This special issue arises from a one-day conference on the topic of âRadio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBCâ that we held on 19 May 2016 at the British Library, with the support of the Communications and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster. Almost all contributors to this issue gave papers at the conference; others who spoke or who had planned to speak (Hugh Chignell, Henry Mead, Kate Murphy and Paul Wilson) enriched the discussions in welcome ways, and we remain grateful for their contributions. The talk by Paul Wilson, Curator of Radio at the British Library, brought the significant issue of archivesâand their preservation, curation and accessibilityâcentre stage; his championing of the series of public listening events (âLouis MacNeice: Radio Writer and Producerâ, curated by Amanda Wrigley) across May-June 2016 meant that the conferenceâs papers and discussions were followed by an act of communal listening to, and discussion of, a little-known example of MacNeicean radio.
The conference was attended by around fifty participants from richly diverse areas of expertise including practice-based research and the historical study of architecture, broadcasting, classics, drama, imperialism, literature, modernism, musicology, radio, sound, television and transnationalism. The enthusiastic engagement of participants across the day underscored the sense that âradio modernismsâ as an idea represented a productive meeting-point for the exploration of common questions from a broad range of perspectives. This not only indicated a hot interdisciplinary topic but it also mirrored distinctive aspects of the conferenceâs particular focusâthe programmes, aesthetics, personnel and creative practices of the BBC Features Department in the middle stretch of the twentieth century.
In truth, we did not anticipate that this topic would resonate so widely. The idea for the conference had arisen from a specific desire to engage two scholarly constituencies more closely in dialogue with each other. We had observed with excitement the recent flowering of interest from scholars of English literature in âliterary radioâ (for want of definitive terminology). The radio programmes of interest to these scholars either adapt and realise in sound modernist works in print, bring to light the radio writings of canonical and more marginal modernist authors, or are radiogenic creations (often feature programmes) that exploit radio technology in a way that engages with the concerns and aesthetics of literary modernism and modernity itself. But the focus is often concentrated on the text and the writer. The second constituency comprises broadcasting historians in the UKâespecially those, like ourselves, who have literary backgrounds and are actively researching the literary cultures and modernist aesthetics of BBC radio in the middle decades of the twentieth century. This constituency is rather diffusely spread across a variety of institutions, research centres and departments (of, for example, communications, cultural studies, education, English literature, modern history, media history, media studies, television and theatre). On the one hand, then, the practical aim of the conference was to enhance the sense of connection amongst those based in the UK with research interests in BBC Radioâs imaginative programming from the mid-twentieth century; and, on the other, the intellectual project was to explore how we may best share and learn from each othersâ methodologies and sets of expertise with the aim of strengthening scholarship across disciplinary boundaries.
The conference was held at the ten-year point since the 2006 publication of Todd Averyâs landmark book Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922-1938 (and we were delighted that he was able to give the keynote address). A number of book-length studies by literary modernist scholars followed: for example, many of the essays in Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle and Jane Lewtyâs 2009 collection Broadcasting Modernism and Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning and Henry Meadâs 2014 Broadcasting in the Modernist Era are concerned with modernist auteur engagements with radio, as are Melissa Dinsmanâs 2015 Modernism at the Microphone, Emily C. Bloomâs 2016 The Wireless Past and David Addyman, Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonningâs Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio (2017, eds). Without neglecting their fundamentally important skills of literary criticism and textual analysis, literary scholars are increasingly seeking to anchor their work more broadly. Bloomsburyâs Historicizing Modernism series (in which Feldman, Tonning and Meadâs 2014 volume and Dinsmanâs 2015 monograph are published) emphasises the importance of historical sources beyond the modernist text itself. Another recent collection, Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Coyleâs special issue of Modernist Cultures, titled âBroadcast Traces / Tracing Broadcasting: Modernism and Radioâ (2015), perceptively highlights the need for modernists interested in literary radio to âmove beyond the simple limning of relations between single authors and radioâ as they introduce new work that is intended to â[trace] plural histories, multiple conversations, and feedback loopsâ (2). The latest monograph on the shelf of literary radio tomes, published almost simultaneously with this special issue, is Ian Whittingtonâs 2018 Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939-1945. Whittington conforms to the customary one author per chapter arrangement, but seeks to represent the âbroad literary coalitionâ of wartime radio writers and in doing so navigates cross-currents of broader cultures and politics assuredly (4). Writing the Radio War is about literary radio but its foundations are much broader.
This flourishing interest in literary radio revives aspects of a rich seam of scholarship from the 1980s that had been foundational for our own research. For example, British Radio Drama, edited by John Drakakis in 1981, offered essays by Christopher Holme on Louis MacNeice, Peter Lewis on Dylan Thomas, Donald A. Low on Susan Hill and Dorothy L. Sayers, Frances Gray on Giles Cooper, Roger Savage on Henry Reed, Katharine Worth on Samuel Beckett and David Wade on radio drama from the 1960s. Radio Drama, edited by Peter Lewis, focused less on individual auteurs, with contributors (English literary scholars mainly, with some practitioners) bringing a more generic, theoretical or practice-based lens to the topic of drama, fiction and features. In 1982, Ian Rodgerâs Radio Drama brought his practice-based and critical expertise to an interpretation of the development of the form across three decades from the early 1920s. Kate Whiteheadâs 1989 monograph, The Third Programme: A Literary History, offered a tightly integrated discussion of the institutional contexts for the work of poets, playwrights and novelists for the BBCâs Third Programme network, 1946â1970. The qualities that these works from the 1980s have in common include a serious engagement with creative processes within institutional frameworks, the aesthetics and intermediality of literary radio and an assessment with the evidence for programmes and programme-making preserved in the BBC Written Archives Centre. They offer, in short, valuable historiographical models which were soon underpinned by excellent cultural and social histories of pre-war broadcasting: D. L. LeMahieuâs 1988 A Culture for Democracy and Paddy Scannell and David Cardiffâs 1991 A Social History of British Broadcasting.
Those currently engaged in historical research on literary radio who style themselves as historians of broadcasting, culture, media, society, etc, do engage in close analysis of programmes (including the text, whether existing as audio record or script) but they are keen to decentre that text through the application of historicist methodologies to the investigation of its contexts, such as collaborative practices amongst producers and other creative personnel involved in realising scripts through sound; to investigate the institutional frameworks and policies informing programme choices; and to assess the properties and grammar of the soundscape itself which (when extant and available for researchers to access) conveys a fuller sense of the original audienceâs sensory experience of a programme than any script alone can offer. In broadcasting history more generally, there has been attention paid to listenerships (Kate Laceyâs 2013 Listening Publics; Amanda Wrigleyâs 2015 Greece on Air), national identity (Thomas Hajkowski, The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 2010), transnationalism (Michele Hilmes, Network Nations, 2011), the soft diplomacy and cold war politics of overseas broadcasting (Simon Potter, Broadcasting Empire, 2012; Alban Webb, London Calling, 2014), the role of women at the BBC (Kate Murphy, Behind the Wireless, 2016) and architecture and the built environment to 1945 (Shundana Yusaf, Broadcasting Buildings, 2014), to name just a few recent perspectives that illuminate the rich heterogeneity of radioâs histories and deepen our knowledge of broadcasting, and the BBC in particular. Current work promises to add welcome depth to the still persistent perception (in some quarters) that broadcasting history is monolithically âinstitutionalâ.
Features, Cