communities the less costly and more easily established FM

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and trail radio predominate. Radio is a medium of linguistic and cultural continuity, and sometimes of survival. During the crisis of the summer of 1990, when Quebec police and Canadian military troops clashed with Mohawk people at Kanehsatake, CKRK-FM, in the blockaded neighbouring community of Kahnawake, was the sole connection with the outside and an essential link between the communities. At the same time, Mohawk broadcasters Marie David and Bev Nelson, inside Kanehsatake, were trapped in their community radio station. As both observer-broadcasters and community members they were able to provide on-the-spot news and commentary which kept the community informed and helped to maintain morale. Their insider status increased their credibility, which was enhanced by Marie David’s legacy as a member of a distinguished family of ‘traditional’ Mohawk journalists which includes her late father, Walter David, and siblings, Valerie David and Dan David (a major figure in Canadian television and the Aboriginal People’s Television Network). The situation in Kanehsatake and Kahnawake recalled the 1973 Lakota siege at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota in the United States, when Lakota women kept the local radio station going under tense and sometimes life-threatening circumstances (Crow Dog 1991). For indigenous communities radio is a medium of linguistic and cultural, as well as physical, survival. As Jocks puts it, ‘First Nations stations regularly broadcast in their own language as a matter of course. In those communities where the language is threatened, Native-language programs become the star attraction to their listeners’ (Jocks 1996: 175). Radio remains the chosen medium for local and regional communication, sometimes in tandem with the Internet, which in addition to extending the range of radio broadcasts has become an important forum for discussion and debate and a tool for global and regional constituency-building and cross-border organising. Its potential should not be underestimated. The 1960s political leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, has attributed the failure of the mass student protests to become a full-fledged revolution to the students’ ‘failure to capture the radio stations’ (Barnard 2000: 69). Jim Bell, editor of Nunatsiaq News, thinks the Internet offers a way of ‘fighting back’ – a chance for aboriginal people to ‘send the information the other way’ and an antidote to the cultural demolition which the Inuk journalist and political leader, Rosemarie Kuptana, described in her famous speech

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campaigning for indigenous television: ‘We might liken the onslaught of southern television and the absence of native television to the neutron bomb … Neutron bomb television … destroys the soul of a people but leaves the shell of a people walking around’ (Brisebois 1983: 107). The journalist and actor, Gary Farmer, publisher of Aboriginal Voices (transformed in 2000 to an APTN television magazine and currently developing a radio magazine) is cautiously optimistic about the expanding role of the internet in indigenous communications. Seventy-five years ago, we were all we had except for Saturday night radio. A hundred and fifty years ago, we were all we had. We must have been a hell of a lot more fascinating. We had to have been great storytellers. We certainly had a lot more time for each other. … Yet; the amount of information we have at our fingertips is astounding. Access such as we have never had before … I wonder about our existence in the future and what communication skills will be required to survive … Can we live off our creativity and our ability to communicate? (Farmer 1998)

In 1991, the world’s largest Aboriginal television network was born, yet another product of Canadian policy and innovation. The mandate of Television Northern Canada (TVNC) was to broadcast cultural, social, political and educational programming in English, French, and several indigenous languages, to Canada’s northern indigenous people. It was targeted, via satellite, at an audience of approximately 100,000. In early 1999, after several years of successful broadcasts, the CRTC granted TVNC permission to expand southward and become a national Aboriginal television service – the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN). While most major developments have been in northern regions, APTN is not the only project to include Canada’s urban south. In the early 1990s, Enos (Bud) Whiteye, a writer and broadcaster from Ontario’s Moraviantown Delaware First Nation, and several colleagues founded Native News Network of Canada (NNNC) in London, Ontario. They hoped to develop a nationwide, alternative news wire service which would be able to pay indigenous staff and freelance journalists and distribute their work to print and broadcast media outlets. The organisation has marketed articles to newspapers and radio stations, and its current heads, Dan and Mary Lou

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Smoke, host a radio programme called Smoke Signals, linked to NNNC, on the University of Western Ontario student station. While it serves an important community function and has national and international radio and television links, its broadcast area is limited to a radius of only a few miles. Related projects are emerging, notably the current development of a national Aboriginal radio network linked to APTN, which is still going strong. The developments in Canada are part of a world movement of indigenous media and people. Inspired and influenced by the landmark developments in Canada as well as in their own countries and communities, indigenous people are developing global, as well as national, regional and local news outlets. From Australia to Alaska, they are using satellite, digital, cable and other technologies and the Internet to strengthen their culturally and linguistically diverse voices and disseminate information to a rapidly expanding global audience, simultaneously maintaining or restoring particular languages and cultures while promoting common interests. I have called this internationalisation of indigenous media audiencehood and media production ‘the New Media Nation’.3 Despite the increasing availability of an array of higher-tech, more global indigenous media, the geographic, cultural and economic realities suggest that radio will continue to be the backbone of the New Media Nation in the coming decades. Its affordability and portability, and the warmth and eloquence of voices, make indigenous radio a unique and continuing expression of connectedness and community.

Notes The author wishes to thank the Canadian High Commission for funding part of the research undertaken for this chapter. 1. In Canada, the term ‘First Nations’ or ‘First Nations People’ has a specific political meaning (referring to indigenous or first peoples), but in general usage does not normally refer to Inuit. The words ‘indigenous’ and ‘Aboriginal’ (or ‘aboriginal’) are used interchangeably. Many indigenous people in Canada prefer aboriginal. However, to those outside Canada it often connotes the Aboriginal people of Australia; for this reason, the dominant term used in this essay is the more internationally accepted ‘indigenous’. It should be noted that some people prefer Native American, specific cultural names (e.g. Ojibway or Cree) or ‘Indian’ and consider ‘indigenous’ offensive. In short, there is no

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universally preferred term; preferred usage varies among communities and cultures. 2. Inuk means one Inuit person (female or male). The primary Inuit language is Inuktitut. 3. This concept is developed and discussed in detail in Alia (2003)

References Alia, V. (1999) Un/Covering the North: News, Media, and Aboriginal People, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. —- (2003) ‘Scattered voices, global vision: indigenous people and the new media nation’ in Karim, K. (ed.) The Networks of Diasporic Communication, London: Routledge. Amagoalik, J. (1996) ‘My little corner of Canada’, Nunatsiaq News, January 19. Barnard, S. (2000) Studying Radio, London: Edward Arnold. Brisebois, D. (1983) ‘The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation’, Anthropologica, 25. Canadian Radio–Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) (1980) The 1980s: A Decade of Diversity: Broadcasting, Satellites, and Pay-TV, Report of the Committee on Extension of Service to Northern and Remote Communities (The Thérrien Report), Hull: Canadian Government Publishing Centre, Supply and Services Canada. Crow Dog, M. with Erdoes, R. (1991) Lakota Woman, New York: Grove Press. Fallding, H. (1995) Personal communication, December 6. Farmer, Gary (1998) ‘Letter from the editor: time in a computer chip’, Aboriginal Voices, 6. Giuliani, M. (1983) ‘The Inuit Broadcasting corporation’, Government of Canada North/Nord, 16. Jocks, C. (1996) ‘Talk of the town: radio talk shows’ in Alia, V., Brennan, B. and Hoffmaster, B. (eds) Deadlines and Diversity: Journalism Ethics in a Changing World, Halifax: Fernwood. McNeil, B. and Wolfe, M. (1982) Signing On: The Birth of Radio in Canada, Toronto and New York: Doubleday. Raymont, P. (1981) Magic in the Sky, Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada (documentary film). Roth, L. (1996) ‘The politics and ethics of inclusion: cultural and racial diversity in Canadian broadcast journalism’ in Alia, V., Brennan, B. and Hoffmaster, B. (eds) Deadlines and Diversity: Journalism Ethics in a Changing World, Halifax: Fernwood. —- (2000) ‘Bypassing of borders and building of bridges: steps in the construction of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network in Canada,’ Gazette, 62.

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Salter, L. (1980) ‘Two directions on a one-way street: old and new approaches in media analysis in two decades’, Studies in Communications, 1. Smith, B. and Cornette, M. (1998) ‘Electronic smoke signals: Native American radio in the United States’, Cultural Survival Quarterly, Summer.


CHAPTER 6 

NATIVE AMERICAN RADIO: WOLAKOTA WICONI WASTE Bruce L. Smith

Introduction The Lakota (Sioux) Indian1 name for radio station KLND-FM on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in north west South Dakota is Wolakota Wiconi Waste. It means ‘through unity a good life’. The arrival of an Indian-owned radio station on the reservation was an almost revolutionary development in 1997, and radio has since become a unifying voice for a people who have traditionally had little means of communicating with one another. In general, Native American owned radio stations have had a profound impact in Indian Country. Leonard Bruguier, Director of the Institute of American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota, says Native stations serve the function of the eyapaha on the reservations (Bruguier 1997). In traditional Lakota Sioux culture, the eyapaha was an individual who moved through a nomadic camp sharing information, much as town criers did in England and colonial America in centuries past. Bruguier says that the radio stations are a vital source of information in communities that traditionally have had no local media. Gordon Regguinti, the former Executive Director of the Native American Journalists Association, says the stations also

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serve as electronic smoke signals (Regguinti 1998). Smoke signals were once a simple means of communicating a basic message across a large distance, connecting communities. Today it is radio that connects disparate communities, many of which still have no local newspaper or television service. Other media originate from distant places and have historically been viewed as forces that promote the melding of Native with majority culture. Native radio, on the other hand, serves to connect and preserve communities. Regguinti says that Native radio has several practical uses: 1. It is one, often the only, means of communication available to provide community and tribal news. 2. It is the community bulletin board. 3. It builds self-esteem in individuals and tribes. 4. It successfully transmits Native culture. ‘Radio is one means by which folks learn language,’ Regguinti says. ‘The value of Native American radio in teaching and preserving tribal language cannot be over-stressed. It is the means to successful language retention.’ The mission statements of many Native stations assert the importance of using radio to help pass along language and culture. KUYI-FM, a Hopi station, says its mission is ‘To provide a creative and innovative forum through which cultural information relevant to the Hopi community will be broadcast in the Hopi language’ (URL: http.//www.tribalwisdom.org/hopiradio.html. Consulted 8 May 2001). The mission statement goes on to say that the station will help the Hopi community grow stronger by 1. Broadcasting in the Hopi language to preserve the culture of the Hopi nation. 2. Using Hopi storytelling to preserve the history and build the future for the Hopi people. Regguinti speculates that developing countries, as they work with newer technology, will also turn to radio as Native Americans in the United States use it. Radio will deliver news, provide local bulletin boards, and transmit and preserve language and indigenous culture. Today, Native Americans own or operate more than three dozen radio stations in the United States. They range from locations in New York in the east to Alaska in the west, and

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from the Dakotas in the north to Arizona and New Mexico in the south. Most of the stations serve rural areas. In the Lower48 states they mostly reside on reservations. In Alaska, they serve isolated villages in the Bush (Keith 1995; Smith and Brigham 1992). These stations provide a different service from the highly formatted programming of commercial or even public radio stations that target the majority culture. The programming is more eclectic, it often blends English with indigenous languages, and it blends popular Western musical forms with traditional drum music, powwows, and other expressions of indigenous culture. Some of the stations are literally ‘sole service’. Sole service means that there is no other radio station available: the Native station is the only receivable signal. In other cases, the stations are the only source of radio programming that targets the specific needs of Native people. There may be other stations, but they make little or no effort to serve Natives. In both situations, Native stations feel compelled to provide programming for young and old listeners alike. They play popular and traditional music. They do news, talk shows, public service announcements, live special event broadcasts, and other information services that connect and inform their communities. Perhaps most important, they are the only broadcast voices using indigenous languages. Dennis Neumann, former station manager of KLND-FM in South Dakota, says ‘Native radio is one of the success stories in media today. This is a medium that fits the cultural heritage and social conditions of its constituency. Adoption of new communication technologies is slow in Indian Country and radio will continue to serve as the main delivery system for some time’ (Neumann 2001).

Historical overview Native American broadcasting in the United States has quite a recent history. The first radio station owned and operated by Native Americans went to air in 1971, more than fifty years after KDKA began broadcasting in Pittsburgh as the first licensed radio station in the United States in 1920. Native Americans neglected even to begin their adventures with radio until after the medium had transformed itself repeatedly from being an experimental novelty to a dominant media force,

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then marginalised by television, and finally settling into a comfortable niche doing mostly popular music entertainment. For decades the radio that entered Native American communities was that of the cultural majority. Sometimes it originated in small communities spread across the prairies where many Natives live. At other times, the signals were from large urban ‘clear channel’ stations that served large regions of the country. In both cases the programming services had little or nothing to do with Native Americans. If there was news about Natives, it was bad news – about crime, alcoholism, and other forms of social dysfunction on the reservations. Radio did not engage the needs of Natives. It did not help Natives to talk to one another or to the majority culture, nor did it help to preserve fragile languages and cultures that were under bombardment by mainstream media and popular culture (Casey 1999; Keith 1995). A parallel situation existed in much of the rest of the world. Donald R. Browne, in his 1996 book, Electronic Media and Indigenous Peoples: A Voice of Our Own? documents the slow development of indigenous media in Africa, Norway, Finland, the Soviet Union, and even Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. A minuscule amount of airtime for indigenous languages and indigenous programming was available in many places, where colonial powers favoured broadcasts in colonial languages and the ‘correct’ use of the dominant language. The climate for indigenous broadcasting improved gradually after the Second World War but did not gain significant momentum until the 1970s or later (Browne 1996). While Natives in the United States had talked about constructing their own stations, the effort began in earnest in 1971 at the height of the Indian rights movement when the American Indian Movement (AIM) was engaged in much publicised efforts to gain recognition for Indian rights. Michael C. Keith has documented this period of Native radio history: The construction of Native-owned radio stations began in 1971 at the height of the Indian rights movement. It was felt that these stations would further empower Native Americans in their quest for fair and just treatment. As more and more Natives learned about the opportunity to have a voice of their own on their reservation, radio stations were built. The desire by Native Americans to control their own destiny, manage their own information, and preserve their culture fueled the development of Native-controlled broadcasting sta-

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tions. Many Native tribes ran the risk of becoming overassimilated into mainstream culture, thus losing touch with their own history and heritage, and Native radio was seen as a possible means for slowing and possibly reversing this trend. (Keith 1995: 19)

Why did Native Americans not build their own radio stations long before the early 1970s? The reason is largely economic. Native communities, especially the most rural reservations and Alaska Bush communities, are not cash-based economies, at least not to the extent of non-Native communities. Even today many rural Natives in Alaska hunt, trap and gather much of their food, just as their ancestors have done for millennia. Their subsistence lifestyle requires little cash, which is good, because there are few jobs in the villages and little cash circulates (Brigham and Smith 1993). A commercial radio station is not viable in this environment. There are few businesses, and they have little need to spend money marketing their services. Non-commercial radio in the United States is also dependent upon generating most station income from local communities. Donations from listeners are the largest income source for many non-commercial stations. The populations in Native communities are relatively small, there is little cash circulating in the economy, and incomes are so low for most people that donating money to radio stations would not be a high priority. The mainstream models for both commercial and non-commercial radio did not work for Native stations. Tom Casey, station manager of KILI-FM on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, said that when activists began talking about building a radio station there the reaction of local reservation officials was sceptical. Owning and operating a radio station seemed too ambitious. One official even suggested that the group try to build a petrol station instead, because that was more practical (Casey 1999). How then did the Native radio stations gain a foothold? The first, KYRU in North Carolina, came on the air as a commercial station that served a moderately populous region. It delivered a popular music format not targeted narrowly at Native Americans. Natives also listened, but the station adopted a format that was attractive to the cultural majority. That decision made it possible for the station to be commercially successful. The second station, KYUK, in Bethel, Alaska, took a different approach. Its founders sought support from Alaska’s state gov-

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ernment for construction and operating funds. In the years that followed Alaska invested heavily in constructing and operating radio stations all over the sparsely populated ‘bush’, serving Yup’ik and Inupiak Eskimos, Athabascans, and Aleuts. Alaska became a model for providing service to its indigenous populations (Brigham and Smith 1993). Outside Alaska there was still little money to build and operate Native radio stations. A few new stations came on the air between 1973 and the mid-1980s. Their staffs were small and their budgets tiny, but they survived and their audiences were appreciative. Congress helped to address the funding problem in the mid1980s when it mandated that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting take initiative in supporting the creation and operation of minority radio stations, including Native, Hispanic, and African–American. Earlier federal funding formulas made it difficult for such stations to meet the qualifying criteria for funding but under the new federally mandated guidelines Native and other minority groups could successfully seek continuing financial support. While not all stations qualified for the funds, the availability of the grants led to an accelerated pace of station construction. In the years that followed new Native stations went on the air every year and the total number of stations doubled.

The challenge of counting stations Approximately three dozen stations either are Native-owned or serve predominantly Native listeners with Native programming. Nearly all of the stations are in the western United States, concentrated especially in Alaska, the Dakotas, and the southwestern states of Arizona and New Mexico. Most states in the west have at least one station. In the eastern United States there are now only two Native stations. One, CKON, spans the Canadian and U.S. borders, and serves the Mohawk Nation. The other station serves the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in northwest Wisconsin. At one time there were also commercial radio stations owned by Natives in Alabama and North Carolina, but non-Natives purchased both stations in recent years. There is no single agreed-upon count of stations in existence for a number of reasons. First, stations come and go without fanfare, and it is difficult to keep track of them. Most

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current lists of Native stations, for example, still show the stations in Alabama and North Carolina, but non-Native corporations purchased them some time ago. Second, the ownership of some stations is fluid. A station may serve a predominantly Native population but be licensed to a not-for-profit corporation with a board of directors. At any given moment the board may be majority Native or not. In other cases a station’s licensee may be an entity such as a school board, church mission or other group that is not necessarily Native controlled, even when the community served is distinctly Native. A Jesuit mission owns the Lakota Sioux station KINI-FM, on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, for example. In Alaska there is a special problem with tallying stations. Entities called ‘repeater’ stations serve rural communities in western Alaska. They repeat the signal of another radio station but originate little or no programming themselves. They are similar to licensed ‘translator’ stations that only repeat stations in locations where the originating station is difficult to receive directly. Repeaters, unlike translators, have the capacity and right to originate programming locally but many do not. In a count of stations, should a repeater be counted as a separate station for purposes of tallying the number of Native stations? The answer seems to vary. Finally, there are stations with non-Native ownership serving largely non-Native populations that broadcast some Native programmes, distributed by satellite programme providers. These stations sometimes appear on lists of Native stations. All counts, however, show a growing number of stations serving Native populations.

Programming Station programming comes from multiple sources. Most stations create local programmes in indigenous languages that seek to celebrate and preserve Native cultures. Commonly, stations begin their broadcast day with a programme of Native music and may do something similar in the evening. The remainder of the programming day often consists of popular non-Native music forms such as rock and country, network and other satellite delivered services, and local news and public affairs. Most stations broadcast in the local indigenous language. Some use the language much of the time. Others use it very little.

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Tom Casey, manager of KILI, believes that using the indigenous language is vital. ‘Each day we have the Lakota language. Our DJs speak it. Our guests speak it. And we have Lakota music. It reaffirms Lakota culture and Lakota ways’ (Casey 1999). Johanna Eurich, a producer in Alaska, expresses concern about how little the indigenous languages are used by Alaska Native stations: It is obvious that radio efforts, even in the more indigenous Alaskan communities, are by and large on the side of the majority culture. Most of the time we hear English on the air. Where are the kids speaking Yup’ik and Inupiaq dee-jaying on the air? Why are most of the announcers, even the ones who are fluent in Yup’ik, speaking English? (Eurich 1998)

Local news programming is less common than other kinds of information and public affairs programmes. Some stations do local news, but many do not. News coverage has ignited political backlashes from tribal councils and other powerful forces in Native communities. Discussion and call-in programmes provoke less volatile reactions (Eurich 1998). Keith (1995) reports on the problem of tribal interference in station operations. Sometimes the interference, he says, is politically inspired. At other times the officials just want to take over the programming of a station and dictate what the schedule should be, including what songs and features should be broadcast. The latter type of interference arises out of a common misconception in and outside of Indian Country that anyone can be programme director. An important programming resource for stations is American Indian Radio on Satellite (AIROS), delivered to stations across the United States on the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS). With federal and private funding, AIROS offers programming to Native stations 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Some programmes include (URL: http://www.airos.org. Consulted 30 March 2001): AlterNative Voices – Native music, interviews, and news reports relevant to Indian Country. Different Drums – a weekly hour of music and words by Natives, frequently profiling individual artists or focusing on important current issues.

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Native America Calling – a live one-hour call-in show distributed both to AIROS stations and members of the National Public Radio system. New Letters on the Air – discussions with and about contemporary Native authors. Voices from the Circle – highlights Native news, music, issues, entertainment, and storytelling from reservations and urban Native communities.

Station profile: KLND-FM KLND-FM is ‘the first electronic medium to exclusively serve the entertainment and information needs of the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota people of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Nations’ (URL: http://www.klnd.org. Consulted 30 March 2001). The station is relatively new and is representative of what many Native stations are doing, or are trying to do. Its licensee is a non-profit corporation, Seventh Generation Media Services, Inc., and the station serves two reservations in north central South Dakota. Because the station only began operating in 1997 its founders had considerable opportunity to observe what was being done elsewhere. They tried to apply their learning to the design and operation of the station. The Lakota name for the station, Wolakota Wiconi Waste, ‘through unity a good life’, reflects its mission of being a unifying force across the vast region that the station serves. The station hopes it can ‘bring everyone together under one voice’ (Eagle 1997). In its application to the federal government for assistance with funding the construction cost of the new station, KLND founders justified the request in their accompanying narrative: Native American nations or tribes were once free, not wild. They enjoyed their sovereignty and lived in harmony with all of creation. This era is gone. Categorically speaking tribes and their tribesmen are ‘exiled in the land of the free’. This very application is stark evidence of this reality. Herein the readers will find a defined recognized tribal nation and its members requesting help to access a freedom enjoyed and taken for granted by most in this great nation.

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Unquestionably, a radio station will give great power to unify and create recovery in a fragmented Native society. … While such coverage may not seem significant to the dominant society, for residents of this area, such service will be a first service. News of reservation issues at the present must reach the outlying districts via ‘moccasin telegraph’, i.e. word-of-mouth. The democratic process depends on the rapid flow of information both to the people and from the people. The proposed station will be a major step forward in the empowerment of Lakota people. Seventh Generation sees this medium in communication as a healthy step in the direction of self-determination through information and interaction. (Seventh Generation 1993)

Construction and start-up funds for the station came from a variety of sources, including the United States Department of Commerce, the nonprofit Bush Foundation, and a contribution from the tribe, derived from income from a tribal-owned gambling casino. The station’s annual budget is about (US) $280,000. Its income comes from the tribe, programme underwriting,2 and fund raising events. The station also qualifies for federal grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, including funding from a new CPB Rural Listener Access Incentive Fund (Neumann 2001). KLND operates with a paid staff of seven full-time employees and a number of part-time employees and volunteers. Turnover of staff has been very high. In four years the station has had three news directors and six development (fundraising) directors (Neumann 2001). Its biggest on-going personnel challenge is finding and retaining a technician to keep the equipment operating. KLND’s programming is a blend of Native American, country, and rock music, news and public affairs. Here is a summary of the station’s programme schedule for weekdays in Spring 2001 (programme titles are italicised): 6:00 7:00 8:00 10:00 12:00

Traditional Wake-Up (Native American music) Morning Drive (Native American music, weather, news) Various local public affairs programmes Various rock music programmes Native America Calling (national satellite call-in talk show for Natives) 13:00 Various local public affairs programmes 14:00 Various country music programmes 15:00 Classic Rock (rock oldies)

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16:00 17:00 17:30 18:00

Adult Rock Interviews (local interviews) News, Weather and Announcements Various music programmes, emphasising Native music forms in late evening 24:00 Sign-off News and Weather Weekends are somewhat different. The emphasis on Saturdays is on eclectic music programming, both Native and popular. Sundays contain a blend of religious programmes and rock music. The station’s schedule contains much more talk and information than is typical of radio stations, including public radio stations, in the United States. This is consistent with the station’s mission of facilitating dialogue about important issues and helping to exchange information on the two reservations. Dennis Neumann says information is the station’s priority: Commercial media outside the boundaries of Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Reservations do not focus their attention on the comings and going of activities that are in these two nations. These two nations have the complexities of government and politics and social relationships that exist out there in the majority culture but which are never ever brought to light by majority culture media from the outside. There is just never the opportunity or emphasis by media in another location to provide service to people here. It is just not their role. So the effort here (KLND) is to provide it on our own. And to provide it in ways that are culturally appropriate and culturally sensitive. This station and 36 or 40 others like it are serving these isolated pockets – we call them islands in the vast sea of the majority culture – out there. There is a strong need here to have open public discussion about the activities and issues of government. And we have talk programs that allow people to phone in and express their views about how tribal government and district government is being run here. It is something that has been missing from society on these nations – to have a sort of electronic talking circle that everyone can listen into on the issues of the day. (Neumann 1999)

Neumann says that the station’s schedule over its first four years has evolved, but many of the original programmes are still on the air: ‘The people who present them have become better communicators and the content more interesting and

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entertaining’ (Neumann 2001). Neumann says that one of the station’s continuing challenges is to get leaders in tribal government to use radio as a window on governance, but also to provide basic information to the public. Tribal council meetings are broadcast, but sharing other information with the public over the airwaves does not seem to be a priority, he says. Tribal leaders are often not cooperative about making information available to the station beyond what happens in public meetings. He believes, however, that the station is demonstrating on a regular basis to the tribal councils that the station can be a significant contributor to society and government (Neumann 1999). Another area where the station can do more, according to Neumann, is in providing services for youth. The station already broadcasts a Friday evening programme entitled Koka Hwo (‘What’s Happening Show’) produced by youth from the Cheyenne River Reservation. It hopes that over time KLND can create more such programmes. Neumann says American Indian Radio on Satellite has ‘spawned the creation and delivery of new and exciting programming for and by American Indians’. The programming forms have evolved beyond entertainment and information, past the examination of issues and ideas into the realm of performance art. Just recently independent Native producers and AIROS began offering an Indian comedy programme. KLND produces a programme of its own for national distribution to other stations over the AIROS system. The one-hour weekly programme Native Vibes features contemporary American Indian music and conversations with Indian musicians. It is hosted and produced by Charles Shoots the Enemy, a Lakota Indian.

Conclusion One or more new Native stations go to air each year. While there are still areas with sizable Native populations that have no station, the majority of Natives are now within the coverage area of at least one Native station. Not everyone feels that Native radio is fulfilling its potential. Johanna Eurich, who has worked with many Native stations in Alaska, feels that the stations are still too bound by the conventions and formats of the majority culture. Native broadcasters copy majority culture styles such as fast pacing,

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editing out silence, compressing long stories, and using English rather than indigenous languages. Where, she asks, are the programmes that capture the spirit of Native culture? On one level it would appear that radio could play a unique role in indigenous cultures which are, at the core, oral cultures. These cultures did not evolve a written form, so there is no body of traditional written literature – no Canterbury tales, no Shakespeare, no Tales of Genji. But oh, the stories and the oratory! For example, art that rivals Homer can be found in Tlingit speeches for the removal of grief, given extemporaneously at memorial potlatches. So why isn’t it happening on the radio? (Eurich 1998)

Native radio, Eurich asserts, will not have fully matured until it ‘discards Western conceptual tools’. The ability to do that is restrained, she thinks, by the continuing dependence of stations on non-Native personnel in key positions and the continuing domination of the majority culture generally. Working within the constraints imposed by the majority culture, she says, ‘Natives now colonize themselves’. Dennis Neumann, formerly of KLND, is excited about the future of Native radio. He, like many Native managers, expresses concern about resource limitations, staff turnover, and other problems. In general, however, he is optimistic. ‘The evolution of Indian Radio coincides with a cultural, economic and social renaissance in Indian Country’ (Neumann 2001). Meg Quintal, of the Institute of American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota, reflects on the oral traditions of Native people and their relationship to radio. She says Indians are trained ‘that the ear is an extremely important way of learning and gathering information and remembering so traditions and learning can be passed on. Radio is going to be another one of the ways that will strengthen oral traditions more and more’ (Quintal 1999). Michael Keith sums up the future of Native radio: While Native Americans may have come to the electronic media a half century behind everyone else-for reasons mostly beyond their control-their overdue presence will constitute a unique chapter (rather than a mere footnote) in future histories written about the Fifth Estate... No longer will Indians be techno-peasants or media paupers but rather adept travelers on the information highway. (Keith 1995: 141)

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Notes 1. Some indigenous people in the United States prefer the term American Indian. Others prefer the more inclusive term Native American. In Alaska, there are three indigenous groups: Indian, Eskimo, and Aleut, so Native American is preferred. In the Lower48 states, some but not all indigenous people prefer the terms Indian or American Indian. 2. While stations are noncommercial, they may charge for and identify programme sponsors with limited mention of a company name, location, and product or service.

References Brigham, J. C. and Smith, B. L. (1993) ‘KYUK in Bethel: pioneering native broadcasting in Alaska’, The Northern Review, 11. Browne, D. R. (1996) Electronic Media and Indigenous Peoples: A Voice of Our Own? Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press. Bruguier, L. (1997) personal communication, 21 July. Casey, T. (1999) personal communication, 15 June. Eagle, I. D. (1997) personal communication, 25 June. Eurich, J. (1998) personal communication, 8 April. Keith, M. C. (1995) Signals in the Air: Native Broadcasting in America, Westport CT: Praeger Publishers. Neumann, D. (1999) personal communication, 15 June. —- (2001) personal communication, 6 April. Quintal, M. (1997) personal communication, 11 August. Regguinti, G. (1998) personal communication, 1 April. Seventh Generation Media Services, Inc. (1993) Application for Funding Assistance, Public Telecommunications Facilities Program, 13 January. Smith, B. L. and Brigham, J. C. (1992) ‘Native radio broadcasting in North America: an overview of systems in the United States and Canada’, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 36.


CHAPTER 7 

NATIONAL PUBLIC SERVICE RADIO IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC: A COMMUNITY LOUDSPEAKER Helen Molnar

Introduction Radio’s effectiveness for indigenous broadcasting has been seen in Africa, Latin America, Canada, the United States of America, Australia and Asia. In South Pacific Island countries, radio has also been a major vehicle for indigenous communication. National public service radio stations provide a range of indigenously produced programmes in the Pacific. Even with the increasing spread of television in the region, radio is still the dominant mainstream medium. This chapter will explore the use of national public service radio by Pacific Islanders in eleven South and West Pacific Island countries (Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, the Cook Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu) and the reasons for radio’s continuing popularity as an indigenous community voice.

Pacific Island countries: background In any one of the smaller South Pacific countries (PICs) there may be no regular newspaper, little or no local television, and

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only one radio station broadcasting for limited hours. Telephone services in many PICs are also inadequate, effectively serving only the major urban or provincial areas. There are twenty-two countries and territories in the Pacific and they are among the smallest and most remote states in the world. Sheer physical distances are an obvious problem with some island countries consisting of many smaller islands spread over vast amounts of ocean. The physical distances between neighbouring islands, sometimes as much as hundreds of kilometres, makes communication to these areas costly and unreliable. Complicating this further is the small size of the island populations and their spread. Six of the PICs listed above have populations under 100,000. The majority of people (often 80 percent) live in small, scattered and isolated communities spread over vast distances in rural areas and outer islands. This in turn has led to extreme cultural and linguistic diversity between communities. In countries such as the Solomon Islands over one hundred languages are spoken, and in Papua New Guinea it is estimated that at least eight hundred languages are still spoken. The PICs are also grappling with a range of political and economic problems, and this is exacerbated by the fact that many of them are only recently independent. Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Tonga, Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have all gained their independence since 1970. The Cook Islands (1965) and Niue (1974) are self-governing territories in free association with New Zealand. Since their independence, the PICs have become more assertive about their nations’ needs. But the challenges facing them are considerable. These include defining a sense of nationalism, improving serious deficiencies in the health and education systems including the lack of compulsory primary and secondary schooling in some PICs, adapting to rapid technological change, confronting major environmental concerns, defining appropriate development for subsistence economies, rising youth unemployment, and the often unequal and exploitative relationships between Pacific countries and foreign investors and companies. Over the past twenty years, Pacific Islanders have also become increasingly concerned about the need to protect their cultures from erosion and distortion by industrialised countries. The PICs are particularly vulnerable because they are dependent on western aid and expertise in a number of key

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areas. At the same time, western media and cultural products are flooding the region and their impact is being felt on Pacific Island culture, languages and lifestyles.

National public service radio in the PICs Radio is the mass medium in the South Pacific because it is the only medium that has the potential to reach a whole Pacific country. Many rural and outer island areas are yet to receive electricity, and this, along with the expense, has been an impediment to establishing local television. Battery-run radios, on the other hand, are widespread. When the Fiji Broadcasting Commission (now Fiji Broadcasting Corporation Limited) (FBCL) was established in 1954, the Governor of Fiji described the significance of national radio to a Pacific country: It is the ability of broadcasting to overcome time and distance that makes it of special importance in a country such as Fiji, where the sea separates so widely – and sometimes so wildly the islands in which we live. Through broadcasting, we are able simultaneously to share a common experience, whether we be in Suva or Savausavu … or the southernmost islands of Lau. Broadcasting can bring us together, can tell us what our fellowcitizens elsewhere … are doing, can overcome isolation and loneliness; and can keep us informed and entertained. (Usher and Leonard 1979: 1)

The colonial administrations established the national services in the PICs ‘to facilitate the adoption of western institutions’ similar to the way the French and Americans have used television in their Pacific territories (Barney 1978: 299). These national radio services were modelled on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation (NZBC). Their introduction involved transferring metropolitan models of radio, complete with content and work practices. The first radio services were set up in PNG (1933) and Fiji (1935) but it was only after independence that the national stations were operated by Pacific Islanders rather than expatriates, so the history of indigenous broadcasting in the Pacific Islands is fairly recent. This is an important factor when considering the challenges Pacific radio now faces.

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Currently there are national public service stations in Fiji, Kiribati, the Cook Islands, Niue, Vanuatu, Western Samoa, Tuvalu, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Nauru, and PNG. These stations broadcast mainly on the AM band, but some also broadcast via FM and shortwave. The larger stations broadcast from early morning to around midnight, whereas the small stations broadcast for shorter periods during the day. Staffing levels vary from stations like Radio Sunshine in Niue with three staff and some casuals to serve a population of 1,780, to the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) with thirty-five staff for a population of just over 440,000. The two largest stations are the FBCL, which has two AM services (Fijian and Hindustani) and three commercial FM music stations (Fijian, Hindustani and English), and the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) in PNG which has a national AM service and nineteen provincial stations (English, Pidgin, Moto and provincial languages). While the NBC is the only national service with a number of regional stations, some of these are not fully operational due to a lack of resources. With the exception of the FBCL and the SIBC which both operate a regional station, the national stations are centralised and operate from an urban base. Transmission range varies depending on the country involved. In some like Tonga, the signal can be heard throughout the country and the outer islands, while in others the transmission is less reliable because of geography and the strength of the signal. In situations like this satellite technology has the potential to increase the range and quality of the service, but Pacific Island governments cannot afford to subsidise satellite costs to rural and outer island areas. Prior to independence the national stations were responsible to a government department such as the Ministry for Information. Today only Radio Tuvalu, Radio Nauru and Radio Vanuatu are directly under government control. The national radio services were also initially totally funded by government, but this is no longer the case. Over the last decade, Pacific governments have been cutting back their funding, forcing the stations to rely more on advertising revenue. Most of the stations are now corporatised and as such are only partially funded by government. In the Cook Islands, the national broadcaster has been privatised. In order to raise extra revenue the national services in Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and PNG have established commercial FM music services in addition to their public service station. Some of the corporations also run

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a national television service (Niue, Samoa, Vanuatu, Nauru, Tonga, the Cook Islands and Tuvalu). The television services, unlike the national radio stations, broadcast mainly overseas material. Television was established in these PICs from the late 1980s onwards and in some countries radio staff were expected to multi-skill and work in both media. As a result, television drew resources away from the national stations and while this is still the case today, the situation has improved in Samoa and Tonga. In Vanuatu, Tuvalu and Kiribati, the national radio stations also publish newspapers. Community radio, by comparison, has not developed quickly. There is a community station in Fiji and one is planned for the Solomon Islands and PNG, and two of the universities have student radio stations. However, given the resources required to operate even a small radio station, it is not surprising that community radio has not had a major impact to date. Alternative uses of radio in the Pacific are very rare, as are the overtly political uses of radio. The public service culture that permeates Pacific national radio combined with Pacific Island culture, both of which are very hierarchical, can also make public criticism of authorities difficult in some countries. At the same time, though, government departments throughout the South Pacific make extensive use of radio as a ‘loudspeaker’ to discuss developmental issues and government policy initiatives. The other form of radio in the South Pacific is commercial radio. Fiji, the Cook Islands, PNG, the Solomon Islands and Samoa have privately owned commercial stations, and as noted earlier four of the national stations operate a commercial FM music station in addition to the national service. Of the commercial stations FM96 in Suva, Fiji is the best known and most successful. The commercial stations in the South Pacific are modelled on western commercial radio, and feature formatted contemporary western and Pacific Island music, community announcements, news and sport. As such, they can sound similar to commercial radio in Australia or America. Commercial radio has developed slowly in the South Pacific because of the small audiences and advertising markets. In some of the PICs that have largely subsistence economies and populations under 11,000 it is very difficult to support commercial media. In these countries, the national radio services rely heavily for their income on the purchase of air time by government departments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

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Radio programme forms Matters of life and death such as cyclone warnings and rescue operations depend on radio, but you can also tune into an unpredictable array of other things, such as wedding announcements, reminders to employees on vacation that they were supposed to come back last Monday, advice from the Post Office that there is a telegram waiting for you, the Ministry of Education announcing that the examination papers will be dropped from a helicopter into a playground of the local school at 2 pm . . . almost anything. (Avery 1986: 1)

The national public service stations broadcast a range of programmes and this is what distinguishes them from the commercial stations. These programmes include news and current affairs, education, message programmes, developmental programmes, religion and music. Much of the programming is generated from metropolitan areas as funding cuts have meant that it is much more difficult for broadcasters to travel to rural and outer island areas to collect material. Message programmes The message programmes are one of the most distinctive community uses of radio. People living in rural areas and outer islands without telephones can communicate with people outside their villages by sending messages to the radio station, either in writing, via the community radio–telephone, or more recently, via e-mail. Governments and other organisations also use these programmes extensively to publicise government policies and projects and other issues of relevance to the audience. The messages are a source of revenue for the stations as they charge a small fee to cover the cost of the broadcast. In addition to message programmes, Pacific stations have regular segments for birthday calls and for funeral announcements, so that people from outlying areas can make the necessary arrangements. Other critical information relates to shipping and airline schedules. In the more remote outer islands a ship may visit only once every few months, so it is vital for the community to know when it is coming so that they can be ready to travel. Development programmes Development programmes are the other major feature which distinguishes the national public service broadcasters from the

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commercial music stations. Each of the national stations has a commitment to these programmes and they are generally broadcast in the evening, with some, such as women’s programmes, broadcast during the day. The programmes provide Pacific Islanders with information on a range of developmental issues of importance to them. These programmes also provide a regular source of development information to rural and outer island communities and supplement the work of extension workers. Government departments and NGOs usually produce the programmes with assistance from station staff, and the departments and NGOs purchase time on the stations to broadcast the programmes. Radio Tonga has a large commitment to developmental programming and a survey conducted by the station in the mid-1980s found that: Radio is a source of information and persuasion resulting in some action in the direction of development. The people are motivated to do the things repeatedly emphasised in radio programmes, including modern methods of farming, improved health care and sanitary measures, primary and secondary education, and formation of working groups for village improvement etc. Radio publicity encourages communal development activities leading to successful attainment of many useful projects. It would be difficult now to imagine life in Tonga without radio, which has played a role in the everyday lives of the people in the major social, economic and political changes that are now taking place in national development and modernisation. (Fusimalohi 1986: 75)

Developmental programmes broadcast by the national stations range from two-minute advice segments or jingles played at regular intervals during the day and short radio dramas to the fifteen- to thirty-minute interview programmes or talks discussing specific issues. This latter form dominates at present. The programmes cover a range of issues, such as agriculture, health and nutrition, national festivals, water provision and issues related to this, how to run small businesses, women’s issues, banking advice, police information, and specific government campaigns, for example keeping a town clean. In some instances, the audience is encouraged to write in, or where available, telephone in, and have their questions answered on air. In this way radio enables the audience to participate in the programme and in the development of their own information.

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However, for this programming to be really useful it needs to reflect the interests and concerns of the rural communities it serves and be local, participatory and appropriate. The constraint on this, as mentioned earlier, is the shortage of government funding, which makes it difficult for the radio broadcasters and departmental officers to travel to the outer islands on a regular basis to collect material. This means that the programming is not as effective as it could be because it does not include much information from the grassroots. Consequently the problems common to top-down broadcasting systems are apparent in the Pacific, with urban-based and orientated broadcasters and departmental officers often talking at, rather than to, people in rural areas and the outer islands. The SIBC attempted to remedy this in the 1980s by producing a series of dramas instead. The SIBC devised an improvised drama called Kirori, which went to air each week. The main ‘actor’ was a farmer and other agricultural and social workers took part and provided technical information. Humour and current issues were important elements in the programme. So was spontaneity. The production was ad libbed after the subject had been discussed and this added to its liveliness. One series of Kirori focussed on growing cocoa, taking farmers through from start to harvest and marketing. SIBC producers found that farmers were listening closely and relating to the programme, following the weekly instructions, with the result that during the series a number of farmers on different islands began to grow cocoa (Palapu 1992). Audiences liked the programme because it featured people they could identify with and was recorded outdoors in locations they could recognise, and most importantly, because the content was shaped through consultation with the community. Unfortunately, Kirori finished in 1987 due to lack of funding. The development programmes’ role as a community loudspeaker can also be seen in the programmes produced by teachers’ associations and development organisations. They often book weekly programme slots on national radio as a way of communicating with their staff in different parts of the country and informing them about the latest policies and issues. Health workers also use these programmes to announce when they will be visiting certain areas and to give information on government health campaigns. These programmes can also be harnessed effectively during times of national crisis. In the Solomon Islands ethnic tensions disrupted the country for two years, and a peace agreement is

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now being implemented. The major source of regular information about this agreement and issues to do with peace are programmes produced by churches, NGOs and aid agencies on the SIBC along with the SIBC news. Educational broadcasting Educational broadcasting is the other form of development programming. The literacy rates in South Pacific countries vary, with some countries, such as the Solomon Islands, having low rates, and others like PNG not being able to afford compulsory primary or secondary school education. The quality of education is extremely variable, with rural areas and outer islands in particular having few resources and often poorly trained teachers. Educational radio programmes have the potential to complement existing education by supplementing what is taught in the classrooms. However, with some exceptions (such as Fiji) educational radio still tends to reflect its colonial heritage. The overall sound of educational programmes in the Pacific is dated because the material has not been adapted to the medium in a way that makes it stimulating. The programmes instead take the form of traditional classroom teaching. As a consequence educational broadcasting is not a very successful area of programming. Drama programmes Drama and story telling are other Pacific Island programme forms considered important for development purposes as well as cultural maintenance and regeneration, but they too are under-resourced, and as a consequence are not broadcast on many Pacific stations. The SIBC used to broadcast traditional stories told by two former SIBC employees which were very popular with children. Radio Tuvalu also had a similar programme as well as a drama series written and produced by the staff. More recently, community theatre groups in Vanuatu, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands and Fiji have been producing radio drama, usually as vehicle for development messages. These programmes have been produced with the assistance of funding from aid donors. Music programming Music is another important part of the programming on the national services. Pacific Islanders have used music for cen-

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turies to pass on their beliefs, languages and knowledge to the next generation. Depending on the station, a mix of traditional music and contemporary Pacific music is broadcast. The sound of traditional music is very distinctive and is not derivative of western music as some contemporary Pacific Island music is. Consequently, even when traditional music is sandwiched among western tracks, it contributes to a ‘Pacific sound’. And while it is certainly true that younger Pacific Islanders enjoy western music, requests for traditional Pacific music come from all age groups. The recording of music, however, whether traditional or contemporary, is also constrained by a lack of resources. This makes it difficult for producers to record music on a regular basis. Lack of funding means that stations do not employ broadcasters specifically to record music so music production has to be fitted in with other duties. One consequence of this is that the existing music tapes are played over and over again. A number of the stations cannot afford copies, with the result that some music urgently needs re-recording as the sound has become so muddy that it is hard to listen to. The lifespan of the tapes is also threatened by excessive humidity as it can be difficult to provide air-conditioned areas for the record library. Lack of equipment is another constraint on music recording. A few stations have a studio and equipment to record music but most of the recording of traditional music is done in the field at a village or as part of the coverage of an event on a portable tape recorder. To date, only Fiji and PNG have the resources, equipment and personnel to establish and maintain a Pacific Island music industry. Some of the smaller Pacific stations sell cassettes of the music they record, but this happens in an ad hoc way. In the meantime, the production of Pacific music and other Pacific programme forms is being undermined by the availability of contemporary western music. Western music is widespread in the Pacific, even though few of the national services have the funds to purchase large amounts of this music. The national stations tend instead to rely on western music they have accumulated over the years with the result that many of their records are dated. The more recent music, though, is supplied free of charge in pre-produced programmes from organisations like Radio Australia (RA) and Voice of America (VOA). These programmes are very popular with younger people as they feature artists and songs they have seen in music videos.

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The amount of western music played on national public service is dependent on the resources and expertise available to produce other programme forms. Some national stations, lacking the trained staff and funding necessary to produce more complex spoken word programmes, can play large blocks of music with few produced spoken word inputs.

Constraints on the production of development programmes Development programmes are the most difficult to prepare and produce and their success is being compromised by a number of factors. An overall concern about these programmes is that many are not imaginatively produced, and tend to consist of talks only or ‘talking head’ interviews which are unlikely to attract audience interest. The present dominance of ‘talking head’ programmes can be attributed to the colonial heritage of these stations, as these forms are leftovers from old ABC and BBC models. They are culturally specific programme forms, suitable for educated middle-class audiences who have ‘learnt’ how to listen to this type and length of presentation. These programmes do not seek to engage the audience; instead they present the information to them. These ‘talking head’ development programmes have been allowed to dominate for a number of reasons. The first relates to the lack of programme diversity in the Pacific. It is very difficult for Pacific Island broadcasters to develop new programme ideas when they work in an environment that does not expose them to a diversity of forms and content. Second, in countries where the national service is the only radio outlet, there is no competition and little public accountability. As a result producers tend to settle into formats and maintain these because they are easy to produce week after week. The third factor is training. Comprehensive training programmes are needed to improve the quality and creativity of development programming. Training is particularly important for the departmental officers and NGOs as they are the main producers. These officers may have only done a basic radio production workshop and they do not work full-time in radio. But full-time experience is necessary if they are to build up their skills and become more aware of ‘radio culture’. In practice, they have to combine their role as producer with other duties, with the result that

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their programmes are often produced in a hurry, with the emphasis on ‘having to fill the time’. Ideally broadcasters and the departmental officers should work together exchanging skills, but this does not always happen. A major challenge facing the broadcasters working in this area is that over the past decade staff cutbacks have impacted on producers of development and spoken word programmes, thus reducing the available producers. There are some excellent producers in the Pacific Islands but they often find themselves stretched because of all the demands on them, and as a result they do not have the time or the resources to advise on how to produce these programmes differently. Two other issues need to be addressed if development programming is to be more effective. The first is the lack of market research. This type of research is critical for the design and delivery of effective developmental programmes. As it is, feedback on audience listening is largely anecdotal, and while there is certainly evidence in everyday conversation that radio is being listened to, this is not a specific enough measurement for programming purposes. Radio programmers tend to broadcast material when they assume the target audience will be listening based on their understanding of daily lifestyles of their communities. Audience research, community consultation on programme input, pre-testing programmes, and evaluation are all vital if the programmes are to reach their target audiences and have the desired effect.

Local and regional news Local and regional news is another important programme input on the national stations. The larger national stations have always produced news bulletins but some of the smaller stations only started producing their own news in the mid-tolate-1980s. These stations generally broadcast news three times a day, with a degree of overlap between the bulletins. Until the late 1980s, the PICs had largely learnt about each other and the world through overseas news agencies such as the ABC’s Radio Australia, the BBC and Radio New Zealand International (RNZI). RA’s Pacific bulletin is still recorded by some of the stations each day and then replayed or in some instances, broadcast straight to air. The bulletin is also translated into the major indigenous language and re-broadcast.

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PACNEWS: the Pacific News Agency In 1987 the first regional Pacific Island news agency – PACNEWS – was established. The agency was set up by the regional radio training project, the Pacific Broadcasting Training and Development Scheme (PACBROAD), which at that time was mainly funded by the German foundation, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), with a small amount of funding from UNESCO. In the 1990s, PACNEWS was funded by FES and subscriptions, and following FES’s withdrawal it is funded, at the time of writing in 2001, by subscription only. PACNEWS has fifteen contributing member countries. They are Kiribati, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, the Marshall Islands, Fiji, PNG, the Solomon Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Tonga, Niue, the Cook Islands and the Republic of Belau. It was originally set up in Suva in Fiji, along with PACBROAD but in 1990 was forced to relocate to the Solomon Islands via New Zealand for political reasons. The then Rabuka government was suspicious of PACBROAD’s aim of improving journalism skills and its commitment to freedom of the press. PACNEWS then moved to Port Vila in Vanuatu, which had more accessible telecommunications, and in 2000 it moved back to Fiji as telecommunications there were more reliable and affordable. PACNEWS operates under the management of the Pacific Islands Broadcasting Association (PIBA). PIBA is one of two major regional media associations, and its members are the national public service stations. When PACNEWS started it was transmitted via telex, but this proved slow, unreliable and expensive. It was, however, an advantage to the service in its initial stages as it meant the stations could use their existing equipment. Each of the stations was then equipped with a fax machine funded by the German Technical Foundation (GTZ). PACNEWS is now transmitted via e-mail and currently only Tuvalu still receives the bulletins by fax. The contributing stations are encouraged to send news items to the PACNEWS editor in Suva, where the news is selected and edited and then sent out three times a day to the fifteen stations and other subscribers. Subscribers consist of media organisations in the Pacific and overseas together with libraries, embassies and universities. The staffing model for PACNEWS has been effective and inexpensive. The staff consist of two editors, one trainee journalist, and an administrator.

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For Pacific Islanders, PACNEWS’s value has been significant because of its Pacific orientation and the amount of detail the bulletins contain. This, along with the developmental nature of many of the stories covered, is in contrast to the brevity and western orientation of the reports in the international news services. PACNEWS’s most obvious achievement is that it gives the island states the opportunity to hear about their neighbours for the first time. We have been listening to news about Africa, which doesn’t concern us much, South America, and Western-Anglo countries, and this is evident when we run a national quiz programme. Our kids rattle off the names of the Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers of Britain, Australia, New Zealand and America, but you pose a question about Vanuatu and no one knows because information hasn’t been coming out. (Prasad 1988)

Now listeners can hear what is happening in Kiribati or Tonga from Pacific journalists in those countries. A number of these stories would be considered unusual by western news standards, for example the story of a successful pig farm on an island in Tuvalu, but these issues are very significant for countries with subsistence economies. With the increasing impact of online services in the Pacific, PACNEWS has now been joined by other online news services. The Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) produces PINA Nius – a regional bulletin online seven days a week;1 the University of the South Pacific Journalism Department has an online news service, and a number of different media organisations (radio, television and print) have also set up their own online news services. While computer penetration outside urban areas in the Pacific is low to nonexistent, the availability of this news online is a benefit to Pacific media organisations capable of receiving it. It is also valuable for overseas news services and for Pacific Islanders living abroad, as it allows them to stay in touch with their countries. Government control One area of concern relating to news production in the Pacific is government control and how this affects the independence of PACNEWS since the latter relies on contributions from government-funded national services. There are very different degrees of government control in the Pacific, and this needs to

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be understood. In some countries there are examples of ministers quashing stories that embarrass them. In Tonga, where the royal family dominates, there are no critical stories about royalty in the media and in Vanuatu, Nauru and Tuvalu, where the stations are still part of government departments, critical reporting on government is very difficult. The Solomon Islands, on the other hand, has a reasonably good reputation for press freedom, although ministers will criticise stories they do not agree with as they do in Australia. The current Samoan government has also adopted a more open approach to the media than previous Samoan governments, and this is a promising sign. The media in Fiji and PNG are also particularly vigorous. Examples of more direct government control were seen in Fiji after the 1987 coups when the national radio service, the FBCL (then the FBC), allegedly watered down its news bulletins so that they were not critical of the interim government. Then during the elections in 1992 it was reported that the Rabuka government was considering tough new libel laws ‘under which Fiji journalists and publishers could face fines up to $2000 or a two year jail term’ (PINA Nius 1992: 1). Government threats to impose media legislation to restrict press freedom are not uncommon in other PICs, but they are usually empty. Early in 2001 the PNG government removed the managing director of the NBC, ironically just before Media Freedom Week, because it objected to stories that were broadcast, and there appeared to be little that the NBC could do to protest about this. Some of the existing controls are in place because a number of Pacific Island governments do not appreciate the potential of the media for national development nor its importance in disseminating relevant information to Pacific Islanders about government policies on the role of the media. Politicians can also focus too much on the negative potential of the media, and as a consequence are suspicious of any media and keep them at arm’s length. This situation will take some time to change.

The status of broadcasting in the Pacific While it is true that radio is a vital means of communication, its significance is undervalued. The problems with lack of resources (human and financial) mentioned throughout this

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chapter, are indicative of much more fundamental concerns to do with the status of broadcasting in the PICs. Broadcasters and journalists do not have a high status in the Pacific. While donor-funded training options are now more widely available, comprehensive on-the-job training is rare as is mentoring new employees. Defining careers paths and opportunities for promotion can also be limited, especially in the smaller stations, with the result that younger, bright employees are attracted to better paying positions outside broadcasting that offer them more options. Broadcasters, even in the larger countries, are not well paid. Over the last two decades governments have also appointed public servants to manage some of the stations (and this is still the case today in a few countries). These managers are not always the best qualified to lead a broadcasting organisation because they lack media experience and vision. This has also meant that a number of stations operate without clearly defined programming philosophies and mission statements. The status of broadcasting is also not helped by the existing structures within the stations. These structures often favour administrators at the expense of broadcasters, reflecting the fact that they were established during colonial periods. Some stations are therefore more reminiscent of western public service models of the 1950s or 1960s. Moreover, the Pacific public service is characterised by a distinct demarcation of duties and this can be seen in the national radio stations. As a result, archaic broadcasting practices are being kept in place, which work against the effective running of the stations. Funding is an on-going issue and there is no easy solution. As noted earlier, a number of these PICs rely heavily on aid to meet pressing development needs, and broadcasting comes a long way down the list of priorities. Broadcasters are likely to face increasing pressures to raise more of their own funds, and this in turn will impact on their capacity to produce development programmes, news, education and drama. The commercial music stations set up by some of the public service stations may have some potential if well-programmed and targeted, but currently only one service has had success in this area. Now with the impact of convergent technologies, the broadcasters are faced with the need to replace old analogue equipment and purchase digital equipment. For the bulk of the stations discussed here, aid funding will be needed to achieve this and this will be a long process. None of the stations are currently operating Internet radio and this is unlikely

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to change in the immediate future given their limited resources and the inability of much of their audience to access this material. The online news services, however, are proving effective and may provide a source of revenue as islanders living overseas could pay to access these. It would be wrong to assume that the problems listed above make radio a less significant medium for Pacific Islanders. However, it is likely that in the next five to ten years the survival of some of these services will be seriously challenged. With the growth of commercial radio, local television, overseas satellite television and online services, there is now more media diversity in the PICs and this will continue to grow. It is therefore even more vital that public service radio stations define how they will meet these challenges and most important, what their role will be in the new millennium. Some of the stations are already doing this effectively, but they are in the minority.

Notes 1. PINA and PIBA are currently discussing merging the two associations.

References Avery, D. (1986) ‘Broadcasting the Pacific Way’, UNESCO SPECIAL, Paris. Barney, R. (1978) ‘Pacific Islands’ in Lent, J. (ed.) Broadcasting in Asia and the Pacific, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Fusimalohi, T. (1986) ‘Radio Tonga’, Pacific Islands Communication Journal, 15. Palapu, D. (1992). Personal interview with the Director of Programmes, Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation, Honiara, Solomon Islands, 20 January. PINA Nius (1992) ‘Libel decree shock in Fiji’, 1–2 April. Prasad, D. (1988). Personal interview with the Acting General Manager, Fiji Broadcasting Corporation, Suva, Fiji, 26 May. Usher, L. and Leonard, H. (1979) This is Radio Fiji: Twenty-Five Years of Service, 1954–1979, Suva: Fiji Broadcasting Corporation.


CHAPTER 8 

YOU’VE GOT TO HIDE YOUR LOVE AWAY: GAY RADIO, PAST AND PRESENT Alan Beck

‘As a closeted pop fan in the mid-Sixties – an age when gay men were still imprisoned – my loneliness was compounded by the relentless boy meets girl message of every lyric of every song I ever heard or ever bought. The message of “You’ve got to hide your love away” reflected my own terrified paranoia.’ Tom Robinson introducing the Sony-award winning You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, a radio feature on BBC GLR (Greater London Radio) 26 December 1996

Definitions What draws together the following instances of ‘gay’ radio: Leonard, Lord Forth in one of the first wireless plays broadcast from London’s 2LO station in 1923 (Five Birds in a Cage); the songs of 1930s to 1940s bisexual crooner ‘Hutch’; the wartime comedy series ITMA; Julian and Sandy in the comedy show Round the Horne (1965–70), The Killing of Sister George (stage play in 1965, film in 1968 and radio play in 1978); singer David Bowie; the latest phone-in on lesbian and gay (l/g) partnership rights; a new out-gay DJ on BBC Radio 1; and the Triangle Radio Network – ‘America’s only Gay Radio network on the Internet’? What defines ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ radio through the decades? Is it because it is heard as such by

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the gay listener? Is it because the gay listener’s pleasure is paramount? What ‘gay listener’ and ‘lesbian listener’? And is radio gay because of the performer? Or gossip? ‘Queer’ is today’s inclusive academic term which resists the either-or of gay/lesbian. We can also talk of radio’s ‘homosexual’ (pre1960s liberation) period. It was a time of sexual censorship, also of revealing and concealing, when sexuality could be uncategorisable. As well as giving some account of lesbian and gay radio on the BBC, this chapter will consider the problems of studying gay radio. Not the least of these is the disappearance of ‘ghetto’ radio (by and for a l/g audience) from the BBC. ‘Ghetto’ has gone international by moving onto the Internet – today’s technological solution for those who can afford it. The Internet offers cheap niche broadcasting, narrowcasting to a community however dispersed, the one-to-many that defines radio, pioneering do-it-yourself and marketing. Is this the solution? Overall, radio with a l/g content falls into the following categories: (1) (2) (3) (4)

‘Ghetto’ programmes run for a gay audience. Popular music. Mainstream discussion-tied-to-phone-in on an issue. Magazine programmes such as ‘Gay and Lesbian London’, now to be found on the Internet. (5) Personality interviews. (6) Radio drama. (7) Radio comedy. (8) Targeted commercials. (9) News items, packages and features. (10) L/g-operated stations, and now radio on the Internet. This chapter cannot attempt an international history of l/g radio, especially in the U.S. (Capsuto 2000; Johnson and Keith 2001), nor can it survey popular music, the great bulk of l/g programming. Radio is fleeting entertainment and often leaves not much behind for the researcher. It can be a matter of luck if recordings exist and are in accessible archives. But radio drama is a promising area because of the extraordinary BBC script collection surviving in Caversham; and the choice of stage plays adapted for broadcast also provides a site, as does the tradition of British theatre, for the ‘formation of dissident sexual identities’ (Sinfield 2000: 1).

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History A first need in research is to parallel the story of l/g rights, from the hostility to and suppression of homoerotic material until the 1960s and from the 1960s to today. Euro-American society heavily penalised sodomy – non-procreative sexual acts. This was countered by gay liberation in the 1960s – the Stonewall Riot in New York in 1969 marks a key date, while the above quotation from Tom Robinson is evocative of that era – and reforming legislation. Then there were the twenty years of HIV/AIDS, which still continues today, and queers and post-queers, and possibly their integration into the mainstream (see Jeffrey-Poulter 1991, Watney 2000 and Weeks 1989 and 1991). So there is a movement from homosexuals to postcloset gays and lesbians, and to queers and mainstreaming. To this can be added the BBC’s ways of regulation, right back to the card handed to wireless artists in 1925 (‘No gags on Scotsmen, Welshmen, Clergymen, Drink, or Medical matters.’). There is a comparison here with British theatre censorship, up to the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain in 1968 (de Jongh 1992). The first instance of gay radio cited above is my particular response, my gay response, to the satirised Leonard, Lord Forth in Gertrude Jennings’ Five Birds in a Cage. This vivacious 35minute satire was broadcast on 29 November 1923 from London’s 2LO (Savoy Hill), adapted from the 1915 stage play. (A full analysis is in Beck 2000.) The ‘Five Birds’ are characters from the top and bottom layers of society, and the ‘Cage’ is a stalled Underground lift. Leonard is constantly attacked by the sexually predatory Susan, Duchess of Wiltshire: So useless. So very, very useless. You’re nothing but a shop window. You have a straight nose, you have a manner, and – well – you look intelligent, but what use are you? If I had married you how ashamed I should have felt! What a failure as a husband! Worse than my first!

Leonard is not just emasculated but as good as outed. While the Duchess in the ‘Cage’ makes advances to bricklayer Bert, Leonard is only apologetically genial to Nelly, a milliner’s assistant. Leonard may have been played ‘straight’, and as there is no recording, we will never know. This ‘well-dressed, good-looking man’, as the script describes him, is a bumbling and finally good-hearted aesthete. For me, the centre of his

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characterisation is that he is a privileged pre-Great-War homosexual, now heard on 1920s wireless, when it was chic to be ‘queer’ for some (Woods 1998: 5). This play is from the very earliest beginnings of the BBC, under its notoriously Calvinist General Manager, John Reith. It also shows the hurdles of analysing radio in its ‘homosexual’ decades, before gay liberation. Evidence is fragmentary. But it can be enough to unsettle the listener’s decoding of homo/heterosexuality. Dealing with objections by many heterosexually identified critics to Shakespeare being ‘gay’, Gregory Woods argues that what matters is if the sonnets are amenable to being read by a gay reader as such. The ‘reader’s pleasure is paramount … a potential gay text is a gay text’ (Woods 1998: 9). Of course Woods also recognises the dangers of a ‘trans-historical and cross-cultural unifying definition of gay culture’ and the need for careful theorising. There is no universal gay or lesbian viewer/reader/listener (see Sinfield 2000: 347). Another definition of gay is through performers. Also in 1923, one of the first wireless actors in Savoy Hill was Ernest Thesiger (1879–1961), ‘witty, skeletal … by far the most eccentric gay actor around in the 1930s and 1940s’ (Bourne 1996: 17). He became famous as the Dauphin in Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan in 1923, and as Dr Praetorius in the American film, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935); for his book, Adventures in Embroidery (Howes 1993: 838–9); and as sewing companion to Queen Alexandra. Accounts of the cultural contribution of artists such as John Gielgud (brother of Val who was to be so influential as BBC director of drama from 1929 to 1963), Robert Eddington, Gwen Frangçon Davies, as well as composers of the range of the Pet Shop Boys, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland and Hans Werner Henze, would not be complete without their radio broadcasts and commissions (Gill 1995).

Literature and criticism Alan Sinfield said of gay literature that ‘gay men seem doomed to wrestle with the canon’ (Sinfield 1994: 64) and there are already a few key publications doing the same thing with respect to radio. First and foremost, there is the invaluable resource encyclopaedia Broadcasting It: An Encyclopaedia of Homosexuality on Film, Radio and TV in the UK 1923–1993 (Howes 1993). An update is urgently needed for this astonishing treasure store. For the U.S.A., there is Alternative Channels: The Uncen-

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sored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television (Capsuto 2000) and the newly-arrived Queer Airwaves (Johnson and Keith 2001). Both give some fleeting coverage to radio due to the paucity of early U.S. material. We learn of the first openly gay character, in the Theatre Guild on the Air production of Moss Hart’s Lady in the Dark, in 1947, of some low-key gay jokes on radio vaudeville routines (the Rudy Vallee Show), and of a 1939 episode of the Jack Benny Show with an all-male skit on the famous Cukor film, The Women. Tallulah Bankhead’s variety show from 1951 constantly joked about her being ‘Mr’. To these publications, add Trenchard and Finch’s Are We Being Served? Gays and Broadcasting Project of 1985, sponsored by the then London local government authority, the Greater London Council (GLC). This was a model of media studies research (Trenchard and Finch 1985). Lesbian radio is ably surveyed in ‘Twisting the Dials’, updated from its 1994 original in Daring to Dissent – Lesbian Culture from Margin to Mainstream (Nye, Godwin and Hollows 2000). The first mainstream lesbian play was Now She Laughs, Now She Cries by Jill Hyem, directed by Jane Graham and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 14 April 1975 (Howes 1993: 561; Nye, Godwin and Hollows 2000: 75). Much detailed research has already been done on the other media. So more radio work is needed to match the detailed narrative of, for example, the outstanding Brief Encounters: Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema 1930–1971 (Bourne 1996), Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage (de Jongh 1992) and the massively researched A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (Woods 1998). There must be more discoveries of lost radio, a reassessing of radio undervalued by straight critics, archiving and interviews. There are gaps and arguments from silences, filled through acts of – only gay? – interpretative imagination. This makes some historians uneasy but imagination must link with a text-critical, contextual, cross-media procedure. Additionally, there is the need to keep current, and monitor the Internet. So far so good. But what of ‘in/visibility and un/friendliness’ and the ‘near miss’? These are usefully taken from Alan Sinfield on positive and negative images, and suppression and liberation, and what might be gay but turns out not to be. They are in Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Sinfield 2000: 3–4). Leonard, Lord Porth (above) is ‘in/visible’ and a ‘near miss’ in 1923. One could also add a long parade of comedy homosocials, those all-male (usually) comic teams onwards from radio’s pre-liberation period. Examples

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are ‘Mr. Stitch’ of wartime ITMA (‘I’ve made the jacket very full in the skirt’) and foppish aristocratic twits hilariously invented by ITMA scripter Ted Kavanagh; the odd couple in Bandwagon living on top of Broadcasting House in 1939 (Arthur Askey and Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch); more odd-couple bickering in The Men from the Ministry; and flashes in The Goon Show (1952–1960), though this was curiously coy about sex. The voice becomes exaggerated, excessive, ironic and the vehicle for allegorical indirectness. We listen beyond it. Tim Brooke-Taylor’s radio pantomime dame, which has had many farcical outings since the 1970s, is typical of postliberation radio. It is well-adjusted and heterosexual, but anarchically pansexual, or at least as far as blind radio goes in gender-bending in its most popular entertainment. Julian and Sandy from Round the Horne (1965–1970), played by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, remain the peak of radio’s glorious gay liberation. Still available on BBC cassettes, they continue to broadcast their ‘polari’ gay-speak (‘vada’, ‘eek’, ‘lallies’, ‘lattie’) and some jokes almost too defiant for straight audiences. (Singing and composing in a ‘Bona Musicals’ sketch: ‘Julian’s a miracle of dexterity on the cottage grand’.) Even in comedy, there is ‘unfriendliness’ (Sinfield 2000: 3). It can still be heard in the dinosaur ‘mind-your-backs’ jibes of the BBC Radio 2’s The News Huddlines, starring Roy Hudd, broadcast regularly since 1976. This is otherwise a successful and jolly variety show, enlivened by Hudd’s patter. Radio comedy, being almost totally verbal playtime, is able to explore society’s contradictory feelings about same-sex attraction but without the statements already made by a performer’s visual presence-to-audience. Artists can extend their range. Julian Clary and Richard Wilson, both well-known for their television comedy, played darker, slower gay scenes in the little series Late (BBC Radio 4) – ‘coldly comic scenes from the city late at night’ as The Radio Times advertised it (4 July 2001). Clary was even a character who refused to come out – unimaginable for him on television. Recent BBC comedy shows a more complex range of queerness. Queer studies is flourishing, founded in the late 1970s and in areas neighbouring to radio – queer film, performance and literature, and so on. (See Clum 1992; Creekmur and Doty 1995; Dollimore 1991; Dyer 1986 and 1992; Miller 1996; Weiss 1991; also in References for Internet resources.) So, to sum up so far, there is an ongoing need for the encyclopaedic collecting of instances of gay radio; and the difficulties of classifica-

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tion and of research methodology are somewhat eased by a combined queer radio studies.

Theory List-making is not enough and the next advance is to higherorder theorising. Since the pleasure of the gay listener has already been established above as a principle, though more of that will be explored below, the need is to extend radio reception theory to where, frankly, it has not yet reached. What of pleasure, desire, the body, shifting identities, cyber communities? How does radio seek to generate bodily pleasure? Can radio audience studies reach to queer uses of radio, beyond the urban and to those who are not out (public)? Above all, can the study of queer radio hitch its wagon to queer theory? The answer is yes, but there are worries. A main problem is that so much queer theory in film is linked to the visual. An example is the male ‘gaze’ and associated psychoanalytic theory. (There is not space here for definitions and controversy over ‘gaze’ theory. See Chandler’s useful Internet links.) The same worry applies to appropriating any visualist theory. The greatest contribution of the ‘gaze’ to film studies is that it has enabled discussion of the gendered construction of narrative and gendered positioning. So, if the ‘gaze’ is about oppressive ways of seeing, are there oppressive and analogous ways of radio listening? These would be of use to queer radio theory. The answer is probably not, from this theoretical angle anyway, and mainly because the ‘gaze’ is an unacceptable first principle, or point of inference, for radio. The gaze is visualist and there is no getting around that. Let me chase radio ‘gaze’ theory through to its unacceptable conclusion for a moment, while also recognising that for some film theorists, the ‘gaze’ master-theory has been discredited anyway. I have to follow a rather dense argument here. If an attempt were made to transpose a Laura Mulvey-de Lauretis-Phelan (see Chandler) type of ‘gaze theory’ to radio’s language, for example – and that has not been ventured – then ‘radio gaze theory’ would impose itself even more severely on radio theory and text analysis. I mean even more severely than in film. Suppose radio is to follow film along the same Lacanian path. Then language itself, being phallocentric, could be argued to coerce a radio listener identification, with a position of male antagonism towards women. Mulvey’s male

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looking and female ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ of film would become radio’s male hearing (the constructed and coerced radio listener – male or female) and female ‘to-be-heard-ofness’ on radio. That is, either female speaking in phallocentric language or female silence. This will not do. It is unconstrained master-theory association, in linking ‘gaze’ with radio. Frankly, if one starts from a proposition which is a contradiction in itself, anything can be deduced and there is no chance for coherence in argument. ‘Gaze’ theory just will not do for radio. The foundations for the gendered constructions of radio must be sought elsewhere. For queer radio studies, the search may well be in the pleasure of ear-to-brain contact, in the erotically ambivalent and in what suggests sexual deviance. Gesture, eye contact and dress are ‘absent’ and the radio display is one of voice, but only primarily. There is a contradiction. Voice reveals a male/female binary and is this irreducible? Does the radio voice contradict the possible deceptions of drag? Queer studies is often engaged deconstruction and a search for possible resistances with consequent empowerment, and ‘a sustained political edge’ but with ‘huge problems of methodology’ (Stacey 1996: 389). Interestingly, queer radio research hits against what is presently thinkable and unthinkable in radio studies itself. It is a hint of a broader struggle over how to deal with radio’s meaning, with the huge and dispersed output of broadcasting and multiple uses of radio, and with the significance or insignificance of radio style and aesthetics.

The contemporary scene You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away (26 December 1996), referred to at the top of this chapter, was a pinnacle of l/g radio broadcasting in the U.K. Starring the bisexual pop star Tom Robinson, best known for his 1976 hit, ‘Glad To Be Gay’, this was a witty guide to gay songs from the 1920s onwards. It won the top U.K. Sony Award for Robinson and producer, Matthew Linfoot. Here was confident mainstream entertainment, educational, too, and an hour in length. Music has long been an activating force in l/g culture. But since this programme there have been surprising changes and disappearances. Tom Robinson was broadcast on BBC London, on Greater London Radio’s (GLR’s) weekly Gay and Lesbian London, which started in March 1993. This was a weekly community programme, sophisticated entertainment, and a hit due to its presenter, Linfoot. It was

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axed in 2000 and GLR itself became London Live. Also, BBC Radio 5 dropped its regular Out This Week, a more serious magazine half-hour, broadcast nationally from February 1993 to March 1999 (a total of some 150 programmes). There is now no regular l/g-focused programming on U.K. radio outside some community station output (as Greater Manchester Radio’s Gaytalk), an odd RSL (restricted service licence for a month and a 2-mile radius), some activity for Pride (Mardi Gras) across summer, and International AIDS Day on 1 December. It has come out from ‘ghetto’ programming and into the mainstream, and the millennium marks a convenient watershed. There is no loss of visibility or diversity, especially on the music scene. (Wahid Ali has won a licence for a future digital London station, ‘Purple FM’, for dance music.) And then there is television. Crucially, gays and lesbians have discovered their niches on Internet radio, too, an impressive international network. On radio, l/g political and cultural issues are handled routinely, and sexual identification has entered what the media labels ‘lifestyle’. The Nicky Campbell BBC Radio 5 phone-in coinciding with London’s Mardi Gras is now typical (29 June 2001, 9-10 a.m.). In the studio were gay spokesmen Terry Sanderson (journalist) and Michael Brown (former Tory MP). Only two anti-gay callers were put through. When Paul in Bury asked ‘How many gay people are there in Bangladesh?’, presenter Nicky used a put-down silence, and then said ‘We’re just counting’. The much-admired Campbell was following BBC Producer Guidelines in ‘taste and decency’ where sexual orientation is not to be a vehicle for prejudice. ‘It is not the rules that have changed, so much as people’s confidence’, explains Victoria Stewart, Executive Producer on Radio 4, and previously a co-presenter on Gay and Lesbian London. This reflects l/g politics in the U.K. – first the ‘suffragette’ period of claiming rights, identifying and then celebrating a sub-culture (especially the 1970s to the 1990s), and on to the rise of the pink pound, age-of-consent at sixteen, and diversity. On the other hand, some anti-gay legislation such as Section 28, the ‘Bullies’ Charter’, is just on the way out, but religious bigotry still remains. There are fresh alarms about the rise of HIV infection among young gay men and, generally, about risky behaviour. U.K. campaigning issues – for example, on partnership and family rights – are now staider. Along with the mainstreaming and domestication of l/g politics, the zest and outrage of the

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‘suffragette’ decades have passed away from U.K. radio. The camp has gone too, except from comedy. Most l/g spokespeople speak like bureaucrats, which in fact, those who are funded are. For example, diversity and sexual orientation counselling in the workplace has substantially replaced HIV/AIDS awareness as an ‘industry’. While l/g programmes lost out at the millennium, so also did most ethnic community programming (Jewish, Asian, black). Instead came the management principles of flow (no more half-hour segments for BBC Radio 5 and local stations), integration (management talked of de-ghettoization) and personality presenters. The ‘straightening’ of gay politics and culture means that l/gs only get the microphone when they are a problem (gay marriage?) or an issue (Mark Ravenhill’s play Shopping and Fucking). The dialogue is only straight-to-gay, l/gs interrogated by a ‘taste and decency’ presenter. Gone is the gay-to-gay chat, the camp, the transgressive. A sanitised return to radio’s ‘homosexual’ period? Queer radio may have translated itself to the Internet but has it lost its sense of place?

Radio and the gay experience One of the paradoxes of radio is its hybridity, that is, its ability to transcend its boundaries and draw on, even ‘clone’, other forms of the mass media like television. Radio can challenge its known identities and those elements most radiogenic – that is, which make most use of radio’s features. (For hybridity see Hendy 2000: 189–90.) So when BBC Radio 1 returned for the third time to Mardi Gras 2001 (London’s Finsbury Park), on air from 5–9 p.m., straights and gays were ‘listening to the listening’, so to speak, and to presenters Judge Jules, Danny Rampling and guest Frankie Knuckles. How can we analyse their experiences? Music – the predominant genre in queer radio – is not just a ‘most powerful sensory stimulator’ for fantasy, but there is much more to be researched into the functioning of ‘mediated, privatised and industrialized auditory in the management of users’ everyday lives’ (Bull 2000: 14–15) on the personal stereo). Radio involves the listener in a physical way too, and young gay audiences are an obvious example. This can become a variety of trance, from synchronization or ‘entrainment’, twinning mental and physical rhythms to the external (Guck 1996: 18).

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Ravers and concert audiences, and radio listeners too, utilise individual biosignals (heart, breathing, muscle movement, etc.) along with pleasurable endorphin production in the brain. Also rhythms of radio speech can position the listener ideally and intimately ‘within’ the dialogue. We have all fallen in love with songs and voices from the radio. (See Koestenbaum (1991: 205–234) for singing and coming out.) Music is one of the few pleasurable aural excesses on radio and there is much of value to research and to read about queer identity and popular music, musicals, opera, stardom and divas. (See Dyer (1992), who also quotes Kenneth Williams on Joe Orton: ‘He once told me about picking up a bloke who said you could always tell a “queer’s” place because they’ve all got LPs of Judy Garland’.) As well as music and dialogue entrainment, or twinning the body to the broadcast, radio also positions the listener. A special gay-identifying closeness can be linked to the warmth and distinctive vocal qualities of, for example, Tom Robinson in You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away. Or earlier, before 1964, there was the example of the famous and recognisably lesbian journalist, Nancy Spain, on the BBC’s My Word! and Any Questions?. There are specific ways in which radio filters identities as a single-modality blind/invisible medium. An added factor is paraproxemics. This is the apparent interpersonal distance between audience and television’s or radio’s performers. Watson and Hill define paraproxemics as ‘the way TV handles the space between people, echoing and simulating the real-life use of space’ (Watson and Hill 1997: 166). Radio ‘presence’ parallels the spatial zones of the Lifeworld, especially the intimate, one-to-one and social group. Dialogue constantly gives depth cues, particularly in magazine programmes, interviews and radio drama. For example, the DJ uses closeness to the microphone (positions 1 and 2) and the result is bass tip-up or increase in bass tones and colouring. He or she is – almost – ‘in-your-face’. The microphone is also at ‘eye contact’ position, in regular close-up. So what do entrainment (twinning the body to the broadcast) and paraproxemics (simulating real-life space) offer to the l/g listener and also to those ‘under-the-duvet listeners’ – the young and older who have not yet come out? It is a one-toone, a common cultural identity, as well as potential identities, the self-creating, constantly in-the-making identities. Postmodernism and cyber studies do much to inform us about

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these. As Bruce Smith says in his study of the acoustic world of Renaissance England, ‘We speak ourselves into being’ (Smith 1999: 246). Hence all the greater need for l/g spaces on radio, for the gay one-to-one experience.

Soap operas and plays The remainder of the chapter will be about BBC Radio 3 and 4 dramas and soaps. Two powerful institutions meet there – theatre and the BBC – and two regulating systems. Alan Sinfield points out that today ‘the conditions for explicit lesbian and gay theatre have been achieved – to the point where gay presence in the mainstream can be complained of as disproportionate’ (Sinfield 2000: 1). The first gay soap characters are fascinatingly outlined in Howes (1993). In The Archers of 1952, Lady Hyleberow wanted to take Christine Archer to Ethiopia as her ‘secretary and companion’. John Tregorran arrived in 1953 from his caravan tour, ‘comforting gypsies’. The Dales in 1967 had Richard Fulton, followed by the more urban and realistic Waggoners’ Walk (1969–1980), with bisexual pianist Kit and then Rob Pengelly in 1979. It took The Archers until 1998 to bring a gay character to the microphone, though we had regularly heard of assistant Shane in Nelson’s wine bar. Scriptwriter Sam Boardman-Jacobs (1986–2000) campaigned for a gay character and he explains ‘we sort of got one, Welsh and Jewish, Sean Myerson. There are immense pressures in a soap to heterosexualise a gay character, wanting a heterosexual character who is gay – they’re just like us. It’s a good liberal impulse, but it’s wrong’ (Boardman-Jacobs 2001). Sean ran the rival village pub with his partner (unheard) and also captained the cricket team. His business and sports rival was Sid Perks, and ‘I was pleased when Sid reacted as a homophobe and that was quite positive’ (Boardman-Jacobs). Independent soap director Penny Leicester comments: ‘The mistake is to create an issue-led character like the slightly clunky gays in Waggoners’ Walk. A soap is the place to put gay characters in touch with people’ (Leicester 2001). The character Sean has now left The Archers. Boardman-Jacobs summarises: ‘People prefer to use gayness as a metaphor for something else and I want to say bugger off’ (Boardman-Jacobs 2001). David Rudkin’s Cries From Casement As His Bones Are Brought To Dublin (BBC Radio 3, 1973, director John Tydeman) remains

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one of the great masterpieces of radio drama writing and directing. ‘It combines two forbidden themes – Ireland and homosexuality’ said John Tydeman in interview and it went as far as the BBC Board of Governors for approval. The bones of the Irish Republican hero martyr, Roger Casement (1864–1916) were finally returned in 1965, dug up from the ‘Pentonville limepit’ as the script puts it, after his execution. Crippen lay alongside, and so Eire received ‘a poisoner’s toe up his warrior’s ass’. The Cries are the memories of Casement in his coffin, taken partly from the notorious and sexually explicit Black Diaries, now accepted by most as authentic and not British forgeries. (There is a detailed analysis of the play in Lewis (1981: 71–3) though it is coy about homosexuality.) Crippen, a crude Cockney, wakes Casement in the limepit: ‘Eh, fruity boy! Casement! Roger sir!’. Casement was dreaming: ‘A saucy young fellow of a fusilier was opening his thighs for me.’ Mixed with Casement’s political testimony – his famous investigations into slavery in Brazil and the Congo and his attempt to enlist an Irish Brigade from First World War prisoners of war – is his homosexuality. He lists his contacts across the world – Pepe, Manuel (‘only on a spit the like of that would I be at home’), Ramon, Tiger, the Congo itself (‘Casement would touch these ebony curves of Adam flesh’). He cries: ‘Oh Africa! Rape me! I’ll ransack your gorgeous nature’s treasure dry of milk in me. Hush Hush! Rob’s colony, cock’s colony’. John Tydeman was the master of adapted stage plays, too. An example is John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me set in the decadent pre-Great-War Austro-Hungarian officer corps (1965 at the Royal Court Theatre and radio version broadcast on 16 January 1994). Osborne ran into problems with the Lord Chamberlain as he had included a drag ball and obvious links with the homosexual and spy scandals of the declining Macmillan–Home Conservative governments (Sinfield 2000: 262-4). A range of other radio adaptations include Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser (BBC Radio 4, 29 March 1993, starring Michael Palin and Freddie Jones and directed by David Blount, from the 1980 stage original), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (BBC Radio 3, 11 January 1993, directed by Penny Gold), and Hermann Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (BBC Radio 3, 12 March 2000, directed by John Tydeman). Sinfield points out that by the early 1980s ‘it was possible to bring in from the fringe candid representations of sexual dissidence, so long as they did not much unsettle prevailing notions about gays’ (2000: 339).

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On radio there is never the option of putting on plays written by a minority for a minority. The last examples are mostly of the mainstream, but all still remains to play for with directing, scripting and acting. Andy Kirby’s Compromised Immunity, about a London hospital and its first AIDS patient and originally a 1985 Gay Sweatshop production, was broadcast on BBC Radio 5 in 1990 in six episodes and directed by Turan Ali. In A Kind of Freedom by Alan McDonald (BBC Radio 4, 10 October 1992, director Clive Brill), male rape becomes a symbol for vicious and corrupt Toryism. This is a sharp and pacey political satire. Working-class Michael was raped by Robert, who now, twenty years later, is a Tory MP. His victim has become a successful property-developer and what is more, married his attacker’s sister. Michael has flashbacks of the attack, with Robert and his cronies shouting ‘This is what we do to dirty little specimens like you!’, and he still holds on to some evidence – an envelope of money thrown at him in recompense. Michael rescues his in-laws with his new wealth but cannot tell his wife (‘I thought we can’t get married unless I tell her and then I thought she won’t if I tell her.’) The flashpoint comes when the MP is asked to join the government and Michael spies on him and his young boyfriend (‘twentyone – as old as I was when …’), and finally confronts him: ‘Freedom to buy and sell people – freedom to rape people’. But the career of each is ruined by the other. The MP is forced to resign when Michael lets the media know the scandal. In revenge, the facts of Michael’s own corrupt land deals are leaked by his brother-in-law. Michael’s wife leaves him (‘Mike’s lost his job and his self-respect and me’). What raises this play above gay-related melodrama is its toughness in confronting negative images of gay sex, its linking of rape and power and Toryism in the early 1990s, and its skilled use of monologues and montages. Death of an Ugly Sister by John Peacock (BBC Radio 4, 10 December 1995, director Ned Chaillet) is the darkest of comedies which follows through the last night of a failing pantomime. One Ugly Sister, played by Roy Barraclough (well known in the television soap Coronation Street and for his comic TV drag duo with Les Dawson), is gradually revealed through his monologues as a serial killer of women. Triggered apparently by his mother remarrying, he has just dumped the body of his latest victim – the crack addict actress playing Cinderella. The other Ugly Sister played by Paul Shane (television’s Hi-Di-Hi) is married but picks up gay partners, and

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gradually and tragically realises that his long-standing stage partner is a murderer just as the police move in. Finally, there is Derek Jarman’s Blue (BBC Radio 3, 1993). This is a 75-minute film – famously, cinema audiences are faced with nothing on the screen but monochrome blue – but was also a simulcast television and radio broadcast and a compact disc. Jarman, filmmaker, painter and poet, died of AIDS in 1994 and Blue combined a diary of his advancing blindness with stories and allegories around ‘blue’. Typical of his integrity as an artist, Jarman refused the hero role and countered AIDS-correctness of this second decade of the pandemic: ‘I shall not win the battle against the virus – in spite of the slogans like “Living with AIDS”.’ The specificities of his AIDS-related illnesses are almost overwhelming. But the ‘blueness’ of this invisible/blind audio piece resists determinacy. Author and listeners are blind together, and Jarman is both present and absent, and finally absented by his death. Ultimately, he faces the ‘death beyond death’ (the French historian Michelin’s phrase), the fate of having memory and life extinguished and eternally forgotten. But Blue counters that and offers a new cultural script for dying. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter are the best known among radio dramatists for linking the listening experience with a blind character. Blue takes this further, as listening, knowing and not-seeing lead the audience through a transcendent experience.

An agenda for the future So to end, here are some more puzzles. From the ‘homosexual’ phase of radio, we look, particularly in music, drama and comedy, for fragmented vocal gestures of irony and exaggeration. These latter conceal and compensate for what cannot be named. Early homosexual identifications do not match with post-closet identities. Today, BBC radio comedy can even make fun of the fear that homosexuality might go undetected. And for the future? More work needs to be done on how radio makes listeners susceptible to queer pleasures and fantasies, but also on how the aural delimits all sexualities. And moving on from restricted, routine-like discussion of stereotypes, how does one identify or prove sexuality on radio? Need gay radio confine itself to positive or accurate images? Is there a gay radio aesthetic? Is coming-out to stay the dominating topic, no matter what the pretext? Across news, phone-ins and music –

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think of rap – there is still the tension between free speech and hate speech. But what of the easy assumption that l/g representation must of itself be progressive? Listing is a key to research but so also is higher-order theorising.

References Beck, A. (2000) ‘The Invisible Play’: B.B.C. Radio Drama 1922–1928, CD book published by Sound Journal. URL: http://www.kent.ac.uk/ sdfva/invisible/index.html. (Consulted 26 June 2001.) Boardman-Jacobs, S. (2001), private conversation with the author. Bourne, S. (1996) Brief Encounters. Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema 1930–1971, London: Cassell. Bull, M. (2000) Sounding Out the City: Personal Steros and the Management of Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg. Capsuto, S. (2000) Alternative Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television, New York: Ballentine. Chandler, D. (n.d.) ‘Notes on the Gaze’, Daniel Chandler’s Media and Communication Studies Site. URLs: http://www.aber.ac.uk/ media/Documents/gaze/gaze.html. (Consulted 26 June 2001.) Clum, J. (1992) Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama, New York: Columbia University Press. Creekmur, C. and Doty, A. (1995) Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, London: Cassell. Dollimore, J. (1991) Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dyer, R. (1986) Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, New York: St Martin’s Press. —- (1992) Only Entertainment, London: Routledge. Gill, J. (1995) Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music, London: Cassell. Guck, M. (1996) ‘Music loving, or the relationship with the piece’, Music Theory Online, 2. URL: http://boethius.music.ucsb.edu/mto/ issues/mot.96.2.2/mto.96.2.guck.html. (Consulted: 26 June 2001.) Hendy, D. (2000) Radio in the Global Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Howes, K. (1993) Broadcasting It: An Encyclopaedia of Homosexuality on Film, Radio and TV in the UK 1923–1993, London: Cassell. Jeffrey-Poulter, S. (1991) Peers, Queers, and Commons: The Struggle for Gay Law Reform from 1950 to the Present, London: Routledge. Johnson, P. and Keith, M. (2001) Queer Airwaves, New York: M.E. Sharpe. de Jongh, N. (1992) Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage, London: Routledge. Koestenbaum, W. (1991) ‘The queen’s throat: (homo)sexuality and the art of singing’ in Fuss, D. (ed.) inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, London: Routledge.

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Leicester, P. (2001), private conversation with the author. Lewis, P. (ed) (1981) Radio Drama, London: Longman. Miller, C. (1996) Stages of Desire: Gay Theatre’s Hidden History, London: Cassell. Nye, S., Godwin, N. and Hollows, B. (2000) ‘Twisting the dials’, in Mitchell, C. (ed.), Women and Radio: Airing Differences, London: Routledge. Sinfield, A. (1994) Cultural Politics – Queer Reading, London: Routledge. —- (2000) Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Smith, B. (1999), The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, London: University of Chicago Press. Stacey, J. (1996), ‘Report of the Society for Cinema Studies conference’, Screen, 37. Trenchard, L. and Finch, M. (1985) Are We Being Served? Gays and Broadcasting Project, Hall-Carpenter Archive and London Media Project. Watney, S. (2000) Imagine Hope: AIDS and Gay Identity, London: Routledge. Watson, J. and Hill, A. (1997), A Dictionary of Communication and Media Studies, London: Edward Arnold, 4th edn. Weeks, J. (1989) Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, London: Longman. —- (1991) Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Idenity, London: Rivers Oram Press. Weiss, A. (1991) ‘A queer feeling when I look at you’ in Gledhill, C. (ed.) Stardom: Industry of Desire, London: Routledge. Woods, G. (1998) A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Internet resources ‘Gay and lesbian issues’ bibliography: URL: http://www.growing.com/accolade/viol/gaylesb.htm. Princeton University course resources: URL: http://infoshare1.princeton.edu:2003/online/guide/mm/lg.html. Michigan State University catalogue: URL: http://www.lib.msu.edu/diversity/lgbt.htm. University of Texas resources: URL: http://libraries.uta.edu/dillard/subfiles/gayles.htm. Studies on lesbian and gay language: Michigan State University resources: URL: http://www.msu.edu/~greenm14/outil/ gaybib.html. Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago: URL: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/gaylesb/. Queer Studies List: University of Kentucky resources: URL: http://www.uky.edu/StudentOrgs/QueerInfo/qstudy.htm. (Consulted 26 June 2001.)


CHAPTER 9 

CONTINUITIES AND CHANGE IN WOMEN’S RADIO Kate Lacey

Everywhere the potential exists for the media to make a far greater contribution to the advancement of women. From the section on ‘Strategic objectives and actions’ of the Beijing Platform for Action (UN, September 1995).

Introduction After long years of marginalisation, women at the start of the twenty-first century hold some of the highest profile roles in contemporary British radio – from heading BBC Radio to presenting flagship breakfast shows. Women’s voices are to be heard across the schedules, indeed there are examples of varying longevity of women-only stations. Even academia has been taking women’s radio seriously, as witnessed by the recently published reader on the subject (Mitchell 2000a). After decades of neglect these developments are all welcome evidence of women having found their voices on and about the airwaves in the U.K. and, while there can be no room for complacency, the progress made can be seen as part of a broader success story of the feminisation and democratisation of the public sphere. Indeed, such is the range and variety of women’s participation in contemporary radio that it would be

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invidious to pretend to summarise that relationship in an essay of this length. Of course there are distinct histories of women’s programming and female audiences to be told – and this essay begins with reference to recent work which is beginning to bring those histories to light. However, as an historian venturing into contemporary waters, my central concern here will be to ask whether the gendered discourses which served to shape broadcasting in its formative years still resonate in the ‘multi-media world.’ There is a caveat to be mentioned at the outset which informs and underpins the discussion of women’s radio that follows. Although this chapter is included in a book section labelled ‘identities’, it takes issue with the notion of identity politics and the identity-based programming that arises from it on the grounds that a politics of representation which imagines and projects a common identity based on sex – or on race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality or any other essentialist categorisation – closes down the space for pluralistic political action and tends only to preserve the status quo. The limitations and perils of cultural and political practices founded on identity become clear in the light of the appropriation of such practices to serve conservative and totalitarian designs. This is one of the conclusions I drew from an analysis of radio programming for women in the critical transition from a putative democratic broadcasting system to a totalitarian one in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century (Lacey 1996). In turn, that work drew on feminist appropriations of the agonistic public sphere proposed by Hannah Arendt in which mutual recognition depends not on a shared identity but on the existence of actual physical spaces in which people can speak to each other in the world (Arendt 1958). The objects of discussion are generated in, and not prior to, discussion, that is to say questions that are of ‘inter-est’, literally ‘between us’, constituted by relationships that are of necessity not fixed. Arendt’s performative, agonistic politics offer a model for feminists who want to challenge the predominant gendered constructions of public and private, political and personal.1

Historical perspectives The early history of radio was an almost all-male affair. From inventors to regulators, producers to presenters, men dominated broadcasting as they did most other walks of life. There

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were important exceptions, however, and we are beginning to rediscover the stories of female broadcasting pioneers like Olive Shapley and Hilda Matheson in the U.K., and Bertha Brainard and Judith Waller in the U.S.,2 and to reconstruct the histories of specialist women’s programming.3 Such accounts are important revisions to mainstream broadcasting history and recognise a long if unfamiliar tradition of women’s presence in programme-making and the definition of their own representations. But beyond this kind of additive or compensatory history, a feminist perspective can also foreground gender as an analytical category that challenges the sex-blindness of traditional historiography. Gender is thereby recognised and mobilised as ‘one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated, and criticised’ (Scott 1986: 1073). In a seminal essay Joan Scott urged feminist historians to read history as a text, examining not only the social construction of gender but also the meanings of gender, particularly its use as a metaphor and as a ‘primary signifier of power’. Scott’s insight was that history too creates its meanings through differentiation and in this way organises knowledge about the world. The form that knowledge has taken – the remarkable absence or subordination of women in the narratives of the ‘rise of civilisation’ – indicates a politics that sets and enforces priorities, represses some categories and disqualifies others. Therefore a relativised concept of gender as historically specific knowledge about sexual difference allows a double-edged analytic tool that offers a way to generate new knowledge about women and sexual difference and to inspire critical challenges to the politics of history (and other disciplines like media studies). In my own work on the early history of broadcasting in Germany (Lacey 1996), I took a similarly discursive approach to the analysis of the contemporaneous emergence of radio and women into the public sphere – in other words analysing the hierarchies, institutional relations, modes of characterisation, economic arrangements and social processes expressed in language. In the public policies and mediated commentaries about the institutionalisation of public broadcasting in Germany – as elsewhere – gendered metaphors provided the frame of reference in the discourses about the new medium and helped determine the form that radio takes today as a medium straddling the public and private domains. It was a public, masculine medium directed into the private, feminine sphere, a process of dissemination and reception, of penetra-

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tion and invasion, of expertise versus amateurism, activity versus passivity, power versus powerlessness, speech versus silence. The political content of broadcasts was circumscribed and a middlebrow culture advanced at least in part on the basis of prevailing distinctions which rendered the (middleclass) domestic realm unsuitable for controversy, challenge or corruption, because such programmes would be heard by women and children in the home.4 Despite the low profile of women on the air or behind the scenes in the formative years of radio, women were significantly present in the discursive construction of the audience, and at least at certain times of day represented the majority. Some of the standard formats of contemporary broadcasting, like the continuous serial or the informal studio chat, were developed as a response to women’s pleasures, their routines and their purchasing power. The set manufacturers, too, had the female audience in mind when designing receivers that could fit in with domestic furnishings (Moores 1988). As the early interactive participation of radio hams gave way to state controlled or commercial broadcasting systems, listeners were increasingly addressed as individual or familial consumers, captive in their homes or their cars, separated both from those addressing them and from those infinite others being similarly but separately addressed. So the paradigmatic listener that was constructed by the industry throughout the better part of the twentieth century was really that of the distracted, isolated and impassive housewife listening to the radio in the home while busy doing other things.5 And the paradigmatic programming to which she listened was the ‘emasculated’, industrialised kitsch of mass-produced culture. Radio, then, was explicitly and implicitly shaped by the prevailing gender ideologies of the age. But as a major cultural medium, it was also a site on which gender relationships were open to contest and redefinition, affirmation and reproduction. In the first half of the twentieth century when women around the world were increasingly entering the public sphere of politics and waged labour, we find examples of how women fought to exploit the liberating potential of educative, cultural and political programmes carried on a medium that could reach women otherwise isolated in the home. If their impact was limited it was because they had to fight against not only explicit discrimination against the presence of women’s voices on the air and in the public sphere, but also against the limiting function of scheduling policies designed to echo the rou-

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tines of conventional family life by which radio worked to (re)integrate its female audience into the home. In short, feminist media histories which are sensitive to the gendered language of public media discourse can illuminate policy questions around the organisation, censorship and social function of the radio as a medium of mass communication and, I would suggest, should provide useful insights for analyses of contemporary developments, not least as new media technologies which include new forms of distributing music and the spoken word, are finding their social application in a global context. In making such a claim, however, it is crucial to recognise that gender, like other categories of social analysis, is of course context-specific and contextdependent. As Lynn Spigel puts it, history doesn’t repeat itself but, ‘the discursive conventions for thinking about communication strategies are very much the same … our culture still speaks about new communication technologies in remarkably familiar ways’ (Spigel 1992: 186,182). Although comparisons across time and place are important and instructive, context is all – lest we fall into the trap of dehistoricising gender, and pretend that historiography simply provides endless variations on the unchanging theme of a fixed gender inequality.

Changes in the air … In any consideration of women’s contemporary relationship to the radio, there are a number of factors which cannot be overlooked, although I will only sketch them very briefly here. First there is the impact of the postwar achievements of feminism in materially changing the lives of women, radically influencing our range of expectations and encouraging our representation in all dimensions of the public sphere. Related to this are the ongoing shifts in the gendered delineation of the public and private, including changing working practices that have also begun to redefine the once easy separation of home and work. Second are the insistent technological developments that continuously reconfigure the media landscape within which radio fits and which redefine radio itself. For the purposes of a gendered analysis, the key questions revolve around the ways in which the key symptoms of convergence, fragmentation and specialisation, and digitalised modes of distribution impact upon opening up access and changing conditions of reception. Finally, all of these processes need to

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be set within the context of globalisation, not only to take account of the place of radio in the globalising media economy, but as a way of identifying the unevenness of these developments, political, social and technological, around the world. Within this broad context, despite all the changes, it is still possible to argue that there is a particular relationship between women and radio that persists, and that the radio remains particularly well suited as a channel for promoting the interests and expressions of women. At the heart of this relationship remains the advantage that radio has as a medium that enters the private sphere and that can be listened to while doing other things. It is especially well suited to reaching women who are potentially quite isolated in the home. It is also an intimate medium, well suited to the treatment of sensitive issues, the telling of stories and the building of communities, both real and imagined.6 Similarly, the blindness of the medium can be a liberating experience for women who are so often judged on appearances; the emphasis on the spoken word can validate or innovate feminine styles of verbal communication; and there is the potential for anonymity, which can be extremely important where women are at risk from exposure of their views. Moreover, since women in many parts of the world are often implicitly, if not explicitly, excluded from conventional public politics (such as political meetings in public places), it is arguable that radio acts as a forum for a kind of politics that does not put such a premium on public assembly, and which can reach those sections of the population otherwise untouched by conventional means of mobilisation and political participation. Radio also has the advantage that receivers are cheap and widely available around the world (the more so since the introduction of wind-up radios which remove the dependency on expensive batteries or inaccessible mains power for many rural listeners in developing countries), and the technologies required for transmission are also relatively inexpensive in comparison to other media. Stations are also widely distributed around the globe and, especially where local and community stations are in place, often more easily accessible than other media. The learning curve associated with access to those technologies is a gently sloping one which can be important in encouraging women to get involved, and production can be organised individually or collectively – collective productions have been a particular characteristic of feminist media organ-

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isations since the participatory model is recognised as an empowering experience above and beyond the content of what is broadcast. With audio cassettes and newer digital recording devices, nonbroadcast distribution can also be a useful addition for feminist groups. The advent of webcasting promises greatly to extend the possibilities for women’s radio, although information and communication technologies (ICTs) are also being used to encourage and extend the reach of conventional radio broadcasting in regions where access to the Internet is limited. In many places around the world where literacy levels are especially low in the female population – women account for two-thirds of the world’s illiterate population (Cliche et al. 1998) – the radio has obvious advantages over other media. Above all, the radio can be a forum for women to speak for themselves and to each other in the public sphere. The earliest examples of women’s radio were the spaces carved out in the schedules of the mainstream broadcasters, and the evidence suggests that there is still a lot to be gained by creating autonomous airtime, despite the arguments that such separatism sidelines women’s issues from the mainstream, or that conceding part of the schedule to women’s interests distracts from the need for a more genuine acknowledgement of female listeners in the rest of the schedules. There are lots of examples around the world, including the stalwart of BBC Radio 4, Woman’s Hour, which has been flexible enough in responding to the changing lives of women to stay on the air uninterrupted since 1946 (Feldman 2000; Murray 1996). Many stations annually devote a whole day’s output to women’s issues on International Women’s Day (March 8). Many would include packages produced by WINGS, the Women’s International News Gathering Service that has been operating from Austin, Texas, since 1985.7 One of the most prominent international programme-making ventures is FIRE, the Feminist International Radio Endeavour, founded in 1991 with support from the Foundation for a Compassionate Society. For seven years this daily two-hour programme (in English and Spanish) was broadcast internationally (to over 100 countries) on shortwave Radio for Peace International, based in Costa Rica, including live broadcasts from women’s international conferences.8 FIRE is still active in training women in radio production, but no longer broadcasts on shortwave. Instead it is developing a presence on the Internet, archiving audio materials that can be downloaded for local transmission.9

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Not all women’s programming has such an explicit activist feminist agenda, although examples of programmes of the old style which simply define women’s issues as cooking, cleaning and childcare are comparatively rare. There are examples of women’s music radio which showcases ‘music produced by women, sung by women, written by women, about women or for women’ to cite Kim Kranich, the producer of one such programme on American college radio (Makhijani 1992).10 Another example is Women’s Business Radio, a weekly Internet radio show that ‘brings you interviews with successful women’, not so much to provide role models as to exchange experiences and tips in what is an interesting mutation on the radio traditions which interpellated women almost exclusively as consumers.11 Some stations or programmes are more explicitly identity-based, such as the various broadcasts for lesbian and bisexual communities, among them the longrunning listener-supported station 88.5 FM WXPN/Philadelphia, which offers the weekly Amazon Country.12 Other programmes open up a space for reviews of women’s art and literature, or simply to engage women in conversation regardless of their sexual, political or other kinds of orientation.13 While most programming for women has been slotted into existing schedules, whether on public, commercial, community or pirate stations, there are also instances of women-only stations around the world. The best known example of women’s radio in Britain was ‘Viva!’, which was a muchhyped commercial venture headed by three high-profile media professionals, Lynne Franks, Linda Agran and Katy Turner, and backed by Golden Rose Communications. It targeted women ‘aged between twenty-five and forty-five, probably working, possibly a mother – the professional woman of today juggling her social life, her family and her career’ with a magazine format of music, news and views ‘from a feminine perspective’ (Mitchell, 2000c: 106). Despite the publicity surrounding the station, ‘Viva!’ lasted little more than a year before it sold up and was rebranded as ‘Liberty’, with a station policy to appeal to a more general market. A variety of reasons for the failure have been proposed, from lack of financial support to poor programming, but the difficulty of defining a unified female audience, especially in commercial terms, proved perhaps the final straw. Yet ‘Viva!’ was only the most prominent experiment: it was neither the first nor the last women’s station to broadcast on the British airwaves, although all the others have been temporary community-based

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stations. The first was Fem FM, a restricted service licence (RSL) station broadcasting in the Bristol area in 1992, and there have been at least ten further RSLs granted to women’s stations.14 Participatory, short-term, local community-based and nonprofit-making stations have also proved to be the most common forms of women-only stations beyond the U.K.15 The temporariness or limited scope of these stations should not be considered a shortcoming or a failing; indeed, in analysing these alternative channels of communication, it is generally important not to use conventional measures of ‘success’, such as permanence, audience share or turnover. Their importance lies rather in their contribution to a dynamic and diversified civil society in the expansion of discursive space.

Radio, gender and development Acting as a bridge between public and private, broadcasting has been intimately involved in the processes of modernisation over the last eight decades. And for the same reason it has been intimately involved in the processes of democratisation and the integration of women into the public sphere. Although these processes need to be ongoing in all societies, it is the case that the democratising potential of the communications media and gender development is becoming a central concern in the modernisation policies of developing countries, and to the various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working to promote women’s rights.16 The links between gender, culture, media and development were made explicit in a report of the UNESCO World Commission for Culture and Development in 1995 which identified the relationship between gender and culture as an important contribution to sustainable development and as a priority area for exploration. It claimed that gender – as a societal rather than sexual construct – is one of the most sensitive issues within periods of economic and cultural transformation and that women are most closely linked with notions of cultural distinctiveness and are generally identified as the ‘bearers and signifiers of their culture’ (Cliche et al. 1998). This tendency to find exegesis in the figure of Woman in time of crisis is part of a long-established and widespread tradition of transforming women into symbols and expressing power relations in gendered metaphors that makes women at once central and mar-

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ginal to the political and economic events of the (male) world. Such a statement certainly echoes the situation when radio emerged in America and Europe: a time of great political and cultural upheaval, in the 1920s and 1930s, suggesting that here at least is one of the ways in which the gendered discourses that informed the birth of radio might still be resonant in the contemporary media landscape. At the fourth UN World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, women and media were defined as one of the twelve ‘critical areas of concern’ requiring urgent action to improve the status of women in society.17 Its ‘Platform for Action’ declared the intention to ‘increase the participation and enhance the access of women to expression and decisionmaking in and through the media and new technologies of communication’ and to ‘promote a balanced and non-stereotyped portrayal of women in the media’.18 Since then, there have been renewed efforts around the world to increase women’s access to communication and media.19 In 1997, a joint UN project called WomenWatch was set up to monitor the results of the Beijing Conference and to create Internet space for global women’s issues. Its website includes an archive of programmes on women’s issues that have been broadcast on UN radio, programmes which deal with issues like dowry-related violence in India, images of older women in the media, women journalists covering conflict, and equality before the law.20 However, one interim review five years after Beijing reports that, although there are widespread indications of increasing numbers of women entering the media professions (not least in Asia and Latin America), women’s access to decision-making and policy remains limited and female media practioners still face discrimination in the workplace. The review is even less positive about the trends in media content and representations of women, where negative and pornographic images are on the increase, trends which it links to the absence or patchy implementation of national media codes.21 Although there is important work being carried out across all media, radio stands out for special attention for a number of reasons, some of which have been alluded to already – its cheapness, its accessibility, its blindness to appearances, its potential for anonymity, its ability to reach illiterate or isolated populations – all of which have especial resonance for women who are often doubly disadvantaged by poverty and lack of development.22 It is also ‘the ideal medium in which to

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exploit established patterns of communication in an oral culture’ (Ceesay 2000: 107). A few indicative examples garnered from reports available on the internet will have to stand in the place of a proper survey.23 Following the Beijing conference, the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) in the Latin American region developed a Women’s Programme with the aim of training radio women and formulating programming with a gender perspective. In the year 2000, a women’s community radio station in Mbalmayo, Cameroon, received a $40,000 seedcorn grant for equipment from UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication. The station focuses on health, childcare, sound agricultural methods, employment opportunities, building literacy and encouraging the role of women in the development process. It also offers continuous training to the station’s personnel.24 In the same year, as part of a campaign against the rising incidence of child marriages in Africa, UNICEF launched a radio programme called the Sara Adolescent Girl Communication Initiative in ten eastern and southern African countries.25 The programme appeals to its listeners to keep girls in school and also covers issues like HIV/AIDS, domestic responsibilities for women, and female genital mutilation. In some cases radio soaps, music and dramas can be the most effective way of imparting information. One soap opera, Marwo at the School Gate, is being developed in Somalia with production assistance from the U.K.-based Women’s Radio Group. It centres on Marwo and the friends she meets when collecting their children from school. The stories deal with some of the cultural, social, linguistic and environmental issues that Somali women and children have to adjust to in British society. It is also a vehicle for storytelling, traditional songs, and music.26 In other cases, women’s interests can be best served by reaching out to try to change men’s attitudes. One such campaign is being organised by Radio for Development in Bangladesh where unusually female life expectancy is even lower than it is for males, in part because of complications from illegal abortions and poor provision for childbirth. A multi-media operation (combining radio, film and theatre) in conjunction with the Marie Stopes Clinic is campaigning to encourage men to take more responsibility in sexual and reproductive health matters. The initial effort is concentrated on a radio magazine programme, broadcast nationwide through Dhaka Radio over a twenty-six-week period, and by

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building ‘Radio Listening Clubs’ around tea stalls, an appropriate social context for the target group audience of lowincome, sexually active males. The Bangladeshi National Media Survey (1998) shows that radio is one of the most powerful media in Bangladesh, and is both cost-effective and appropriate for such sensitive material.27 All of these projects cited are the result of international organisations generating and supporting projects at the local and national level, not least in conscious opposition to what is often perceived as the homogenising and disempowering effects of the globalisation of the media. While the multinational media empires have penetrated new markets all around the globe, one of the less reported effects of globalisation in Africa and elsewhere has been ‘the diversification of radio away from the single, state-monopoly broadcaster, creating a wide array of local and community radio stations which emphasize local issues and employ local languages, discourses increasingly embedded in the local rather than the global’ (Fardon and Furniss 2000: 3). The new media technologies, too, have a paradoxical relationship to the concerns of gender and development, at once enabling international communication and exchange, while at the same time being beyond the reach of many women in the developing world and serving to widen the gap between the information rich and the information poor. Women who are involved in working for fair representation in and on the media are campaigning for reforms in legislation and regulation about ownership and control as well as access and content. But they are also exploiting the possibilities thrown up by the new technologies and the global village. It is a mark of radio’s continued relevance to development issues and women’s empowerment in a multimedia age that there is growing evidence of the use of the new media to promote radio’s use, by extending its reach with parallel webcasting, increasing its capacity to interact with listeners, and by enhancing its programming with the proliferation of international exchanges of programming. One example of this kind of convergence work is The Women’s Net Community Radio Pilot Project in South Africa, which aims to increase gender-sensitive content on community radio stations and to train representatives of gender organisations to improve their skills with information and communication technologies, generate content for news and programming on community radio, as well as interacting more effectively with the mainstream media. The project

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works by creating an electronic network connecting community and commercial radio and gender organisations, running a web-based clearing house of radio content on women’s and gender issues, and publishing locally provided information on women and gender in a radio-ready format on the Internet.28 There are also examples of women’s radio programmes making use of this convergence of technologies in Asian countries like Sri Lanka and Nepal.29 A common feature of all the various projects tends to be training. For example, a key organisation in the Asian region – where radio remains a vital tool of education and communication particularly in lower-income and rural communities – is Isis International-Manila, an international women’s NGO which brings together media groups, individual practitioners, media activists, academics and policy makers in the region and which, among other activities, provides training for women on radio production, electronic networking, database and resource centre management.30 In most parts of Africa, too, radio is the medium that reaches most people, but opportunities for training are limited. In April 2000 the IWMF’s (International Women’s Media Foundation) African Women’s Media Centre co-sponsored a weeklong training session for radio journalists in northern Mali where, although women have for a long time made up a large percentage of radio journalists, few have had any formal training in their profession.31

Conclusion Throughout this whirlwind tour across history and across continents, the central argument has been that if women have a special relationship to radio it is not by virtue of any intrinsic feminine traits, but by the persistence of the gendered demarcation of the public and the private. The radio, like televison, the press and the Internet, bridges the public/private divide, but radio’s abiding features as a cheap and accessible oral medium that can be listened to while doing other things have made it an attractive and effective channel of communication for feminists since broadcasting began.32 The appropriation of radio as an alternative public space by women has been especially marked in times of transition and crisis and has played a significant part in processes of modernisation and democratisation around the world, from the 1920s to the present day. Women’s participation in radio has also informed the nature

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of the medium itself. There are parallels to be drawn, for example, between women finding their public voice and public radio finding an institutional voice which could imitate private modes of speech in ways that can be argued to have ‘feminised’ and democratised the public sphere in important respects (despite the common equation of feminisation with ‘dumbing down’). Radio continues to be a platform from which women can speak to women even in the multi-media world. Feminist media practitioners are learning to harness the organisational and distributive potential of the Internet in order to use both webcast and broadcast radio to reach and interact with new audiences and contribute to improving women’s lives. Much has already been achieved but while women around the globe continue to face discrimination in all its forms, there will continue to be a role and a need for women’s radio in all its diversity.

Notes 1. For a fuller discussion of the feminist appropriation of Arendt’s agonistics, see Honig (1992: 216). 2. See for example, Olive Shapley’s autobiography (1996), Fred Hunter’s biographical essay on Hilda Matheson (2000) and Michele Hilmes’ work on female broadcasting pioneers in the U.S. (1997: 132–50). 3. There was an early programme for women on the British Broadcasting Company’s London programme from Savoy Hill, but this was discontinued by 1924 and there was no regular service explicitly for women in Britain until Woman’s Hour was reintroduced in 1946, though the idea was broached again in the 1930s (Lewis and Booth 1989: 60). There were programmes for women in Australia, as Lesley Johnson has described, but it is not clear to what extent women were involved in their production (1988: 100–12). The history of women’s programming in the United States is more difficult to discern, but although there were programmes aimed at female day-time audiences, an organised service comparable to the German Frauenfunk, on air continuously in various forms from 1924 (Lacey 1996), does not seem to have emerged (Butsch 1998; Cramer 1989: 214–16; Hilmes 1997: 146–50). 4. For an account of the development of ‘middlebrow’ culture and ‘light entertainment’ on British radio, see Frith (1988). 5. I have suggested elsewhere that this definition of radio as a secondary medium – housewives’ distracted listening while continu-

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ing with daily chores – was associated with precisely those women whose lives were least integrated into the modern and yet this was a paradigmatically modern and potentially politicised mode of perception available to those women that other modern mass media were unable to reach. The schedule that was designed to weave itself into the routines of the household would paradoxically also draw attention to those routines and the fact that those routines were shared by countless other households (Lacey 2000). 6. There are also interesting though less sustainable arguments about the differences in modes of perception between the sexes that suggest that women have an affinity to the enveloping, incorporating perception of the ear in contrast to the masculine penetrative and distancing gaze and that women are better listeners. Since the world enters the body through the ear, a connection has been made in various cultures with the sexual penetration of the female body: in ancient Egypt and in Indian mythology the gods penetrate the genitalia-like ears of young women. In Christianity, the Eastern Orthodox church understood Mary to have conceived via the ears, and western representations of the Virgin Mary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took up this idea in more chaste images of the wind or music reaching Mary’s ears. Birth through the ear is also mentioned in Greek mythology – in the Minerva sagas – and is a topos that appears until the middle ages (Jütte 2000: 105–6), and there is an explicitly gendered hierarchy between image and sound in the myth of Echo and Narcissus, with woman and sound allied on the ‘weak’ side of the story (Lawrence 1991: 2). 7. The news in WINGS comes from women radio reporters (with the occasional male contributor), many of them producers at community, college and pirate radio stations around the world, but also independent producers and members of larger networks. Some news is generated via telephone interviews from Austin. WINGS is distributed to radio stations on audio-cassettes in the mail, and via community radio satellite (ComRadSat in Australia, and Pacifica’s Ku-band satellite in the US). See also Werden (1996). URL: http://listweb.bilkent.edu.tr/kadin/1998/May/0047.html. For archived programmes by WINGS, see: URL: http://www.wings.org. WINGS also organises international programme exchanges in the English language. 8. FIRE seeks ‘to create a communications channel where women’s voices, in all their diversity, are heard by the international community, crossing barriers of nationality, culture, race, geography, and language’. 9. Feminist International Radio Endeavour, URL: http://www.fire.or.cr/ indexeng.htm. 10. A site which lists and provides links to music stations for women around the world is compiled and maintained by Gerri Gribi at URL: http://creativefolk.com/radio.html.

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11. For further details see: URL: http://www.wemeanbiz.com/ radio.htm. 12. The relatively rare instances of lesbian programming in the U.K. are recounted by Nye et al. (2000: 73–83). 13. One example is Women’s Voices, an American magazine format programme broadcasting on Thursday evenings promising ‘Insightful interviews, Irreverent opinions, Intelligent chat’ and inviting its listeners to ‘join the conversation’. URL: http://www.womensvoices.com/resources.html. 14. For a detailed account of this history, see Mitchell (2000b). 15. For a European perspective, see Mitchell (2000c). Internationally women’s community radio stations are represented by the Women’s International Network of AMARC (AMARC-WIN), which is devoted to ensuring women’s right to communicate through and within the community radio movement. URL: http://www.amarc.org/amarc/ang/. 16. Women’s rights in the developed world also need promotion and protection, of course, and there are women’s organisations dedicated to using radio to that end. The Women’s Radio Group, a U.K.-based arts charity committed to providing training for women in all areas of radio production, has produced, in association with CETRA (Centre for European Training, Research and the Arts), a series of seven programmes about the institutions of the European Union and their relevance to women in Europe. The four to five minute long programmes are available on CD and are free for use by radio stations, educational institutions and women’s organisations. URL: http://www.twiza.demon.co.uk/ wrg/europeforwm.htm. 17. There had been other expressions of concern in advance of the Beijing conference. An important example is the only international women’s news/features syndicate, the Women’s Feature Service, which began in 1978 as a UNESCO-UNFPA initiative to create copy with a gendered perspective to be carried by mainstream media around the world. Based in New Delhi, the WFS has been independent since 1991. While its main focus is on printed media, it also produces radio programmes. Recent examples include broadcasts for All India Radio, including a twenty-sixweek series in 1997 entitled Your Rights, Your Responsibilities, on women’s legal rights, and a series of thirty-minute programmes over the last two years on reproductive and sexual health made for the Population Council – broadcasts touching on issues like menstruation, the menopause, sexuality, contraception, body image, and the stress of adolescence. Other important precursors were the ‘Permanent Forum on Gender Communications’ founded in Quito, Ecuador in 1994, and the Bangkok conference in February of that year when more than four hundred women from media organisations in more than eighty countries met to

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discuss the theme of Women Empowering Communication. URL: http://www.ecuanex.apc.org/ alai/bang-eng.html. 18. From the chapter on ‘Strategic objectives and actions’ of the Beijing Platform for Action (UN September 1995). URL: http:// www.ecuanex.apc.org/alai/beijing.txt. 19. One was the meeting of journalist and civil associations which met in Toronto under the auspices of UNESCO and developed a Platform for Action to promote women’s access to expression and decision-making in the media. 20. WomenWatch was founded by the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW). URL: http:// www.un.org/womenwatch/. 21. Alternative Assessment of Women and Media based on NGO Reviews of Section J, Beijing Platform for Action, by WomenAction 2000, coordinated by Isis International-Manila and compiled by Meena M. Shivdas. URL: http://www.womenaction.org/csw44/ altrepeng.htm. 22. Radio is the most accessible form of communication in South Asia, the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia. Findings from a 1998 research project show that radio reaches between 60 to 88 percent of the population. The low levels of literacy (except in the Philippines) account for radio’s popularity here. Women’s programmes can be found in these countries despite the little support they receive from governments or private sources. See ‘Alternative Assessment...’ above. URL: http://www.womenaction.org/csw44/ altrepeng.htm. 23. Internet research for this chapter was conducted in July 2001. 24. ‘Women’s community radio in Cameroon receives UNESCO grant.’ URL: http://www.ijnet.org/Archive/2000/3/31-6803.html. 25. The UNICEF report lists poverty as the main reason, since families cannot afford to care for their daughters. Sometimes this can be a cover for recruiting young girls into prostitution. Fear of sex or pregnancy before marriage is another reason. UNICEF regards early marriage as a violation of children’s rights (especially those of girls). URL: http://www.womenswire.org/. See also URL: www.unicef.org. 26. Women’s Radio Group (a training and networking charity for women interested in radio) and the Somali Women’s Radio Drama Group. URL: http://www.twiza.demon.co.uk/wrg/dramagroup.htm. 27. Radio for Development (RfD) is a media consultancy that has specialised in the design and implementation of media campaigns in the developing world since 1995. URL: http://www.rfd.org.uk. 28. The Community Radio Project was supported by the Open Society Foundation. URL: http://radio.womensnet.org.za/about.htm.

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29. See ‘Alternative Assessment . . .’ above. URL: http://www.womenaction.org/csw44/altrepeng.htm. 30. See: Isis Manila, Linking Women, Sharing Knowledge, Engendering Change: Radio Production Training for Asian Women Broadcasters, April 2000. URL: http://www.isiswomen.org/radio/ index.html. 31. ‘Building Radio Journalists’ Skills in Mali’, International Women’s Media Foundation, URL: http//:www.iwmf.org. See also Myers (2000). A site listing reports of training in gender broadcasting is at the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association: URL: http:// www.oneworld.org/cba/gender/training.htm. 32. Apart from the cost and complexity of the technology, one of the reasons television has barely developed the same tradition of alternative, community stations is that it never had the prehistory of amateur experimentalism that accompanied the development of radio, the press, film, the internet and other radical media. Although video technology did inspire alternative and underground productions, activists rarely broke through with audiovisual broadcasting.

References Alternative Assessment of Women and Media based on NGO Reviews of Section J, Beijing Platform for Action, by WomenAction 2000, coordinated by Isis International-Manila and compiled by Meena M. Shivdas. URL: http://www.womenaction.org/csw44/ altrepeng.htm. Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butsch, R. (1998) ‘Crystal sets and scarf-pin radios: gender, technology and the construction of American radio listening in the 1920s’, Media, Culture and Society, 20. Ceesay, C. (2000) ‘Radio in Niger: central control versus local cultures’ in Fardon, R. and Furniss, G. (eds) African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition, Oxford: James Currey. Cliche, D., Mitchell, R. and Wiesand, A. (1998) ‘Women and cultural policies’, European Research Institute for Comparative Cultural Policy and the Arts, Preparatory Paper IX for the Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development. URL: http://www.unesco-sweden.org/Conference/. Cramer, J. (1989) ‘Radio: a woman’s place is on the air’ in Creedon, P. (ed.) Women in Mass Communication: Challenging Gender Values, London: Sage. Fardon, R. and Furniss, G. (eds) (2000) African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition, Oxford: James Currey.

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Feldman, S. (2000) ‘Twin peaks: the staying power of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour’ in Mitchell, C. (ed.) Women and Radio: Airing Differences, London: Routledge. Frith, S. (1988) ‘The pleasures of the hearth: the making of BBC light entertainment’ in Music for Pleasure, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hilmes, M. (1997) Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Honig, B. (1992) ‘Toward an agonistic feminism: Hannah Arendt and the politics of identity’ in Butler, J. and Scott, J.W. (eds) Feminists Theorise the Political, London: Routledge. Hunter, F. (2000) ‘Hilda Matheson and the BBC’ in Mitchell, C. (ed.) Women and Radio: Airing Differences, London: Routledge. Johnson, L. (1988) The Unseen Voice: A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio, London: Routledge. Jütte, R. (2000) Geschichte der Sinne: Von der Antike bis zum Cyberspace, München: C.H.Beck. Lacey, K. (1996) Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. —- (2000) ‘Towards a periodisation of listening: radio and modern life’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 3. Lawrence, A. (1991) Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Lewis, P. and Booth, J. (1989) The Invisible Medium: Public, Commercial and Community Radio, London: Macmillan. Makhijani, S. (1992) ‘Women’s radio show inspires music revolution, participation’ in The Digital Collegian, published by students at Penn State University. URL: http://www.collegian.psu.edu/. Mitchell, C. (ed.) (2000a) Women and Radio: Airing Differences, London: Routledge. Mitchell, C. (2000b) ‘On air/off air: defining women’s radio space in European women’s community radio’ in Mitchell, C. (ed.) Women and Radio: Airing Differences, London: Routledge. —- (2000c) ‘Sisters are doing it … from Fem FM to Viva! A history of contemporary women’s radio stations in the UK’ in Mitchell, C. (ed.) Women and Radio: Airing Differences, London: Routledge. Moores, S. (1988) ‘“The box on the dresser”: memories of early radio and everyday life’, Media, Culture and Society, 10. Murray, J. (1996) The Woman’s Hour, London: British Broadcasting Corporation. Myers, M. 2000. ‘Community radio and development: issues and examples from francophone West Africa’ in Fardon, R. and Furniss, G. (eds) African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition, Oxford: James Currey. Nye, S., Godwin, N. and Hollows, B. (2000) ‘Twisting the dials: lesbians on British radio’ in Mitchell C. (ed.) Women and Radio: Airing Differences, London: Routledge.

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Scott, J. (1986) ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91. Shapley, O. (1996) Broadcasting a Life, London: Scarlett Press. Spigel, L. (1992) Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Werden, F. (1996) ‘The founding of WINGS: a story of feminist radio survival’ in Allen, D., Rush, R. and Kaufman, S. (eds) Women Transforming Communications; Global Intersections, London: Sage.

PART III

GENRES


CHAPTER 10 

‘REALITY RADIO’: THE DOCUMENTARY David Hendy

‘[Documentary] is one of those terms which refer not to an entity which may be definitively described but to an ideal … If documentary were capable of definition, it would not be what it is.’ (Vaughan 1976: 1–2)

Preamble The documentary – whether on television, in photography, in magazines, or on the radio – is a fascinating paradox. It is sometimes made by journalists, who regard it as a form of extended current-affairs reportage. Yet it is also practised by producers who have more aesthetic concerns, who might stress the creative dimensions of the form, who will look for reality in less informational ways and through the expressive or dramatic dimensions of a programme. It claims a special relationship with reality, observing and collating the ‘raw’ sounds, images and objects of the world. Yet it also insists on generating wider meanings from such observations, by attempting a creative interpretation of this raw material – sometimes to establish general truths about social and political policy, at other times to explore less tangible aspects of human existence, such as love, hate, fear, loss or loneliness. It offers authenticity, but it also denotes artifice.

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Perhaps the biggest contradiction of all is that the form survives in the multi-media age. Sober, expensive to make, and with what all too easily appears to be a hopelessly idealistic claim to be part of a progressive social project, it exists, against the odds, in a media ecology characterised by intense competition for audiences and resources, by an apparent popular taste for exhibitionism and thrills, and by widespread public scepticism over journalistic ethics and the ‘hidden agendas’ of the media. In the particular medium of radio, the documentary’s survival is surely an even greater surprise, for it demands attentive listening at a point in history when radio is heard distractedly. The documentary is the ‘built’ programme par excellence, while contemporary radio as a whole is so often made up of a continuous, segmented stream of amiable but undemanding chat and music. That we can still hear documentaries – at least on major public-service networks like BBC Radio 4 – poses the question of how the form has managed to survive against the odds. There is a process of ‘reinvention’ to be discussed here. But there is another question to be posed too: in what ways precisely might radio documentaries produced in the television age still represent something of the spirit of the pioneers like John Grierson, Lance Sieveking, Olive Shapley, D.G. Bridson, and others – documentarists who enjoyed the expectation of an audience’s largely undivided attention? In trying to explore these questions, I start from the premise that the central feature of documentary – the ‘essence’ – is in some way related to its claim to represent ‘truth’ and to be based in some way on ‘reality’. In discussing radio documentary the task, then, becomes one of examining the strategies producers employ in order to display a programme’s status as ‘true’, despite the interpretative effort which has evidently gone into making it available and comprehensible to its intended audience.

The institutional contexts of documentary production Let us begin, though, with a brief assessment of the institutional context in which the radio documentary finds itself. Kilborn (1996), Corner (1996), Winston (1995, 2000) and others have outlined the ‘new’ contexts for television documentary production in Britain. They alert us to competitive pressures to win ratings battles and to reduce costs, to the casualisation of

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production, the temptations to manipulate material in order to sensationalise, the gradual disappearance of more sober or more creative forms of documentary in order to make room for more popular forms – ‘docu-soaps’, ‘reality’ dramas, and so on. Is the radio environment any more conducive? In many respects its experiences are strikingly similar. First, while radio documentaries cost much less to produce than television documentaries, they are more expensive than almost any other form of radio except original drama: £14,000 per hour is not untypical, against an average across all BBC network radio of about £5,200 (BBC 2001). In a competitive climate, any drive to reduce costs will inevitably expose the documentary. This is partly because while the genre is expensive the audience is small, even by radio’s own standards. Most documentaries on Radio 4 are scheduled in either the mid-morning or midevening ‘dips’, when perhaps fewer than 250,000 are listening at any given time: most of us are either working or, by the evening, watching television. Radio documentaries are, in this sense, a minority taste: ‘I don’t get any letters saying, “Bring on more documentaries”. I get loads of programme-makers saying, “let’s have more documentaries”. That’s slightly different’ (Radio 4 Controller, Helen Boaden, quoted in Knudsen 2001: 30). The documentary is revered by its producers. But it has to ‘make do’ at the margins of the schedule. It can be seen as a ‘quality duty-genre’ (Winston 2000: 41), its presence on the schedule a deliberate and well-advertised marker of public service commitment – a commitment which allows the rest of a broadcaster’s efforts to be devoted to winning the ratings battle with more popular and lower-cost fare in peak times. Even so, this ‘branding’ function can end up making documentaries indispensable: ‘they are one of the things that defines Radio 4 – if you took the documentaries and features out, the richness that is Radio 4 would be taken away’ (Andrew Caspari, quoted in Knudsen 2001: 28). More significantly, radio knows it has already lost the ratings battle with television for the evening audience. Those who are still listening to Radio 4 by 8 p.m. will have deliberately ‘opted in’ to even more demanding listening. In the BBC’s own words, they will be people who ‘regard the evening as a time when they can concentrate on specialist or intricate programmes’ (BBC 1998). And serving what is effectively a minority audience rather than a mass audience can allow programme-makers and schedulers greater freedom. Even so, listeners come to expect a certain consistency

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from their favoured station. As one of Radio 4’s commissioning editors puts it: ‘Simply saying to the audience “switch on to Radio 4, you’ll be sure of a big surprise” doesn’t work. They need some kind of sign as to what there will be’ (Caspari, quoted in Knudsen 2001: 40). So there are firm limits to this freedom. Programmes now get made in order to fit into a particular slot in the schedule, with each slot designed with the dispositions of the target listeners in mind. Anyone planning to make a documentary for broadcasting on Radio 4 at 8 o’clock on a Monday evening is told that ‘there will probably be some element of presentation (montage is notoriously difficult for listeners to follow), but it will tend towards personal storytelling rather than analytical argument’; aspirants are reminded of ‘the strength of a simple idea’; ‘there is a danger of too many downbeat programmes’ (BBC 2001: 87). Such taste-preferences go in cycles, but it is clear that producers selling their ideas will always have to engage in a large degree of second-guessing. Pitching to editors in this climate has been described by one contemporary producer, Matt Thompson, in characteristically mischievous terms: This is just like in Hollywood where we have only about 1 minute to get the gist of the idea across. If they don’t get it after 1 minute no amount of talk will save it. We smile a lot. (Thompson 2001)

What would commissioners ‘get’ after just one minute? With several hundred documentaries being broadcast on Radio 4 each year it would be unfair to generalise, but the novelist Sebastian Faulk’s recent description of the network embodying ‘a kind of humane, upper-middlebrow seriousness’ certainly hints at the general tone (BBC Radio 4 Online 2001). Its predecessor, the Home Service, had always been the ‘middlebrow’ network of the BBC family, and while the end of the Third Programme saw more highbrow speech shifting to Radio 4, the network’s feel has never been particularly experimental. Indeed, McKibbin’s description of English ‘middlebrow’ literature in the 1950s is wonderfully evocative: It treated the avant-garde as unsound and its practitioners as poseurs … In its matter-of-factness, its eschewing of the unreal or exotic, it represented the matter-of-factness of the contemporary English middle-classes. (McKibbin 1998: 492)

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There is a striking parallel here, I think, with the finding that Radio 4’s present-day listeners are apparently happy with the network being ‘intelligent’ but worry about it occasionally being ‘over-intellectual’ (BBC 2001: 26). And echoes, too, with D.G. Bridson’s strategy for his 1962 programme The Bomb: ‘as the programme was designed for popular listening on the Home Service, I was determined that it should be crisply stated, fast-moving and easy to follow’ (1971: 292). The ‘mood music’ of documentary production on Radio 4 is, then, broadly ‘realist’ in tone. And it is a tone reinforced over a long period of time by two related trends. First, the steady development over several decades of ever smaller and more portable recording equipment, which eased the ‘capture’ of real-life actuality on location and encouraged the steady abandonment of more ‘constructed’ techniques, such as studio-based actors reciting scripts based on real people’s stories, or elaborate orchestrations of recitals and music. As with television – only more so – portability and miniaturisation has encouraged ‘a new drive towards directorial minimalism and against self-conscious elaboration’ (Corner 1996: 15–16). Second, and in parallel, much documentary has been gradually reconstituted within radio as an extension of journalism. News output has increased, producers with a journalistic background and training have come to dominate, and there is a widespread concern for impartiality, ‘balance’, and ‘neutrality’ across the whole of factual output.

The aesthetic debate Such, then, are the broad outlines of the institutional contexts of production for the radio documentary today. They touch on all sorts of debates over funding and resources and creative freedom. But I wish here to pick up on a more fundamental aesthetic debate which they raise, namely the inherent tension within the whole documentary movement between actuality and the producer’s treatment of that actuality – a tension which can also be expressed in terms of other ‘couplets’ – such as art/reportage and truth/viewpoint (Corner 1996: 9–10). Corner helps us here by distinguishing between the ‘primary’ aspects of a documentary – the recordings of a particular sound – and the ‘secondary’ aspects – the construction of the ‘whole’ out of these primary elements. He then suggests that if the secondary aspect is seen to be distorting the primary, the

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documentary’s referential status is vulnerable: ‘should the employment of the primary level be regarded as too heavily a function of secondary level discursive requirements, then there are problems of credibility even though the primary veracity of the material remains undisputed’ (1996: 18). The realisation that an uncomfortable gap may exist between the raw actualities of the world – ‘reality’, if you like – and the narration or sequencing that gives a more digestible shape and meaning to these sounds – the search for a general ‘truth’, we could say crudely – is one of the driving forces behind experimentation with the documentary form across all media: This mix of the objective and the subjective is a constant presence and, for many of us, a constant challenge – what blend of the two is proper, and at what point shall we begin to cry ‘foul’? … We go through cycles and eras, times when documentary writers or photographers are inclined (and expected) to be relatively aloof from their chosen ‘field of study’, their ‘subjects’ … or times when the hope is for a virtual entanglement of those under scrutiny and those giving them the once-over. (Coles 1997: 8)

The intensely ‘forensic’ style of narration of much currentaffairs output, which evokes the discourse of the scientific or legal worlds is clearly one response. It encourages us to trust the narrator, because the narrator is hearably trustworthy. He or she is measured and careful not to claim more than is hearably claimable from the ‘evidence’ presented. The narrator talks in degrees of probability rather than categorical assertions of truth or falsity, uses ‘modal’ verbs such as ‘may’ or ‘might’, temporal adverbs such as ‘sometimes’ and ‘often’, and quantifiers such as ‘most’ and ‘some’ (Fairclough 1995: 131). With such evident ‘care’ in the use of language, we – as listeners – are comfortable about accepting the validity of any general truths being claimed. The presenter has helped us to bridge the gap between the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ aspects of the programme. Another response to this ‘discursive’ gap is the recurring use of typicality. When, for example, we hear a person describing circumstances of personal distress in the opening sequence of a programme, the obvious question is this: how typical is this person’s story? If the person’s story were to be entirely typical, it would be so mundane as to barely merit attention. If, on the

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other hand, it is entirely untypical, the story might remain interesting but it would be merely parochial or sensationally freakish. It would not offer the possibility of documentary treatment, which would aim to establish some form of secondarylevel discourse built upon it, some social significance to the story. Establishing the typicality of a particular incident or story therefore becomes a central concern of many documentaries. Indeed, it is precisely the presence of ‘the typical’ that gives documentaries their political charge, which underpins their claim to have a role within the public sphere of debate. It makes the personal into the political. It becomes ‘significant’. Of course, achieving this significance while retaining the trust of the listener through a careful, step-by-step move through corroborating evidence can make for a rather dull – even if informationally rich – programme. Dispensing with narration altogether, and using montage is the obvious alternative. It is often presented as an example of verité radio, where the actuality ‘speaks for itself’. But producers and listeners are now all too aware that actuality is never raw, it has always been selected and shaped, if only to make it digestible. It is therefore just another version of reality. A more robust explanation for the appeal of montage is its power for creating metonymy. Higson writes of the ‘poetic’ ambiguities of documentary films being ‘contained by the imposition of a voiceover, which … institutes a particular reading of the images’ (1986: 79). Montage juxtapositions, though, create ‘metaphorical and associational possibilities’ (1986: 79). Individual and seemingly insignificant stories and incidents can, through association with other seemingly insignificant stories and incidents, become rich in meanings – meanings that viewers can ‘pick up’ and make their own. Radio, with its lack of visual ‘clues’, tends sometimes to ‘overcompensate’ by spelling out all too clearly the connections between its different elements – ‘signposting’ everything, reducing the chance of misunderstanding the ‘message’. Conversely, where this urge to overcompensate is resisted, the ambiguity of the various sounds and stories contained in a programme becomes more intense – a problem for current-affairs programmes that strive for forensic clarity, but an advantage to those striving for the poetic possibilities of metaphor for the listener. As Crisell puts it, ‘in radio … we are free – forced – to imagine everything’ (1994: 153–4). The associational possibilities of montage hint, too, at a story’s wider significance without recourse to narration:

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At an intellectual level, the function of montage construction for the documentary movement is the ability to hold in play several different scenes of action (and indeed different times) at the same moment: in other words to construct a much broader, more extended diegetic world. (Higson 1986: 78)

Without addressing the ‘typicality’ of a story head-on, and through the power of association, the personal has again become, if not the political, then certainly the social. A programme, for example, featuring various collectors – whether of records, beer mats or insects – becomes a programme about passion, or obsession, or loneliness, or sociability, or indeed all of these and more. The programme, like its more linear current-affairs counterpart, has attained significance.

Documentable experience It is impossible to categorise most radio documentaries in clear-cut ways. We cannot say that this programme is ‘aesthetic’ while that one is ‘social’, or that this programme is ‘purely observational’, while that one is ‘heavily authored’. What we can say is that the tensions in the relationship between the primary material of raw actuality and the discursive practices – narration, montage editing – that go into creating a secondary ‘creative interpretation’ of that material in order to generate wider meanings, generally remain unresolved – most certainly because they are irreconcilable. The tensions are inherent to the form. In the remainder of this essay, I would like, therefore, to move on from the debate over authorship and actuality. Instead, I will look at how these tensions manifest themselves through two rather different dimensions of the radio documentary. First, by exploring the central importance of ‘experience’. And secondly, by discussing what makes up documentary’s ‘discovery procedure’, a term which touches upon notions of journeying, of learning, and the passage of time – notions that are arguably as important to the documentary ideal as actuality and authorship. First, then, let us explore the notion of ‘experience’. The question arises for any documentarist of not just where reality is to be found (whether in the raw material, or in the arrangement of that material), but which realities are on offer – and, perhaps more pertinently, whose realities. BBC commissioners often say to producers that at the heart of factual programmes

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are ‘ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances’. That people’s ‘experience’ has to be to some degree ‘extraordinary’ is understandable: as Thompson reminds us, to earn their place on radio, ‘people have to have a strong story. Which on the whole means something has happened to them. On Radio 4 this is normally something horrid … Radio 4 always requires the psychological element’ (Thompson 2001). What about the phrase ‘ordinary people’? Why have people at all when mere objects appear to be capable of conveying meaning? James Agee, for instance, was always uncomfortable about providing a written commentary for the photographs of depression-era America, and offered as forceful a paean to the metonymic power of raw material as we could hope to find: If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. (James Agee, quoted in Coles, 1997: 3)

The fragments contained in a ‘still life’, Agee suggests, can tell a larger story. Perhaps, then, the verbal recital of ‘facts’ could be regarded as the radio documentarist’s equivalent of ‘photographing’ the world – capturing what Agee called ‘the cruel radiance of what is’? Maybe. The problem, though, is that the effect has been found to be curiously inert. Ewan MacColl described the technique, as D.G. Bridson used it, on programmes such as his documentary on the building of the Mersey Tunnel. MacColl describes the ‘stupefying dullness’ of what he calls ‘catalogue theory’, which held that a list of objects – any kind of objects – could produce an emotional response in those who heard it: For the best part of an hour, four beautiful voices competed with each other in reading lists of statistics about the number of inches dug in number of man hours, days, weeks, months; the type of rock to be cut through; the number of drills used … the amount of steel, iron, copper, zinc, lead, brass, aluminium; the various types of cement … the number of nails, screws, tacks, bolts; the total and individual weights of all these things … and their single and combined lengths, widths and thicknesses … In this mountain of facts, this vast ocean of measurements, this veritable universe of grades, standards, degrees, norms and criteria … the tunnellers had been forgotten. (MacColl 1990: 232–3)

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A documentary, MacColl suggests, needs to be peopled in some way. Yet these people cannot be anyone. Since, as Thompson observes, ‘you can’t make a bore interesting’ (2001), documentarists clearly need ‘good’ talkers. But articulacy is not a simple matter. It can come across as either ‘authentic’ or as in some way ‘manufactured’ and insincere. So the question becomes: where do we find authentic articulacy? One clue lies in another comment from MacColl, when he was listening-back – along with his collaborators Peggy Seeger and Charles Parker – to the actuality recorded in Song of a Road (1959), their programme about the building of Britain’s first motorway, the M1: We had observed that there were basic differences in the way in which words were used by the manual workers on the one hand and by the planners and white-collar staff on the other. The latter, though educated and ‘articulate’, were tedious to listen to … To our ‘uneducated’ speakers, however, we could listen for long periods without any decline in concentration … We made a rough analysis of the speech in a number of tapes chosen at random and came up with some interesting facts. The managerial contributors tended to use an extremely small area of the vocal-effort spectrum … Irrespective of the subject under discussion, they scarcely ever varied the tempo of delivery. Almost all of them made constant use of the impersonal pronoun... similes and metaphors were almost totally eschewed. They spoke ‘at’ you rather than ‘with’ you. The total result was a reasoned, impassive, uninvolved stream of sound. And it was dull. The labourers, on the other hand, used similes and metaphors with obvious enjoyment. They changed tense frequently … when they wanted to emphasise a point or to sharpen an argument. They made use of extended analogies and emphasised verbs in such a way as to give every sentence an effort peak. Almost all of them used the first-person singular and the present-historical with equal effect. Their spectrum of vocal efforts was, on the whole, much larger than that of the managerial group … The workers were speaking for dramatic effect and watching the result, not just giving information. (MacColl 1990: 317)

These ‘uneducated’ people, we can infer, are better speakers because they speak from experience. Their voices convey ‘the excitement of an experience relived’ (p. 313). There is some special pleading going on here, of course. MacColl, Parker and Seeger all tended, famously, to mythologise the working classes. But the fundamental idea that lived experience speaks

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more eloquently than second-hand experience is undoubtedly a recurring influence in documentary well beyond the confines of the Radio Ballads. The trouble is, a quick ‘good quote’ is not that hard to come by these days. Fairclough has described the way in which those professionals – doctors, lawyers, academics, politicians, and so on – who once constituted broadcasting’s limited repertoire of ‘accredited’ voices (and who, in MacColl’s era, were evidently inclined to talk rather stiffly) have now responded to the media’s need for ‘naturalism’: such experts are ‘induced to regard talking in an ordinary conversational way in public contexts … as part of their repertoire’ (1995: 139). They have, in other words, been ‘media trained’. Documentarists working to a tight deadline might be tempted to succumb to such offthe-shelf naturalism, but they are also aware that they are not necessarily buying the ‘lived experience’ they really crave. What is more, the price they might pay for taking the shortcut is not just a ‘dull’ interview: it is also that they could enter unwittingly into the theatre of political broadcasting, with its attendant concern for balance and neutrality. To Norman Swallow, who produced television documentaries for the BBC in the 1950s, this would represent a strategy inimical to the documentary form itself: We wanted to be very non-political. We wanted to break loose from the convention that the truth is somewhere between the Right and the Left, and will in some way mysteriously emerge out of an expression of two utterly contradictory points of view. I believe that truth exists despite politicians. Moreover, the routine BBC theory that sitting on the fence is in some way a profitable position has never appealed to me. I don’t mean that I advocate the embracing of one political party or the other; I mean that the truth can be sought without recourse to political help, and that if it is the truth then (a) it is more inspiring than political debate, and (b) because it is the truth, it is unassailable; by definition it cannot be biased one way or the other. (Quoted in Bell 1986: 73)

So: it is not just that lived experience is more eloquent, but that much of what used to constitute ‘authorised’ speech in radio and television – the voices of politicians or pundits – is intrinsically outside the concern of the documentarist because it is mere opinion. To include such opinion as a basic buildingblock of a documentary would be to confuse Corner’s ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ aspects of production, where ‘primary’

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elements have little discursive function in themselves and the construction of wider meaning is achieved through secondary aspects, such as narration or the particular juxtaposition of primary sources (1996: 18). Rigidly adhering to such a definition would, of course, exclude from the genre many programmes we now happily call documentaries, and we might not be comfortable with this. But the point may usefully remind us that when the ‘current affairs’ documentary remains largely studio-bound and dominated by the opinions of politicians and experts rather than representing the firsthand experience of ‘real’ people, it may be better thought of as a development of the old BBC ‘Talk’ genre than as documentary in the original sense. Lived experience, then, remains the goal of the documentarist. Two recent documentaries on Radio 4 give some idea of how it can be represented. The first, Runaway Brides, was broadcast in July 2001, as part of the It’s My Story series. The series title itself is telling, and Radio 4’s own commissioning document is clear about the series format: ‘the focus is on the human experience or quest told from the perspective of the leading character’ (BBC 2001: 87). In this particular instance we hear about the work of a community group that helps British Asian women who are being forced into marriages in Bangladesh. The programme’s first five minutes or so is taken up by the testimony of one British–Bengali woman’s own traumatic experience. The programme moves on to relate her experiences to that of several other women, as well as community workers and a lawyer. We can, as listeners, judge the first account to be ‘typical’ of a problem that is largely forgotten or underestimated. Although there are political implications, in terms of the lessons for diplomatic and administrative protocol, these are not explicit, and no politician is interviewed. This is, then, a documentary built almost entirely of lived experience. This experience does not, however – and despite the series’ title – speak for itself. There is a narrator, a journalist, who introduces each clip and provides a considerable amount of background information and scene-setting. There is a form of emotional ‘pull’ on the audience – music is played under the opening and closing testimonies of the women affected – but the dominant tone overall is of a detached, ‘forensic’ exposition. The second example, Spar Boys, broadcast later in the same month, is somewhat different. Its focus is the gangs of youths loitering in the streets and outside the corner-shops of Brad-

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ford. It is topical, broadcast in the same month that youths in the city had been involved in large-scale rioting. Yet, again, no politicians or local councillors or academic experts are interviewed, and the riots themselves are only referred to obliquely. The focus, instead, is on examining the fine line ‘on the ground’ between harmless loitering and intimidatory violence. We hear interviews on location with present-day gangmembers and interviews with those who were gang-members in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The programme consists almost entirely of working-class people speaking about their own experiences, in their own environments. The most interesting feature of Spar Boys, though, is that it is presented by a local policeman. The programme is not just a collection of primary-evidence experiences, but is narrated by someone with experience of his own – doubly so, since he is not just a local policeman dealing with today’s gangs, but was once a ‘Spar Boy’ himself. Being truly experienced, the policeman cannot be as ‘detached’ as the narrator in Runaway Brides: apart from two or three studio-recorded links, he is always heard in the thick of the action himself, conducting the interviews as informal encounters in which he frequently interjects (‘thank God for that!’, ‘any excuse!’), and with some of his ‘links’ being unscripted reflections recorded while in the car travelling from one encounter to the next. This personal ‘journey’ is striking in the degree to which the presenter can be heard shaping an unfolding thesis, namely that the violence is in large part about perception. Take, for example, the following exchange, with the presenter identified as P and the interviewee as I: P: When you saw them, were you intimidated by them, or were you just curious? I: I didn’t find it aggressive. At all. They were just meeting. They were having a … having a chat. They talked to each other. And then, you know, they came and went. You know. There might’ve been a little core … sort of a dozen, and four or five came and four or five went. And it sort of went on like that for a while. P: If you were to see the same group of … of young ones outside of the shop today … You’d feel intimidated … I: I think that would be a likelihood, yeah. P: … Even though it could be misconceived. It’s still that its there … I: Yeah. P: … That people see a bunch of lads, and they think they’re up to no good. When in fact, if they were to cast their mind

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back to their own youth, the lads are basically doing what we’ve always done. I: Yeah, hanging around and er … P: Watching the lasses. I: Yeah.

Note that the presenter’s inflexions are not always questioning – they are more like statements to which the interviewee is invited to respond. Here is the apotheosis of the idea that lived experience possesses untouchable veracity. The presenter can be opinionated because he has experience, and this experience, being ‘authentic’, is beyond argument or politics. The programme has been nothing but first-hand experience, and yet it has also developed a thesis – it has constructed a ‘secondary’ level discourse. All this is a logical development of the long-term trend, identified by Fairclough (1995), in which information is increasingly given in an experiential way rather than through abstract theoretical discourse. However, it goes further than the examples discussed by Fairclough and drawn from Radio 4 in the early 1990s. Whereas Fairclough saw presenters being positioned as ‘ordinary’ co-members of the listeners’ lifeworld, Spar Boys’ presenter is as much a comember of the subjects’ lifeworld as of the listeners’ – ‘we’ are connected seamlessly to ‘them’. Of course, as Fairclough points out, this is not entirely unproblematic. The impression of a ‘common sense’ that emerges through shared membership of a lifeworld can, he suggests, implicitly legitimise certain social relations and assumptions and implicitly negate differences of opinion (1995: 148). The conclusion, though, is clear enough: documentaries are still about expertise and depth of understanding, rather than the superficial understandings of daily journalism, but expertise resides most comfortably with the real-life experiences of ‘ordinary’ people.

Documentary and the process of discovery Let us turn, finally, to what I have referred to as radio documentary’s ‘discovery procedure’. It is an ugly phrase, but one that alludes usefully to the way in which both producers and listeners are, in several different ways, engaged in a journey of discovery. Take, to start with, the producers themselves. Olive Shapley spoke about her discomfort in meeting people who lived a life unlike her own:

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… although it was good to meet people and fascinating to have such close glimpses of their lives and work, I think I was sickened by it at times … There was nothing very honest, it seemed to me, in walking into a hospital, say, picking the brains of a man who had been working on a piece of research for years, tidying up what he had to say, recording the surface of it, getting into my car and driving off, then going to a remand home or a mental hospital and doing the same thing. My subjects were always left behind doing the work. A BBC colleague used to call it ‘dabbling in other people’s realities’. (Shapley 1996: 62–3)

Nowadays, we would talk of being ‘a tourist’ in other people’s lives and spaces. But the idea is much the same, namely that a hasty visit is never the same as real engagement, that the ‘experience’ of the interviewee is somehow appropriated all too hastily, much like a holiday souvenir, for the journalist’s own purposes, rather than for the interviewee’s. Coles suggests that documentarists are invariably at pains to distinguish their behaviour here from the curt exigencies of daily journalism: [They] worry that … they are guilty of being fly-by-night observers, given to turning a quick, personal, occupational profit out of a spell ‘across town’ as it were … One can get some ‘news’, make some ‘observations’, obtain some ‘data’, ‘conduct’ some interviews, take some pictures, film a scene, wrap up one’s project, and leave forthwith; or one can linger and try to learn something other than the ‘answer’ to one’s original inquiry. (Coles 1997: 85,75)

The implication here is that the quick fixes of journalism may not allow enough time to reach a full understanding of the ‘reality’ of a given situation, let alone allow for a sense of responsibility towards those who have been observed. Documentarists, we might infer, are different. They do – or at least should – ‘linger and try to learn something’. The idea of a sustained engagement with the lifeworld of the documentary’s subjects is not just a matter of political conviction or of overcoming preconceptions, though. It is also that a more hearable authenticity can emerge through a more extended approach to the task in hand. MacColl, for instance, describes how, in 1960, he, Seeger and Parker, had to spend some two-and-a-half weeks working with just one interviewee in Singing the Fishing:

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until his emotion-memory was in full flight and he began to relive and refeel the experiences and emotions of three-quarters of a century earlier … as time wore on, he ceased to censor his memories … Singing the Fishing had taught us the value of depth-recording, had taught us to recognise the moments when a person would use the kind of language which could transform an individual response into a universal one. It had taught us to recognise the necessity of lying in wait for the moment when the individual ceases to be the one who is being interviewed and becomes, instead, one compelled by some inner need to give creative expression to all the things he or she has experienced. (MacColl 1990: 319, 328)

This provides a specific and practical example of a more general invocation made earlier by Grierson, that documentary ‘requires not only taste, but also inspiration, which is to say a very laborious, deep-seeing, deep-sympathising creative effort indeed’ (in Grierson 1946: 84; my italics). The danger, of course, is that in all the cogitating and all the editing, in trying to sketch-out the underlying truths and then condense them through telescoping, and segueing and splicing and mixing, and so on, the authentic rawness of what the producer began with can be lost – obscured by too much artistic intervention. Grierson may have defined the documentary mission as the ‘creative interpretation of actuality’ but, as Winston suggests, the issue with documentaries is sometimes just how much ‘creative interpretation’ this actuality can withstand before the genre’s claim to have a special relationship with reality has to be relinquished (Winston 1995). In this respect, the historical arc of the radio documentary is clear: from early public apathy towards Lance Sieveking’s baroque multi-studio features of the late 1920s onwards (Scannell 1986), the trend has been generally, and with notable exceptions, towards a sense that less is usually more. One of the key moments in this learning curve came in the early 1970s, when Radio 4 broadcast a high-profile series of documentaries tracing the everyday experience of ordinary people through history: The Long March of Everyman. Its producer outlined a democratic hope, that it would ‘recapture’ history from the elitists and place the voice of ‘Everyman’ centre-stage, to confront the recurring tensions between ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. At the same time, he wrote about the programmes showcasing ‘the great music of audio, in which the voices are the string section of the orchestra’, and about them being ‘an adventure in the use of sound’ that could revive the tradition

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of making ‘ambitious’ features in BBC radio, and claw back some of the limelight enjoyed by television (BBC WAC R34/1489/1). Across twenty-six 45-minute programmes, field recordings from across the country were interspersed with clips from historians, and set against a flow of music and effects produced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The finished programmes were certainly technically ambitious, and were given more advanced publicity by the BBC than had been accorded to any other radio programme in its history. Popular reaction, however, was mute – a mere handful of telephone calls and letters to Broadcasting House (BBC WAC R41/266/7). Press critics also sensed that here was a good idea smothered by grandiosity. Writing in The Listener, John Carey remarked that it spoke little to the underdogs of history with whom it claimed an affinity, and his reasoning is worth quoting here at some length: Underdogs who switched on at one of March’s more radiophonic moments may well have suspected some fault in their sets. Others perhaps concluded they were tuned in to a private carouse in the sound-effects department. Snatches of folk-song, seagulls, horses’ hooves could be heard, punctuated by strange observations enunciated with a care which implied that they contained some occult significance... Scraps of plays, letters, diaries, poems, swept by in the radiophonic effluent. But who wrote what, why, where – even whether he intended fact or fiction – were details repeatedly obliterated … It’s evident that the one noise more universally familiar to our ancestors than to us was silence. In this respect a power cut provides better historical commentary than any number of radio hours. By the same token, the less electronic gadgets obtrude themselves, the more chance history programmes have of evoking the past … The scholars were diligently prevented from putting across a cogent exposition of their subject, and what they did manage to say was so hacked about as to impair its meaning … That the programmes intended thought-provoking ‘collage’ plainly can’t be urged. To the majority of listeners, the chopped documents they contained would be quite mysterious, so no accurate thought could arise from their conjunction. Rather, the Long March … should be seen as a contribution to the determined modern effort to discredit knowledge and replace it by pure sensation. (Carey 1972)

There is clearly some fogey-ishness at work here. Carey’s fusillade was an attack on early seventies drug-culture and antiauthoritarianism as much as on anything to do with radio.

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But Mollie Lee, another critic writing in The Listener, draws out the essence of Carey’s attack for our purposes here: ‘The programmes have evidently been compiled with great enjoyment. Are Them enjoying it as much as Uz? There are, as we know, producers’ productions and listeners’ productions, and occasionally they don’t coincide’ (Lee 1971). 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. It had echoes, too, of Scannell’s verdict on Sieveking’s ‘allegorical whimsies’ of the late 1920s: ‘The problem they posed was their suitability in a medium that addressed itself not to the avant-garde public but a much wider audience with simpler tastes’ (1986: 4). So: there is a tension between the invocation to producers to let the raw material gestate in their mind, and the danger of being too clever – too obviously authorial – in handling it. And the contemporary mood, one senses, is to see the potential of simplicity. Take Thompson’s handling of the speech material in one of his recent programmes, High Contrast, which interweaves the two stories of an amnesiac artist and a successful opera-singer who lost her voice: I always use the first take. If you get the interviewee to repeat themselves, the second time is always dead, maybe because their subconscious knows you already know what they’re about to say. Deep within them they can’t be bothered telling you again. A lot of TV is retakes, even documentaries, which gives it that dead, artificial quality. I always try to retain the original pattern of speech. Brutally cut down news interviews sound to me weirdly arrhythmic. (Thompson 2001)

Thompson returns us here to the importance of finding truths, not constructing them: production is a process of stripping away – not building up – the layers. And as such, echoes the description made of radio documentaries by Paul Ferris in The Observer in 1959, that ‘the technique, in fact, is simply that of spade and archaeologist – blade cuts through soil and brings up a load of material’ (quoted in Bridson 1971: 280–1). It is also about waiting for iconic moments to make themselves apparent. Such fragments, with their metonymic potential might, of course, need a helping hand in order to become fully hearable to a distracted listenership. In the case of High Con-

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trast, one deceptively simple sequence becomes crucial to Thompson in representing some of the emotional truth of the opera singer Judith’s predicament – and in relating this to the programme’s other interviewee, Ian the amnesiac artist: I have an archive tape of Judith singing before her accident. It’s very hissy, but removing the hiss oddly reduces the feeling of loss. The hiss reminds the listener that this cassette tape is of a past voice gone forever. Also, more fancifully, the hiss could stand for the noise of Ian’s lost memory. Instead I enhance the hiss and lengthen it. I debate with myself for a long time whether to go for a sudden cut out of this tape or slowly fade to silence. A brutal cut is surprising, almost like the ‘murdering’ of her voice. But Judith is at peace with her past, so somehow hearing the hiss slowly fade into the distance seems more ‘true’. Almost like her voice is an old friend who still exists but has walked away forever. I can’t listen to that old recording without tears coming to my eyes and I’ve heard it ten or twenty times. It becomes the centre of the programme. All these tiny decisions are what constitute my ‘style’ of production. (Thompson 2001)

Elsewhere, Thompson pastes in a few seconds of silence after some words to ‘point them up’, and when searching for the last words in a sequence – the ‘out’ – he prefers ambiguity to clarity: ‘An “out” is like an enormous bell that tolls over a city and you can hear the reverberation of it long after the words have died away’ (Thompson 2001). At one level this is all simple dramatic suspense, and Thompson does indeed refer to the programme’s ‘plot’. But the recurring motif in all this is nevertheless an interesting one. It is, I would argue, a playing with ‘time’ as much as with ‘sound’ – a sense in which the drama is one that unfolds slowly over time, and one which therefore demands of the listener some sense of patience too in order to complete this journey of discovery. Indeed, the documentarist actively constructs his or her programme so as to take the listener on a similar journey of discovery to the one he or she has already made. Thompson refers to the ‘ticking clock’ that is ‘like a time bomb’; the beginning of a programme should be about ‘first impressions’; it should ‘leave bits out’ and create some ‘tension’ and ‘uncertainty’ for the listener. ‘I like’, he says, ‘to use a lot of dread in my programmes’. It is his response to the commissioning editors’ belief that documentaries should ‘convey their messages subtly, by stealth’ (BBC 1998).

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‘Stealth’, of course, demands time. It is, I would suggest, as much of a reason for the radio documentary being a ‘longform’ programme as the journalistic need to convey a convincing amount of information. The impression that a producer has ‘discovered’ the truths within a programme – to have settled on the plot, so to speak – only after speaking to interviewees is significant here. It avoids what some programme-makers refer to as the ‘string of interviews’ format, in which a self-confirmatory circle is constructed where ‘interviewees are shown lending experiential support to an emerging, general version of the truth which they have been precisely chosen to underwrite’ (Corner 1996: 130). A documentary can avoid this charge, Corner suggests, precisely though offering enough ‘space’ – that is, airtime – for the subjects to be heard revealing themselves gradually: there is an integrity to their testimony because they have not been ‘hurried’ to the point at which they most obviously ‘contribute’ to thematic development (p. 130). Time, then, is the strongest tool in the documentary’s kitbag. Experimentation with the textures of sound is viewed warily by a network like Radio 4, firmly embedded as it is in a matter-of-fact realism. Time, on the other hand, allows character, and mood, and themes to emerge ‘by stealth’. With time on our sides, the journey we travel is as much emotional as informational. Just as Thompson edits by first instinct – ‘I go for the bits that move me’ – we, as listeners have the space to find an empathy with the subjects: we become involved because we feel that we get to know them. We could even conclude that the time accorded to a documentary is nowadays the chief guarantor of its truth claim. We know that ‘pure observation’ is a chimera and that narration can be overbearing. We are aware of the shortcuts and simplifications of daily news. But a programme that can be heard to be not rushing to judgement gives, in Corner’s well-chosen words, ‘an integrity to the testimony’: we are not just presented with real ‘lived experience’, but we can come to believe this experience to be real, and on that basis begin to believe that the programme as a whole has truth. There are, to be sure, many accommodations to the demands of contemporary broadcasting: the need to bend ideas towards ‘branded’ slots in a network’s schedule, the need to cut costs and reduce production time, and so on. Yet radio documentary can still score over its television counterpart. Its smaller-scale equipment and one-person production techniques are probably better than a camera-wielding

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crew at moving through locations quickly and achieving an unforced naturalism among its subjects; the medium’s lack of visual clues only serves to increase the radio documentary’s associational powers, rewarding the listener with a more involving – because more open – text; it does not have to compete for the same mass audiences as peak-time television, having instead a smaller but more committed audience who have opted quite deliberately for something relatively challenging. Perhaps then, we should worry most, not about the pressures to produce simpler and cheaper programmes, but about any threat to the time allowed on air for a documentary. The process of discovery, of revelation, of not rushing to judgment, of emotional involvement, lies at the heart of the documentary. And it depends on time. When that is squeezed by the radio networks, the documentary really will be in trouble.

References BBC WAC references are to files kept at the BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham: URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/thenandnow/ wac_home.shtml, reproduced here with their kind permission: BBC WAC R34/1489/1 (Policy) and BBC WAC R41 (Programme Correspondence Section).

Programmes referred to are Song of a Road, BBC Home Service, 5 November 1959. Singing the Fishing, BBC Home Service, 16 August 1960. High Contrast, BBC Radio 4, June 2001. Spar Boys, BBC Radio 4, 11 July 2001. It’s My Story: Runaway Brides, BBC Radio 4, July 2001.

Other references BBC (1998) BBC Radio 4 Commissioning Guidelines 1998/9, London: British Broadcasting Corporation, January, 2nd edn. BBC (2001) BBC Radio 4 Commissioning Guidelines Spring 2001, London: British Broadcasting Corporation. BBC Radio 4 Online (2001) URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ four_you/myradfour/ Bell, E. (1986) ‘The origins of British television documentary: the BBC, 1946–1955’ in Corner, J. (ed.) Documentary and the Mass Media, London: Edward Arnold. Bridson, D. G. (1971) Prospero and Ariel, London: Victor Gollancz. Carey, J. (1972) Review in The Listener, 4 May.

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Coles, R. (1997) Doing Documentary Work, New York: Oxford University Press. Corner, J. (1996) The Art of Record, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Crisell, A. (1994) Understanding Radio, London: Routledge, 2nd edn. Fairclough, N. (1995) Media Discourse, London: Edward Arnold. Grierson, J. (1946) ‘First principles of documentary’ in Hardy, F. (ed.) Grierson on Documentary, London: Collins. Higson, A. (1986) ‘“Britain’s Outstanding Contribution to the Film”: the documentary-realist tradition’ in Barr, C. (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London: British Film Institute. Kilborn, R. (1996) ‘New contexts for documentary production in Britain’, Media, Culture and Society, 18. Knudsen, H. (2001) The Radio Documentary on Radio 4, BA Media Studies dissertation, University Of Westminster. Lee, M. (1971) article in The Listener, 9 December. MacColl, E. (1990) Journeyman, London: Sidgwick and Jackson. McKibbin, R. (1998) Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scannell, P. (1986) ‘The stuff of radio: developments in radio features and documentaries before the war’ in Corner, J. (ed.) Documentary and the Mass Media, London: Edward Arnold. Shapley, O. (1996) Broadcasting a Life, London: Scarlet Press. Thompson, M. (2001) ‘Diary of a programme maker’, BBC R4 Online: All About 4 – Getting to Air, URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ radio4/allabout/gettoair/. Consulted 2001. Vaughan, D. (1976) Television Documentary Usage, BFI Television Monograph No. VI, London: British Film Institute. Winston, B. (1995) Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited, London: British Film Institute. —- (2000) Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, London: British Film Institute.


CHAPTER 11 

RADIO AND POPULAR CULTURE IN GERMANY: RADIO CULTURE BETWEEN COMEDY AND ‘EVENT-ISATION’ Andreas Hepp

Introduction Mentioning the concept of popular culture in the context of the media, one usually thinks of television, the popular press and Hollywood movies rather than of radio. One thinks of radio only after some reflection, and even then primarily as a medium of popular music. However, in Germany radio enjoys a widespread popularity, especially among youths and young adults: in respect of viewing/listening hours it remains competitive with television. Radio seems to occupy a significant position in German popular culture. This position – and this is the main argument of my article – results not only from the fact that popular music is aired on the radio but from two other trends. First, popular radio entertainment is being strengthened by the development of radio comedy. Second, there is a growth in the creation of what may be termed ‘popular radio events’. In this article, I want to consider these two trends, but it is first necessary to make some remarks about the general development of German radio culture. Its very specific character results from radio’s fragmentation into different regional stations, and this can only be understood historically. So begin-

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ning with some brief historical background, I will deal with radio comedy and the example of the so-called ‘radio-comics’ in the sense of acoustic equivalents of comic books or comic strips. I will then discuss the way in which radio broadcasts are transformed into ‘events’, a process which must be seen as part of a general tendency in media and popular culture and for which I coin the term ‘event-isation’. I regard these as phenomena which cannot be viewed in isolation from each other. Moreover, it is necessary to see them in the context of the general development of German popular culture. In the last part of my article, I want to look at this culture from a theoretical point of view.

Radio landscapes: German developments The present German radio landscape is highly fragmented. In order to understand why, one must go back to the end of the Second World War. Mindful of the political exploitation of radio during the Third Reich, the Allied forces intervened in the creation of the West German media system by imposing a regional structure and public ownership despite the opposition of postwar politicians (Löffelholz 1997: 136). From 1948, in that western part of Germany which later became the German Federal Republic (FRG), various public broadcasting corporations were founded: Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), Hessischer Rundfunk (HR), Radio Bremen (RB). And in some cases these corporations, such as Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) and Südwestfunk (SWF), were not identical with state borders. On the other hand, in the eastern part of Germany a Soviet-style, centralist broadcasting system was set up. Though the Western corporations formed the Arbeitsgemeinschaft öffentlich-rechtlicher Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ARD) [the institutionalised working pool of the broadcasting corporations of the Federal Republic of Germany], the foundation of individual broadcasting companies marked the development of a fragmented radio landscape with individual stations limited either to regions or federal states. From the start the system was a patchwork of different stations which in their respective areas broadcast a mixed programme network ‘for the entire family’ on the medium wave (Dussel 1999: 203). To this horizontal fragmentation was added a further, vertical fragmentation between the individual transmission areas

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when at the beginning of the 1950s the various radio institutions built up a second programme network. At first these also offered mixed programming, but in the 1960s they were increasingly developed as ‘educational networks’ with serious music (Dussel 1999: 210–11). This vertical fragmentation was taken further as the broadcasting corporations established third networks in the 1970s. The third network of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, BR3, was followed by HR3 (1971) of the Hessischer Rundfunk (1972) and by SWF3 of the Südwestrundfunk (1975), which in 1998 merged with the Süddeutscher Rundfunk to form the Südwest-German Rundfunk (SWR) (Brünjes and Wenger 1998: 15). This development was made possible by FM technology, but was strongly motivated by radio’s urgent need to distinguish itself from television. The broadcasting corporations decided to establish so-called ‘service frequencies’ as third networks in order to give radio the appeal it had enjoyed before television, and to react to its increasing use as a background medium which had resulted from the miniaturisation of receivers. These third networks were more than the mere service frequencies for drivers which had been originally intended: SWF3 developed a rich diet of rock and pop music and a wide range of short items on politics, economy, and culture – and the concept gained popularity with other German radio stations (Brünjes and Wenger 1998: 51). With this development, as Michael Buss emphasises, ‘a public service profile was developed which could draw on the youth culture of the 1960s and on the experience of broadcasting radio magazines’ (Buss 1998: 15). From a cultural studies point of view, the vertical fragmentation of the radio landscape can be interpreted as part of the whole process of individualization and fragmentation in German society (see, for instance, Beck 1983; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1994; Hitzler and Honer 1992; Lau 1988: on the media, see Hasebrink and Rössler 1999). The above mentioned youth culture was surely only the tip of a general development (Hoffmann et al. 1999). The introduction of the ‘dual system’ can be understood as a further, central and vertical phase of fragmentation. In the mid-1980s, the monopoly of the public radio stations was broken when private broadcasters were allowed on the air. This was a dual system because as well as the public broadcasters which must by law supply a basic programme service, there is now a second sector of private broadcasters which target specific audiences. The impulses behind this deregulation were economic and political and expressed themselves in strong

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criticisms of the public broadcasting corporations. The public institutions in the individual federal states reacted to the private broadcasters by showing a clear regional affinity and introducing stronger, locally focused fourth channels which did not address the federal state as a whole but only parts of it. The radio stations of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) became part of this dual system in 1990. Table 11.1 illustrates today’s fragmented radio landscape. This comprehensively fragmented radio landscape presently corresponds to a period of relatively high radio use (see table 11.2). Of course, the validity of these statistics is limited. They suggest that radio in Germany is still very popular, but we cannot use them to draw conclusions about radio’s contribution to popular culture. To do so would be to embrace a notion of popular culture which has been rightly criticised by John Storey as merely a ‘quantitative index’ – as nothing more than ‘culture that is widely favoured or well liked by many people’ (Storey 1997:7). The problem with such a quantitative notion of popular culture is that it includes more or less everything which is fairly widespread and fails to deal with the contradictions of popular culture which result from a strained relationship between commercialization and productive appropriation.

Popular pleasure: radio comedy How are we to understand popular culture if we are not to perceive it in purely quantitative terms? In late modern societies popular culture is a highly contradictory phenomenon. On the one hand, it is commercialised: it is pre-produced and distributed with economic aims. On the other hand, it is the culture of those people who use their own life experiences to attribute specific meanings and pleasures to manufactured goods. Like other cultural phenomena popular culture is constituted in an active process of generating and circulating meaning within a certain context which is in this case that of the consumers’ everyday life (Miller and McHoul 1998: 3). Accordingly, popular culture – however commercialised it may be – cannot simply be described in terms of the buying and selling of goods (Fiske 1989: 23). Against this background the concept of everyday life, as seen by Michel de Certeau, acquires a central importance.

– 1 3 – – 1 2 2 – 3 1 3 3 4 2 25

– 1 1 1 1 – – – – 8

statewide

– 1 – – 1 2

nationwide

– – – – – – – – – 14

3 – 6 1 4 –

regional

– – 46 1 – 9 – – – 125

15 52 2 – – –

local

Private channels

– – 1 – – 2 – – – 4

– 1 – – – –

Central/ common programme

1 12 – – 1 1 – 2 – 36

8 1 1 – 2 7

Privatenoncommercial

– – 1 – – – – – – 2

– – 1 – – –

nationwide

(5) (5) 6 (4) 4 5 (5) (5) (9) 56

4 5 8 4 5 8

ARD institutions (statewide)

Source: Böckelmann and Mahle (1999: 44)

Bracketed figures in the ARD column indicate services provided by broadcasters with head offices in another federal state.

Baden-Württemberg Bavaria Berlin/Brandenburg Bremen Hamburg Hesse MecklenburgWestern Pomerania Lower Saxony Nord-Rhine-Westphalia Rhineland-Palatinate Saarland Saxony Saxony-Anhalt Schleswig-Holstein Thuringia Total

Federal State

Table 11.1: Germany’s fragmented radio landscape (as at 1999)

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149 147 150 112 114 132 144 160 192 191

Television in total Men Women 14–19 yrs. 20–29 yrs. 30–39 yrs. 40–49 yrs. 50–59 yrs. 60–69 yrs. 70 yrs.+

170 169 171 131 136 150 166 181 215 216

162 149 173 116 162 182 178 169 163 134

1991

177 176 179 133 138 166 166 189 223 226

169 158 178 125 171 193 183 175 165 137

1992

177 176 179 133 138 166 166 189 223 226

169 158 178 125 177 181 183 176 168 140

1993

178 176 181 142 141 159 169 190 224 225

168 159 177 121 168 188 181 175 169 142

1994

178 173 181 143 139 161 167 184 223 230

167 160 173 117 161 192 180 177 169 135

1995

179 177 181 146 138 156 168 191 222 231

169 161 176 121 164 191 186 173 171 143

1996

168 161 173 125 131 151 157 175 206 219

177 169 184 126 168 193 182 183 187 158

1997

Source: Media Perspektiven: Basisdaten 2000:68; details in minutes per day, 5 a.m. to midnight.

156 143 168 118 166 174 170 162 157 121

Radio in total Men Women 14–19 yrs. 20–29 yrs. 30–39 yrs. 40–49 yrs. 50–59 yrs. 60–69 yrs. 70 yrs.+

1990

Table 11.2: Time budget for radio and television

173 170 177 136 133 151 162 183 215 227

172 163 181 128 166 188 186 181 178 150

1998

182 176 188 142 139 158 167 193 223 245

179 171 187 125 164 195 196 193 187 160

1999

181 173 189 159 149 155 164 186 222 233

202 207 197 133 205 230 228 221 201 143

2000

194 Andreas Hepp

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According to him a society not only has collective disciplines but includes many other practices which remain ‘small’ and ‘minor’ (Certeau 1988: 110). Everyday practices are a part of these ‘small’ practices ‘underprivileged’ by history. They are primarily forms of consumption and depend therefore on resources provided by the (culture) industry, which cannot retain complete control of them (Certeau 1988: 13). Everyday practices are ‘appropriation practices’ (Certeau 1988: 19; Poster 1992; Silverstone 1989) by which consumers can take hold of products and make them part of their cultural property. They are used not strategically but tactically. ‘Strategy’ is the behaviour of a power ‘bloc’ based on a calculation of the balance of power. In contrast to this, the tactical approach is characterised by a lack of calculation: it is less about longterm planning than short-term gratification. Tactics pertain to the private and individual creations of meaning and pleasure, which are temporary and situationally specific. They should be understood as being very much shaped by oral rather than written influences. With respect to the relationship between media and popular culture, one can state that popular culture is dependent on certain commercial resources, on certain ‘strategically’ produced media products. Yet it is constituted in a contradictory act of appropriation by its recipients. In what follows, I want to refer to the radio-comics of SWF3 (SWR3, after the merger with SDR3) in order to explore that dynamic process of cultural appropriation.1 The ‘radio-comic’ is how media producers describe a satirical piece of modern radio entertainment with a maximum length of 120 seconds. It points to the fact that radio-comics, like printed comics, thrive on a certain exaggeration. The question raised in the following pages is why radio-comics have become a central feature of contemporary popular culture. Radio-comics through the eyes of the programme producers For radio producers an orally determined popular culture is not an area of reality which is detached from their everyday practice. They have at their disposal a distinctive working theory which reflects on the position of their products as well as on their strategies and on the ‘implied audience’ (Tulloch 1999: 151). On the basis of two interviews, each of 45 minutes, with editors of the former SWF3 and the present SWR3,2 in which they explained their own production practices, I have been able to reconstruct two aspects of this working theory –

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first, the everyday ideas about the radio-comic itself, and second, ideas about how it is appropriated by the listeners.3 In the eyes of the editors, it is axiomatic that every radiocomic is a ‘programme product’ (Interview A) and that the comics are ‘events … in the programme’ (Interview B). This means that they are designed to be part of individual programmes, where ‘programme’ means a flow of specific clusters which are thematically connected (Stockinger 1995: 34). The comics must create a certain ‘event character’ (A/B) for the programmes ‘to make them into things which [people] find it worthwhile to talk about’ (A). Like every radio station SWF3 has to promote its programmes: it is hardly surprising that the comics are expected to take a leading role in securing the loyalty of the listeners. Their crucial attribute must be ‘everyday life’ (A) and a connection with the ‘reality of life’ (A). In the eyes of the editors, it is important that comics reflect places, topics, and patterns of behaviour that are known by a maximum number of listeners, so that their connection to the everyday world is guaranteed. Partly, ‘everyday’ has to be understood in the sense of ‘familiar because of the media’. Hence the creation of the comics is a largely ‘intertextual’ process: places, topics and characters are picked up from newspapers, television and radio. According to the editors’ working theory it is essential to the success of the comic that its presentation is ‘simplistic’ (A), ‘brash’ and ‘catchy’ (A). It should make use of ‘emotive words’ (A) ‘with puns’ (A) and ‘defamiliarise’ (A) them. When reviewing the editors’ working theory about the way in which audiences appropriate the radio-comics, one notices that the word ‘penetrate’ is used again and again. What does this mean? The expression involves two entities: there is always a penetrator and a penetrated. While the first entity is clear – it is the comic that penetrates – the second is less so. The descriptions of its impact vary between ‘shaping the language’ (A) and ‘being part of people’s consciousness’ (A). Such a psychologising and subject-centred idea is quite close to classical ideas of media impact like the stimulus-response model. But the editors’ statements show that in this regard their working theory is far more complex. They indicate that for radio producers the relevant mark of success is the subsequent communication among the listening public that a comic brings about. Subsequent communication does not simply mean recommendations to listen to it (A), but the incorporation of some of its elements into the everyday language. I have

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already pointed out that with the help of the comics it is the editors’ aim to give radio programmes ‘topics which are worth talking about’. Elsewhere, they speak about ‘scraps’ (A) and ‘types’ (A) being ‘incorporated’ (A) into daily language and that the latter should be ‘stamped’ (A) by them. However, radio producers realise that such incorporations are only temporary, they acknowledge that the ‘penetrating potential’ of comics decreases as everyday language changes. This explains why according to their theory the comics constantly need new concepts and further development in order to counteract ‘aesthetic wear and tear’ (A). Their working theory illustrates how producers use radiocomics not to create momentary pleasure but with the strategic aim of achieving a permanent ‘penetration’ of the recipients’ popular culture. The need to connect sound broadcasting with popular culture is acknowledged by the editors when they say that radio-comics should pick up thematic and stylistic elements in the recipients’ daily life. These are used strategically as ‘scraps’, ‘types’ and ‘clichés’ in the hope of penetrating popular culture again and again. Radio-comics as popular radio comedy between puns and stereotypes Radio-comics can hardly be described as a clearly defined ‘radio genre’ in the traditional sense. This was already touched upon in the account of the editors’ working theory, which characterizes the comics as a relatively open ‘programme product’. The difficulty lies in the fact that the borders between the comics and the other parts of the programme are comprehensively blurred, for instance by incorporating dialogue with the comic characters into the presentation or by using comiclike elements in the trailers. Aside from such elements in the overall programme, the expensively produced and clearly defined elements, which are ‘comics’ in the strict sense, tend to stand out. Beyond typological differences – one can distinguish three forms of radio-comics: the satire, the corny joke, and the series4 – the peculiarity of radio-comics is to be found in their excessive punning and in their treatments of popular stereotypes and clichés. As John Fiske points out, puns are a typical feature of popular cultural texts – from commercials and articles in the print media to radio and television shows (Fiske 1999: 68). They play with the diverse meaning potential of everyday life by exploiting the phonetic similarities and indis-

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tinctness of spoken language. The target of this excessive punning is primarily everyday stereotypes and clichés, which are in themselves very interesting objects of analysis since they provide a ‘framework’ of everyday perception and cultural practices. This is illustrated by the most popular comic series of SWF3, Höllentrip bei Feinkost Zipp (‘The Trip to Hell at Zipp’s Delicatessen’). Its individual episodes mostly consist of an only slightly varied plot which is as follows. A customer enters the cornershop, ‘Feinkost Zipp’, and is greeted by the owner. The shop assistant, Ms Zombie, asks how she can help him and the customer names the article he wishes to buy. This article is in various ways unsatisfactory and the customer complains. Ms. Zombie then asks the second shop assistant, Ms Werewolf, what is wrong with the article. Ms Zombie has to translate the growling and the rattling of the chains for the customer who, after learning why the article is unusable, inedible, undrinkable or whatever, pays Mr Zipp for the article and leaves the shop. On the one hand, this comic satirises stereotypical forms of communication and the practices of everyday life, in this case the ‘institution of the cornershop’. Almost everyone knows from personal experience about the welcoming rituals and acts of courtesy performed in small shops. These patterns undergo a satirical exaggeration to which the dialectal speech of the shop staff contributes. But the central feature is the punning. In one episode a customer enters the shop in order to buy a bra. As she leaves, Mr Zipp says goodbye using the dialectal word ‘Wirsing’ instead of the High German ‘Auf Wiedersehen’. But since in High German ‘Wirsing’ is also the word for a savoy cabbage she understands him to be trying to sell her some vegetables, which she politely declines. However the main joke centres on her complaint about the bra she has ordered: it immediately walks out of the shop because it is not a Wonderbra but a ‘wander-bra’. There are again two incoherent discourses with sound similarities which surface only in their oral articulation. The radio-comics play not only with clichéd forms of communication but also with character and gender stereotypes. Another series, which could be translated as ‘Comfort Yourself’, could be defined as a series of corny jokes. One episode parodies the stereotypical communication patterns in counselling programmes and articles: it purports to solve a personal problem by reinterpreting it in a positive way. Two radio presenters outline the problem: a woman, whom they name,

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suffers from nymphomaniac tendencies. And they promptly offer the solution: they can provide her address to male listeners. However the sketch also plays with the gender stereotype5 of the woman who if sexually available is automatically assumed to be a nymphomanic. The explosive nature of this joke, which creates an ambivalence in the listeners, stems from the fact that the discursive elements it is playing with are multi-vocally placed next to each other. While the communicative mode of a counselling programme can be attributed to a more enlightened sexual discourse, the gender stereotype of the ‘sexually available woman’ is part of a sexist discourse which is strongly criticised but is still a part of everyday life. Without any comment these two discourses clash in this sketch, and it is an open question how far the listener embraces the gender stereotyping it involves. As Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrated, such multi-vocality can be understood as a specific moment in a culture of daily laughter, with its characteristic features of carnivalesque and grotesque moments (Bakhtin 1990: 54, 119). Even if the play with stereotypes cannot be seen as unproblematic from the start – the joke could meet with disapproval in the context of feminist criticism – this also points to a certain affinity between the radio-comics and everyday orality. Oral communication is characterised by returning to existing formulas, myths and topics which can be ‘newly’ communicated according to their situations (Ong 1987: 47). Similarly, radio-comics pick up patterns, topics, and stereotypes of present everyday life and play with them in their specific ways. This helps to explain how radio-comics can become such a resource of popular culture in Germany. However, one should not forget that popular culture is constituted by the appropriation of such resources. Radio-comics, interpretative communities and everyday talk When reflecting on the editors’ working theory, I indicated that from the radio producers’ perspective the success of radiocomics manifests itself in the adoption of individual ‘scraps’ of everyday communication. This means that the affinity between radio-comics and popular culture amounts to more than the sharing of an oral modality. It is through the oral communication of the listeners – their everyday talk – that the radio-comics become assimilated into their popular culture. This is proved by an analysis of listeners’ letters which SWF3 has received about the series Höllentripp bei Feinkost Zipp, a

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considerable number of which are signed not just by one person, but several: and a large number of letters written by one person are explicitly written on behalf of a group (Hepp 1998). The appropriation of radio-comics takes place in ‘interpretative communities’. This is of interest in harking back to the beginnings of ‘the appropriational history of radio’. Comedy shows in particular were listened to in groups, when radios were equipped with speakers and not merely with headphones (Crisell 1994: 164; Dahl 1983: 138–45). This is logical, as ‘laughing’ and ‘enjoying oneself’ are characteristically social practices. There is an increasing tendency to listen to the radio in groups, especially in the workplace (Wild 1989). But even if one listens to the radio alone, talk about programmes very often takes place in a group. There seem to be two fundamental kinds of interpretative communities concerning radio: the working communities in different companies and offices and leisure communities ranging from friends and family to clubs. From the letters which SWF3 receives, one notices a strong sense of community among office workers and company employees.6 Remarks like ‘we are all great Werewolf fans’ (from the employees of a company making electronic devices) or ‘we applauded the huge success of Mr Zipp’s delicatessen’ (from the editors of an advertising magazine) indicate that collective radio listening contributes to a sense of community. This is also suggested by the ‘para-interactive intimacy’ which the employees feel for the radio producers as well as for the comic characters. Thus, the editors are casually addressed – ‘Hello, SWF3 team’ – and in the familiar du form (‘Please air … once again’), while emotions are expressed in an emphatic way (‘incredibly delighted’). On the one hand the letter writers take up the colloquial style of the radio station itself and on the other express their feelings of intimacy with the station’s personnel. The intensive communal use of the radio in companies leads to the employees’ perception of the radio producers as ‘media friends’ (Meyrowitz 1987: 96) or ‘para-interactive colleagues’ who provide their radio programme as an accompaniment to the working day. The attitude of the leisure communities does not seem fundamentally different. Thus the letter from the ‘Zombie Bowling Club’ is para-interactively addressed to the radio-comic character of ‘Ms Zombie’: the ‘coincidence’ that the club and the character have the same name allows the latter to be elevated from a ‘media friend’ to an ‘elective affinity’, and the letter thus becomes a piece of family correspondence. It is

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especially in leisure communities that radio-comics are important topics of everyday discussion. Over and over again, the various listeners’ letters and faxes point to the fact that members of a group interpret the individual episodes together, assess them and invent new episodes. In addition, and no matter what the leisure group, catch-phrases from the radiocomic strip are adopted for group communication. As well as the ‘Moggään’ [‘Morrniing’] greeting by the shop owner, these phrases include the long pronunciation of ‘Dankää’ [‘Thank you’] and ‘Bittää’ [‘You’re welcome’] of the shop assistants and especially the farewell ‘Wirsing’ [‘Auf Wiedersehen’]. The listeners clearly indicate that in everyday communication phrases are loosened from their original context and become a fixed part of oral greeting and farewell rituals. They function as recognisable features, especially for friends and groups for whom being radio fans constitutes part of their group identity. As I argued, the radio-comics pick up many elements of orally shaped everyday life by playing excessively with the meaning potential of everyday expressions, stereotypes and clichés. A central feature is the oralisation itself, the playful combination of elements of incoherent discourses by sound similarities which can only be understood as transcending the disciplined correctness of literal modality. Such means are employed strategically by media producers and with their appropriation by the listeners the radio-comics become a part of popular culture. While such conditions apply to the electronic media in general, the present argument is specifically concerned with radio. Radio’s particular effect stems from its mobility – its position as the permanent companion of people during both work and leisure – and from its oral character: it generates jokes and irony with speech patterns that are familiar to its recipients from their everyday life. This probably explains why radio is still a central resource for popular culture. What is remarkable, however, is that media producers regard the radio-comics as ‘programme events’, and in so doing refer to a more general phenomenon: the tendency towards ‘event-isation’ in popular culture.

Popular media events: radio events It has been pointed out several times that the appropriation of the products of popular culture aims not only at the the gen-

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eration of meanings but at the experience of pleasure. At this point, the work associated with cultural studies and current studies from the tradition of German-speaking cultural sociology join forces. Gerhard Schulze, for instance, emphasises in his outline of contemporary cultural sociology published as a book with the title Die Erlebnisgesellschaft [‘The Event Society’] the event-based nature of present-day culture (Schulze 1993: 40; Schulze 1999). By this he means that humans in present ‘event-dominated societies’ seek to become managers of their experiences, that they look for specific situations that will secure a calculable experience. This might be a visit to the cinema but it might also be the participation in a techno-event as, for instance, the Love Parade in Berlin. Ronald Hitzler, in particular, has comprehensively theorised such developments in his sociology of events. According to him events are ‘from the point of view of time and space condensed and performatively interactive occurrences lifted out of our late, post- and reflexively modern everyday life with a high attraction for relatively many people’ (translation: Hitzler 2000: 402). In parallel with a discussion of popular culture, Hitzler points out that events cannot be interpreted exclusively as the ‘marketing events’ of individual producers but that they only provide the prerequisite for collective pleasure when they are appropriated by particular groups of people. The event itself comes into being in an ‘intricate dialectic of doing something together’ (Hitzler 2000: 404). Nevertheless the extensive commercialisation of events is self-evident. Apart from their promise of a ‘unique’ experience, the growing number of events involves a relative large financial expenditure in planning, preparing and staging them. Hence it is increasingly necessary to find wealthy sponsors. Ritual festivities versus popular events Waldemar Vogelgesang and I have suggested elsewhere that current events have to be understood as popular events within a framework of a theory of popular culture (Hepp and Vogelgesang 2003). There are six features which distinguish such events (a prototypical example is the above mentioned Love Parade) from ritual festivities such as Christmas. Ritual festivities are transcendental interruptions of everyday life, they dominate the whole of society, they recur regularly and are comprehensively pre-planned, ceremonially performed and orientated towards harmony. In contrast, popular events are routinised experiences which are far from ‘everyday’: they

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are routinised insofar as the specificity of their experience is calculable but at the same time they still have a touch of the exotic. In this context, their exoticism has to be orchestrated, even if such events are in some ways recurrent. Popular events do not dominate the whole of society, but rather a certain cultural segment (a ‘scene’, a youth culture, a fan culture, and so on). They are not only extensively pre-planned but also comprehensively commercialised. Popular events are not performed ceremonially, but are fun-oriented: the aim of their participants is to enjoy themselves, to pursue pleasure. At the same time, popular events do not embrace society as a whole, but are conflict-oriented: the integration which they can achieve for a particular cultural segment has to be seen as being marked off from other cultural segments. Hence popular events are crucial to the conflict within society. In Germany this became obvious in the dispute about the date of the Berlin Love Parade in 2001. The dispute was not simply about dates: it embraced the fears expressed by ecological groups about the pollution it might cause as well as criticisms of that ‘fun culture’ which is presently widespread in Germany. The distinction between ritual feasts and popular events is not, of course, absolute. This is especially clear in the eventisation of ritual festivities like Christmas. But it allows us to understand the general tendency towards the event-isation of popular culture in Germany. Radio stations cannot escape this tendency. This is clear from a written survey of ten radio stations which I conducted in April 2001.7 The typical answer to the question ‘To what extent do you arrange events and what kind of events are they?’ was that events play a key role for the radio stations in question. The programme organisers of HitRadio Antenne (Hanover), for instance, pointed out that they organise about 100 events a year and that the biggest has ‘more than 180,000’ participants. Other radio stations are similar. Events have become a comprehensive part of radio communication. ‘Event’ radio In this context, Christa Lindner-Braun raised the concept of ‘event radio’ for discussion. What does it mean? LindnerBraun discerns three so-called ‘radio qualities’: first, that of ‘atmospheric’ radio; second, that of information radio; third, the quality of event radio (Lindner-Braun 1998: 57). From the audience perspective, atmospheric radio establishes a personal and intimate atmosphere and achieves close social con-

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tact. Information radio provides its listeners with reports and interviews on matters of interest. The quality of ‘event radio’ is about offering its audience the immediacy and specificity which they would associate with actual participation. It can be done by smaller programme items like the radio-comics but also by stimulating a wider participation in its events. These radio qualities should first of all be understood as conceptual rather than actual, since the output of a radio station is often a blend of all three. But in a survey of stations in southern Germany, Lindner-Braun showed that the distinctions have some basis in fact. In answering the question about what attributes they assigned to a particular radio station, the interviewees showed a clear tendency to regard the radio networks SWF1 and SDR1 as information radio, the mainly locally focused S4 as ‘atmospheric’ radio, and SWF3 and SDR3 as event radio (Lindner-Braun 1998: 58). If one seeks to define the position of radio and, in this case, of radio events in popular culture, these quantitative surveys need to be treated cautiously – a point which I emphasised in my general remarks on the development of German radio culture. Quantification may be an important indicator for the evaluation of tendencies but in the first instance has less to say about cultural processes. For this reason, I want to use some concrete examples to bring out the status that radio events have in popular culture. The creation and commercialisation of events Media events are defined by the fact that their core is constituted and comprehensively pre-defined by media communication. At the same time, media events cannot be defined solely in terms of a commercial campaign. What has so far been one of the biggest media events in southern Germany – an event growing out of the campaign ‘Radio für den wilden Süden’ [‘Radio for the wild South’], which was conducted by the radio station SDR3 – illustrates the extent to which the dynamics of change can shape the character of these events. The starting point of the campaign, which dates from 1989, was the fact that ever since its beginning SDR3 had existed in the shadow of the very successful SWR3: before the merger their transmission areas were partly overlapping. At the same time, private radio stations had been gaining more and more listeners since the mid-1980s. SDR3 decided to start a broad campaign under the above mentioned slogan in cooperation with an advertising agency. It was supported by presenters’

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jingles, trailers and announcements on the air, and in the offair sector by an extensive poster campaign and later, by commercials in the cinemas. The strategic aim was to overcome the ‘faded rock image’ of SDR3 and to re-connect with the popular culture of the listeners. The turning-point of the campaign was, however, a ‘marathon listener hit parade’ called ‘Top 1000x’ which was characterised by Ulrich Neuwöhner as follows: For five days and six nights in August [1989], two presenters played a total of 1,501 request titles. … This not very original dramaturgy of a hit parade became an event, since it did not draw exclusively on the music but also on the supporting and very often spontaneous listener parties, the supportive actions by the presenters [sic] who were on air 24 hours a day, and on the follow-up concerts where several thousand listeners gathered to listen to the radio together. (Neuwöhner 1998: 126)

Neuwöhner considers the event from the perspective of a media economist concerned with campaign evaluation, but in this quotation there is a hint of what is of interest in radio and popular culture from a cultural studies point of view. The listener hit parade became a turning-point in the campaign not just because of the strategy of the radio producers but because people made the campaign part of their popular culture – and this happened in a way which was partly outside the producers’control. The hit parade rankings emerged not from salesor play-lists, but from the songs requested by the listeners. The complete list differed from the presenters’ expectations of what the hit parade would be. Hence this particular hit parade could be seen as the appropriation of the play-lists by the listeners. It became in essence an event because the listeners themselves organised parties around it, even in the grounds of the broadcasting studios in Stuttgart. These ‘mini-events’ were triggered by the main event but developed their own dynamic. The commercialisation of popular media events has a double character. On the one hand, the events are used by the radio producers to tie listeners into their programmes: a clear strategy can be seen here. On the other hand, the listeners can deal productively with this commercialisation. They are not conscious of the radio station’s interests but know how to use them partially for themselves. As shown in the study of a popular media event which was originated by television (Hepp 2002), audiences turn the general attention arising from the

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event to their own advantage by organising parties under slogans which are diffused by the media. Because of this they can be sure that their parties will gain a certain amount of attention: this may even extend to media coverage. At the same time, this attention raises the possibility of making money out of these self-organised ‘mini-events’ and the financial beneficiaries are the people themselves. This can be seen as a process of local commercialisation. At this point one should certainly avoid romanticising the possibilities for the listeners. However commercialisation and event-isation form parts of a highly complex process that does not necessarily involve an ‘exploitation’ of popular culture. Even for the people themselves, who form the repository of popular culture, these events can be an occasion for making profits. ‘Club’ and ‘event’ radio Commercialisation and popular culture can hardly be separated from each other. This becomes obvious whenever SWR3, the radio station that was created from the merger of SDR3 and SWF3, tries to enlist popular culture and popular events in its own promotional activities. This it does with the help of its ‘club’. This club is directly comparable to the fan clubs of football teams. For an annual membership fee of thirteen Euros anyone can become a member and receive the ‘Gold Wildcard’ along with several special offers. Besides reduced admission fees for concerts and events organised by the radio station, the members receive eleven issues of the club magazine every year and discounts from various businesses associated with SWR3. The club magazine is partly an events calendar and partly a means of cultivating the image of the station, but it also carries special offers for its listeners. It not only contains background reports on the station’s presenters or on the events organised by them but includes pieces on their (political) commitments and on SWR3’s radio-comics, together with movie guides and lonely hearts ads for the listeners. The websites of the radio station are a second but increasingly important channel of communication with the club members, and also with other listeners. The advantage is to provide continually updated contents alongside the programme listings. The club is of special interest concerning the creation of radio events because it is a central means of realising events which focus on different cultural segments. As well as the annual ‘Wildall Party’, an extensive family event which takes

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place in the Rust Europa Park, an amusement complex, and includes live appearances from the ‘Gagtory’ radio comedy team, the station organises the New Pop Festival at the production plant of Smart cars, which mainly involves events for a fan culture around young people’s music; beach parties at Lake Constance; and a mystery night that targets the youth ‘grave’ scene – parties in graveyards where the participants wear black clothes and white make-up. The club not only offers ticket reductions but uses other media besides the radio station to publicise its events. From a general perspective it is possible to see how different events focus on different cultural segments. Thanks to the club offers, there are also ‘mini-events’. An example is ‘Survival 99’, a complex blend of media event and actual event. Five teams, each consisting of a presenter and a listener, sat in a room for five hours and were connected with the outside world via the Internet. During this time they not only had to use the Internet to supply themselves with food but solve various tasks culminating in the organisation of a free party for the regular listeners. The creation of such events shows how closely SWR3’s offers are connected with the activities of its listeners. The listeners who collaborated with the presenters were chosen by the audience by means of tele-voting (TED). At the same time, the latter constantly participated in the event, via the Internet and in the coverage of the radio programme, by helping to solve the assignments and supplying the teams of Survival 99 with food and other necessities. The listeners even initiated the final party by providing premises and drinks free of charge. How can these developments be adequately theorised? What is hidden behind the event-isation of radio communication? Has popular culture in Germany changed in some general way? These are the questions I wish to focus on at the end of this chapter.

Having fun: event radio as part of commercialised popular culture in Germany At the end of the 1980s, Dick Hebdige already pointed to the fundamental changes undergone by ‘youth’ in his book Hiding in the Light. Youth is no longer considered as ‘trouble’. In the course of the 1960s and 1970s it established a new image of itself: ‘youth as fun’ (Hebdige 1988: 29). This new definition of

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youth is linked with extensive commercialisation. With the ‘teenager’ the youth market was discovered and ‘a new range of commodities and commercial leisure facilities are provided to absorb the surplus cash which for the first time the youth class is calculated to have’ (Hebdige 1988: 30). ‘Youth culture’ and commercialisation form an extensive bond here and Hebdige points to the local processes of the latter. Individual youths will themselves manage to participate in commercialisation by setting up shops and minor record labels. On the other hand, they will increasingly depend on the major record companies. The companies certainly try to anticipate youth trends in their search for economic success, but their various unsuccessful attempts prove that they do not have the power to set trends unproblematically. On the other hand, access to the communication channels of the big companies – record labels, distribution networks, programmes – is a prerequisite for any chance of becoming at all ‘popular’. To a certain extent, ‘youth culture’ can be understood as one of the historical starting points from which popular culture developed. In this light it is hardly surprising that the commercialisation identified by Dick Hebdige is a central aspect of contemporary popular culture. However commercialisation should not be viewed in a one-dimensional way – as a preoccupation of the various media companies which excludes all else. It is rather a highly paradoxical process from which ‘the ordinary people’ can also gain benefits. The current extent of commercialisation means that popular culture cannot be understood in isolation from it, but has to be theorised instead as a commercialised ‘having fun’ in terms of different cultural segments (such as fan clubs or bikers). However, Ronald Hitzler and Michaela Pfadenhauer point out that commercialisation does not mean that the less affluent are inevitably excluded from popular culture, even if they are naturally disadvantaged (Hitzler and Pfadenhauer 2000). Referring to the ‘techno scene’ in Germany, they have shown how unemployed youths create their own ‘job market’ with the organisation of popular ‘techno events’ supported by big sponsors like Camel, Sony and Red Bull. Local commercialisation demonstrates that popular culture – having fun – and gainful employment do not exclude each other. Instead they are growing together in ‘pioneer scenarios’ of cultural change. In a nutshell, commercialisation and popular culture are not in contradiction: at present they are inseparably connected to each other. This does not mean that this process should be

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viewed from the perspective of neo-liberalism and seen from the outset as positive. But the commercialisation and eventisation of popular culture have to be perceived as the preliminary resolution of a complex socio-cultural process which allows us to theorise the sphere of local commercialisation. The development of event radio along with the examples of the radio-comics can be seen as a reaction on the part of radio producers to the development of commercialised popular culture. In the fragmented German radio landscape, producers who were creating material for popular culture paid close attention to the growth of commercialisation and learned how to adapt it to their own purposes by using their medium as a place in which to create ‘events’. The success which event radio presently enjoys in Germany illustrates that even in a ‘multi-media world’ the medium is still of significance to popular culture. It would be a mistake to see the technology of ‘multi-media’ as the driving force of the new uses to which the media are put. It is more useful to understand technology in terms of cultural practices. From a cultural studies perspective, ‘multi-media’ is just a way of using computer technologies to have fun in a commercialised popular culture. And as for radio, the medium will continue to be attractive as long as it affords the resources of popular culture to its listeners.

Notes This chapter was translated into English by Peter Muellen. 1. ‘Comic strips’ were adopted by some other radio stations and CD versions were sold outside their various transmission areas. For years the production team of SWF3 has very successfully staged some comic strips live, in front of up to 1,800 people, as part of the ‘Gagtory’ (a portmanteau word from ‘gag factory’). Stephan Brünjes and Ulrich Wenger hit the nail on the head when they describe SWF3 as ‘the pioneer of the present comedy boom as well as of other radio trends’ (Brünjes and Wenger 1998: 137). 2. An editor was interviewed in May 1995 (short form A) and in May 2001 (short form B) in Baden-Baden. 3. An excellent example among the SWF3 programmes is the radiocomic Die Lallers, a parody on the evening soap Die Fallers (Südwest 3) or Marie ist doof [‘Mary is stupid’], a satire on the soap Marienhof (ARD). 4. The most rudimentary comic form is the corny joke, an emphatic and ironic playing with foreign words, idioms or expressions. The structure of the satire is more complex. It falls back on a fixed

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repertoire of characters and types; its structure is open (most episodes are a ‘one-off’); and it deals with current events in politics or public life. To a certain extent, the comic series is between the satire and the corny joke: it is distinguished by a fixed narrative pattern, a particular set of places and characters, and deals primarily in satire and puns. 5. Ien Ang and Joke Hermes speak about ‘gender positions’, by which they mean stereotypical, medially imparted offers of identifications which can correspond with social identifications, but do not have to (Ang and Hermes 1996). 6. Of the listeners’ letters that were received and analysed by the radio station SWF3 in 1995, about 30 percent were written by or on behalf of employees’ groups (mostly in smaller or mediumsized companies) while 55 percent were from, or on behalf of, leisure groups. Only 15 percent of the letters could be ascribed to individuals. 7. Radio stations were chosen that target a young and adult audience. Representatives of the following were interviewed: Antenne Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Bayern 3, Hit-Radio Antenne, HitRadio Antenne Sachsen, HR3, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR Jump), Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR2), Radio Hamburg, SWR3, and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR2).

References Ang, I. and Hermes, J. (1996) ‘Gender and/in media consumption’ in Ang, I. (ed.) Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, London and New York: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. (1990) Literatur und Karneval: Zur Romantheorie und Lachkultur, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Verlag. Beck, U. (1983) ‘Jenseits von Stand und Klasse’ in Kreckel, R. (ed.) Soziale Ungleichheiten (Sonderband Soziale Welt), Göttingen: Schwarz Verlag. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1994) ‘Individualisierung in modernen Gesellschaften – Perspektiven und Kontroversen einer subjektorientierten Soziologie’ in Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (eds) Riskante Freiheiten, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Böckelmann, F. and Mahle, W. (1999) Hörfunk in Deutschland: Rahmenbedingungen und Wettbewerbssituation, Berlin: Vistas. Brünjes, S. and Wenger, U. (1998) Radio-Report: Programme, Profile, Perspektiven, München: TR-Verlagsunion. Buss, M. (1998) ‘Das System der SDR-Demometer: Der Trend zur monatlichen Repräsentativbefragung’ in Lindner-Braun, C. (ed.) Radioforschung. Konzepte, Instrumente und Ergebnisse aus der Praxis, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Certeau, M. de (1988) Kunst des Handelns, Berlin: Merve Verlag.

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Crisell, A. (1994) Understanding Radio, London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edn. Dahl, P. (1983) Radio: Sozialgeschichte des Rundfunks für Sender und Empfänger, Reinbeck b. Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag. Dussel, K. (1999) Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte: Eine Einführung, Konstanz: UVK. Fiske, J. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture, Boston, London, Sydney and Wellington: Unwin Hyman. —- (1999) ‘Populäre Texte, Sprache und Alltagskultur’ in Hepp, A. and Winter, R. (eds) Kultur – Medien – Macht: Cultural Studies und Medienanalyse. Zweite überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Hasebrink, U. and Rössler, P. (eds) (1999) Publikumsbindungen: Medienrezeption zwischen Individualisierung und Integration, München. Hebdige, Dick (1988) Hiding in the Light, London and New York: Routledge. Hepp, A. (1998) ‘Die SWF 3 Radiocomics: Populäre Radiocomedy und ihre Aneignung’, Medien Praktisch, 2. —- (2002) ‘Populäre Medienevents zwischen Werbung und skeptischem Vergnügen: Die Aneignung des Medienereignisses “Zindler/Maschendrahtzaun”’ in Willems, H. (ed.) Die Gesellschaft der Werbung, Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher. Hepp, A. and Vogelgesang, W. (2003) ‘Einleitung: Ansätze einer Theorie Populärer Events’ in Hepp, A. and Vogelgesang, W. (eds) Populäre Events: Medienevents, Spielevents und Spaßevents, Opladen: Leske and Budrich. Hitzler, R. (2000) ‘“Ein bisschen Spaß muss sein!” Zur Konstruktion kultureller Erlebniswelten’ in Gebhardt, W., Hitzler, R. and Pfadenhauer, M. (eds) Events: Soziologie des Außergewöhnlichen, Opladen: Leske and Budrich. Hitzler, R. and Honer, A. (1992) ‘Bastelexistenz über subjektive Konsequenzen der Individualisierung’ in Beck, U. and BeckGernsheim, E. (eds) Riskante Freiheiten, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Hitzler, R. and Pfadenhauer, M. (2000) ‘Die Lage ist hoffnungslos, aber nicht ernst! (Erwerbs-)Probleme junger Leute heute und die anderen Welten von Jugendlichen’ in Hettlage, R. and Vogt, L. (eds) Identitäten in der modernen Welt, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Hoffmann, D., Münch, T. and Boehnke, K. (1999) ‘Individualisierung und mediale Sozialisation: Zur Attraktivität des Radios für Jugendliche’ in Mansel, J. (ed.) Kinderkultur, Mediennutzung und Sozialisation, Opladen: Leske and Budrich. Keupp, H. (1976), Abweichung und Alltagsroutine: Die LabellingPerspektive in Theorie und Praxis, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag. Lau, C. (1988) ‘Gesellschaftliche Individualisierung und Wertewandel’ in Luthe, H. and Meulemann, W. (eds) Wertewandel – Faktum oder

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Fiktion?: Bestandsaufnahmen und Diagnosen aus kultursoziologioscher Sicht, Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag. Lindner-Braun, C. (1998) ‘Radio ist lebendig, präzise und persönlich: Ansatz zu einer Radiotheorie’ in Lindner-Braun, C. (ed.) Radioforschung: Konzepte, Instrumente und Ergebnisse aus der Praxis, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Löffelholz, M. (1997) ‘Hörmedien’ in Hüther, J., Schorb, B. and Brehm-Klotz, C. (eds) Grundbegriffe Medienpädagogik, München: KoPäd. Media Perspektiven (2000): Basisdaten. Meyrowitz, J. (1987) Die Fernsehgesellschaft: Wirklichkeit und Identität im Medienzeitalter, Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Verlag. Miller, T. and McHoul, A. (eds) (1998) Popular Culture and Everyday Life, London: Sage Publications. Neuwöhner, U. (1998) ‘Kampagnenevaluation: Wie der Süden wild wurde’ in Lindner-Braun, C. (ed.) Radioforschung: Konzepte, Instrumente und Ergebnisse aus der Praxis, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Ong, W. (1987) Oralität und Literalität: Die Technologisierung des Wortes, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Poster, M. (1992) ‘The question of agency: Michel de Certeau and the history of consumerism’ Diacritics, 22. Schulze, G. (1993) Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart, Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus Verlag. —- (1999) Kulissen des Glücks: Streifzüge durch die Eventkultur, Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus Verlag. Silverstone, R (1989) ‘Let us then return to the murmuring of everyday practices: a note on Michel de Certeau, television and everyday life’, Theory, Culture and Society, 6. Stockinger, H-P. (1995) ‘SWF 3 – Trendsetter im Äther’ in Bucher, HJ., Klingler, W. and Schröter, C. (eds) Radiotrends: Formate, Konzepte und Analysen, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag. Storey, J. (1997) An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, London and New York: Prentice Hall. Tulloch, J. (1999) ‘The implied audience in soap opera production: everyday rhetorical strategies among television professionals’ in Alasuutari, P. (ed.) Rethinking the Media Audience, London: Sage Publications. Wild, C. (1989) ‘Radio – Das mobile Medium: Daten zur Hörfunknutzung außler Haus’, Media Perspektiven, 5.


CHAPTER 12 

RADIO AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY Mike Ladd

The Australian institutional context Poetry on radio asks for deep attention from the listener and active, creative listening. In this way, radio returns poetry to its oral/aural roots. The space for this kind of listening is rare, but dedicated poetry programmes still exist on public and community radio stations in different parts of the world. In this essay I will attempt to examine various aspects of poetry on the airwaves, referring to programmes of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and some poetic radio works of the past. My main focus will be on PoeticA, a programme which I coordinate. I am therefore in a position to provide some information regarding its audience, content, intention, and reception. PoeticA is a forty-minute poetry programme broadcast every Saturday afternoon at five minutes past three on Radio National, an ABC network. The programme began in February 1997, as the latest incarnation of what has been an almost continuous tradition of poetry programmes on ABC Radio since the 1940s. The ABC is government funded and does not carry advertisements. Radio National broadcasts (in mono) to every capital city in Australia and to over 235 regional centres on 247 frequencies on both the AM and FM bands. The network styles itself as a place for the discussion of ideas, with spe-

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cialist coverage of arts and literature, science, health, education, environment, media, law, religion, women’s issues and international affairs. Radio National also has performancebased programming, including music, radio drama and book readings, and it is into this group that PoeticA fits. The ‘broadcasting of dramatic and other performing arts’ is written into the ABC’s Charter. Over the last five years, PoeticA has had an average audience of approximately forty thousand listeners nationally each Saturday – a small audience by radio standards, but a huge one by poetry standards in Australia. Who is this audience? Apart from the raw ratings data we only have the feedback of letters and e-mails to draw on. The clear answer is that they are poetry lovers, and perhaps more broadly, lovers of language. They vary in age from sixteen to seventy, with the majority over forty. Many are tertiary educated but we have also had letters from manual workers who did not finish high school. Seventy percent of our letters are from females. A number of our listeners are also writers of poetry. Several programmes have been generated from unsolicited manuscripts – one example, a group of poems written by Australian and British prisoners of war inside Changi prison, which had been kept in a shoe box for forty years. PoeticA has a brief of 60 percent contemporary Australian content and the remaining 40 percent drawn from all over the world from both ancient and modern sources.

Some radio forms of poetry Right from the start, we decided that the emphasis in PoeticA would be on hearing poetry, not hearing the discussion of poetry. We hoped the programme would be an intimate encounter between poetic words, sounds and music and the listeners’ aural imagination, unmediated by the analysis of experts. This is not to say that there is never any information content in the programmes. On the contrary, we regularly use related documentary material and interviews, often with the poets themselves, to provide context and structure. Overall though, the focus is on acoustical enjoyment and letting the poetry speak for itself. We believe that poetry can best reach the general Radio National audience if it is presented in an imaginative, radiophonic way. In this sense, PoeticA aims not simply to report the rich world of poetry on radio, but to re-cre-

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ate that world in radio terms. This involves the use of voice, sound effects, environmental and actuality recordings, music and, importantly, silence to help ‘place’ the poetry in an acoustic ‘mental space’. Often this means that the producer becomes the ‘audio poet’, whether working with already published poetry texts or poems specially written for radio. In converting something for the page into something for the ear, the producer pays attention to the metrics of the programme (the rhythm and pattern of the voice and other sound elements mentioned above) and to sound as metaphor, not only as illustration. In attempting to re-create poetry in radio terms we also try to make PoeticA formally various in the way that poetry itself is. I would now like to discuss some of these general radio forms for poetry. The poetry/music hybrid An example of this type of programme is Libby Douglas’s production of The Great Zoo by Cuban poet Nicholas Guillen. Five Latin musicians were invited into the studio to improvise around performances of Guillen’s words by Paul Kapsis. Sometimes the words are chanted, sometimes sung. The result is a programme which is simultaneously music and poetry. Interestingly, with the availability of cheap but powerful audio software for home computers and the release of CD burners onto the mass market, many poets in Australia and other parts of the world are moving towards working with voice, music and sound, and publishing the result on CD or CD ROM. We have broadcast five programmes in a series called audio/file/poets based on exactly this kind of material. It seems that new technology is inviting poets back to ancient practices in their craft – the poem as song or chant to music. The verse drama Here the poet and/or actors perform within the genre of radio drama. The works are often narrative and voices (including that of the narrator) are characterised. Dialogue may be spoken in iambics, or even in complete Pushkin sonnets as was the case in our production of Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which was narrated by Vikram Seth himself and broadcast as a serial over six weeks. Other verse dramas produced for PoeticA have been The Monkey’s Mask by Dorothy Porter, The Scarring by Geoff Page, and The Hanging of Jean Lee, a factually-based free verse monologue by Jordie Albiston.

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The poetry feature This is the commonest form used within PoeticA and includes studio productions where poems are read by poets or actors and inter-woven with actuality recordings, interviews, music and sound effects. They range from very simple features to highly complex works requiring a week or more of post production. They include bi-lingual features, which make a point of hearing the poetry in its original language alongside its English translation. Because part of the beauty of the poem is contained in the musicality of the original language, we have found the audience will tolerate hearing some of the work in a language it doesn’t understand, provided it eventually hears the translation. In the last four years, PoeticA has broadcast a dozen bi-lingual programmes in languages such as Greek, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Arabic, Swedish, and Gaelic. Another subset of the poetry feature is what I call the location feature. Here the studio is no longer the performance space. This might be a simple matter of recording poetry readings at different venues in front of a live audience. Or, as in the case of Broken Land, Justine Lees’s feature on the poetry of Coral Hull, it might involve recording the poet in the places that were the original source and setting of the poetry. For Broken Land the location was Brewarrina in outback New South Wales, and the feature included recordings in the local pub, farms, at the town weir, and a slaughterhouse. In this production, not only were the poet’s words returned to their ‘home’ environment, but other voices and sounds natural to that place entered in of their own accord: characters from the town, cars on a dirt track, a distant crow. Of course not all the sounds entered in by accident: the producer also ‘played’ the environment, squeaking a rusty gate or tapping on old iron sheets found on site. The result was an audio exploration of the poetry of place, and there are many examples of this in the work of Australian producers. Ron Sims’s Limestone, Iron and Time is a totally site-specific work which combines soundscapes and interviews recorded within the old Fremantle gaol in Western Australia with poems by prisoners, graffiti on the prison walls, and poems from a notebook found in the prison scrap-heap. Kangaroo Virus is a collaboration between the poet John Kinsella and Ron Sims as sound recordist to produce a multi-layered imagining of the Dryandra forest in Western Australia. Jane Ulman’s The Dreaming and the Dead uses a

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walk around Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery as a way of ‘locating’ poems by W.B.Yeats, with the repeated sound of a spade turning the earth used as a central metaphor. I could give many more examples of the location feature, but one thing they have in common is the desire to get outside the studio, to place poetry in the wider world, and also to find poetry in that world. This mode of production acknowledges that there are moments in everyday life which are themselves poetic; the cry of a bird, a particular turn of phrase from an interlocutor, the rhythms of footsteps, the textures of speech, the correspondence of word and incidental sound. We are now in the territory of the radio poem, a type of feature which aims to use radio as a medium of new poetic creation. The radio poem may either be originally written for radio (these are more rare) or created by the producer from existing poetic texts, actuality recordings, sounds and music, often by a process of collage. For example, in 1998 PoeticA broadcast a series entitled The Four Elements. Each Saturday for a month the listeners heard in succession Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Robyn Ravlich’s Earth programme included amongst a wide selection of poetry, a tour of a mine shaft, an actuality recording of an earth tremor, and sounds made from rubbing stones and digging soil. My own Fire feature included a recording of a live report of a football stadium fire, interviews with fire jugglers and a woman whose house was totally destroyed by a bushfire, and a visit to a foundry. Texts ranged from Heraclitus to Shakespeare to contemporary Australian poets. What we expected of the audience, indeed the requirement for these programmes to work, was that they use their ears to ‘read’ the programme like a poem. Poems were not cordoned off with author or title, but flowed out of spoken word actuality and sound. As producers we looked for rhythm, layering and resonance just as a poet does – but our construction materials were sounds of all kinds, as well as words.

The wider tradition of poetic radio The radio poem sits within a wider tradition of poetic radio that includes features, ‘sound films’, Hörspiel and experimental radio plays. This tradition is marked by an equality of sound and text, a convergence of genres (dramas like features like poetry programmes) an overthrow of the primacy of realism (these works show more interest in creating ‘mental

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spaces’ than simulating real ones) and a search for radio forms, not just re-presenting on radio the forms of other media such as the stage. I think it is worth spending some time discussing several examples of work drawn from this tradition. Poetic radio is by no means confined to designated poetry programmes, and the tradition is as old as broadcasting. In 1928 the film-maker Walter Ruttmann made and broadcast on Berlin radio a poem in sound, an ‘acoustical film’ called Wochenende [Weekend]. Created from the sounds of a train, crowds, speech fragments and silence, it told the story of lovers on a weekend journey (Cory 1992: 339–41). In 1947, Antonin Artaud was commissioned by French radio to make a work for its series The Voice of the Poets. He produced Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu [To Have Done with the Judgement of God] which was recorded but subsequently banned, and not broadcast until thirty years later when it had become more safely ‘historical’. The work consists of poems, prose texts read by different voices, Artaud’s speaking in tongues, screams and shouts, and sound effects played on drum, xylophone and gongs. It begins with an attack on the American industrial war machine, then moves to an account of a ritual of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. This is followed by a section entitled ‘The pursuit of fecality’, dealing with excreta and Artaud’s own horror of the body. Then follows a dismissal of the Christian God and a contemplation of infinity and consciousness. The conclusion incorporates a selfinterview by Artaud using different voices – ‘You are raving, Mr Artaud’ – with images of a surgical dismemberment of the human body, in fact the body being turned inside out. It is a tortured work that sounds tortuous, a cry of mental suffering (Artaud’s own) aimed at cutting through the dominance of the written word. In 1953, just before he died, Dylan Thomas managed to finish Under Milk Wood. He had spent more than ten years writing it and wondering aloud what form it should take – a stage play, a verse comedy, or a radio drama with a blind man as narrator. Under Milk Wood was strongly influenced by an earlier work Thomas had written and narrated for the BBC radio features department, Quite Early One Morning, a poetic portrait of a Welsh seaside town, broadcast in 1944. In its final form Under Milk Wood is in my opinion a radio poem: a work more driven by textures and cadences of voices than plot. Amongst the web and weave of Welsh voices, speaking monologues rich with internal rhyme, dialogues interspersed with songs and

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verse, Thomas calls for silence, chapel bells, money tills, cock crows, organ music, screams, door slams, footsteps, and a choir of children’s voices. The schoolchildren of Laugharne (the Welsh town with the strongest claim to be the basis of Thomas’s fictional Llareggub) were recorded on location, as were the town’s bells, providing an element of actuality in the original 1954 BBC broadcast produced by Douglas Cleverdon. The poets Friederike Mayröcker and Ernst Jandl were part of that remarkable re-invention of German radio drama in the 1960s which became known as the Neue Hörspiel [‘new hearplay’]. The Neue Hörspiel sought to move radio drama away from the text-based ‘well made play’ towards a new art form made with the tools of the electronic medium itself. I would argue that in this process it poeticised radio drama, making it less about direct story telling on air and more about producing states of mind through hearing. This convergence of the radio poem and the radio play continues today. Mayröcker and Jandl collaborated on a work entitled Five Man Humanity, first broadcast in 1968. Five Man Humanity is a rhythmic and very stereophonic journey through life: a fifteen-minute ride from birth, to education, work, judgement, death and back to birth. The main stages are marked by a narrator with rhyming couplets, there is an undercurrent of aggressive but humorously used sounds (guns, slaps, marching and samples from gangster movies) and there is much play with the sound of words (‘OK! COKE! KO!’) and punning on ‘uses/users’ in order to create a sonic picture of the citizenry as consumed consumers. The ‘Five Man’ of the title reflects a kind of stanzaic structure based on stereo positioning. Five voices occupy the main stereo positions (Left, Centre Left, Centre, Centre Right and Right) and repeat lines in different contexts chosen from life situations in which people are placed in a row, such as cribs in a maternity ward, school desks or soldiers marching. In their acceptance speech for the Radio Prize of the War-Blinded awarded to Five Man Humanity in 1969, Ernst Jandl said that the play is ‘a series of poems to be spoken’, and Friederike Mayröcker said that what she wanted from a radio play was that ‘the acoustical proceedings must evoke a very definite response from the listener, something akin to musical enjoyment, but released by words and sound effects, not by notes’ (Jandl and Mayröcker 1982: 48–9). In 1987 producer Harri Huhtamäki made Calewalayana, using fragments from the Finnish national epic The Kalevala, itself a collection of ballads and incantations from pre-Chris-

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tian Finland. The fragments of text exist between long, lonely soundscapes recorded on Bear Island, Kisko and Helenankatu, Helsinki, punctuated by short percussive sounds of knocking on wood and drums, as well as music ranging from primitive herdsmen’s instruments to soprano saxophone. Harri Huhtamäki’s Calewalayana (the extra syllables on the end of Calewala suggesting an Eastern, meditative approach) breaks boundaries between music, poetry and documentary radio programmes. He describes his interpretation of the Finnish national poem as an exploration of Finnish identity and ‘changes in the ecology of mind’ from pagan times to Christianity and the money-based economy. A year after Calewalayana, Harri Huhtamäki made Cockroach, a forty-fiveminute musical setting of Korney Chukovsky’s 1923 children’s poem Tarakanishche (The Giant Roach). In the children’s poem, the cockroach terrifies all the other animals into submission, even the elephants, ruthlessly exploiting them until a humble sparrow calls the cockroach’s bluff and simply eats him, liberating the other creatures. In the radio production, the performances of the poem (either read or sung) are inter-cut with various recordings of powerful figures from Krushchev to Reagan, and other actuality sources representing power and dominance, from a missile attack to a porno movie soundtrack. Excerpts from radio news reports are used to reflect the medium of radio onto itself in this poem about power. Moving to more recent work using radio as a medium for poetry, in 1999 the ABC’s Soundstage FM stereo drama programme broadcast Testimony produced by Christopher Williams. Testimony was commissioned as a collaboration between African–American poet Yusef Komunyakaa and Australian jazz saxophonist and composer Sandy Evans. The development and production of their work took four and half years and involved thirty four musicians. For Testimony, Komunyakaa wrote a series of verse monologues in which different characters voice parts of the life story of Charlie Parker. These texts were set to music by Sandy Evans in styles reflecting Parker’s influence on contemporary jazz. The entire work is a one-hundred-minute radio poem-cum-bebop-oratorio, a testimony to Parker’s life and music which is at times sad, at times joyful. In 2000, David Gallagher of the BBC made a work based on the Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The forty-minute programme contains only this one poem by Stevens, itself made up of thirteen short stanzas.

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Between each stanza are interviews recorded with different people who have had some connection with blackbirds: a man whose wife had just died is befriended by a blackbird, a couple name their daughter Merula (from the scientific name for the blackbird) after hearing the bird sing out of the window of the maternity ward, and so on. The interesting aspect of this work is that while it uses the formal poem as a thread, it finds the bulk of the poetry in recorded moments of everyday life. The cutting, the rhythm of the programme is also rapid and skittish, reflecting the characteristic motion of the blackbird. Also woven into the programme are the glorious sound signatures of the bird and human songs about the bird. Desert Canticles, by Barry Hill, was first broadcast in Australia in 2001 on a programme called The Listening Room. In FM stereo, The Listening Room broadcasts radiophonic essays, audio documentaries, acoustic features, new music, soundscapes, audio poetry and radio or sound art. Desert Canticles is a poem for radio which incorporates fragments of two old texts – the biblical Song of Songs, and T.G.H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia, translations from the oral tradition of the Aranda people who are indigenous to a desert region of central Australia. The poem has an underlying story: a man is writing the literary biography of T.G.H. Strehlow. While living in central Australia, the man marries a woman of Jewish descent but then separates from her. Fundamentally, Desert Canticles is about translation – translation as a metaphor for relationship with place, with others and with songs of different cultures (Hebraic and Aboriginal). The radio production draws together sounds gathered in the central Australian desert with fragments of Aranda and Hebrew, musical settings of The Song of Songs, and the voice of a narrator who has two distinct modes – a voice of lyric poetry marked as ‘Man’ and a more analytic or discursive voice marked as ‘Translator’. The sound motifs represent the four elements, but in a desert context – stone, wind, fire, and delicately and sparingly, water. Just as the chief metaphor of Desert Canticles is translation, these four sound elements are constantly transforming, translating into each other. The desert is represented as a harsh environment but imbued with a contradictory lushness and eroticism; it is also a space for dreaming and thinking. The work demonstrates the ‘conjunction of opposites’ often found in poetry: intimacy/separation, source/translation, male/female, fire/water.

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How radio mediates poetry I could mention many more examples of poetic radio, but these selections will have to suffice. I now want to address the question of how the medium of radio effects the type of poem broadcast in a programme like PoeticA. Poems which offer rich sound imagery would seem to be the most suitable. By ‘sound imagery’ I mean not only the sound of the words when said, but sound sources mentioned within the poem as well as sound metaphors. Such poems offer immediate benefits when produced as voice and soundscape. Of course we need to beware of facile illustration. Does a poem that mentions bells need clanging bells throughout? Does Tennyson’s Song of the Brook need an actual stream? These matters are for the judgement of producers. Sometimes there is an interesting duet between the music of the voice and the physical sound of the subject. Sometimes they play against or cancel each other. What is often more interesting is a more tangential approach, and a temporal displacement, since every programme involves taking the listener on a journey through time. For example, a way of handling the bell poem mentioned above might be to begin with an excerpt from an interview describing the cycle of war and peace in which bells have been melted for cannon then melted back again, followed by the poem, then an echoing of distant bells after the poem. Such an approach provides connections for the listener backwards and forwards through the real time of radio listening. Going further towards sound as metaphor, perhaps the sound source does not have to be specifically mentioned in the poem at all. An example of this metaphoric use of sound is provided by Ron Sims’s production The Drunken God of Verse, a feature on the life and work of the eighth-century Chinese poet, Du Fu. Throughout this feature, as a means of punctuation and shifting time, Ron Sims uses the sound of a gate, though no gates are to be found in Du Fu’s poems in the programme. Sims did not even use an old wooden Chinese gate, but a modern metal one – the point being that Du Fu’s poems are about wandering and exile, about being forced to leave one place and enter another as a stranger. They are also about the pains of the material world and the brevity of life. Entrances and exits: the gate works as a sound metaphor for these ideas in both an ancient and modern context. Another example of sound as metaphor comes from a PoeticA feature Clea Woods and I made in 1999 about the Australian poet John Forbes,

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who had recently died. The feature was constructed from archival recordings of Forbes reading his poems and rapidly inter-cut impressions of the man from more than thirty people who knew him. As in Auden’s elegy for Yeats, Forbes had become his friends and readers. The programme starts and finishes with the sound of a race caller at the horse track. There are no horse racing poems in the programme, but later we find out that Forbes often bet on the horses and also that he loved combining images from Australian popular culture with intellectual concepts – a self-deflating high seriousness that was very post-modern and very Australian. The horse race functioned as a sound metaphor for a person whose ‘race was done’ and was parallelled by our field of interviewees, often with conflicting ideas about John, jockeying for position. Written and telephone feedback suggests to me that listeners respond most strongly to poems with a clear personal point of view and powerful emotional content. Often these are lyric poems that create strong visual images in the mind of the listener. They can be ‘received’, understood on the first hearing. In the future, if our programme is streamed on the Internet, there may be an opportunity for listeners to ‘turn back the page’, to halt the programme and re-listen – but at the moment that opportunity does not exist for us, and the poem is heard once at a set time. That the poem is said and heard, not read and reread, helps to promote the lyric, the narrative poem, the performance poem and the sound poem over other forms. Highly intellectual poems, poems which are more concerned with their own internal construction as language, are harder to put across successfully on radio – or at least they seem to be less warmly received by the audience. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry with its rejection of the ‘lyric I’, its refusal of closure and its self-conscious concern with the creation and function of the poem as language, has presented difficulties for radio. But one aspect of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, its insistence that poetry should not operate in a safe haven of individual thought but open itself up to information overload and ‘intrusions’ from the wider world, seems to connect with some of the ideas already mentioned in regard to the radio poem. Both the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet and the producer of a radio poem may join things that do not belong together in a traditional lyric, but perhaps belong together in a wider sense that re-presents/re-creates the contemporary world in sounds and words. Visual or Concrete poetry (poetry where the typographical layout or visual pattern is as important as the meaning of the

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words) is hard to represent, but this is not to say that aural equivalents of visual effects cannot sometimes be found. On the other hand, Sound poetry (by which I mean a kind of poetry that is more concerned with the sound of words than with their dictionary definitions, that may abandon words altogether and depend instead on vocalisations, that invents ‘languages’, and that performs a music of the body) would seem a natural choice for radio. In PoeticA we have broadcast sound poetry ranging from Marinetti, and Edwin Morgan, to recent Australian sound poets such as Hazel Smith and the late Jas Duke. It is true that the form of Sound poetry needs little translation for it to be broadcast on radio, but this is not the whole story. Sound poets disrupt the expectations of the poetry audience that they will find meaning in the words and ask them instead to find meaning (or at least enjoyment) in the sound of words, vocalisations or noises. That ‘ask’ has to be prepared for. Also, some sound poems require the physical presence of the poet to work, and radio is such a disembodied medium. This brings me to the subject of transmission.

The uniqueness of radio poetry A (radio) colleague of mine once said to me that as far as he was concerned his final mix in the studio was the end product – he was making audio art and he didn’t care about how it was distributed. He would have been happy to post out a CD to each listener – the fact of radio transmission was irrelevant to him, as long that final mix got out to the audience. On a day-to-day basis, this is usually what happens: the producer makes a final product (often well ahead of broadcast) and the actual transmission is a non-creative, electro-magnetic process. But to leave it at that seems to me to be a mistake, ignoring potential in both the audience and the medium. The fact is that the distribution of a poem in audio form (or of any audio art) by radio is very different from its distribution by a live performance in a theatre or club, or CD release, or an audio installation in a gallery. So what are these differences? Firstly, radio gives simultaneous mass distribution into multiple different environments. It is worth thinking about how that phenomenon might be used creatively. For example, the Czech–Australian producer Jaroslav Kovaricek made a programme called Full Moon Night, a mix of music and poetry about the moon. The programme was broadcast at 10 p.m. on

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30 October 1993, the night of a full moon. Luckily the weather was clear across most of Australia that night, and the moon visible. As part of the programme Jaroslav Kovaricek encouraged listeners wherever they were to turn off their lights, open their curtains and windows, and let the moonlight and night sounds into their rooms, or if they were outside, to look up at the moon. Listeners were asked to do something in their listening environments to make actual moonlight part of the mix of music and poetry. As a participant, I can vouch that the effect was very successful – not only because of the beautiful transformation of my own living room by ‘moonsound’ and moonlight, but also by the thought of all those other listeners in those other environments experiencing the same moon in different ways. While listening might be solitary, radio transmission is communal and simultaneous, making it possible to link the poetry to events in the wider world. These events might be natural, seasonal, social or political. Radio is portable and ‘eyes and hands free’. Letters to PoeticA give evidence of listeners driving, gardening, jogging on the beach, cooking, and so on, while listening to poetry. A batterypowered radio can be taken into almost any environment. This presents opportunities for interactive poetic subject matter – for making the poem part of listener activity or listener activity part of the poem. Radio is mostly a round-the-clock, continuous distribution. Julian May of the BBC made use of this fact when he commissioned several poets to write a poem about a particular time of the day. The results were broadcast at the time of the day referred to in the poem during a twentyfour-hour cycle on the U.K.’s National Poetry Day. In effect, he converted the radio station on that day into a large ‘Book of Hours’. Poetry on radio sits within the wider context of the grammar and forms of radio networks – news, talkback, music shows, sports calls. It may imitate, link in with or parody and subvert these forms. I produced a feature on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, making the programme in the form of a sports panel, where Pessoa’s multiple heteronyms argued amongst each other like football commentators. Live radio performance poet Tug Dumbly has nicely co-opted the radio style of Australian horse-race callers in a work called Did the Mob Kill Marilyn and the poet Π Ο has produced an audio poem entitled Talkback Radio.1 Π Ο‘s poem uses the form and style of radio talkback with its telephone distortion, cut-offs, and leaps of subject matter. A kind of talkback has also been used for other

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forms of radio art such as Gregory Whitehead’s Pressures of the Unspeakable produced by Roz Cheney for The Listening Room in 1991 – though what was being collected and aired was not people’s opinions but their screams. Australian radio arts producers Tony MacGregor and Andrew McLennan have also asked listeners to telephone into the programmes, bringing their sounds live into productions. Radio is a disembodied medium, an absent presence. Though sound carried by radio enters into us, and we feel its presence, the source remains distant, almost abstract. What this means for radio as a medium for poetry or any audio art is a question worth asking, not simply ignoring. In 1997 PoeticA broadcast a work by the Newaural Net Collective which used the Internet to create a radio poem about ‘absent presence’. A poem whose subject was the Internet itself (its paradoxical connectivity and loneliness) was sent out to an Internet telephone site and people were asked to read back parts of the poem which were then recorded on line. Also recorded were comments and questions such as ‘I don’t understand what you want’, ‘I’m hanging up now’ and most poignantly ‘I don’t know any poetry’. In fact these moments seem more poetic to me than the original written poem. They were mixed together with various music sessions and sound recordings to create a new radio poem. This work, entitled Trans Global Express, has recently been published on CD.2 Now, with streaming via the Internet, a different sort of poetry transmission is possible which could increase listener involvement and extend the life of programmes. To date, PoeticA has not been streamed and has only used the web as an adjunct to the radio broadcasts – for information about past and upcoming programmes, as a site for down-loading audio from an interview with poets, and as an e-mail contact point. National Poetry Day, sponsored by the ABC, had its own website which was used for voting for Australia’s favourite poems (very useful information for us) and the building of a listenercreated poem. Resource and copyright issues have prevented PoeticA providing an on-line transcription service for its programmes. Future streaming via the Internet could be a simple matter of supplying listening on demand or it could involve transcriptions of the poems, links to additional material, perhaps a photo gallery of the poets – and then, why not moving images? Such a multimedia approach allows the listener (that term doesn’t seem to cover it any longer) much more access and control – but it is no longer simultaneous in the commu-

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nity, eye free, or portable. It is no longer the same beast as radio and requires a new set of production techniques. To return to poetry on radio as an ear/mind skill, a listening experience shaped by the producer and received by the listener, I conclude with a story of a wheat farmer in Western Australia who wrote to say that he was listening to a broadcast of the poems of Nazim Hikmet while harvesting. He liked the poems so much that he stopped work in the middle of the field to listen in silence. This image intrigues me: the farmer listening in a field of wheat, the poems and their performance heard by chance at an extreme distance from their source, via a portable transistor. The poetry stopping the machine. Who says poetry makes nothing happen?

Notes 1. Both these works may be found on the CD Going Down Swinging no.18, (eds) Adam Ford, Stephen Grimwade, alicia sometimes, GDS, 2000. ISSN 0157 3950, Tracks 25, 15. 2. In A Celebration of Australian Poetry 1901–2001 (ed.) Mike Ladd, ABC Audio 2001. ISBN 0 642 558078, CD 2 Track 21.

References Cory, M.E. (1992) ‘Soundplay: the polyphonous tradition of German radio art’, in Kahn, D. and Whitehead, G. (eds) Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant Garde, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Jandl, E. and Mayröcker, F. (1982) ‘Acceptance speech for the Hörspiel preis der Kriegsblinden’, trans. Derk Wynand, Stereo Headphones, 8, 9, 10.


CHAPTER 13 

A MEDIUM FOR MATESHIP: COMMERCIAL TALK RADIO IN AUSTRALIA Terry Flew

Talk radio in Australia: an institutional history Australia was one of the first countries in the world to develop talk radio (known in Australia as talkback radio), and its talk radio hosts are among the highest paid and most prominent media personalities in the country. Its most nationally prominent presenters, such as John Laws and Alan Jones, have audiences in the range of two to three million on a daily basis, and receive income in the form of salaries and sponsorship that totals at least $A1–2 million annually. Their capacity to influence public opinion is strongly respected by politicians on all sides, who frequently use their programmes to reach ‘ordinary Australians’. At the same time, they have been widely criticised for what is seen by critics as their blatant and irresponsible propagandising, rampant egotism, greed, self-serving promotion of commercial interests and their alleged breaking of industry codes of practice. Talk radio is an important yet often controversial and volatile component of the Australian mediascape. In order to understand the place of talk radio in the Australian media, there is a need to consider three historical developments in Australian media. First, there is the emergence of a dual system of commercial and public service

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broadcasters when Australian radio became popular in the 1930s. Radio was quickly taken up by the Australian population, with there being 1.3 million radio licences issued among a population of about 5 million at the time that the Second World War began in 1939. The stations that were a part of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (later to become the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) (ABC) and funded by licence fees were classified as the ‘A’ class stations, and the commercially funded stations were classified as the ‘B’ class stations. Lesley Johnson (1988) has traced the ways in which this institutional divide between two types of station manifested itself in different forms of identification by radio listeners with the ‘A’ or ‘B’ class stations, with assumptions about the degree of cultural capital associated with one type of station informing negative assessments of the audience for the other. Many ABC listeners, particularly in the capital cities, self-identified as ‘highbrow’ and viewed the medium as primarily an instrument of education and moral improvement, whereas commercial radio listeners were seen by these ABC audiences as ‘lowbrow’ in their tastes and, indeed, saw themselves as primarily looking to the radio medium for entertainment and distraction. While forms of talk radio exist today on ABC stations, particularly on the metropolitan and regional stations, the talkback format is primarily associated with commercial radio and is seen by many ABC listeners, and announcers, as basically corrupt and irresponsible. By contrast, commercial talkback listeners often see the brashness and controversial comments of the talkback hosts as an antidote to perceived ‘political correctness’ on the ABC. The second major historical development is the rise of television, and the ways in which this transforms commercial radio. Television broadcasts commenced in Australia in 1956 and, as with radio, Australians were early adopters of the new medium, with 80 percent of homes owning a television set by 1964 and 90 percent by 1973. As television became a popular mass medium, formats that had been popular, such as serial dramas and quiz shows, disappeared from commercial radio and became popular locally produced television programmes. As commercial radio adjusted to the rise of television, it moved from what Raymond Williams (1975: 86–96) termed a ‘segmented’ format towards a ‘flow’ format, where listeners increasingly identified with a station as an overall service rather than with its particular programmes. Two forms of ‘flow’ formatting dominated. One was music radio, as a num-

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ber of stations quickly became conduits for rock ’n’ roll music as it became popular with young people throughout Australia. The other was talk radio, which emerged after legislative changes in 1960 allowed the direct broadcast of material from the telephone, although it would not become a popular format until the 1970s. It is perhaps no coincidence that Australia’s most famous talk radio host, John Laws, began as a radio announcer on the Sydney radio station 2UE in 1956, the year that television commenced. For much of the 1960s, Laws was a music radio presenter, as were most of the popular radio announcers in the 1960s. It is in the early 1970s that Laws adopted the talk radio format, and became Australia’s most successful radio presenter. The final change of significance is the decision in 1980 to permit broadcasting on the FM radio band. New commercial FM stations such as the Triple M network adopted the Adult Contemporary format that had been central to FM radio in the United States in the 1970s and, with the more sophisticated audience targeting techniques of the FM stations, this saw the demise of ‘teen radio’ or ‘Top 40’ formats on the AM radio band. The result has been a marked age-based demarcation of radio audiences across the two radio bands. AGB McNair ratings figures for Brisbane have shown that 85 percent of radio listeners in the ten to seventeen and eighteen to twenty-four age demographics listen to one of the three FM stations (Triple M, B105, and Triple J, the ABC youth network), while 70 percent of those in the forty to fifty-four demographic and 95 percent of those in the fifty-five-plus demographic listen to AM radio stations. The audiences for the AM stations split between those who listen to music-based ‘Hits and Memories’ stations, ABC metropolitan and regional radio, and the commercial talk radio stations. The latter group includes 2UE and 2GB in Sydney, 3AW in Melbourne, 4BC in Brisbane, 5AA in Adelaide and 6PR in Perth. Of these, the most prominent are 2GB and 2UE, as their leading talk radio presenters such as Alan Jones and John Laws have their programmes nationally networked, with the John Laws Show being received by seventy-seven radio stations throughout Australia in 1999, to a potential listening audience of ten million people, or over half of the Australian population (Australian Broadcasting Authority 2000).

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The influence of talk radio ‘Forget the Press Gallery. If you educate John Laws, you educate Australia.’ (Paul Keating, quoted in Adams and Burton 1997: 2.)

The above quotation from former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating is indicative of a consensus that emerged among political leaders in Australia in the 1990s, that talk radio had become the most important medium for reaching ‘ordinary Australians’. Indeed, Keating’s championing of talk radio may be ironic, as the influence of the medium as an outlet for ‘ordinary Australians’ to express their concerns with the Keating government was seen as a significant factor in Labour’s landslide electoral defeat by the conservative parties in 1996. On an ABC Lateline programme in 1998, Liberal party strategist Michael Kroger credited the subsequent re-election of the Coalition government led by John Howard to the influence of the Alan Jones breakfast talkback show. This was on the basis of his reach and influence in the so-called ‘battler’ electorates of Western Sydney, which during the 1990s elected Federal Liberal MPs for the first time ever. The influence of talk radio on Australian politics can be best understood through a two-track analysis of media influence. In their study of media influence for the Australian Broadcasting Authority, Mark Pearson and Jeffrey Brand (2001) found that the most significant influences upon ‘official’ opinion and debate were national broadsheets such as The Australian, the AM programme on ABC radio, ABC TV programmes such as The 7.30 Report and Lateline, and the Sunday programme on Channel Nine. This was, however, paralleled by the influence of more ‘popular’ media, such as the Sydney tabloid newspaper The Daily Telegraph, early evening commercial current affairs programmes such as A Current Affair, the 60 Minutes programme on Nine on Sunday nights, and talk radio hosts, most notably the widely syndicated announcers Alan Jones and John Laws. The influence of the talk radio hosts stemmed from the perception that they were ‘a litmus test of community opinion’ which key decision-makers and other media monitored ‘to ensure they were not out of touch with the views of ordinary Australians’ (Pearson and Brand 2001: 97). The capacity of talk radio hosts to have influence arises in part from specific features of the programmes as well as aspects of the radio medium. The ‘voice’ of the talk radio host

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is a commonly remarked upon element of their influence. John Laws is sometimes referred to as the ‘Golden Tonsils’, and his voice is a deeply resonant one that conveys a certain authority and belief in what he is saying. Alan Jones is a former Oxford scholar, one-time adviser to former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, former national rugby coach and a highly paid motivational speaker, and his opinion is widely respected by his audience because on the basis of his prior education he is seen as knowledgeable about his subject-matter. More generally, the voice of commercial talk radio in Australia is: • • •

Overwhelmingly male; Authoritative in its presentation of issues and opinions; Often highly opinionated, with listeners encouraged to share the announcer’s opinions, which are – paradoxically – often presented as being unpopular with influential ‘others’ in the community; • Certain in its morality and judgement – topics where the announcer has a sense of moral ambiguity tend to be avoided; • Familiar with its audience; • Often intimate with its audience, as a way of bonding with the listeners on the basis of shared concerns; • Populist in tone. The talk radio host characteristically presents himself as providing a form of collective voice to the listeners, who are presented as feeling remote and excluded from official decision-making channels, and he also seems able to make things happen on behalf of his listeners. In the recent ABA report on media influence, Alan Jones described his influence as a talk radio announcer in these terms: The roadblocks are up for a lot of people, the bureaucracy is very impenetrable, parliamentarians sometimes yield painfully to change, and people feel as though they can come to me because I can actually exercise beneficial clout. Not power, not for its own sake, but power in the pursuit of a legitimate end and that happens. (Pearson and Brand 2001: 125)

An illustration of the persuasive techniques employed by Australian talk radio announcers in their presentation of issues can be seen in the following excerpt from the John Laws

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Show on 16 March, 1998, where Laws is endorsing Prime Minister John Howard’s intention to fully privatise Telstra, the telecommunications provider in which the public had a majority holding: I don’t think there’s much doubt about it. John Howard has pulled off the political coup of the decade, or maybe the past five decades, by electing to sell the rest of Telstra after the next election. He hinted this would happen when he and I talked on this radio programme some weeks back, not too many weeks back. That election will now undoubtedly be held before the end of the year. You can start betting on it. The merits of the Telstra sale will be debated for months and months and months, but it’s the political strategy which really counts. And it’s a very, very clever piece of political strategy. In one fell swoop, John Howard has locked the Labour Party and the Democrats into opposing the sale, and all the goodies which flow from that 45 billion dollars the sale will raise. The first casualty of the Howard decision, of course, will be Labour’s secret theme for the next election, which they deny being in place, but it is. New Labour is the tag successfully used by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Bit hard to sell a new look Labour Party when a plank of its election platform is to retain the status quo and leave things as they are, and keep Telstra. Hardly a new look, is it? In fact Labour’s going to find it hard to sell anything in the run-up to this election campaign. Armed with a potential $45 billion war chest, the Prime Minister will be able to offer unprecedented change to things like our national debt, for example, the health system, nursing homes. Think of a problem and John Howard can now credibly say that he can fix it. Simple as that. It’s true.

The use of repetition, rhetorical questions, colloquial language (‘all the goodies’), a certain knowingness about how things ‘really work’, self-referencing to how key political announcements are made on his programme (‘he hinted that this would happen when he and I talked on this radio programme’), and conclusions pointing to the self-evidence of his own observations (‘Simple as that. Its true’), are all standard elements of the rhetoric of persuasion that is central to Laws’s success as a talk radio host. Part of the influence of talk radio arises from three features of the medium. First, talk radio endorses Marshall McLuhan’s (1964: 297–307) observation

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that radio is a ‘hot’ medium as it concentrates upon a single sense, meaning that delivery of the message can be more focused and sustained than is the case in television, particularly when it involves the comments of a single person over a long period of time. Second, the radio audience is more selfselecting than that of television; people tend to identify their preferred station or announcer, and stay with them over time rather than moving across channels in the manner that television audiences more typically do. It is also more self-selecting in the sense that people who disagree with an announcer’s set of opinions are unlikely to remain regular listeners to that programme. Jo Tacchi’s observation that radio is ‘emotionally evocative and reassuring’ to its listeners is relevant here (Tacchi 2000: 291). Finally, listeners to talk radio, and to radio generally, are more likely to listen in an environment where they are by themselves – in a car, at work, or when other members of the house are out – than is the case for television. Radio has by far its largest audiences at those times of the day – early-to-mid morning and mid-afternoon – when television viewing is at its lowest.

A medium for mateship Mateship is the most enduring motif of Australian nationalism. In 1999, when Australian talk radio hosts were accused of providing favourable editorial comment in exchange for corporate sponsorship in the ‘cash-for-comment’ inquiry (discussed below), there was also a concurrent debate about whether the word ‘mateship’ should appear in the Australian Constitution. A Draft Preamble to the Constitution, prepared for Prime Minister John Howard by poet Les Murray in the lead-up to the referendum on whether Australia should become a republic, proposed using the term. This sharply polarised opinion in the community on the extent to which the term was inclusive or exclusive, particularly of women, migrants, those of non-Anglo backgrounds, and indigenous Australians. While mateship is utilised by the conservative political forces as a binding category, its natural home in Australian politics is arguably in the dominant Sydney-based right-wing faction of the Australian Labour Party, whose leading figures are seen as part of a tightly-knit fraternal bond of ‘mates’ of Irish Catholic background. Mateship is an inescapable element of the Australian media discourse, being

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used everywhere from televised sports broadcasts to gay male porn videos, where use of the term ‘mate’ can appear in the most intimate and unlikely moments (McKee 1999). The concept of mateship is central to understanding the popularity of Australian talk radio hosts. John Laws in particular regularly refers to his mates, and how they come from all sections of Australian society, and his mates often reciprocate. As Laws faced allegations of misuse of his authority as an announcer during the cash-for-comment inquiry, the popular Australian country music singer Slim Dusty declared on the programme that ‘If things are going a little bit wrong you know where your mates are’ (Meade 1999: 6). Slim Dusty is himself something of an iconic figure in the pantheon of Australian mateship, having recorded a very popular song called ‘Duncan’ in 1982, where the singer declared ‘I love to have a beer with Duncan, ‘cos Duncan’s me mate’. The significance of mateship and its theme of a common bond between talk radio hosts and their listeners, based not simply upon shared ideas and values but upon a ‘common culture’ grounded in the ethos of mateship, differentiates Australian talk radio hosts from U.S. talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. The affinity of audiences with talk radio hosts has rested less upon a common ideology or political position – although this can be promoted – than upon a more deeply rooted set of allegiances, grounded in the popular vernacular of the announcers and their ability to listen to the concerns of ‘ordinary Australians’, that the most successful Australian talk radio hosts have cultivated very effectively.

Talk radio, populism, ‘tabloidisation’ and audiences ‘I guess the philosophy of the program is that I probably try to entertain – and inform second.’ (Stan Zemanek, 2UE evening talk radio host, quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 1997.)

Australian talk radio is, for its critics, a form of stage-managed populism. While talkback radio provides the experience of an extended conversation between the hosts and their listeners, to which all other listeners can choose to participate, the reality is that of a highly managed form of participation. The hosts and their producers have the ability to reward ‘favourable’ callers (often with gifts of their sponsor’s products), disadvantage ‘hos-

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tile’ callers, select calls, order calls, interrupt callers, and cut off ‘hostile’ callers, through what is known as ‘the dump’, which is often followed by derogatory comments from the announcer after the caller is cut off the airwaves. The bond between announcers and their listeners can be seen as based upon a form of populism that can, following Ernesto Laclau (1977: 158–71) be typified by: its construction of a ‘we/they’ distinction between the objects of the announcer’s criticism and their audience of ‘ordinary Australians’; its presentation of simple answers to complex problems (e.g. stop immigration to reduce unemployment); its protest ideology, where powerless masses are seen as subject to a powerful few; its linkage to deeplyrooted national traditions, such as the Australian idea of mateship and a ‘fair go’ to all regardless of background; its moralistic, emotional and anti-intellectual form of speech; and its reliance upon strong leaders to ‘solve things’ by whatever means necessary. In their study of Australian talkback radio, Philip Adams and Lee Burton have argued that such populism is essentially cynical and manipulative of its audience: Talkback radio is the nadir of Australian media. It is characterised by sleaze and hypocrisy, by bombast and bigotry, by cynical populism and feigned rage. And all the megalomania and moral panics are in the interests of station revenue. To legitimize, or attempt to legitimize this relentless rapacity, claims are made to the high ideals of demos. We are hearing, we are told, ‘the voice of the people’. Talkback radio is simply reflecting their views. The politicians buy it, the advertisers buy it, and the people, deaf to alternatives, buy it. (Adams and Burton, 1997: 26)

Concerns about the populist aspect of talk radio and its consequences came under considerable scrutiny in Australia in the 1990s, with the election of Pauline Hanson as an independent MP in 1996, and the subsequent rise of the One Nation party, which attracted 23 percent of the vote in Queensland in the May 1998 state election. Many of the central political proposals of Pauline Hanson and One Nation – opposition to further immigration, hostility to multiculturalism, opposition to Aboriginal land rights and government funding for Aboriginal people and organisations, opposition to foreign investment, and the belief that ‘equality’ meant non-recognition of racial and ethnic differences in public programmes – had been well-rehearsed themes of talkback radio throughout the 1990s.

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Moreover, Pauline Hanson’s particular mode of address through the media, characterised by Catharine Lumby as presenting a figure ‘whose humanity is only underscored by her halting dentist’s-drill voice and her challenged vocabulary’ (Lumby 1999: 234), shared characteristics of the populist voice of talk radio. Many talk radio hosts openly supported Pauline Hanson and One Nation. Bob Francis on Radio 5AA Adelaide described himself as being ‘85 percent in agreement’ with Pauline Hanson’s views (Adams and Burton, 1997: 199), while Howard Sattler, on 6PR Perth, hosted her controversial public meetings in Perth in 1997. Most notably, Alan Jones promoted Hanson after her maiden speech to Federal Parliament, and on that day received thirty-seven thousand phone calls from his listeners supporting her views. The critique of talk radio articulated by Adams and Burton, among others, has recognisable parallels in the critiques of ‘tabloidisation’ as a regressive trend in popular media. Critics of tabloidisation fear that it is ‘considered to sacrifice information for entertainment, accuracy for sensation, and to employ tactics of representation which entrap and exploit its subjects’ (Turner 1999: 60). Talk radio is related to the declining commitment of Australian commercial radio to independent newsgathering in the 1980s and 1990s, as concentration of ownership and the networking of radio programming have meant that news bulletins on commercial radio are largely sourced from news services such as Australian Associated Press (AAP), newspapers or the ABC (Turner 1996). A consequence is that the most influential talk radio announcers, such as Alan Jones and John Laws, have come to see their programmes as driving the station’s news material rather than the other way around, because it is on their programmes that political leaders and other influential public figures are going to give exclusive information. Turner notes that ‘tabloidisation’ concerns both conservative critics of popular culture and those on the political left who deplore the commercialisation of public life and the decline in public service media and their potential role in constituting a ‘public sphere’ founded upon rational debate. Philip Adams in many ways exemplifies the latter position in Australian public life. Adams has been an influential figure in both cultural policy and cultural commentary in Australia for over thirty years, and has been for many years the host of the Late Night Live programme on ABC Radio National. For political conservatives, Adams is an emblematic figure of the ‘left’

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and ‘political correctness’ within the ABC, to the point that former Managing Director of the ABC, Jonathan Shier, was at one stage seeking a ‘right-wing Philip Adams’ to ‘balance’ political commentary on Radio National. Adams is also a recurrent critic of commercialism in Australian public life, American culture and, not surprisingly, commercial talk radio. Adams’s criticism of talk radio as ‘cynical populism’ that only reflects the views of the people who are apparently ‘deaf to alternatives’ has a strong resonance in what Turner describes as ‘a conventional and long-standing hostility to popular culture itself’ (Turner 1999: 63). Such binarisms have been critiqued in the academic literature of cultural studies. John Hartley’s Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture (Hartley 1996) presents perhaps the most sustained challenge to binarisms between information and entertainment, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ news, substance and style, culture and consumerism, and public service media versus commercial media. Hartley argues that while such distinctions ‘may well have a long history as “common sense” in the media industry and among policy-makers, academics and listeners to breakfast radio’, this ‘doesn’t make them any less prejudicial as a mental map of modern media’ (Hartley 1996: 27). Hartley argues that, in relation to journalism, this is itself an ideology that reinforces rather than challenges the claim that ‘public service people value their work but not their readers, while commercial people value their ratings but not their writings’ (Hartley 1996: 28). Commercial talk radio inserts itself into these debates in an interesting way. It can provide the ‘emotionally evocative and reassuring’ elements that listeners frequently seek from radio (Tacchi 2000: 291), but the question is whether it does so through reproducing we/they binaries between its listeners and some of the most marginalised and disenfranchised elements of Australian society (Flew 1998). The obvious case in point with Australian commercial talk radio is the frequent attacks on Aboriginal people and organisations. An excerpt from the Stan Zemanek evening talk radio programme on Radio 2UE from 16 March 1998 provides a clear illustration of how this can work. The National Audit Office is doing its job. They have found that the Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Commission [ATSIC] has failed to provide adequate documentation to explain its spending of taxpayers’ funds.

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The National Audit Office has also questioned the administration of associated Aboriginal organisations, such as Aboriginal Hostels Ltd. and the Torres Strait Regional Authority. They found that ATSIC had not improved the level of compliance with procedures for explaining and spending of a government grant. This was also found for many other groups who received grants as well. Well … we’ve heard all this before, haven’t we? We really have. And it’s time for the Government to introduce systems which are common to all organisations who receive government grants. And if the organisations don’t keep track of what they spend, and how they spend it, grants get cut. That would force them to stick to the rules. And as a matter of fact, I’m a great believer [pause] there’s been so much wasted money on these government grants to Aboriginal organisations, because of incompetence and stupidity with the people who’ve managed the funds, and something really has to be done about it. Something really has to be done about it. Because money has been squandered, left, right and centre. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s the Aboriginal community, whether it’s the Italian community or the Greek community, or wherever it is. If money is being squandered, it is being misspent, if organisations are being run by incompetent fools, then the Government has a right to step in and say ‘Listen, enough is enough. We’ll put in professional managers into your organisation’. And, if need be, for argument’s sake, with the Aboriginal community, if they don’t have the expertise, then the Government should turn around and say ‘OK, we will give you the education and the training needed to run these organisations’. You know, it is stupid to put anybody, it doesn’t matter what colour they are, it is stupid to put anybody in control of any organisation where they don’t have any experience. Anyway, what do you think of this? Give us a call on 13 13 32.

It would be a bold listener who rang Stan Zemanek’s show to defend ATSIC after this introduction. It should be noted, however, that anxieties about such commentary are not exclusively the preserve of intellectual elites or the political left. The study commissioned by the ABA into media influence found that audiences surveyed found commercial radio to be the last credible media source of news and current affairs (Pearson and Brand 2001: 353), and talk radio announcers themselves, most notably John Laws, have publicly expressed anxieties

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about the influence of their medium on the rise of racist attitudes in Australian society in the late 1990s. Gil Appleton (1999: 83–6) notes that many of the condemnations of talkback pay little attention to its audience, and why these announcers attract such a large and loyal audience that is highly valued by advertisers. Talk radio has clear appeal to certain demographics, both in Australia and overseas, notably among those over fifty, manual workers and the self-employed, and those who have above-average incomes and hold to ‘traditional values about home, work and society’ (Appleton 1999: 85; see also Bennett, Emmison and Frow 1999). An ABA study of radio listeners quoted by Appleton (1999: 86) found that talk radio met many of the criteria that those listeners who were surveyed identified as the most valued attributes of radio: • • • • •

its ability to provide company; the immediate nature of the information it provides; the sense that it keeps people in touch with the views and opinions of others; its entertainment value; the sense of belonging it gives to listeners.

Appleton is critical of those who assume that Laws’s listeners are ‘mindless dupes’. Instead, she draws upon uses and gratifications analysis to argue that Laws has established a strong bond between his programmes and information that his audience seeks. While agreeing with Adams and Burton that what Laws offers his listeners is ‘reassurance and certainty’, and that ‘he has strong and entrenched views; he brooks little opposition … [and] he helps people to know what to think about the important issues of the day’, she argues that his power is not so much to influence but to ‘confirm, in many instances, listeners’ existing views, and the interaction between Laws and his listeners encourages this’ (Appleton 1999: 87). Appleton also observed that the Laws programme frequently delivers solutions to problems raised by its callers, particularly around consumer complaints. For Appleton this appears to ‘reinforce the listener’s view of Laws as someone who gets things done, a comforting and powerful presence in a world of confusion, deception and exploitation of ordinary people and “battlers”’ (Appleton 1999: 90).

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‘Cash-for-comment’: talk radio, commercialism and regulation On 12 July 1999, the ABC television programme Media Watch alleged that John Laws had made a deal with the Australian Bankers Association, worth $1.2 million, to cease criticising Australian banks on his programme and to run an advertising segment on his programme, called The Whole Truth, that would comment favourably upon the banking industry. In developing the agreement a confidential memorandum produced by the Australian Banking Association described one of its objectives in funding Laws’s programme as being ‘to shift Australians’ perceptions of, and attitudes towards, banks’. The Australian Broadcasting Authority announced its intention to investigate the deal and other arrangements that Laws had made with his many sponsors. The ABA inquiry was extended to include investigations into financial arrangements made by 2UE’s breakfast announcer Alan Jones, most notably about his $2.6 million agreement with telecommunications provider Optus. The ABA investigated these deals on the grounds that they breached requirements under the Broadcasting Services Act (1992) that broadcasters are required to ‘encourage providers of commercial broadcasting services to be responsive to the need for fair and accurate coverage of matters of public interest’. More significantly, it was argued that such activities contravened the Commercial Radio Code of Practice, administered by the Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters, particularly clauses which require that advertisements broadcast by a licensee must not be presented as news programmes or other programmes. In its inquiry, known as the ‘cash-for-comment’ inquiry, the ABA found that radio station 2UE, on which Laws and Jones broadcast, had committed five breaches of the Broadcasting Services Act concerning the broadcast of political matter, sixty breaches of the Commercial Radio Code of Practice concerning accuracy and fairness in news and current affairs programmes, and thirty breaches of the Commercial Radio Code of Practice concerning the requirement not to present advertisements as news or other programmes. The ABA required that in order to continue to hold a commercial radio licence 2UE must ensure that presenters disclose their commercial arrangements when matters relating to that company were discussed on air, and that advertisements broadcast by the licensee be presented in a way that enabled a reasonable

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listener to distinguish such advertisements from other programme material (Australian Broadcasting Authority 2000). The cash-for-comment inquiry drew attention to two particularly important aspects of Australian commercial talk radio. First, there was the question of whether these presenters were considered to be primarily entertainers or providers of information. John Laws was under no doubt where he stood on the entertainer-information ledger: I find it quite extraordinary that you people are so amazed that an individual like me should use a little entrepreneurial skill and go out and make some money. … If I have been given an ability that I can market successfully, then I have every intention of doing it … I’m an entertainer, there isn’t a hook for ethics. (Quoted in Toohey 1999: 45)

The second issue is the extent to which the lines between entertainment, information provision, commentary, and advertisement had become blurred on commercial talk radio programmes. The high salaries and lucrative commercial endorsements received by talk radio announcers such as Laws and Jones have rested upon the seamlessness of their capacity to move from news commentary to commercial endorsement, and their ability to bring the same plausible voice to all of these tasks. The line of demarcation that was of relevance to the ABA’s cash-for-comment inquiry was the extent to which deliberate commercial endorsement (which, it could be argued, is an entrepreneurial skill of the announcers and the basis of their professional livelihoods) had led to distortions in the presentation of information in ways that misled the public on matters of importance. In other words, is there a difference between an announcer such as John Laws declaring that Valvoline is the best motor oil or Toyotas are the best motor cars, and his defence of banks from criticism on the grounds that critics do not understand ‘the whole story’? The distinction, I believe, is twofold. First, there are real public policy issues that arise from the latter use of public means of communication to endorse a particular point of view and persuade the public to think likewise. Second, the Australian Bankers Association consciously invested in Laws’s opinion on the grounds that he had been an effective critic of banks with the wider community, and that neutralisation of these criticisms was an important strategic objective of the sector. In this respect, the issues raised by cash-for-comment are similar to

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issues that have existed since the ‘Payola’ scandals in American commercial radio in the late 1950s, where money is consciously used by commercial agencies, not only to support some opinions but to suppress others, without any form of public disclosure that could provide relevant information to the listening public. To some extent the cash-for-comment inquiry also put the Australian Broadcasting Authority in the dock. During the 1990s it had implemented a policy of co-regulation, whereby representative industry bodies such as the Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters (FARB) developed industry codes of practice in consultation with the ABA and then undertook responsibility for their administration. The ABA claimed that co-regulation was a success because at the same time as reducing the cost of handling complaints it required the industry to ‘own’ the process of dealing with them. But as early as 1994, programmes like Media Watch had complained – to no avail – about broadcasters such as Alan Jones acting as mouthpieces for their corporate sponsors in ostensibly editorial comment. The cash-for-comment issue threw the ABA’s claim into serious doubt. The perceived inadequacy of the sanctions imposed upon radio station 2UE, and the subsequent on-air mocking of the disclosure requirements by Laws and Jones, contributed to a sense that these highly-paid and well-connected broadcasters had in effect got away with recurrent breaches of their own industry codes of practice. The development of commercial talk radio in Australia draws attention to areas of continuity and change, both in the uses of the radio medium and in Australian society. Its hosts frequently pitch to the virtues of an ‘older’ Australia that was more comfortable to their understood audience of ‘ordinary Australians’, yet they are in many ways at the vanguard of developing radio as a cross-promotional commercial instrument. Its institutional history arises out of recurring processes of adaptation to newer media forms, such as television, FM radio and, increasingly, the Internet. For policy-makers the challenges presented by commercial talk radio revolve around not only balancing free speech concerns with those of social responsibility and preventing the vilification of minorities, but also ascertaining the actual degree of influence of the presenters themselves and the extent to which responsible industry self-regulation is an adequate mechanism for public redress. Its audiences also remain poorly understood, not least because the ways in which leading announcers use the medium imply a certain audience

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that is older, conservative, Anglo-Australian, likely to be seduced by irresponsible populism, and anachronistically attached to cultural shibboleths of ‘mateship’ (Turner 2001). Whether this is indeed the audience of commercial talk radio and what actual uses it makes of the programmes stand out as issues requiring further research, particularly as the rise of talk radio has overturned a prior orthodoxy that radio was becoming a less influential medium over time.

References Adams, P. and Burton, L. (1997) Talkback: Emperors of Air, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Appleton, G. (1999) ‘The lure of Laws: an analysis of the audience appeal of the John Laws program’, Media International Australia, 91. Australian Broadcasting Authority (2000) Commercial Radio Inquiry: Report of the Australian Broadcasting Authority Hearing into Radio 2UE, Sydney: Sydney Pty Limited, February. Bennett, T., Emmison, M. and Frow, J. (1999) Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Culture, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Flew, T. (1998), ‘No more “critical outsiders”: media studies and journalism after popular reality’, The UTS Review, 4. Hartley, J. (1996) Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture, London: Routledge. Johnson, L. (1988) The Unseen Voice: A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio, London: Routledge, 1988. Laclau, E. (1977) Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, London: Verso. Lumby, C. (1999) Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Meade, A. (1999) ‘Lawsie awash with waves of sentiment’, The Australian, 13 July. McKee, A. (1999) ‘Australian gay porn videos: the national identity of despised cultural objects’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: Mentor Books. Pearson, M. and Brand, J. (2001) Sources of News and Current Affairs, Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Authority. Tacchi, J. (2000) ‘The need for radio theory in the digital age’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 3. Toohey, B. (1999) ‘Laws case opens a can of worms’, The Sun-Herald, 18 July. Turner, G. (1996) ‘Maintaining the news’, Culture and Policy, 7.

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—- (1999) ‘Tabloidisation, journalism and the possibility of critique’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2. —- (2001) ‘Reshaping Australian institutions: popular culture, the market and the public sphere’ in Bennett, T. and Carter, D. (eds) Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programmes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, R. (1975) Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Fontana.


CHAPTER 14 

FIRESIDE ISSUES: AUDIENCE, LISTENER, SOUNDSCAPE Frances Gray

Bells and other voices A peasant listens to the Angelus in medieval France. Her world is constructed by sound. Church bells tell you who you are. Their limits of audibility define your territory. They express your history and that of your neighbours, ringing to indicate your birth and baptism, your death agony and burial. They begin and end your working day, they tell you that the harvest is in, that the tax collector has arrived, that the king has been crowned; they order you to church, point out that you are late, move you from work into the stillness of prayer or the relief of festival. The complex code of the bells within your community is highly specific to it and demands that you become the repository of a detailed knowledge; without it you cannot make the single, correct response demanded of you at any one moment by the ringing across the fields. The bells construct time as a rhythm, governed not by clocks but by the seasons, whether those of the earth or those of the church year. The path of the sound waves transforms geographical space into what Alain Corbin resonantly dubs ‘sacred space’ (Corbin 1999: xi) in which social and personal identity is constructed and nurtured. A little girl is lost in the woods at the end of the twentieth century. She is cut off from the competing secular noises which

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have replaced the bells; she has one contact with human society, and that is her Walkman. As a travelling French peasant might register a change of parish by the varying peals, Trisha, the heroine of Stephen King’s novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, can chart the distance she has walked by the need to shift frequency in order to listen to Red Sox games. To interpret these she too needs a knowledge of aural codes, one which enables her to visualise the subtleties of the baseball action described by the sportscaster. But she has another kind of aural skill. She not only interprets the broadcast games, she is able to hold conversations with her idol, the pitcher Tom Gordon, and these cover far more than baseball. Tom Gordon becomes ‘her fulltime companion, not pretend, but accepted as real.’ (King 1999: 166) who helps her through the ordeal with advice and support. ‘Tom’ is of course a symbolic figure through which Trisha’s own knowledge and experience, sufficient to ensure survival, are marshalled and channelled in a way psychically acceptable to her, and Stephen King’s story is a tribute to the practical value of the human imagination. Tom is not, however, an arbitrary construct but one with very specific origins. Trisha is unable to get comfort from the tapes she also carries even though her favourite band is as important to her as the Red Sox. ‘Tom’ is a product of Trisha’s relationship not just with baseball or with a sports hero but with broadcasting; his presence depends upon the fact of transmission even though his guidance bears no relationship to what is being transmitted.

The art of listening Trisha and the French peasant praying at the instigation of the Angelus are both listeners. At first sight, however, they appear to have completely different conceptions of listening. While the latter receives unambiguous information transmitted in a codified space, the former selects it from a series of competing aural discourses and then transforms it. But it is not as simple as that. In 1431 Jeanne D’Arc debated the church bell code with a priest, Peter Maurice. She explained to him that angelic voices came to her when the bells rang at Compline. Maurice, humanely searching for a way in which she could back down from a position that would lead to a conviction for heresy, suggested church bells ‘often sound in men’s ears like human voices’ (Lovill 2000: 192). Jeanne refused to

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accept the compromise in that word ‘like’, insisting that the voices were ‘real’ and that their orders took priority over the hegemony. Neither Jeanne nor Maurice, however, seemed to consider it unusual or impermissible to make creative use of the bells; they assumed that the ringing constituted more than codified orders, and that its interpretation might involve highly individual responses. On the other hand, Trisha’s freewheeling imagination does not have unlimited liberty to improvise her construction of Tom Gordon as magic helper. For example, she is unable converse with him when the ‘real’ Tom is playing baseball, even if the game is being broadcast on a frequency inaccessible to her. One might argue that Tom Gordon and the angel voices needed no special source: had Jeanne lived in a village without a bell tower she might have heard voices in the wind, had Trisha been imagined by a writer not a baseball fan (with his own radio station) she might have found her magic helper in a forest bird. But they might more credibly be seen as figures captivated by the interpretative and creative potential of a soundscape. Both bells and broadcasting have at times found themselves on the wrong side of the law. The continuing existence of a soundscape, a space perhaps not ‘sacred’ in a purely religious sense, but which offers aural opportunities to construct meaning, is something for which people have been willing to fight with their lives. Alain Corbin’s history Village Bells narrates a process of resistance to laws designed to secularize postrevolutionary France by silencing the bells: at the dawn of the nineteenth century the Pyrenees resounded with bells rung in what one frustrated Mayor described as ‘an altogether brazen, insolent and scandalous fashion’ (Corbin 1999: 33). The image of people in the occupied territories clustered round forbidden radio sets is one of the most moving of the Second World War. For what is at stake in a soundscape is not simply the transmission of information but a relationship with space and time. The defiant ringing of the bells proclaimed a reluctance to enter a rapidly industrialising world dominated by clocks which defined your time in terms of the labour you sold in order to survive – that is, time in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. Radio certainly partakes of quantitative time, and the Greenwich pips ensure that factory clocks can calculate the price of labour down to the last penny. However, it also offers something else: the risks taken over those illicit receivers, those forbidden stations, were not simply to hear information about the war, vital as this might be. Sometimes the point was

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to allow the knowledge of war to be held in abeyance. Anne Frank records periods of listening as pools of peace in the midst of the quarrelsome stresses of confinement (Frank 1995: 125). Her household was even prepared to tune in to German stations to hear classical music. It is evident too that listening to forbidden stations is done for listening’s sake. To listen is to assert the possibility that time and space can be owned in a different way, that even if the air could be co-opted to serve particular military or industrial ends the soundscape may not be precisely equated with occupied geographical territory. Corbin’s study of village bells is elegiac, asserting the impossibility of reconstructing their ‘auditory patrimony … an index to a deeper mode of existence’ (Corbin 1999: xii). However, by beginning this article with two characters as disparate in space and time as Trisha and Jeanne I hope to suggest that a soundscape need not depend on bells or any specific aural medium; rather, it depends on the continuing existence of a listener, a figure who hears and – consciously or not – chooses to become a point of intersection, to be the site on which information meets imagination. As Trisha and Jeanne make clear, radio drama is not the only point where this is possible; but it is precisely what radio drama is designed for.

Towards an anthropology of radio Radio has always been a neglected medium; however – especially in the last thirty years – scholarship has provided it with a history, a sociology, a rapidly developing body of theory and a wealth of aesthetic criticism. What it lacks, I would suggest, is an anthropology. The discipline of theatre anthropology already has a body dedicated to its development, ISTA, founded by Eugenio Barba in 1979. Its field of study is ‘the preexpressive scenic behaviour upon which different genres, styles, roles and personal or collective traditions are all based … it does not attempt to blend, accumulate or catalogue the performer’s techniques. It seeks the elementary: the technique of techniques’ (Barba 1995: 9–10). I am not suggesting that I can begin here to formulate what such a study might mean in radio terms. However, it may be possible to clear some ground. For what is immediately apparent is that the initial point of departure must be different: while radio draws on the talents and insights of performers and scholars of performance, an anthropology so solidly

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rooted in the performer as its starting point for what Barba calls ‘learning to learn’ cannot be easily appropriated. The pre-expressive presupposes a performer’s body which needs only the cooperation of the spectator to make possible the indefinable but always identifiable moment of authentic theatrical communication. The body of the radio actor is not like that. An unspeaking body on stage can be charged with possibility, on radio it is invisible. It is likely that it will not be ‘live’. It may in extreme cases be not only invisible and in recorded form but have no existence. Andrew Sachs’s play The Revenge (1978), consisting entirely of sound effects, is celebrated for the novelty of wordlessness – but it is also actorless, the body of the protagonist inhering solely in noises made by a team of technicians with boxes of gravel, doors and other spot effects to give the illusion of footsteps or fighting. Barba points out that ‘the theatre’s raw material is not the actor, nor the space, nor the text, but the attention, the seeing, the hearing, the mind of the spectator’ (Barba 1995: 39) and while the actor in the theatre is uniquely equipped to empower the spectator, the conditions of radio shift the balance of the relationship. It is the task of the figure in the soundscape to tune in to the disembodied voice and embody it and its environment, and that of the seeker for the ‘technique of techniques’ to focus upon the skills brought to bear in the act of listening in the soundscape. An implicit acknowledgement of this in broadcasting is evident from the existence of two distinct terms: listener and audience. Virtually all diagrams, flow charts and training manuals produced within the BBC to explain itself to itself once contained as the focal point a seated stick figure in a frame with a box symbolizing a radio. The figure of ‘the listener’ gave its name to the BBC flagship magazine which discussed broadcasting in a wide context of arts debate and criticism. The listener (as I was given to understand as a BBC trainee) was the one to whom we were all accountable. ‘Listener’, then, might be seen as the equivalent of Barba’s ‘spectator’. His use of the singular is, however, misleading. Most theatre anthropology assumes that the sharing of response – Aristotelian catharsis or Brechtian enlightenment or just laughter at a piece of slapstick – is vital. While the spectator may be individually discriminating, he or she is also subsumed into audience and some of the responses that he or she will make will depend upon this.

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Broadcasting has sometimes assumed the existence of an ‘audience’ in this sense. When the valve wireless replaced the crystal set it became the focal point for group listening in the home; what were called ‘fireside issues’ of the Radio Times assumed a family audience sharing the same radio experience in the same room. And yet, even in those pre-transistor homes, the ‘audience’ might fragment, children playing as topics passed over their heads, adults settling down to relax or coming and going in the course of household chores. And there were other kinds of listening with less potential for an engaging Radio Times cover illustration: those respectable but sad figures in lonely bedsitters hymned by Larkin and Betjeman, the old, the bedridden. Only, perhaps, for news and for live broadcasts which offered a chance of vicarious participation – a coronation, say – could broadcasters be confident of an ‘audience’ gathered specifically to listen as a community. Nonetheless, before television largely superseded radio as the chief source of home entertainment, there was a body of people expressing a collective response to popular radio theatre with as much pleasure and energy as a group in the stalls at the fall of the curtain. The difference was that it actually constituted itself after the broadcast. In the 1940s and 1950s series such as ITMA or Dick Barton arguably achieved true collective response when discussed the next day in the workplace, or when their catchphrases or distinctive voices passed into common currency. The willing entry into a radio fiction by the individual was, even in its so-called golden age, the key moment in the communication process, the one thing needful to prompt the listener to metamorphose the next day into part of a responding and discussing ‘audience’. The advent of the portable radio, the cassette recorder and the car stereo only confirmed rather than altered the nature of that key moment.

From audience to listeners – and back again Awareness of the listener in broadcasting organisations has, however, been partially swamped since the Thatcher revolution: many of what used to be understood as public services have been redefined as industries whose success must be judged according to their productivity. The police deliver arrests, schools deliver examination passes. When broadcasting organisations speak of ‘audiences’ they are referring not to groups sitting around the fireside or discussing programmes

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the next day but to something that quantifiable networks are expected to ‘deliver’. Denis McQuail has pointed out that audience analysis takes place ‘along a dimension ranging from audience control to audience autonomy’ (McQuail 1983: 16). That is, it may be driven by this need to increase or, in commercial broadcasting, to attract demographic groups with particular kinds of consumer power; on the other hand it may be governed by issues about the audience’s own rights, pleasures, and functions. While it would be unlikely, in this millennium, to find a head of drama asserting, as Donald McWhinnie once did, that if the audience for radio drama were no bigger than that for Chinese poetry it would ‘not be negligible’ (McWhinnie 1959: 15), the sustained efforts of BBC radio drama to discover both the size and the nature of its audience base are at least free from the commercial pressures that might direct them only to the ‘control’ area of McQuail’s scale. If we turn to the largest output of drama on radio, Radio 4’s Afternoon Play, it is clear that Radio 4 has a long experience of audience research and does it well. It is aware that in any one week 8.87 million people will listen – a 10.8 per cent share of the total audience for radio. It has charted this share through the week in some detail. There are peaks, for instance, around meal-time news programmes and a drop in momentum afterwards. The World at One will have an audience of around two million, the afternoon broadcast of The Archers will drop by about 100,000 or so and the Afternoon Play will retain about 79 percent of the audience for The Archers. The largest single group making up this percentage will be retired women, but Radio 4 has a larger percentage of professional people among its audience (around 75 percent) than in the population as a whole (around 50 percent). Likewise, it has a higher proportion of listeners in the south of England. The average age of the Radio 4 listener is fifty-four and he or she will probably be listening at home, although a few drivers may tune in during the rush hour. It is reasonable to suppose that the Radio 4 Afternoon Play is under pressure to attract younger listeners in order to preserve an audience into the next generation, to ensure that a larger share of Archers fans keep their fingers away from the off button. However, there are indications that focus is not only on the quantitative audience but on the audience which draws together listeners. Commissioning guidelines speak of ‘iconic, topical, groundbreaking, incisive and imaginative’ broadcasting. Nor can the BBC be unaware from these statistics that the

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‘average’ listener was born into expectation. If aged fifty-four, he or she grew up with free orange juice and vitamins, free medical care, schools masterminded by Rab Butler and tertiary education courtesy of Harold Wilson and the white heat of technology. This average listener saw the abolition of theatre censorship, the power of popular protest against segregation and the Vietnam war and the rise of the women’s movement. This will not be an easy figure to patronise. He or she will also, having grown up with the television of the Sixties and Seventies, know that one of the most popular bits of broadcasting mythology is the ‘Cinderella’ trope, the story of a programme like Star Trek which proves to be beloved in the teeth of all market research or attempts to second-guess the audience. While one might be sceptical about this kind of story – what better way to convince the public of your concern for its pleasure than the occasional admission that you got it wrong? – there is probably no body entrusted with delivering audience figures which does not have this caveat lodged in its mind. The composition of an audience can be known; certain attitudes can be inferred from audience feedback – about subject matter, about language, about length – but what transforms a quantified audience into listeners who then become an ‘audience’ responding with group excitement is always, ultimately, defined by those listeners. As one of them – as a professional southern woman of fifty-four, I am virtually stereotypical – it is my own training in the pre-expressive that I am going on to examine here.

Listener training There were times in the history of radio when broadcasters spent a degree of energy and effort in training the listener to listen. In 1928, for example, the BBC produced a series of booklets, which could be bought in advance of a transmission and facilitated a variety of interpretative skills. One of these, as the endpapers of the little green books suggest, was the purchase of adequate equipment. The volume on Calderón’s La Vida es Sueno advises, ‘Listen to Life’s a Dream through really good headphones … place the score on your knee and a pair of ERICSSON Super Sensitive Headphones on your head. Three resistances – 120, 2,000, 4,000 ohms – one price, 12/6’ (Twelve Great Plays 1928: no. 4). It also offers a plot summary of what must be one of the most radiophonic of plots in that its hero

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Sigismund is taken from prison to become King of Poland, and then drugged, taken back and told that his experience has been a dream. This is put into context with a life of Calderón, an extended essay on his literary merits, and a discussion of his sources. This might be seen as evincing Reithian determination not just to administer the classics, but to do so on the terms of the university-educated. The tone is undeniably a little patronising. It also assumes, as early radio drama tended to assume, that the listener’s own imagination needs rather too much support. For example, there is an illustration of Sigismund, a square-jawed Bulldog Drummond in rather modern-looking dressing gown, set fair to undermine any more resonant and complex image in the listener’s head. But it also acknowledges that listening is a skill and indicates that a high value is placed upon the listener’s commitment, an attitude for which I find myself nostalgic. As part of a ‘target audience’ I should consider myself an object of desire, but desire fired by the drive for bigger audiences seems to lack 1920s concern as well as 1920s patronage. Beyond a few lines in the Radio Times or cassettes of an adapted popular classic for which there might well be a market even without prior broadcast, it is not easy to come by supporting material – a script, for example. Institutions such as the Giles Cooper Awards for Radio Drama once ensured that at least some material was available in print – and there is no longer a forum like The Listener or even, it seems, a repeat at a time when it would be possible to record a play I have enjoyed. Sheer awareness is perhaps the most endangered of all the skills of the listener. The Internet is doing a little to remedy this – but I find, for instance, that the undergraduate course I run on writing radio drama has to assume that students do not know what is available to them. One thing those little booklets take for granted: that the listener, after homework on Calderón, will sit in the Ericsson headphones with a sense of occasion, that he or she will enter the soundscape as a receiver of drama. The Radio 4 analysis shows that this cannot now be relied on. While listeners do, still, make a date with the Afternoon Play, the majority evidently treat a play as part of a flow of radio communication. After The World at One and the quiz programme the listener may make a mental shift into fiction with The Archers and then make a further adjustment to enter a play which may have a different kind of fictionality. Or she may simply break into the soundscape while the Afternoon Play is going on.

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This has sometimes been perceived as a difficulty, making it necessary for radio playwrights to labour vital exposition for the benefit of the partially distracted hearer. Yet it also offers scope to charge with excitement that moment which powerfully calls out the skill of the listener as she encounters what is being transmitted. Unlike film or television or theatre, radio does not present a consistent reality. Images evoked by words or sounds are temporary; when the sound has passed, the listener has no evidence of their continuing existence. Radio drama has always enjoyed playing with this existential flexibility: Spike Milligan’s Goon Show pioneered the technique of offering an image to the imagination and then smashing it or putting it through a radical metamorphosis: Seagoon: Search his pockets for salt water. Moriarty: It’s all a mistake. I’m a female channel swimmer I tell you … here’s a record to prove it. Splash. Seal bark. Bagpipes. Seagoon: You impostor, that’s a seal. But why the bagpipes? Moriarty: It’s the Great Seal of Scotland. (Milligan 1973: 131) Engagement in this imaginative play of visualisation and counter-image has long been part of the conscious listening technique of my generation. Hence, perhaps, the way snatches of the Goons and latterly of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978–9) have passed into the repertoire of the funny voice addict and remained there long after the original transmissions. (Arguably this delayed audience response may have gone some way to creating the new audience for these on cassette.) Less consciously acknowledged, however, is our awareness that all images prompted by radio have, latently, the same existential ambiguity. As I listen to Today in Parliament I have the opportunity to construct an image of the Prime Minister with the potential to be my personal Tom Gordon (not an option I can imagine exercising). A vital aspect of the listener’s pre-expressive skill is not passively to receive, but to develop an imagination constantly alert to the fact that the medium may make demands on it, and in turn, perhaps, to make those playful demands upon the medium that Trisha does. Conversely, to break into a piece of the Afternoon Play may leave you temporarily at a loss as to the reality of what you hear. Everyone knows the story of Orson Welles’s radio pro-

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duction of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. We tend to think of the panic that gripped America in 1938 as listener naivety, a lack of familiarity with the codes of drama in sound. But to listen today – Radio 4 often offers the opportunity at Halloween – is to be aware of the existence of a legendary artefact, and one of the features to be admired is its shifting relationship to time. While the story starts with a popular music programme punctuated by increasingly bizarre ‘outside broadcasts’ in ‘real time’, it goes on to make temporal leaps, following figures who have no access to a microphone. At some point, like the majority of Welles’s original listeners, I bring an ear trained to make the acknowledgement that the action has moved from apparent reality to a naturalistic convention which allows me to pretend to overhear rather than be addressed. In 1997 some listeners tuned in to Radio 4 to hear a child saying, ‘In the olden days – when they wrote the songs and the operas, and that – it mattered how you died’ (Hall 1997: 136) and as Lee Hall’s play Spoonface Steinberg continued, different listeners assented at different points to its fictionality. For some the speaker, an autistic girl dying of cancer, was understood throughout as ‘real’, talking perhaps in a studio (Crook 1999: 138), for others the preternatural eloquence and the careful structure made it clear that this was performance, at a very high level. Both plays depend upon the ultimate undeception of the listener; without it they remain only curiosities. But the moment of realisation, the point at which the listener crosses the bridge from simply receiving to choosing to initiate the specifically dramatic mode of communication, gives them their value. We do not just make a leap of unbelief but enter a different relationship to space and time. It is not only a question of imaginatively constructing characters and setting, but of assuming the active role of a listener in a soundscape where the fictional interacts and comments on the real. The majority of Welles’s listeners in 1938 made a leap from passivity to a point where they might be free not only to visualise Martians to their own taste but to consider their first reaction in relationship to the isolationist policy of the United States. Pity for a ‘real’ Spoonface yields to a more complex engagement with those notions of art and belief Spoonface herself raises. Tim Crook argues that the play offers only an image of what adults would like to believe about dying children and is ‘exploitative of the real agony and suffering of real children in

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these contexts because it denies them an independent identity’ (Crook 1999: 142). I would suggest, though, that the vocal convention of the play undercuts this danger. As with the opening sequences of The War of the Worlds, the initial deceptive ‘realism’ depends upon the fact that we are hearing a voice speaking directly to us. A naturalistic scene that – however effectively – gave us the impression of eavesdropping could not do this; a piece of recorded reality without visual support needs interpretation and the mere fact that we could understand what was going on would serve to indicate fictionality. In Spoonface the heroine is fictional, but the act of communication is real. We are being directly addressed; we are not pretending to overhear a character talk to herself. The simultaneous honesty and fictionality of the play engages our cooperation with the young performer, Becky Simpson, who offers us entry into the soundscape, where all we have imbibed from the wider flow of information about death and about children can be brought to bear. In 1985 Peter Brook and the Centre International de Créations Théatrales attempted to make the Sanskrit epic the Mahabarata meaningful to a largely western audience and rapidly gravitated to the idea of a narrator who would become involved in the story: not only in order to tell the story but to receive it (Brook 1988). So the long and densely populated drama began with a child being offered the story of himself, his own race and history. Radio has often made use of a narrator as a useful, and sometimes lazy, short cut. But this figure also makes the most positive and creative acknowledgement of the individuality of the pre-expressive listener by countering it with an individual voice sensitive to his or her needs. In preparing this chapter I conducted an informal survey of writers and producers and found that the idea of ‘audience’ only arose when discussing the quantifiable; practitioners asked to envisage the reception of their work thought in terms of the listener. They spoke of writing for ‘myself’, for ‘someone shut in who needs to be set free’, of the need for actors to ‘address the individual rather than waffling in monologue’, of the delicacy possible in playing a sexually charged scene when every touch is read through the listener’s experience. The pre-expressive ear of the listener must negotiate with the play to achieve balance: she has the power to engage the imagination, the play has the power to control and surprise it; she has the power to embody characters in the mind, the play offers a body that stubbornly refuses to become the object of a

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gaze by inhering solely in voice, asserting an equal and dialogic existence that cannot be denied; the play is a whisper invading the listener’s vulnerability, the listener a social and political being which can bring the intimately awakened imagination to bear upon the public information circulating in the soundscape just as Jeanne transformed private prayer and public bells into the voice of an archangel.

Negotiating the balance: two modern radio plays Some recent Afternoon Plays have explored that balance in teasingly complex fashion. Alex Ferguson’s play I See the Moon, transmitted in 2001 in the run-up to the General Election, appears to be a straightforward ghost story of a familiar pattern. A tired town planner, Richard Thornton, tells us of meeting with an unhappy child in a Georgian house, how he broke his promise to return to her and how his feeble career – culminating in jail when entangled with a more successful but corrupt friend – is haunted by the memory. Naturally he discovers that the child was a ghost. What gives the story resonance is that Thornton is not narrating his personal history alone.We begin in 1968 as he argues as a young man with the owner of the Georgian house, Professor Taylor, ‘Tower Block King’ and one of the forces behind the new brutalism driven by the corrupt and environmentally irresponsible policies of Labour government in the Sixties. As Thornton stumbles his haunted way through his career, the cheap condescension of those jerry-built flats gives way to Thatcherite greed and the transformation of the beautiful Georgian house to what Thornton’s cellmate calls ‘an estate of poncy executive homes with Toytown locks and Mickey Mouse alarms’ for yuppie philistines. This is not only the history of architectural style but of the England shaped by it. The presence of the child-ghost haunts not only Thornton but the society that reveals itself through the play, a society that at no point acknowledges children. Thornton discovers that the child is not a Georgian ghost but Taylor’s daughter, hidden and bundled after her early death into a secret grave because she was, as Sixties wisdom put it, ‘mentally deficient’, an inadequate symbol of Taylor’s meritocratic ideology. All Thornton can do is to salvage her remains (causing resentment as he halts building work to do so) and give her the only kind of house she can now inhabit, a grave where ‘the flowers are fresh and the gravel is clean.’

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While the play itself forces the listener into making connections between private sentiments and public policy, its place in the soundscape augmented them. The news immediately afterwards comprised: a Green Party manifesto; an item about care workers charged with the abuse of children; and a row between the rival candidates for Number 10 about whose party had the more ‘stringent’ (that is, repressive) attitude to asylum seekers. Together the transmissions invited the listener not simply to hear current policy about the country’s treatment of the environment and of the displaced, vulnerable and marginalized, but to be haunted by it, and like Thornton, to take at least some action. Lucy Gough’s play The Mermaid’s Tail, (Radio 4, December 1998) has a plot that is itself a do-it-yourself guide to the use of soundscape. Stella is having a bath, fantasising about her desire to be a mermaid. As her mother grumbles outside the door, Stella’s radio keeps her company. Into the music (Radio 1) and the shipping forecast (Radio 4?) something else inserts itself, a lecture on mermaids by the (real) academic Marina Warner (surely a Radio 3 talk?) Warner’s voice places the fantasy into context. While Stella longs to ‘carve her shape’ – there is a clear suggestion of anorexia – Warner describes how contemporary culture has tamed the wild image of the mermaid into children’s entertainment and also corrupted the notion of perfect beauty from a wonder to be dreamed of into a capitalist fantasy that it can be attained through consumption of the right product. Is Stella plucking the voice of Warner from the soundscape or has Warner called into being Stella as listener? We become aware of Stella’s body early in the play as she ducks beneath the water and we hear the blood pounding in her ears. Comparison with the sounds of the womb is unavoidable. When Warner comments that the compelling song of the mermaid in myth represents the sound of the mother speaking to her unborn child, a sound that speaks to our need to return to the pre-semiotic ‘space of bliss’ before separation, she is not only helping us to make the connection between womb and water, but offering a gloss on something we, and perhaps Stella, have noticed for ourselves. The insight of the gloss is then comically undercut by the voice of Stella’s unidealised mother bawling the usual complaints to an adolescent hogging the bathroom. Stella makes use – as many listeners do – of the magical incantation of the shipping forecast to prompt an underwater fantasy that expresses her desire for a ‘space of bliss’ – only to

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weave into that fantasy the figure whose imminent arrival was prophesied by Mother – the window cleaner. He, rather than Warner, persuades Stella to abandon her mermaid status and grow up. Like Tom Gordon, he says what his listener knows, but cannot say to herself as herself. Warner’s talk discusses the relationship between mermaids and silence. Images of sexuality in a misogynist world, mermaids are often deprived of language in stories like Hans Andersen’s, as a way of neutralising their threat to male hegemony. Warner suggests that the feminist writer should reclaim mermaids as subjects, write from the viewpoint of uncanny and wondrous creatures and restore their voices. Is the window-cleaner, who persuades Stella to find her voice, Stella’s own feminist creation? The result of Stella’s interaction with Warner’s information on the airwaves? Is Warner speaking her lines at will, or at the instigation of Lucy Gough? The ‘lecture’ does not obey the rules of a radio talk; it loops back on itself to repeat information, so that, for example, it echoes in the ears of Stella as she swims back in her fantasy towards adulthood. Does this indicate Stella’s own internalisation of the feminist wisdom alive in the soundscape? There is, of course, no final answer. Warner and Stella, listener and voice, playwright and audience, are symbiotic. The listener learns to articulate him- or herself more fully, not sitting in a group round the fireside but by self-placement in the soundscape. Here he or she becomes the point where information and imagination converge to form a new discourse – about angels, about finding your way home, about the state of the nation, or about what it means to be a speaking as well as a listening subject. Only then does listener become audience.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Caroline Raphael, Ned Chaillet, Judith Adams and Lucy Gough for their good-natured replies to my enquiries about listening. Any mistakes or mishearings are my own.

References Barba, E. (1995) The Paper Canoe, trans. Richard Fowler, London: Routledge.

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Brook, P. (1988) ‘The language of stories’, interview with Georges Banu for Alternatives Théatrales in Williams, D. (ed.) Peter Brook: A Casebook, London: Methuen. Corbin, A. (1999) Village Bells, trans. Martin Thom, London: Papermac. Crook, T. (1999) Radio Drama: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. Frank, A. (1995) The Diary of a Young Girl, trans. Susan Massotty, London: Viking Press. Hall, L. (1997) Spoonface Steinberg and Other Plays, London: British Broadcasting Corporation. King, S. (1999) The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, London: HarperCollins. Lovill, J. (2000) (ed.) Notable Historical Trials, London: Folio. McQuail, D. (1983) Mass Communication Theory, London: Sage Publications. McWhinnie, D. (1959) The Art of Radio, London: Faber and Faber. Milligan, S. (1973) More Goon Show Scripts, London: Woburn Press. Twelve Great Plays (1928), London: British Broadcasting Corporation.

PART IV

NEW TECHNOLOGY


CHAPTER 15 

DUTCH WEB RADIO AS A MEDIUM FOR AUDIENCE INTERACTION Martine van Selm, Nicholas W. Jankowski and Bibi Kleijn

Introduction In this essay we illustrate how Internet technology is used to facilitate interaction between the web radio programme BuZz and its listeners. We examine the concept of interactivity in terms of the manner in which contact is achieved between radio programme hosts and listeners, and the manner in which listeners gain a degree of control over programming content. The analysis is based on a small-scale study involving individual interviews with programming staff and focus group interviews and an electronic survey held among the listeners of the web radio programme BuZz. This case demonstrates that although interactive tools are made available on the website, live web radio programmes continue to resemble traditional radio shows inasmuch as radio programme hosts prefer to remain the ‘stars’ and listeners prefer to be entertained and treated as members of a conventional radio audience. Before this case is presented, however, we provide a brief sketch of the general phenomenon of web radio.

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Origins and characteristics of web radio The first experiment with web radio is attributed to the campus station at the University of Kansas that began continuous broadcasting via the Internet in December 1994 (Kaye and Medoff 1999). Commercial radio stations in the United States followed suit about a year later, and since then the number of stations with a web presence and form of Internet broadcasting has multiplied substantially. One of the most extensive efforts to monitor this growth is maintained by the ‘radio-locator’, previously known as the MIT List of Radio Stations on the Internet. In 1999 the compilers of this list identified around 7,500 radio stations world-wide that were operating in some fashion on the web; by 2001 more than 10,000 stations were said to be on the list and dozens of stations were being added each week.1 Lind and Medoff (2000) estimate that between 25 and 40 percent of the more than 10,000 commercial radio stations in the United States have an Internet presence. One of the reasons for this rapid growth is the potential the Internet holds for traditional mass media generally (Boczkowski 1999; Dennis 1996; Mings 1997). Jankowski and van Selm (2000a: 88), for example, itemise the possibilities the Internet may create for online newspapers and suggest eight potential values. Many of the possibilities listed below are also applicable to web radio: • • • • • • •

hyperlinks to additional information sources; discussion groups; feedback to newspaper staff; multimedia publishing; elimination of the traditional media news slot; integration of online and offline stories and services; timely update and release of news stories.

Lind and Medoff (2000) have undertaken a similar exercise in identifying the added values of the Internet for radio stations. They note that interested persons outside a broadcasting region are able to listen to the programmes stations distributed via the Internet. These programmes can be live ‘cybercasts’ or archived files of previously broadcast programmes. Programmes can be, they suggest, supplemented by text and images. And, thanks to multi-tasking, listeners can use their computers for other purposes while listening to the radio via the Internet.

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Although large numbers of radio stations are now making use of the Internet, the nature of that use varies substantially. By far the primary use of the sites is for station-related promotional purposes. Based on a content analysis of the sites of commercial radio sites in the United States, Lind and Medoff (2000) report that nearly three-quarters of the sites they investigated contain promotional materials such as programming guides, profiles of staff and other forms of station information. Considerably fewer stations – between 10 and 25 percent – provide information related to news stories, sports and the weather. Contact with stations was for the most part arranged through e-mail links. Other forms of contact or feedback – listener surveys and registration forms, discussion groups and bulletin boards sessions – were organised by small fractions of the stations studied. No more than 15 percent of the sites examined by Lind and Medoff (2000) provide chat opportunities for listeners. The above profile of features may be related to the fact that the researchers restricted their study to initiatives undertaken by commercial radio stations on the Internet. Public service stations and community radios may reflect a different constellation of features. It is conceivable that stations with these origins may incorporate more features that stress listener participation than commercial radio stations apparently do. In this respect, central characteristics of community media – resident access to and participation in station activities, and control of programming content (see, for example, Jankowski 2001) – may be a more suitable reference point for the form of web radio discussed in this chapter. Our own informal exploration of web radio stations suggests that there are three main categories of web radio. The first involves simultaneous activity on the web during regular radio broadcasting. This means that instead of listening to the radio ‘over the air’, the programme is ‘cybercast’ and listened to via the Internet. This category, as Lind and Medoff (2000) suggest, provides opportunity for listeners to perform other tasks with their computers – termed multi-tasking – while listening to Internet-delivered radio programming. The second category is web radio as a ‘jukebox’. Web radio sites operating in this category offer an electronic database from which visitors can retrieve music. The third category of web radio involves programming made especially for the Internet. Sometimes these web radio stations are associated with conventional radio stations, but sometimes they are available only

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on the Internet. Like stations in the first category, listeners can also perform multi-tasking with exclusively Internet-based radio stations.

BuZz: a case study of web radio The Dutch radio programme BuZz provides an illustration of how one conventional radio station experimented with features of web radio. In addition to its regular programming on the Dutch national radio station, Radio 3FM, the producers of BuZz2 decided in 1999 to initiate a form of web radio. The underlying idea was that young people, the target group of the BuZz programme, were making increasing use of the Internet and seemed to have the potential and interest to work with this new medium. Another reason for experimenting with web radio was the challenge of introducing interactive elements into aspects of the programme. The initiators of BuZz considered web radio a possibly effective way to come closer to their audience – to receive comments, ideas and opinions from audience members. A second reason was that less experienced radio-trainees would have the opportunity to make radio programmes without the risks involved in producing a programme for a large audience.3 The web radio programme BuZz consists of a series of shows presented on Sunday evenings. The programme starts simultaneously with the conventional BuZz radio programme that is broadcast between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m., and continues for another four hours until midnight. At the beginning of the programme, a webcam is activated in the studio so that those persons who log on to the Internet can see programme guests and show hosts. In addition, a chat box is made available on the website. This means that listeners are able at any time during the show to respond to what is happening by typing in comments that can be read almost immediately by the programme hosts and other listeners on the website. Each of the BuZz programme shows lasts around an hour and is hosted by different programme personalities. Each show also differs with respect to audience involvement. During some of the BuZz shows, programme hosts attempt to draw audience members actively into the programme through the chat box, asking them for comments and using the most interesting ones immediately or at a later point in the shows. These shows are thereby produced through interaction between the hosts and listeners. Other

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BuZz web shows, in contrast, are similar to the conventional style of radio programming where a programme host makes the programme independent of audience involvement. In addition to the four hours of live web shows each Sunday evening, BuZz also maintains a website devoted to the programme where different Internet features are made available. First of all, it is possible to download previous BuZz programmes collected in an audio archive. Another feature of the site is a poll of the best new musical group. Winners of the poll are invited to perform on the radio station. In addition, website visitors can leave messages in a guest book on the site. Each Sunday evening around one hundred persons and on each weekday around fifty persons log on to the BuZz website. Considering the three categories of web radio described above, BuZz does not provide programming associated with the second category of web radio, that is, web radio as a ‘jukebox’, although BuZz does maintain an audio archive. BuZz does reflect aspects of the other two categories, however, in that it provides simultaneous cybercasting of its regular radio programming as well as production of programming made especially for the Internet.

Interactivity and web radio The concept of interactivity has been the topic of considerable study, particularly regarding the Internet and multimedia (for example, van Dijk and de Vos 2001; Hanssen, Jankowski and Etienne 1996; Jensen 1999; McMillan and Downes 2000; Rafaeli 1988). Regarding web radio, Lind, Medoff and Rarick (2001) suggest that one of the factors for visiting web radio stations is the possibility of interaction with others. Other factors they mention include enhanced reception, the passing of time, information acquisition and entertainment. A general description of interactivity has been proposed by Rafaeli and Sudweeks (1997) as ‘a process-related, variable characteristic of communication settings. Like face-to-face communication, computer-mediated communication has the capacity of enabling high interactivity. One postulated outcome of interactivity is engagement’. Jensen (1999) has extended this description to a typology of communication patterns and has applied it to forms of Internet communication. He builds on the four information traffic patterns identified by Bordewijk and van Kaam (1982): transmission, consultation,

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registration and conversation. Transmission refers to a situation in which ‘information is produced and owned by a central information provider and this center also controls the distribution of information’ (Jensen, 1999: 163). The significant consumer activity here is programme reception, as in real time radio and television. BuZz programming that is broadcast live via real time radio is an example of this communication pattern. The conversation pattern of communication occurs when ‘information is produced and owned by the information consumers who also control distribution’ (Jensen, 1999: 163). The consumer activity is ‘the production of messages and delivery of input in a dialog structure’ (Jensen, 1999: 163). Although not independent of time (the chat events are only held on Sunday evenings), the BuZz chat box can be considered an example of this communication pattern. Consultation is achieved when ‘information is produced and owned by an information provider, but the consumer retains control over what information is distributed and when’ (Jensen, 1999: 163). The consumer selects from available options in order to make ‘a request to the information providing center for specific information to be delivered’ (Jensen, 1999: 163). The audio archive available on the BuZz website is an example of this pattern. The registration information traffic pattern is present when ‘information is produced by the information consumer, but processed and controlled by the information providing center’ (Jensen, 1999: 163). Jensen suggests examples such as surveillance, registration systems, and the monitoring of computer systems. The polling option provided by BuZz, enabling visitors to vote for the best new band, is an illustration of this traffic pattern. Whereas the least interactivity is achieved via the transmission information pattern, the other three patterns suggest gradations in interactivity. The conversation pattern, as facilitated in the chat box, can be considered the most interactive pattern. Rafaeli and Sudweeks also suggest that interactivity varies along a continuum: At the one end is declarative (one-way) communication (e.g., most radio and television). Reactive (two-way) communication is further down the road. In reactive communication, one side responds to the other side. Fully interactive communication requires that later messages in any sequence take into account not just messages that preceded them, but also the manner in which previous messages were reactive. In this manner interactivity forms a social reality. (Rafaeli and Sudweeks 1997)

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This definition of interactivity seems to suggest that message content is an additional qualification to the conversation pattern. Only in situations where every new message exchanged refers to the content of all preceding messages, however, do Rafaeli and Sudweeks argue that conversation qualifies as interactive. The web radio programme BuZz employs the latter form of interactivity in the chat box.

Audience interaction In this section we analyse characteristics of the BuZz web radio programme in terms of two features of interactivity, the audio archive and the chat box, sketched above. In what way are these features considered tools for intensifying the relationship between radio programme hosts and listeners, and for increasing the control of the programme by listeners? This presentation is based on data gathered in a small-scale study involving qualitative interviews with radio staff, and focus group interviews and an electronic survey among both programme listeners. Interviews were held in 1999 with five website radio staff: four programme hosts and one web master. The online survey was held amongst visitors to the website and was completed by forty-one respondents. Focus group interviews were held with survey respondents who indicated they were regular participants of the BuZz chat box. Two focus group interviews were held, each with four persons. As previously mentioned, the programme staff knew from website log data that around one hundred people visited the website during programmes broadcast on Sunday evenings, and an average of fifty people would log on to the website for the programme each day throughout the week. The radio staff accumulated a list of ninety-seven e-mail addresses from visitors to the programme who left their e-mail addresses on the website. These persons were invited per e-mail to participate in the survey. Of these ninety-seven addresses, thirty-five addresses appeared to be no longer in operation, leaving sixtytwo valid e-mail addresses. In addition, respondents were recruited via a banner placed on the BuZz website announcing the survey. These recruitment efforts resulted in forty-one completed questionnaires. About half of the respondents were twenty-six years and older; some 85 percent were male and 65 percent held a college degree. These respondents to the survey deviated from the

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age category represented by most BuZz radio programme listeners that ranged from sixteen to twenty-five years old. Instead, the survey respondents tended to reflect the characteristics of the typical Internet user: male, early thirties, welleducated and white (van Dijk 2000; van Dijk, de Haan and Rijken 2000). Three-quarters of the respondents to the survey had more than one and a half years of experience in using the Internet. Two-thirds spent more than six hours per week on Internet activities, ranging in importance from e-mailing friends, searching the web for information, to general web surfing. Two-thirds visited other web radio sites; only one-third of the respondents visited the BuZz web shows on a regular weekly basis. Most persons logged on to the programme from their homes. The respondents were frequent listeners of conventionally broadcast radio programming. Respondents heard about the website through announcements made during the BuZz radio programme and from friends. When they would visit the site, most restricted such visits to a quarter of an hour, except when they would take part in chat sessions. Then, respondents would spend as much as thirty to sixty minutes logged on to the website. In the focus groups participants (seven men and one woman) were between sixteen and twenty-eight years of age.

Perceptions of interactive web radio According to the radio staff interviewed, the main distinction between web radio and conventional radio is the incorporation of interactive features into programming. Both interactive tools provided by BuZz, the archive and the chat box, were considered valuable by the staff of this programme. The ondemand principle of an audio archive, from which former web shows, music and other programming items can be retrieved, was seen as an important feature of web radio. In spite of technical problems, such as slow connections and the costs incurred in downloading audio clips through a telephone modem, this storage-and-retrieval function is, according to these staff, of utmost importance for the future of web radio. Listeners of web radio who participated in the focus group interviews also emphasised that on-demand music services provide a degree of individual control and may become an important characteristic of future Internet-based radio programming. In contrast, the focus group members did not

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make use of this feature themselves. They instead preferred to listen to a mixture of items and music offered by the radio programme editors and hosts rather than participate in the programme as active agents. One of the focus group interviewees expressed this position as follows: ‘You just do not always feel like choosing between alternatives or formulating your own preferences. That’s too much of an effort.’ The preference for being entertained, illustrated above, suggests a possible reason for the limited popularity of the storage-and-retrieval functions on the BuZz web radio site: there was limited interest in becoming an active user of the interactive tools made available. Another possibly – yet to be verified – thought is that using a web radio site as a place from which music can be downloaded transforms the image of the site to that of a database with a specific content and, hence, strips the site of its identity as a radio station. Listeners of web radio may expect web radio to provide traditional radio programming along with the availability of a number of multimedia tools. This aspect is suggested by Lind, Medoff and Rarick (2001) in their study; they reported that listeners appreciated traditional radio functions as well as the new capabilities provided by the Internet. In the focus group interviews, the control aspect was frequently commented on: ‘One should not go too far in giving control on the program’s content to the listeners; in that case you could start a program or music show on your own. People who listen to radio are to be entertained.’ ‘A radio program is made from a specific perspective or vision, and partly, as a listener, you could be a co-actor in giving shape to that, but I actually think that an editor or host, him- or herself, should do that.’

As previously stated, the synchronous chat feature of the BuZz website on Sunday evenings represents a higher degree of interactivity: not only is human-computer interaction facilitated, but direct contact is also made possible between the radio programme hosts and listeners. The programme staff in general regards the chat box as a tool for providing interactivity between programme hosts and listeners, and among listeners. Several comments made by radio staff during the interviews illustrate this view:

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‘To me, being interactive means that they listen, chat, and comment on us and among themselves. They hear your programme and post their reactions immediately through the chat box. That’s what it is all about.’ ‘The chat box is a meeting place in which listeners meet and talk. As an editor you take a look every now and then, and use the content when relevant for the web show.’

The focus group members appreciated the directness of the synchronous contact between programme hosts and several listeners at once. This was seen as a major advantage over the frequently troublesome telephone contact between radio programming hosts and listeners during other radio programmes. In such situations the station would often be confronted with an overload on the telephone system and additional costs incurred by having to maintain a bank of telephones and operators. The focus group interviewees envisioned flexibility of roles as a main characteristic of interactivity, in that the programme is developed as a co-operative activity between programme staff and listeners. This means that interactivity can provide listeners with the opportunity to influence programme content by, for example, posing questions to a studio guest or by suggesting a topic for discussion. As one interviewee expressed it, interactivity is: ‘what BuZz already does. Making a programme together with listeners; that is interactivity. The listeners connected via the chat box, and the programme host at the other side.’ Other chatters emphasised input from listeners: ‘You start with a radio programme and it depends on the listeners as to where things go, in what direction; that is interactivity.’ ‘It’s like me asking a question in the chat room and I immediately hear it being asked in the program! That’s really interactive.’

The above statements suggest a discrepancy between radio programme hosts and ‘chatters’ regarding the value assigned to interactions during the web shows. The focus group members expressed a degree of disappointment with the way in which the hosts incorporated the chat box into the web-based radio programme. In general, the hosts seemed to appreciate

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the interactive chat box as a tool for getting to know the listeners in a more direct and substantial manner. They appeared, however, to be less accustomed to employing interactive tools for dialogue between themselves and radio programme listeners. The radio staff considered the more ‘democratic’ manner of making a web programme – a consequence of the interactivity introduced – an unsettling and problematic challenge to their work as radio professionals. The staff explained that sometimes the chat box was a disturbing factor during the course of the programme on Sunday evenings precisely because of the directness of the contact with listeners. The following quotation from one of the radio staff illustrates this point: ‘Chatting during the program is very disturbing, it doesn’t work at all. While I am interviewing someone, I have to look at the chat site and see whether somebody is asking a question about something I just happened to discuss with the studio guest. The ideas and reactions appear just a moment too late in the studio in this way.’ This lack of enthusiasm for the contribution of chat box by programme hosts did not go unnoticed by listeners. Several quotations from the focus group sessions illustrate this awareness: ‘Every now and then too little attention is paid to the chat box. You can start typing in capitals, but still they don’t look at it. Then you see your text slowly rolling off the screen; that’s disappointing.’ ‘I expect the host to do something with the responses of listeners. They call it interactive web radio; otherwise, they could call it ordinary web radio and leave the chat box out.’

In some cases chatters did not ‘blame’ the programme hosts for failing to adequately react to comments made in the chat box, but considered this a problem with the technology: ‘The chat box really is much too slow. When it takes ten seconds before the host makes a comment, you say to yourself: “So, now you have to read!”’ In summary, interactive media can facilitate two-way communication. It remains uncertain, however, whether radio programme hosts are adequately aware of the implications of this for their work. Their status as radio ‘stars’ is, in a sense, reduced to that of facilitator or moderator of a website where topics are discussed and music played.

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Social relations As previously stated, the chat feature of the station website may facilitate contact between the radio hosts and listeners, as well as between listeners. In the case of the BuZz programme, these contacts were generally appreciated, in spite of the limited nature of the interactions possible in a text-only environment: ‘In a written text it is often hard to express yourself adequately. In contrast, when you just talk a little, your voice already discloses a lot.’ The programme hosts generally considered the conversation held in the chat box as not very serious: ‘I have noticed that people in the chat box do not necessarily comment on what is happening in the program, but chat about subjects having nothing to do with the programme. The chat box is a social meeting place, albeit somewhat superficial and light-hearted.’ ‘At the moment only short sentences and announcements are posted. It’s not very substantial yet. That will come, however; we really have to be patient.’

The assessment of the quality of the chat exchanges by survey respondents was similar to that by the programme hosts. The percentage of respondents who considered chatting the equivalent of posting separate statements and comments was higher than those who saw chatting as a form of conversation. However, nearly three-quarters of the respondents indicated that chatting increased their involvement with the programme. In the BuZz chat box information about participants was rarely provided, mainly because this seemed to be irrelevant to the topics normally discussed in that setting. As one chatter explained: ‘It is possible just to chat about specific topics without knowing much about each other. Music is a topic which can easily be discussed without being personal.’ The chatters considered the manner in which the programme hosts present themselves in the chat arena as one of the reasons why conversations did not become very personal: ‘The hosts actually disclose very little about themselves. I think when they would do so, we would be less reluctant to tell more about ourselves.’ From the discussion in the focus groups a paradox appeared regarding social contacts through computer-medi-

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ated communication. On the one hand, the chatters distrusted the relationships initiated and maintained through the Internet. They would say, for example: ‘You don’t know who is at the other end, it can be anyone.’ ‘It is not a means to finding lasting contact; not at all. I think for others, however, this may be important.’

Alternatively, the chatters felt they ‘knew’ the other participants in the chat and sometimes noticed their absence: ‘I don’t think the other chatters fool you all the time; you know them too well.’ ‘I sort of like it when I enter the chat box and people take notice and say: “Hi there, there you are again, how nice”. They know who you are.’

Some chatters characterised the relationships, using Walther’s (1996) term, as hyperpersonal, suggesting that characteristics of computer-mediated communication such as anonymity and textuality facilitate the exchange of personal information: ‘You tend to talk easily about very personal things; you have to be aware of that. It depends on how things go, but sometimes you say things that you would never say in a first meeting with someone.’ ‘The chance of meeting people from the chat box is very small. Therefore you might feel less inhibited.’

The chat box seemed to be a place where social relationships would be initiated without engagement and behaviour that in other social contexts would be considered anti-social is considered normal. Some chatters considered this as a major liberating factor of computer-mediated communication: ‘It’s not obligatory. Whether or not you show up for one week, or for a year, does not matter. In real life it is considered antisocial when you suddenly stop keeping in touch with people you know.’ ‘The barrier to get in contact with others is low, the same is true for saying “ciao”.’

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In conclusion, it seems that the chat opportunity of the web radio programme BuZz represented not only the added value of getting more in touch with radio personalities, but also with peer web radio listeners – in order to learn of their opinions, interests and assessment of the programme. This is something traditional radio is less easily able to do and hence reflects one of the more important potential values of web radio.

Web radio as community radio The radio staff observed that web programming displays characteristics of community media through the direct interaction between broadcasters and members of audience. The programme hosts considered this in both positive and negative terms. Negatively, the small-scale character of a web show does not provide the glamour associated with hosting a regular radio programme where audiences are generally quite large. The limited number of listeners in the chat box exacerbates this feeling: ‘Some programme hosts and editors are discouraged when only a handful of people fill the chat room. They wonder whether all the trouble of making a web show is worth the effort.’ Although the disappointment is undoubtedly genuine, the programme staff probably are not aware that only a very few people are responsible for most contributions, generally speaking, in many electronic communication forums on the Internet (Jankowski and van Selm 2000b). The actual size of the chat box ‘audience’ may be many factors higher than suggested by the number that actually post contributions. On the other hand, positive features about the small-scale character of web radio were also mentioned. Being aware that only a small number of people listen to the programme contributed to an informal and relaxed working environment. The programme hosts felt free to experiment with new items or to deviate from conventional radio programming procedures, such as playing a specific new album every hour: ‘Internet radio is like community radio; that is how it feels when you make it. It is small-scale, giving you the feeling that it does not matter what you do because nobody is listening anyway. It’s as if you make the program only for your direct colleagues.’ The less formal and small-scale character also opens up ways to develop new and non-traditional radio items. Web shows can be sensational without causing difficulty for the radio station: ‘The ideal situation would be that in web radio

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no “standard” programmes would be made, but things are created that would not be allowed on the regular radio. On the Internet you can be rude, weird or unique; you can go further than in normal radio. Internet is the place for extremes.’ In the focus group interviews this point was also mentioned. The chatters saw web radio as a form of pioneering radio in which new things could be experimented. A number of interviewees compared it to a local radio station, which, because of its small-scale character, allows programme hosts more spontaneity and improvisation, and the ability to achieve more depth in the discussions than in regular radio. A number of quotations from the focus group members illustrate this point: ‘Web radio has not so much to do with mass communication; it resembles a local radio station, as I see it. Few listeners, much time, that’s nice about it.’ ‘In web radio it is more likely that an interesting conversation can arise, because the web radio hosts don’t have to bother attracting a lot of listeners. This results in another type of radio than when you have to stuff an item into three minutes.’

Conclusion In this essay we have illustrated how a single radio station has experimented with Internet technology in order to facilitate interaction between station staff and programme listeners. We presented a case study of an initiative in the Netherlands with web radio, BuZz, and particularly with the incorporation of Internet-based chat activities into the radio programme. The interactive functions of BuZz were assessed in terms of the manner in which contact between radio programme hosts and listeners was achieved and the sense of control listeners felt regarding programme content. Traditional gratifications associated with listening to radio programming, such as being entertained and informed (see, for example, Lind, Medoff and Rarick, 2001), suggest that listeners of web radio programming would be reluctant to seek to exercise control over the content of web radio shows. In this case study it appears that listeners appreciate being entertained by a mixture of web radio items and music selected by the programme hosts. The BuZz web radio staff, on the other hand, showed a reluctance to provide listeners with too much

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influence over programme content. Although the BuZz staff appreciated the interactive chat facility as a tool for getting to know listeners in a more direct way, they expressed an unwillingness to incorporate input from the chat box directly into their web-based radio shows. Web radio programming can be distinguished from conventional radio programming in a number of ways. It can, first of all, provide for a more direct relation between listeners and programme producers. That relation can, secondly, be transformed into a situation whereby listeners contribute to the content of radio programming. In this sense, listeners can become co-producers of the programming and gain a degree of control over the media production process. These features tend to transform web radio into the heuristic form of community media in which citizens not only have access to and participate in a particular small-scale medium, but also exercise a degree of control over programming content and policy. Although we would not want to exaggerate the suggested relation between web radio and community media features, we do feel the use of interactive Internet tools has implications for both programmers and listeners. Consultation of audio archives demands a more active stance than many conventional radio listeners may be willing to accept. And web radio programmers that incorporate chat services into their repertoire of listener-oriented activities will have to take input from listeners more into account than they normally may consider appropriate. These developments create, in fact, a dilemma for both programmers and listeners. The more radio stations make use of the interactive and multimedia potentials of the Internet, the less the programming resembles conventional radio fare. In this process, radio programmers become facilitators of a collective communication process and listeners are transformed into active Internet users. Our study of the radio programme BuZz suggests that this transformation is problematic and tends to be resisted by all involved. This case study of BuZz is too small to support any firm conclusions. Much more investigation is necessary in order to gain a fuller understanding of the meaning of audience interaction via the Internet for traditional radio programming. We would recommend expanding the number of case studies of radio stations experimenting with programming in an Internet environment. We are particularly interested in how stations incorporate the interactive features of various Internet services into their programming domain. As indicated at the

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beginning of this chapter, however, there are many other features of the Internet that may enhance conventional radio programming and services. In the coming years we expect that an increasing number of stations will be experimenting with these features – programme archives, discussion lists, multi-media presentations. We recommend that these initiatives be systematically monitored. To conclude, we believe it difficult to underestimate the potential impact the Internet may have on traditional mass media, radio included. The nature of radio programming may be transformed, the activities associated with stations may change drastically, the conventional relation between programmers and audience members may become diffuse and intertwined. On the other hand, little or none of this potential may be achieved. We simply do not know how media and their audiences will eventually settle into an Internet environment. This is the uncertainty and challenge awaiting both broadcasters and researchers.

Notes 1. URL: http://www.radio-locator.com/bc.html 2. BuZz is a programme of one of the Dutch public broadcasting associations in The Netherlands, called Nederlandse Christelijke Radio Vereniging (NCRV) [Dutch Christian Radio Association]. 3. The BuZz programme on conventional broadcast radio reaches an audience of some 63,500 listeners on a typical Sunday evening.

References Boczowski, P.J. (1999) ‘Understanding the development of online newspapers: using computer-mediated communication theorizing to study Internet publishing’, New Media and Society, 1. Bordewijk, J.L., and Kaam, B. van (1982) Allocutie. Enkele gedachten over communicatie vrijheid in een bekabeld land [Allocution: thoughts on communication freedom in a cabled country], Baarn: Bosch and Keuning. Dennis, E. (1996) ‘Values and value-added for the new journalism’ in Bedrijfsfonds voor de Pers. Het bedreigde debat? 1/2 [Institute for the Press. Public Debate under Attack?], Amsterdam: Otto Cramwinckel. Dijk, J. van (2000) ‘Widening information gaps and policies of prevention’ in Hacker, K. and van Dijk, J. (eds) Digital Democracy: Issues of Theory and Practice, London: Sage.

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Dijk, J. van, Haan, J. de, and Rijken, S. (2000) Digitalisering van de leefwereld. Een onderzoek naar informatie- en communicatietechnologie en sociale ongelijkheid [Digitalisation of the Everyday World: A Study of Information and Communication Technology and Social Inequality], Utrecht: SCP. Dijk, J. van, and Vos, L. de (2001) ‘Searching for the Holy Grail: images of interactive television’ in New Media & Society, 3. Hanssen, L., Jankowski, N.W., and Etienne, R. (1996) ‘Interactivity from the perspective of communication studies’ in Jankowski, N. W. and Hanssen, L. (eds) The Contours of Multimedia: Recent Technological, Theoretical and Empirical Developments, London: John Libbey. Jankowski, N.W, and Selm, M. van (2000a) ‘Traditional news media online: an examination of added value’, Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research, 25. Jankowski, N.W., and Selm, M. van (2000b) ‘The promise and practice of public debate in cyberspace’ in Hacker, K. and Dijk, J. van (eds) Digital Democracy: Issues of Theory and Practice, London: Sage. Jankowski, N.W. (ed.) (with Prehn, O.) (2001) Community Media in the Information Age: Perspectives and Prospects. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Jensen, J.F. (1999) ‘Interactivity – tracking a new concept in media and communication studies’ in Mayer, P. (ed.) Computer Media and Communication: A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaye B. and Medoff, N.J. (1999) The World Wide Web: A Mass Communication Perspective, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishers. Lind, R.A. and Medoff, N.J. (2000) ‘Radio stations and the world wide web’, Journal of Radio Studies, 6. Lind, R.A., Medoff, N.J., and Rarick, D. L. (2001) ‘Uses and gratifications of internet radio audiences: a study of users and non-users’, manuscript. McMillan, S.J. and Downes, E.J. (2000) ‘Defining interactivity: a qualitative identification of key dimensions’, New Media and Society, 2. Mings, S. (1997) ‘Uses and gratifications of online newspapers: a preliminary study’, Electronic Journal of Communication, 7. URL: http://www.cios.org/getfile/Mings_V7N397 Rafaeli, S. (1988) ‘Interactivity: from new media to communication’ in Hawkins, R.P., Wiemann, J. M. and Pingree, S. (eds) Sage Annual Review of Communication Research: Advancing Communication Science 16, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Rafaeli, S. and Sudweeks, F. (1997) ‘Networked interactivity’, Journal of Computer-mediated Communication, 2. URL: http:// www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue4/rafaeli.sudweeks.html Walther, J. B. (1996) ‘Computer-mediated communication: impersonal, interpersonal and hyperpersonal interaction’, Communication Research, 23.


CHAPTER 16 

SPEECH RADIO IN THE DIGITAL AGE Richard Berry

What is digital broadcasting – and what is radio? The title of this book suggests that radio offers much more than a constant diet of Top 40 music and a smattering of songs from our youth – that it can and does offer programmes where music is little more than a background attraction. As the medium enters a new age of technology, I speculate in this chapter about what impact digitisation may have on speech radio. One thing that radio has proved through the years is its adaptability, its capacity to use new technologies to evolve and change with the lifestyles of the audience. We can expect this to continue into the new ‘digital age’, although it has not quite happened yet. The arrival in the 1950s of the transistor set had the effect of freeing the radio from the confines of the home. It made radio portable and perhaps more significantly, widely affordable for the first time. This portability meant that radio could evolve and become a medium that could be used to supplement everyday tasks, such as driving, paid labour and housework. Radio became a secondary medium but one which could serve a useful purpose of entertainment and information. In the digital age the opportunities for radio to once again adapt and exploit new technology are immense. So what do we mean by

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the digital age and what are these brave new prospects? In this chapter I will be discussing and speculating about two modes of digital delivery. The first is Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) – a method by which blocks of radio channels (and data) are transmitted and can then be received on suitably equipped receivers. These transmissions contain data elements, which although secondary to the audio do offer exciting opportunities. The second is the Internet, which allows the ‘streaming’ of radio programmes and stations to a global audience of wired computer users. These new forms of transmission offer both opportunities and threats to the radio broadcaster but also provide some challenging theoretical debates for the radio academic. When approaching radio texts distributed via the Internet one must straightaway challenge the very terms we use. What do we mean by ‘radio’? One could argue that the attribute which has made radio so enduring is its portability, but the exigencies of the new technology are such that the only way one can access online material is to use a computer connected to the Internet via a telephone, digital or corporate line. This presents some key problems in the reception of radio or audio content. Home computers are linked to the Internet via a modem using conventional copper telephone wires, which by their nature can carry only a limited amount of data at any one time. Therefore if one assumes that listening is secondary to the user’s purpose in being online, she or he is already using much of the available bandwidth to download webpages, images or e-mails. And as the latter are downloaded the audio connection may pause, stutter or stop completely. A solution might be faster broadband connections via cable television providers or ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line) – in effect a very fast digital data line capable of carrying around four times as much data as a conventional telephone line. In common with many others my home Internet service provider (ISP) is now offering ADSL connections to its customers, but at £50 a month it is certainly beyond the reach of most of them. The technology is emerging that could provide the ability to access so-called multi-media services – like radio – on future mobile telephones, although telephones with built in digital radios seem more likely. So, when it comes to Internet radio – for the time being at least – we are still tied to our desks and our home computers, thus removing one of the great joys of the medium: its portability. This sedentary method of access-

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ing radio poses some interesting questions. For instance, can we still call what we listen to on our home or office computer, ‘radio’? Is radio a series of electrical disturbances broadcast through the air and picked up by a ‘wireless’ receiving set? Or is it something less easily defined? As I write this chapter I am listening to various radio stations broadcast alongside a package of television channels via the Sky Digital satellite. It is wire-less (in that I do not need to connect wires to the ‘outside world’ in order to listen): but it relies on a dish bolted to the side of the house and is certainly not portable. Yet it is surely still radio. Perhaps, then, we can define radio as being a programme or series of programmes intended to be received without images and broadcast live rather than accessed on demand. I have had this debate several times with colleagues on the U.K. based ‘Radio Studies’ e-mail discussion list, and while we have had some stimulating debates I am not sure that we have ever reached a satisfactory answer.

Internet radio: a listener’s perspective When it comes to speech radio a lot of this debate is superfluous: very little of it is available. Most users find webpages and indeed online radio stations by using ‘search engines’ (web-based databases of websites) but while these offer long lists of music-based services there is very little speech. What do exist are mostly Internet relays of existing FM or AM talk radio stations, mainly located in the United States, together with syndicated programmes such as the infamous Rush Limbaugh talk show. For the music enthusiast the Internet offers a huge array of choice, ranging from far flung radio stations re-broadcasting their local output to on-demand channels or constant streams of narrow-genre music provided by large Internet names such as Yahoo. However, since the latter are little more than constant streams of music with no presenter, news or advertisements they are, in effect, little more than niche jukeboxes for the wired generation. Much of this is due to legislation imposed on U.S. based music broadcasters by Congress, which effectively forced any online service into formats that could never truly compete with traditionally available FM or AM radio stations. During the spring of 2002 it seemed that music on Internet radio had been effectively killed off when negotiations over copyright payments collapsed. This led the U.S. Copyright Office to propose a fee per song per listener,

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and although the rate would vary according to the type of station it could result in payments far in excess of revenue. By 2003 the tariffs were in force, makimg music radio on the Internet a very expensive business. Despite the opportunities for speech radio that this presents, the author is not aware that there has as yet been any expansion in the market. The sad fact is that the choice of speech radio on the Internet is slim, to say the least, and prompts a search for reasons. Could it be that Internet connections are still too unstable to provide adequate carriage for speech? We can tolerate music dropping out but would we be prepared to miss lines from a play or a critical argument in a debate? Moreover, like most radio consumption, online listening is secondary. It occurs while we are viewing other sites or searching for websites rather than as a result of connecting to the Internet purely in search of radio content. Whilst highly compressed music can deliver adequate results on a poor connection, speech can sound somewhat strangulated and is in some cases unintelligible. That said, many people exploit the permanent connections of the workplace, where both free access and fast stable connections make the experience more enjoyable and allow them to listen without a cost implication. In conducting a series of simple searches for this chapter I found little evidence of speech radio aimed exclusively at an Internet audience. I accessed two of the principal search engines using terms such as ‘radio’, ‘talk radio’ and ‘speech radio’ and found only a few examples of speech originated for web audiences. One example is the U.S. based eyada.com, a mixture of live and on-demand programmes under a variety of headings including ‘comedy’ and ‘relationships’. The content is aimed at an American audience and naturally not all of it travels well. While quality is high, there is no evidence of advertising and one wonders if such a service can survive. It is perhaps unsurprising that such sites exist in the U.S., since not only is there a proven audience for talk radio (as opposed to ‘speech’) but access to the Internet is usually free. In the U.K. access to the Internet is largely controlled by one company, British Telecom, which despite regulatory intervention and many recent innovations still makes access to the Internet a relatively costly business. There are, however, benefits. I use the Internet to listen to radio stations in the same way that many people use shortwave. I have accessed stations in America, Australia and other parts of the U.K., which for anyone interested in radio is an

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exciting possibility. For the speech listener, broadcasters like the BBC and Radio Netherlands place archived programmes on the Internet to allow listeners to hear a favourite programme again or to catch up on one they have missed. In particular the BBC Radio 4 Today programme has created a searchable archive of interviews and features, and BBC Radio 5 Live’s News Extra Online is an evening news programme available exclusively online between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. when the main network is broadcasting sport. Since February 2002 the BBC’s legendary soap opera, The Archers, has also acquired an online presence. Each episode can be accessed up to a week after the original Radio 4 transmission in order to allow listeners to catch up with anything they have missed. Huw Williams, the Head of New Media (Radio and Music) at the BBC says of the corporation’s use of the Internet that: ‘We see the role of our radio sites as primarily supporting the analogue networks, so we aren’t in the business of generating vast quantities of original programming which would only be available to those with Internet access’ (interview by e-mail, June 2001). The sites provide the listeners with a chance to catch up on news at a time to suit them, even when they may be out of the country or away from their radio. It is this pattern of using the Internet to create ‘bonus’ as opposed to ‘new’ services that is probably a more effective use of the platform and ultimately more useful for the speech radio consumer. Indeed this complementary service offers, for speech radio at least, the most logical use of the Internet to radio audiences. Many listeners are connected already and may be used to accessing textbased content on websites of their favourite programmes or radio stations. For them to proceed to audio content (perhaps of missed episodes and features) is a logical step.

Internet radio: a broadcaster’s perspective One attraction of the Internet to the broadcaster may be its increasing use as a more cost-effective method of international broadcasting. Both Voice of America and the BBC World Service have ceased broadcasting on short-wave in North America, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands in favour of live Internet streams. The BBC defends this move by highlighting the decline in short-wave listening as a result of local FM re-broadcasting and the number of Internet connections (it

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estimates 168 million net users in the U.S. alone). While this destroys some of the romance of international broadcasting it accepts the new technological reality, and is a (perhaps sad) recognition that in the age of MTV and CNN global broadcasting has changed irrevocably. Many existing broadcasters use the Internet to re-broadcast their programmes, among them Oneword, the U.K. based digital (radio) speech station. The station attracts around 200 thousand visitors to its website each month, and while the hope is that Internet listeners will be converted into owners of digital radio sets the direct cost of Internet listening is still a problem for its web-based listeners. However, with a maximum of fifty listeners at any one time plus the cost of the connection (for the user) this will only ever be the kind of optional or extraneous feature that web-surfers might expect to find on a radio station website. The Internet was proclaimed for many years as the future of radio but while this may be true for music services the same cannot be so confidently said for speech. Overuse means the Internet is getting slower and more crowded: most sites will be able to support themselves through advertising, but as the cost of speech is usually higher it has less chance of succeeding. Many large organisations seek to broadcast on the Internet, but as I write this I read of the closure of one such service and the absorption of another into the Internet giant Yahoo.

U.K. digital radio: teething problems and initial services It is, perhaps, strange that despite all the costs and problems associated with it, Internet radio is the platform which has attracted most public attention over the past few years, whereas the more sustainable and stable digital radio is still at a stage of obscure infancy. Ask the man or woman in the street about digital radio and you will get blank looks: ask a retailer to sell you one and you will be shown an ordinary analogue radio with digital tuning. Both manufacturers and broadcasters recognise that the high price of receivers, conservative programming, and a lack of station choice combine to discourage the consumer. Current purchasers tend to be men over the age of forty-five who are passionate about radio, but since most digital receivers are available only as hi-fi separates and carry a price tag of £300, many of these enthusiasts are already

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likely to own a high quality analogue tuner. It will only be when midi systems and portable sets are freely and cheaply available that digital radio will attract the younger listeners. This began to happen during 2002 when budget manufacturer Goodmans launched a product range for around £100. However, in 2001, U.K. manufacturer Videologic (now branded as ‘Pure’) had already broken ranks by selling tuners for under £300 and it lowered prices to less than £100 by the end of 2002. The continuing stalemate has been attributed by Videologic’s Vice-President of Technical Marketing, Colin Crawford, to the failure of the existing FM and AM services to promote their digital transmissions: ‘The killer for me is listening to a station that is on DAB (such as Virgin Radio or Radio 4 long wave) and doesn’t promote it’ (telephone interview, June 2001). The consensus seems to be that conversion to digital radio will not happen overnight. Nevertheless it is now expected that set ownership will grow faster than the ownership of CD Players did in the early 1990s. Part of the problem is the price of the microchips which are required to make digital radio reception possible. As a mass market is reached – and this could happen any time from 2003 onwards, though the broadcasters say it could be much longer – the cost of sets will inevitably fall with the rise in demand. A bridge between the web and digital radio may be the advent of the Psion Wavefinder, a personal computer (PC) card capable of receiving digital radio. Retailing at a lower price than the full-sized sets (because the PC does a lot of the processing work) the card also uses the Internet connections of the host PC to allow interactive possibilities. However, like Internet radio, it relies on the user being close to her or his PC. But what of the speech-based services on offer to digital listeners? I intend to focus mainly on the services available to listeners in the U.K. from the national (as opposed to local or regional) providers. Presently there are two national multiplex providers: the BBC (as a public service provider it has been guaranteed space on digital radio) and the National Commercial Multiplex operated by the Digital One consortium. Digital speech radio: the BBC At the time of writing the BBC is fully engaged in its roll-out of new digital services. BBC Radio Five Live Sports Extra went to air on 2 February 2002 and operates on a part-time basis to broadcast an overflow of held sports rights from the main Five Live network. Like all new BBC channels it had to receive gov-

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ernment approval before going to air and so operates under the stipulation that it will complement the existing network rather than being an additional service that will compete with the commercial operators. BBC 6 Music went to air on 6 March 2002 and was followed in summer 2002 by BBC 1Xtra, a music based service aimed at a young black audience. Then on 28 October 2002, the BBC launched its Asian Network, serving Asian communities throughout Britain with a service of speech and music. However, like most providers, the BBC is also using the new digital platform to re-broadcast existing services as well as launch new ones, for listeners may be more inclined to make the digital leap if they know that it will not mean the loss of their favourite analogue station. Previously the only way in which British listeners could hear the World Service was either to tune into a BBC local radio frequency at night or to live in the south east of the country and listen on the AM band: but that service has also been transferred to the digital platform and thus made available to the whole of the U.K. twenty-four hours a day. The last of the all-new digital radio services, BBC 7, was launched at the end of 2002 and, since it offers (mostly archive) comedy, drama and children’s programmes, is unequivocally speech-based. It could be seen as an attempt by the BBC to use new technology to recall the public to the pleasures of the imagination in an otherwise visual age. The return of children’s radio to the BBC has arrived at a time when the genre is growing in the commercial sector. The Capital Radio group has now entered into a partnership with the Disney Corporation to develop the ‘Capital Disney’ brand heard on local digital multiplexes in parts of the U.K. In London a lengthy campaign for children’s radio has resulted in the launch of AbracaDABra (sic), a new digital service of stories, games and music. Digital speech radio: the commercial sector As there is still only a small number of digital radio sets in use it is not surprising that digital stations such as the all-speech channel Oneword currently gain the bulk of their listeners from the Sky Digital satellite. The station estimates around sixty thousand people listen to the service this way and the expectation is that some of these listeners will become digital radio set owners when the price is right. Promoted as a service dedicated to books, plays and readings, the current Oneword schedule is a mix of celebrity read-

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ings, acquired classic plays and children’s programmes. The station has raided archives around the world for material and has found volumes of work not previously released or broadcast. Since summer 2001 it has also broadcast work from new radio writers, including a 65-year-old grandmother from Dublin who has never previously written for radio. Material of this kind will help the station to reach its target of originating 33 percent of its output. Its policy of buying in most of its programmes could be seen as ‘radio on the cheap’, but while DAB is in its infancy advertising revenues will be low (as they are in any new medium), and the policy is hardly surprising given that Oneword has a budget of £650,000 compared to the £92 million of its nearest rival, BBC Radio 4. In 2001 Oneword won the Sony National Station of the Year award, which has given extra credibility to the station and helped to boost the profile of digital radio in general. I have been paying particular attention to a number of its day-time programmes, including The Core Curriculum (a programme aimed at school students of English Literature), Listen with Whoever (children’s stories) and various other programmes across the day. The station breaks each hour down into segments of different length according to the time of day: for example segments in the morning and early evening are between ten and fifteen minutes long, whereas late evening segments may last up to thirty minutes. This is a conscious decision to fit in with the lifestyles of the audience: the tenminute serial episode could easily fit into the breakfast routine whereas anything longer probably would not. It is what the station calls the listeners’ ‘availability to listen’ (interview, June 2001). In a station press release the programme controller Paul Kent explains its mission: Over the course of each day programming is ‘day-parted’ and designed to fit in as far as possible with the lifestyles of our listeners. This means we do target certain sections of the audience at certain times of the day (early risers, parents and children on the school run, office workers on their tea breaks, people at home doing the chores, sitting with their feet up or getting ready for bed). (Oneword Press Release, April 2001)

As I have already suggested this approach recognises the way in which audiences will use radio in the digital age. When confronted with thirty or more stations, listeners will be more inclined to switch between them as their mood or circum-

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stances dictate. For instance the listener may choose a loud music service when driving for pleasure but prefer rolling news for the drive to work or stories when sitting at home with the family. An open schedule allows this to happen: this is the future of radio and a future that speech radio needs to (and does) recognise. The nature of Oneword (with short extracts and repeats through the day) allows the listener to dip in and dip out of programming rather than devoting sustained periods of listening to a single service. Although this is likely to be the conventional pattern of listening, research from the BBC would suggest that in the digital age we might actually spend more time with our radios. ‘Early analysis of the habits of new listeners seems to suggest that they listen longer and that the ease of re-tuning allows them more easily to listen to a greater range of stations’ (interview with Huw Williams, June 2001). Compared to the more traditional style of Radio 4, Oneword is relaxed, friendly and accessible. Unlike Radio 4, it makes use of short musical bridges to link programmes, add flow and – possibly – to fill gaps put aside for commercials. A continuity announcer takes the listener through parts of the day and unlike his or her counterpart on Radio 4, is entitled both to a name and a personality. These practices are perhaps not surprising in commercial radio but they add a distinctiveness to the output and combine with frequent ‘signposting’ to keep the listener engaged. The station says it has no eye on what Radio 4 is doing and prefers to create its own niche, but in a market where the latter has captured nine million listeners this is bound to be difficult. Of its relationship with Radio 4, Programme Director Paul Kent says simply ‘There used to be one intelligent speech network, well now there’s two’ (interview, June 2001). Children’s programming features quite strongly in the Oneword schedule and this was a calculated choice. When it launched, no other station was providing a significant amount of speech radio for children: at the time BBC Radio 4 was only offering thirty minutes a week. Oneword saw the provision of children’s programming as an exciting opportunity at a time when children’s publishing was enjoying a boom period, and this has led the station to form partnerships with publishers and rights holders, including the Disney Corporation. Even as an adult I have found the children’s programming engaging, perhaps because it is evocative of my own childhood radio listening and perhaps because of the compelling nature of the stories it features. Among the best

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instances of the fresh approach to speech radio which the station has adopted is the weekly children’s magazine Squawkbox. Its format uses presenter and characters to link the various elements together – they too are involved in their own plot-driven drama while seamlessly moving in and out of the programme elements. It is a highly creative treatment of an old programme idea and one that could well lead children into other speech radio genres. For a time the ‘lifestyle approach’ adopted by Oneword was apparent on other digital radio channels such as ITN Radio, a rolling format of news, travel, weather and sport whose items were repeated several times an hour. ITN had already been operating this format on its local London FM station, News Direct, as well as on a digital television news channel, and close listening suggested that ITN Radio shared material with both. A channel called Bloomberg Talk Money brought the total of speech radio services on national digital commercial radio to three, even though it merely used the sound from the organisation’s U.K. television service. But after only two years on air, both ITN Radio and Bloomberg fell silent in 2002, victims of their owners’ needs to re-focus on their core businesses. Apart from Oneword, it is the BBC with its four new national services – Radio 5 Live Sports Extra, the World Service, the Asian Network and BBC 7 – which continues to carry the torch for digital speech radio. While talking about digital radio it may be worth returning briefly to the above-mentioned Sky Digital satellite. In addition to a myriad of television channels the satellite also carries radio channels, such as Oneword and all the BBC networks. Buried in among these are several Christian radio services, some of which offer all-speech services of Bible readings and discussions which are evidently produced in the U.S. While I do not intend to analyse these services the reader may be interested to know that they exist and to tune into a different digital platform in order to hear speech radio in a highly narrowcast form.

Digital speech radio: outlook uncertain The reader might hope that it is possible to arrive at definite conclusions and predictions about speech radio in the digital age but this chapter should already have revealed that this is difficult to do. Its success depends on so much: future technol-

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ogy, affordability, the desire of broadcasters to provide speech and ultimately of the public to listen to it. In DAB the development and expansion of Oneword already shows commitment on the part of broadcasters, and ongoing work with retailers shows commitment by the multiplex owners, in particular the commercial national owner Digital One, of which Oneword is a channel. The development of affordable sets is crucial. Once portables become available and digital radios replace analogue sets as standard – or at least as an affordable upgrade in items such as midi systems, portable stereos and cars – digital radio will achieve true mass market status. The involvement of the Ford Motor Company in digital radio has thus been an immense boost. The company is a partner in the MXR consortium, an operator of four regional multiplexes (North East, North West, West Midlands and Severn Estuary), and so from 2002 onwards all new Fords were fitted with digital radios as standard. Listening to Oneword and hearing of its plans lends confidence that it will prove to be popular with an increasingly diverse audience who might well prefer its output to music-based formats, other speech services, or indeed tapes. Perhaps the only losers in this new future would be the producers and retailers of spoken word tapes. However, a thriving future for speech radio on the Internet seems, outside the U.S. at least, to be less likely. The cost of staying connected to the net for long enough to hear a play or discussion will prevent many from even trying to listen: moreover speech radio requires greater concentration and a sustained intellectual or emotional response. This is hard if the connection repeatedly fails or if the listener is also writing emails or surfing among favourite websites. While the Internet once offered a real opportunity to alternative broadcasters, overuse of the network and quality and technology issues now mean that it will probably only ever be a viable prospect for niche music stations or supporting services. It will take faster and cheaper connections before live and original speech radio can survive on the Internet in the U.K. In an age when the number of radio stations has increased dramatically it is inevitable that the listener will find it harder to distinguish between all the music services on offer. For a radio station to succeed its listeners must be able to recognise what they are listening to so that they can re-tune to it later or – if they are participating in audience research – log their listening: hence when all the music niches have been filled the next new formats could be speech-based. A radio consultant

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once told me that speech radio will always be very popular with the public – that given the choice, many would prefer talk, drama and other speech forms to music. However, sheer cost means that local licences will never be awarded to speech formats. The economics are simple: spread across the same potential number of listeners, speech programming involves more people and working time per hour of output than straight music programming does. In other words, speech stations need either to win more listeners or to charge more for advertising time. However, in the digital age listeners will be scattered ever more thinly across a myriad of services, which could put speech on a more equal footing. As with music the choice of speech will be broad, from readings of plays to the delivery of news of all varieties (financial, national, or indeed regional). In short, the digital age could prove to be more ‘talkative’ than its analogue predecessor was.

References Interviews Huw Williams, Head of New Media Development, BBC Radio and Music Colin Crawford, Vice President of Technical Marketing, Videologic Systems Paul Kent, Programme Director, Oneword Radio (All conducted via telephone or e-mail by the author, June 2001.)

Other Oneword Press Release April 2001.

Internet resources Oneword broadcasts on the Digital One national DAB multiplex, Sky Digital Channel 877 and at URL: http://www.oneword.co.uk For more information on U.K. Digital Radio go to URL: http://www.ukdigitalradio.com BBC Radio 1 documentaries: URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/documentaries The BBC Radio 4 weekly programme archive: URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/progs/listenagain.shtml The BBC Radio 4 Today programme archive: URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/ BBC Radio 5 Live News Extra Online: URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive

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BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra Online: URL: http:// www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/sportsextra BBC Five Live Extra is on Sky Digital Channel 907.

Richard Berry




NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Marko Ala-Fossi is an instructor in radio at the Finnish Broadcasting Company and a doctoral student at the University of Tampere, Finland. He is interested in radio programming, media policy, media economics and media management, and has published in Finnish on the industrialisation of commercial radio culture and on the impact of competition on commercial radio programming. Valerie Alia is Reader in Media Ethics and Culture at the University of Sunderland, U.K., and an Associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. She was formerly Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University, U.S.A., and is the author of Un/Covering the North: News, Media, and Aboriginal People (University of British Columbia Press, 1999). She is also listed in Who’s Who in the World. Alan Beck is BBC Research Fellow in Radio Drama and a lecturer in drama at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he teaches the largest radio drama course in the United Kingdom. A former teacher at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, U.K., he founded Radio-Net, a network of radio teachers, and is the author of Radio Acting (A. and C. Black, 1997) and co-editor of Sound Journal. He was founder and artistic director of the Medieval Players and organises the yearly Radio Drama Conference.

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Richard Berry is Lecturer in Radio at the University of Sunderland, U.K., where he teaches production skills and media history to undergraduate and postgraduate students. He has previously worked in commercial radio as a broadcast journalist and news editor and is a member of the international Radio Studies Network. His research and professional interests include DAB digital radio and studio technology. Andrew Crisell is Professor of Broadcasting Studies at the University of Sunderland, U.K., and a member of the editorial boards of The Radio Journal and The International Journal on Media Management. He is the author of a number of books and articles on the media, including Understanding Radio (second edition, 1994) and An Introductory History of British Broadcasting (second edition, 2002), both of which are published by Routledge. His next book will be a study of television for the Palgrave Press. Terry Flew is Senior Lecturer in Media Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He has published widely on broadcast media, digital and convergent media, media and citizenship, and the impact of new media technologies on higher education. His book, New Media Technologies: An Introduction, was published by Oxford University Press in 2002. Frances Gray is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Sheffield, U.K. As well as articles on radio, her publications include books on John Arden, Noel Coward and on women and comedy . She also writes plays, for which she has received two Radio Times awards, and is a former resident dramatist at Edge Hill College, U.K. She is currently working on a biography of Meggie Albanesi. David Hendy is Senior Lecturer in Radio and a member of the Centre for Communication and Information Studies at the University of Westminster, U.K. He is the author of Radio in the Global Age (Polity Press, 2000) and is currently working on a history of BBC Radio 4 for Oxford University Press. He was a producer with BBC radio for several years and continues to work as a freelance documentary-maker. He is also a member of the editorial advisory board of The Radio Journal.

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299

Andreas Hepp is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany. His research interests include media and cultural theory, cultural studies, media sociology and qualitative methods of media research, and he has published in German on culture, media and power, on television and everyday talk, and in the fields of media consumption, media analysis and transcultural communication. Nicholas W. Jankowski is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. His publications in community media include: The People’s Voice: Local Radio and Television in Europe (Libbey, 1992), Community Media in the Information Age: Perspectives and Prospects (Hampton Press, 2002) and a chapter in The Handbook of New Media (Sage Publications, 2002). He is Chair of the Community Communication Section of the International Association of Media and Communication Research and coeditor of New Media & Society. Bibi Kleijn works as a marketing consultant at Babcock & Wilcox Vølund Aps in Esbjerg, Denmark. She studied in the Department of Communication at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and at the Universities of Sunderland, U.K., and Århus, Denmark, and wrote her master’s thesis on Dutch interactive web radio. Kate Lacey is Senior Lecturer in Media in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex, U.K. She is the author of Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945 (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and a member of the editorial board of The Radio Journal. Her current research focuses on the modernisation of listening and the connections between the public sphere of radio and other formations of public life in the ‘horizon of experience’. Mike Ladd is a producer within the Radio Arts Department of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and currently presents its Radio National programme, PoeticA. He has published three books of poetry, The Crack in the Crib (1984), Picture’s Edge (1994) and Close to Home (2000), and one audio work on CD, Cries and Calls (1990). He has always been interested in collaborations between poetry and other disciplines and has

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made poetic works for live performance, radio, film, photography, installations and the internet. Bob Lochte is Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at Murray State University, Kentucky, U.S.A. He has worked in commercial and noncommercial broadcasting and has owned and operated radio and television stations. He has published articles in both academic and popular periodicals and has twice won awards from the Broadcast Education Association for excellence in historical research. In 1999 he received a fellowship from the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution to study American wireless inventors and their work. Helen Molnar has worked in media and development communications for many years and has extensive industry and academic experience. She has been Coordinator of the Communications Network, Australian National Commission for UNESCO, has undertaken major regional reviews of Pacific media and communications, and has designed a number of media projects for implementation. She has conducted media training programmes in eight South Pacific countries, and is currently director of an aid-funded regional programme which implements projects in fourteen Pacific Island countries. Bruce L. Smith is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Mass Communication at Texas State University – San Marcos, Texas, U.S.A. His articles about Native American media have appeared in the Journal of Radio Studies, Cultural Survival Quarterly, The Northern Review and the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. He worked as a broadcaster for many years, including twelve years in Alaska. Guy Starkey lectures in radio at the University of Sunderland, U.K. He has worked for radio stations in the Middle East, Italy, Gibraltar, England and Wales, as well as being a freelance writer for various trade and consumer magazines. He has written a chapter on radio audiences, one of his research interests, for Anarchy or Diversity, edited by S. Ralph, C. Lees and H. Manchester (University of Luton Press, 2003), and his other interests include political balance and bias in journalism and pan-European broadcasting.

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Martine van Selm is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands and gained her doctorate at the Department of Psychogerontology of the same university. She has published on meaninglessness in the second half of life, the portrayal of the elderly in the media, the elderly readers of women’s magazines, online newspapers, existential meaning on personal homepages, and on elderly users of information and communication technologies in organisational and other settings.




INDEX

A ABC Channel Nine 232 ABC Radio Australia (RA) 118, 120 ABC Radio National 213–14, 238–9 ABC Triple J network 231 Aboriginal Communications Society 83 Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) 91 Abramsky, Jenny 26–8, 32, 34 Adams, Douglas 256 Adams, Judith 261 Adams, Philip 232, 237, 238–9, 241, 245 Afternoon Play, the 253, 255, 256, 259 Agee, James 175 Ala-Fossi, M. 58, 59, 67, 71 Alasuutari, P. 212 Alberta Native Communications Society 82 Albiston, Jordie 215 Alia, V. 77, 84, 85, 93 Alitalo, S. 58, 71 All Things Considered 47, 48, 49–50, 51–2 Allen, D. 164 Alm, A. 72

AM programme, the 232 Amagoalik, John 79–80, 83, 93 American Broadcasting Company 42–3 American Indian Movement (AIM) 98–9 American Indian Radio on Satellite (AIROS) 102–3, 106 American Public Radio. See Public Radio International Ang, I. 210 Antenne MecklenbergVorpommern 210 Any Questions? 137 Appleton, Gil 241, 245 Arbeitsgemeinschaft Öffentlichrechtlicher Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ARD) 190 Arbitron 53 Archers, The 25, 138, 253, 255, 287 Arendt, Hannah 146, 158, 162 Artaud, Antonin 218 Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ASDL) 284 audiences. See also listeners anthropology of ix–x, xii–xiii,

304

196–7, 199–201, 205–7, 248–50, 251–9, 260–1 Australian radio, for 230–1, 244–5 British demographics 27–8, 29–31, 34 documentary, for 168, 173, 183–4, 185–7 Finnish digital radio, for 67–9, 70–1 Native American radio, for 100, 106 poetry, for 213–14, 223–7 South Pacific radio, for 115, 116, 118, 119, 120 U.S. demographics 39–41, 42–3, 44–5, 49, 52–4 audio/file/poets 215 Australian Associated Press (AAP) 238 Australian Bankers Association 242, 243 Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) 231, 232, 233, 240, 241, 242–4 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) 111, 119, 120, 213–14, 220, 226, 230, 231, 232, 238, 239, 242. See also individual services, networks and stations Australian, The 232 Avery, D. 114, 125 Avery, R. 71, 72 B B105 network 231 Bakhtin, Mikhail 199, 210 Bandwagon 132 Bangladeshi National Media Survey (1998) 156 Banu, Georges 262 Barba, Eugenio 250–1, 261 Barnard, S. 85, 90, 93 Barney R. 111, 125 Barr, C. 188 Bates, A. 19

Index

Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) 190, 191 Bayern 3, 210 BBC 1 13–16, 23 BBC 1Xtra 290 BBC 2 11, 13–16, 18 BBC 5 Live Sports Extra 32 BBC 6 Music 290 BBC 7 290, 293 BBC Asian Network 290, 293 BBC GLR (Greater London Radio) 127, 134–5 BBC Home Service 5, 170, 171 BBC Light Programme 5, 24 BBC News 24 26 BBC Quarterly 4 BBC Radio 1 5, 23, 28, 30, 127, 136, 260 BBC Radio 2 5, 22, 30, 132 BBC Radio 3 5, 30, 138–41, 260 BBC Radio 4 audience demographic of 27–8, 30, 34 comedy on 132 digital transmissions 289 documentaries on 168–71, 175, 178–80, 182–4, 186 dramas and soaps on 138–41, 253, 255, 257, 260 ‘intellectual’ network, as an viii, 3–18 Internet archives 287 range of programmes on 25–6 running costs 24, 291 style of broadcasting on 292 BBC Radio 5 (later Radio 5 Live) viii, xi, 21–37, 135, 136, 140, 287, 290 BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra 289–90, 293 BBC Radiophonic Workshop 183 BBC Third Programme 5, 170 BBC World Service 24, 287, 290, 293 Beck, A. 129, 142 Beck, U. 191, 210, 211

Index

Beckett, Samuel 141 Beck-Gernsheim, E. 191, 210, 211 Bell, E. 177, 187 Bennett, T. 241, 245, 246 Benny, Jack 131 Birt, John 21, 25, 28, 34 Bloomberg Talk Money 293 Boardman-Jacobs, Sam 138, 142 Böckelmann, F. 193, 210 Boczkowski, P. J. 266, 281 Boehnke, K. 211 Booth, J. 158, 163 Bordewijk, J. L. 269, 281 Bourne, S. 130, 131, 142 Brainard, Bertha 147 Brand, Jeffrey 232, 233, 240, 245 Brehm-Klotz, C. 212 Brennan, B. 93 Bridson, D. G. 168, 171, 175, 184, 187 Briggs, A. 4, 19 Brigham, J. C. 97, 99, 100, 108 Brisebois, D. 91, 93 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) commissioning and scheduling policy 169–71, 174–5, 178, 185 digital radio, and 289–90, 292 Internet radio, policy on 287–8 lesbian and gay radio on 128–41 listener, attitude to 251, 253–4 network radio, reorganisation of 22 news broadcasting, policy on 26–8 radio and television, early attitudes to 4–6 radio services, review of 24–5 South Pacific radio, and 111, 119, 120 U.S. public radio, and 48, 50, 51–2 women working in 145.

305

See also individual services, networks and stations British Telecom 286 Broadcasting Services Act (1992) 242 Broken Land 216 Brook, Peter 258, 262 Brown, M. 32, 36 Browne, D. R. 98, 108 Bruguier, Leonard 95, 108 Brünjes, S. 191, 209, 210 Bucher, H-J. 212 Bull, M. 136, 142 Burton, L. 232, 237, 238, 241, 245 ‘bush’ radio 97, 99, 100 Buss, M. 191, 210 Butler, J. 163 Butsch, R. 158, 162 BuZz 265, 268–9, 270–81 C Calderón, Pedro 254–5 Calewalayana 219–20 Campbell, Nicky 135 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) 48, 80, 81, 82, 85 Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) 82–4, 91, 93 Canadian Satellite Communications Inc. (CANCOM) 83–4 Capital Radio 290 Capsuto, S. 128, 130–1, 142 Carey, John 183–4, 187 Carter, D. 246 Casey, Tom 98, 99, 102, 108 Ceesay, C. 155, 162 Certeau, M. de 192, 195, 210 Chaillet, Ned 140, 261 Chandler, D. 133, 142 Chaney, D. 4, 19 Channel 4 11 Channel 5 13 chat box 268, 271, 272, 273,

306

274–5, 276–8, 280 children’s programmes. See educational programmes CHON-FM Whitehorse 78, 84–5, 89 Christian radio services 293 Churchill, Winston 5 cinema 3, 4, 133–4, 189, 218, 256 CKON-FM, Canada-U.S. border 100 CKRK-FM Kahnawake 89, 90 Classic FM 30 Cleverdon, Douglas 219 Cliche, D. 151, 153, 162 Clum, J. 132, 142 Cockroach 220 Coles, R. 172, 175, 181, 187 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) 42–3 Commonwealth Broadcasting Association 162 concrete poetry 223–4 Corbin, Alain 247, 249, 262 Core Curriculum, The 291 Corner, J. 168, 171, 171–2, 177–8, 186, 187, 188 Cornette, M. 81, 94 Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) 46–7, 53, 54, 100, 104 Cory, M. E. 218, 227 Cramer, J. 158, 162 Crawford, Colin 289, 295 Creedon, P. 162 Creekmur, C. 132, 142 Cries From Casement As His Bones Are Brought To Dublin 138–9 Crisell, A. 7, 19, 22, 36, 67, 72, 173, 187, 200, 211 Crook, T. 10, 19, 257, 257–8, 262 Crow Dog, M. 90, 93 Culf, A. 21, 29, 31, 36 Current Affair, A 232 D Dahl, P. 200, 211 Daily Telegraph Sidney 232

Index

Dales, The 138 Davies, N. 4, 19 Death of an Ugly Sister 140–1 Dennis, E. 266, 281 Desert Canticles 221 development programmes 114–17, 119–20 Dhaka Radio 155–6 Dick Barton 252 Did the Mob Kill Marilyn 225 Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). See digital technology Digital One 289, 294 digital technology ix, xii–xiii, 32, 57–74, 283–5, 288–94 Dijk, J. van 269, 272, 281, 282 Disney Corporation 290, 292 Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) 161 docu-soaps 169 Dollimore, J. 132, 142 Donovan, P. 22, 36 Doty, A. 132, 142 Downes, E. J. 269, 282 Dreaming and the Dead, The 216–7 Drunken God of Verse, The 222 Du Fu 222 Duke, Jas 224 Dumbly, Tug 225 Dussel, K. 190, 191, 211 Dusty, Slim 236 Dyer, R. 132, 137, 142 E Eagle, I. D. 103, 108 Eastman, S. T. 40, 49, 54 educational and children’s programmes 22–3, 24, 27, 36, 290–1, 292–3 Emmison, M. 241, 245 Erdoes, R. 93 Etienne, R. 269, 282 Eurich, Johanna 102, 106–7, 108 Evans, Sandy 220 Extending Choice 24–5 eyada.com 286

Index

F 4BC Brisbane 231 5AA Adelaide 231, 238 Fairclough, N. 172, 177, 180, 188 Fallding, Helen 84–5, 93 Fardon, R. 156, 162, 163 Farmer, Gary 91, 93 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 40, 41–2, 44, 45–6, 48, 51 Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters 242, 244 Feldman, S. 151, 163 Fem FM 153 Feminist International Radio Endeavour (FIRE) 151, 159 Ferguson, Alex 259 Ferguson, D. A. 40, 49, 54 Fiji Broadcasting Commission (FBC). See Fiji Broadcasting Corporation Limited Fiji Broadcasting Corporation Limited (FBCL) 111, 112, 123 Finch, M. 131, 143 Finnish News Radio Ltd 58–9 Fiske, J. 192, 197, 211 Five Birds in a Cage 127, 129–30 Five Man Humanity 219 Flew, T. 239, 245 FM (frequency modulation) ABC Radio National, and 213, 220, 221 Australian music radio on 231 Australian talk radio, and 244 BBC networks on 30 Canadian indigenous communities, and 89–90 German radio, and 191 Internet relays of 285 local re-broadcasting on 288 popularity, growth of 22 rolling news, and 25, 26 South Pacific commercial stations, and 112

307

U.S. local radio on 41 U.S. music radio on 43 U.S. public radio, and 45–6, 47–8, 52–3, 54 FM 96 Suva 113 Forbes, John 222–3 Ford, A. 227 Ford Motor Company 294 Four Elements, The 217 Fowler, R. 261 Francis, Bob 238 Frank, Anne 250, 262 Franklin, B. 13, 19 Frauenfunk 158 Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) 121 Frith, S. 158, 163 Frow, J. 241, 245 Full Moon Night 224–5 Furniss, G. 156, 162 , 163 Fusimalohi, T. 115, 125 Fuss, D. 143 G Gallagher, David 220 Gay and Lesbian London 134–5 Gay Sweatshop 140 Gebhardt, W. 211 gendered discourses 146–8, 154 German Technical Foundation (GTZ) 121 Gielgud, Val 130 Gill, J. 130, 142 Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The 248 Giuliani, M. 83, 93 Gledhill, C. 143 Godwin, N. 131, 143, 164 Golden Gate, The 215 Goon Show, The 132, 256 Gough, Lucy 260, 261 Great Zoo, The 215 Gribi, Gerri 159 Grierson, John 168, 182, 188 Grimwade, S. 227 Guck, M. 136, 142 Guillen, Nicholas 215 Gulf War, the 21, 25–7

308

H Haan, J. de 272, 282 Hacker, K. 281 Haley, William 4 Hall, Lee 257, 262 Hanging of Jean Lee, The 215 Hanson, Pauline 237–8 Hanssen, L. 269, 282 Hardy, F. 188 Hartley, J. 239, 245 Hartshorne, C. 19 Harwood, Ronald 139 Hasebrink, U. 191, 211 Hawkes, T. 19 Hawkins, R. P. 282 Hebdige, Dick 207–8, 211 Heinonen, A. 61, 72 Henderson, N. 35, 36 Hendy, D. 61, 72, 136, 142 Hepp, A. 200, 202, 205–6, 211 Hermes, J. 210 Hessischer Rundfunk (HR) 190, 191 Hettlage, R. 211 High Contrast 184–5, 187 Higson, A. 173, 174, 188 Hikmet, Nazim 227 Hill, A. 137, 143 Hill, Barry 221 Hilmes, M. 158, 163 Hirvensalo, J. 70, 72 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The 256 Hit-Radio Antenne (Hanover) 203, 210 Hit-Radio Antenne (Sachsen) 210 Hitzler, R. 191, 202, 208, 211 Hoffmann, D. 191, 211 Hoffmaster, B. 93 Höllentrip bei Feinkost Zipp 198, 199–201 Hollows, B. 131, 143, 164 Honer, A. 191, 211 Honig, B. 158, 163 Hörspiel/Neue Hörspiel 217, 219 Howard, John 232, 234, 235 Howes, K. 130, 138, 142

Index

HR3 210 Huhtamäki, Harri 219–20 Hujanen, T. 73 Hull, Coral 216 Hunter, F. 158, 163 Hüther, J. 212 I I See the Moon 259–60 Ilmonen, K. 72, 73 independent local radio (ILR) 22, 25, 31 Independent Television (ITV) 5 information and communication technology (ICT) 151 International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) 161 International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) 157, 162 Internet radio Australian commercial broadcasting and 244 broadcasters’ perspective on 287–8 Dutch broadcasting on 265–81 Finnish broadcasting on 57, 60, 61–3, 66–7, 69, 70 gay stations on 127, 128, 135 indigenous peoples, and 90, 92 listener awareness, and 255, 285–7 poetry programmes on 223, 226–7 potential and limitations of vii, viii, xii, xiii speech on ix, 294–5 women’s broadcasting on 151, 152, 154, 156–7, 158 Internet Service Provider (ISP) 284 Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) 82–3 Isis International-Manila 157, 162

Index

ITMA 127, 132, 252 ITN Radio 293 J Jandl, Ernst 219, 227 Jankowski, N. 266, 267, 269, 278, 282 Jarman, Derek 141 Jeffrey-Poulter, S. 129, 143 Jensen, J. F. 269, 269–70, 282 Jocks, Conway 89, 90, 93 Johnson, L. 158, 163, 230, 245 Johnson, P. 128, 131, 143 Joint Industry Committee for Radio Audience Research (JICRAR) 26, 29 Jones, Alan 229, 231, 232, 233, 238, 242, 243, 244 Jongh, N. de 129, 131, 143 Jütte, R. 159, 163 K Kaam, B. van 269, 281 Kahn, D. 227 Kangaroo Virus 216 Kansas, University of 266 Karim, K. 93 Kaufman, S. 164 Kaye, B. 266, 282 KDKA Pittsburgh 97 Keating, Paul 232 Keith, M. 128, 131, 143 Keith, M. C. 97, 98–9, 102, 107, 108 Kemppainen, P. 58, 72 Kenomadiwin Radio 81 Kent, Paul 291, 292, 295 Kilborn, R. 168, 188 KILI-FM South Dakota 99, 102 Killing of Sister George, The 127 Kind of Freedom, A 140 King, Stephen 248, 262 KINI-FM South Dakota 101 Kinsella, John 216 Klingler, W. 212 KLND-FM South Dakota 95, 97, 103–6 Knudsen, H. 169, 170, 188

309

Koestenbaum, W. 137, 143 Komunyakaa, Yusef 220 Korhonen, R. 61, 72 Kovaricek, Jaroslav 224–5 Kovitz, R. 46, 47, 53, 55, 72 Kreckel, R. 210 KUOW Seattle 51–2 KUSC Los Angeles 50 KUYI-FM Arizona 96 KYRU North Carolina 99 KYUK-AM Bethel 80, 99–100 L Lacey, K. 146, 147–8, 158, 158–9, 163 Laclau, Ernesto 237, 245 Ladd, Mike 227 Lady in the Dark 131 Lahti, J. 60, 61, 62, 65, 69–70, 72 Lamerton, J. 28, 34, 36 ‘language’ poetry 223 Late 132 Late Night Live 238 Lateline 232 Lau, C. 191, 211 Lawrence, A. 159, 163 Laws, John 229, 231, 232, 232–3, 233–4, 236, 238, 240–1, 241, 242–4 LBC (London Broadcasting Company) 25 Lee, Mollie 184, 188 Lees, C. 37 Lees, Justine 216 Lehtipuu, U. 69, 72 Leicester, P. 138, 143 Lent, J. 125 Leonard, H. 111, 125 Lewis, P. 139, 143 Lewis, P. M. 158, 163 Limbaugh, Rush 45, 236, 285 Limestone, Iron and Time 216 Lind, R. A. 266, 267, 269, 273, 279, 282 Lindholm, R. 65, 72 Lindner-Braun, C. 203–4, 210, 212

310

Listen with Whoever 291 listeners digital radio, to 290, 291–3 female 147–9, 150–1, 156, 157–8 gay 133–4, 136–8 internet radio, to 265–81, 285–7, 294–5. See also audiences Listening Room, The 221, 226 listening, secondary 5, 6, 10 Löffelholz, M. 190, 212 Long March of Everyman, The 182–4 Lovill, J. 248, 262 Luckhurst, T. 26, 27, 30, 36 Lumby, Catherine 238, 245 Luthe, M. 211 Lyytinen, E. 58, 72, 73 M Maasilta, M. 72 MacColl, Ewan 175–7, 181–2, 188 MacFarland, D. 67, 72 Magic in the Sky 81–2 Mahabarata, the 258 Mahle, W. 193, 210 Makhijani, S. 152, 163 Manchester, H. 37 Mansel, J. 211 Marconi Wireless Company 78 Marwo at the School Gate 155 Massotty, S. 262 Matheson, Hilda 147, 158 May, Julian 225 Mayröcker, Friederike 219, 227 McCann, P. 30, 37 McChesney, R. 41, 54 McCourt, T. 45, 47, 54 McHoul, A. 192, 212 McKee, A. 236, 245 McKibbin, R. 170, 188 McLean, G. 17, 19 McLuhan, Marshall 234–5, 245 McMillan, S. J. 269, 282 McNeil, B. 78, 80, 93 McQuail, D. 253, 262

Index

McWhinnie, Donald 253, 262 Meade, A. 236, 245 Media Watch 242, 244 Medoff, N. J. 266, 267, 269, 273, 279, 282 Melville, Hermann 139 Men from the Ministry, The 132 Mermaid’s Tail, The 260–1 Meulemann, W. 211 Meyrowitz 200, 212 microradio 48 Miller, C. 132, 143 Miller, T. 192, 212 Milligan, Spike 256, 262 Mings, S. 266, 282 Minnesota Public Radio 48, 50 Mitchell, C. 143, 145, 152, 160, 163 Mitchell, R. 162 Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR Jump) 210 mobile phones 70, 284 Monkey’s Mask, The 215 montage 170, 173, 174 Moores, S. 148, 163 Morning Edition 47, 48, 49–50, 51–2 Morton, T. 28, 37 Münch, T. 211 Murray, J. 151, 163 Murray, Les 235 MXR digital radio consortium 294 My Word! 137 Myers, M. 162, 163 N National Aboriginal Communications Society (NACS) 84, 85 National Association of Broadcasters 43–4 National Broadcasting Company (NBC) 42–3 National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), PapuaNew Guinea 112, 123 National Public Radio 47–52, 54

Index

Native American Journalists Association 95 Native Communications Programme (NCP) 82 Native Communications Society of Nova Scotia 82 Native Communications Society of the Western Arctic 81 Native News Network of Canada (NNNC) 91–2 Nederlandse Christelijke Radio Vereniging (NCRV) 281 Neumann, Dennis 97, 104, 105–6, 107, 108 Neuwöhner, Ulrich 205, 212 New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation (NZBC) 111. See also Radio New Zealand International Newaural Net Collective 226 News Direct 293 News Extra Online 287 News Huddlines, The 132 Nieminen, H. 73 non-governmental organisation (NGO) 113, 115, 117, 119, 153, 157 Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR2) 210 Northern Broadcasting Policy and Northern Native Broadcast Access Programme (NNBAP) 84 Northern Native Broadcasting Yukon (NNBY) 78, 84 Nye, S. 131, 143, 160, 164 Nyman, J. 58, 72 O Oneword 288, 290–3, 294 Ong, W. 199, 212 Optus 242 Osborne, John 139 Österlund-Karinkanta, M. 69, 73 Out This Week 135 P Pacific Broadcasting Training

311

and Development Scheme (PACBROAD) 121 Pacific Islands Broadcasting Association (PIBA) 121, 125 Pacific Islands News Assocation (PINA) 122, 125 Pacific News Agency (PACNEWS) 121–3 Pacifica Foundation 46 Page, Geoff 215 Palapu, D. 116, 125 Parker, Charles 176–7, 181–2 Paulu, B. 4, 19 Pearson, Mark 232, 233, 240, 245 Peirce, C. S. 19 Peltonen, H. 59, 73 Pessoa, Fernando 225 Pfadenhauer, M. 208, 211 photography 3, 175 PINA Nius 122, 123, 125 Pingree, S. 282 Pinter, Harold 141 PoeticA 213–17, 222–7 Porter, Dorothy 215 Poster, M. 195, 212 Postman, N. 9, 19 Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu 218 Prairie Home Companion, A 48, 50, 52 Prasad, D. 122, 125 Prehn, O. 282 Pressures of the Unspeakable 226 Psion Wavefinder, the 289 Public Broadcasting Act (1967) 46 Public Radio International (PRI) 48–52, 54 Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS) 102 Puro, J-P. 59, 67, 73 Q Quintal, Meg 107, 108 Quite Early One Morning 218

312

R Radio 3FM, Netherlands 268 Radio Ballads 177 Radio Bremen (RB) 190 ‘radio-comics’ 190, 195–201, 206, 209 Radio for Development (RfD), Bangladesh 155, 161 Radio for Peace International, Costa Rica 151 Radio Hamburg 210 Radio Joint Audience Research (RAJAR) 29–30, 34 ‘Radio Listening Clubs’ 156 Radio Nauru 112 Radio New Zealand International (RNZI) 120 Radio Nova 59 Radio Stadi 58 Radio Sunshine, Niue 112 Radio Times, The 132, 252, 255 Radio Tonga 115 Radio Tuvalu 112–3, 117 Radio Vanuatu 112–3 Radio Ykkönen 58 Rafaeli, S. 269, 270–1, 282 Ralph, S. 37 Raphael, Caroline 261 Rarick, D. L. 273, 279, 282 Ravlich, Robyn 217 Raymont, Peter 81, 93 Reggiunti, Gordon 95–6, 108 Reith, John 4, 130, 255 ‘repeater’ radio stations 101 restricted service licence (RSL) 135, 153 Revenge, The 251 Rijken, S. 272, 282 Rinnakkaisohjelma 58 Robinson, Tom 127, 129, 134–5, 137 rock ’n’ roll 5, 43, 104–5, 191, 231 Roos, J-P 60, 73 Rössler, P. 191, 211 Roth, L. 83, 89, 93 Round the Horne 127, 132 Rudin, R. 67, 73

Index

Runaway Brides 178, 187 Rush, R. 164 Ruttmann, Walter 218 S Saarikoski, P. 73 Sachs, Andrew 251 Salminen, K. 72 Salokangas, R. 58, 72, 73 Salter, L. 89, 94 Sattler, Howard 238 Scannell, P. 182, 184, 188 Scarring, The 215 schools programmes. See educational programmes Schorb, B. 212 Schröter, C. 212 Schulze, Gerhard 202, 212 Scott, J. W. 163 Scott, Joan 147, 164 Seeger, Peggy 176–7, 181–2 Seth, Vikram 215 7.30 Report, The 232 Seventh Generation Media Services Inc. 103–4, 108 Seymour-Ure, C. 3, 19 Shapley, Olive 147, 158, 168, 180–1, 188 Shingler, M. 10, 19 Shivdas, Meena M. 161, 162 Shopping and Fucking 136 Sieveking, Lance 168, 182, 184 Sihvonen, J. 73 Siikala, T. 60, 73 Silverstone, R. 195, 212 Sims, Ron 216, 222 Sinfield, A. 128, 130, 131, 132, 138, 139, 143 Singing the Fishing 181–2, 187 6PR Perth 231, 238 60 Minutes 232 Sky Digital 285, 290, 293 Smith, B. 138, 143 Smith, Bruce L. 81, 94, 97, 99, 100, 108 Smith, C. 34, 37 Smith, Hazel 224 ‘sole service’ radio stations 97

Index

Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) 112, 116–17 Somali Women’s Radio Drama Group 161 sometimes, alicia 227 Song of a Road 176, 187 Songs of Central Australia 221 sound poetry 224 Soundstage 220 Spar Boys 178–80, 187 Spigel, L. 149, 164 Spoonface Steinberg 257–8 Squawkbox 293 Stacey, J. 134, 143 Starkey, G. 28, 30, 37 Stavitsky, A. 71, 72 Stevens, Wallace 220–1 Stewart, P. 35, 37 Stockinger, H-P. 196, 212 Storey, John 192, 212 Strehlow, T. G. H. 221 Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) 190, 191, 195, 204–5, 206 Sudweeks, F. 269, 270–1, 282 Südwest-German Rundfunk (SWR) 191, 195–6, 204, 206–7, 210 Südwestrundfunk (SWF) 190, 191, 195–6, 198, 199–201, 204, 206, 209, 210 Sunday programme, the 232 Suominen, J. 73 Swallow, Norman 177 T Tacchi, J. 70, 73, 235, 239, 245 Talkback Radio (by Π Ο) 225 talkSPORT 30, 31 TeamTalk 252 30, 31, 36 Teinilä, J. 59, 67, 73 Television Canada, in 82, 83, 91 compared with radio viii, x, 6–18, 136, 157, 162, 168–9, 235, 244, 256 digital receivers 71 historical impact on radio

313

3–5, 42–3, 191, 230, 254 popular culture, and 189, 196 programmes re-broadcast on digital radio 57, 61, 65, 68 promotional medium for radio, as a 32–3 radio simulcasts, and 141, South Pacific, in the 109–10, 113, 122 Telstra 234 Testimony 220 Thérrien Report 83, 93 Thesiger, Ernest 130 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird 220–1 Thom, M. 262 Thomas, Dylan 218–9 Thompson, Matt 170, 175, 176, 184–5, 186, 188 3AW Melbourne Today programme, the 21, 26, 27, 34, 287 Today in Parliament 256 Toohey, B. 245 Trans Global Express 226 transistor radios 5, 283 ‘translator’ radio stations 101 Trenchard, L. 131, 143 Triangle Radio Network 127 Triple M network 231 Tuk-Tuk Communications Society 81 Tulloch, J. 195, 212 Tulppo, P. 58, 73 Tuominen, H. 58, 73 Turner, G. 238, 245, 245–6 2GB Sydney 231 2LO 127, 129 2UE Sydney 231, 236, 239, 242, 244 Tydeman, John 138–9 U Ulman, Jane 216–7 UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) 161

314

UN World Conference on Women, Beijing 154, 160, 161 Under Milk Wood 218–9 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) 121, 153, 155, 160, 161 UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) 155, 161 U.S. Copyright Office 285–6 Usher, L. 111, 125 V Vallee, Rudi 131 van Selm, M. 266, 278, 282 Vaughan, D. 167, 188 Vega+ 71 Veräjänkorva, A. 61, 74 Videologic (‘Pure’) 289 Vihavainen, T. 72, 73 Virgin Radio 289 Viva! Radio 152 Vogelgesang, W. 202, 211 Vogt, L. 211 Voice of America (VOA) 118, 287 Voice of the Poets, The 218 Vos, L. de 269, 282 W Waggoners’ Walk 138 Wall, T. 71, 74 Waller, Judith 147 Walther, J. B. 277, 282 War of the Worlds, The 257–8 Warner, Marina 260–1 Watney, S. 129, 143 Watson, J. 137, 143 Wawatay Communications Society 81, 82 WBEZ Chicago 50 web radio. See Internet radio Weeks, J. 129, 143 Weir, S. 21, 37 Weiringa, C. 10, 19 Weiss, A. 132, 143 Weiss, P. 19

Index

Welles, Orson 256–7 Wenger, U. 191, 209, 210 Werden, F. 159, 164 Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR2) 210 Whitehead, Gregory 226, 227 Whole Truth, The 242 Wiemann, J. M. 282 Wiesand, A. 162 Wild, C. 200, 212 Willems, H. 211 Williams, D. 262 Williams, Huw 287, 292, 295 Williams, K. 3, 19 Williams, Raymond 230, 246 Winston, B. 168, 169, 182, 188 Winter, R. 211 Wisconsin Public Radio 50 Witherspoon, J. 46, 47, 53, 55, 72 Wochenende 218 Wolfe, M. 78, 80, 93 Woman’s Hour 13, 33, 151, 158 Women’s Business Radio 152 Women’s Feature Service (WFS) 160 Women’s International Newsgathering Service (WINGS) 151, 159 Women’s Net Community Radio Pilot Project, South Africa 156–7, 161 Women’s Radio Group, U.K. 155, 160 Women’s Voices 160 WomenWatch 154 Woodrow, A. 25, 37 Woods, G. 130, 131, 143 Woolf, Virginia 139 World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) 155, 160 World at One, The 253, 255 WXPN Philadelphia 152 Wynand, Derk 227 X XWA Montreal 78

Index

Y YLE Foreign Service (Radio Finland) 63 YLE R1 (Radio Ylen Ykkönen) 58, 59, 61–2, 63, 71 YLE R2 (Radiomafia) 58, 63, 64. See also YLEX YLE R3 (Radio Suomi) 58, 61–2, 63, 64, 71 YLE Radio Aino 60, 63, 67–8. See also YLEQ YLE Radio Peili viii, 57–74 YLE TV 63

315

Yleisohjelma 58 Yleisradio (YLE) (Finnish national public service radio) 57–60, 64, 67–8, 69, 71. See also individual networks, services and stations Ylen Klassinen 71 YLEQ 71 YLEX 71 Z Zemanek, Stan 236, 239–40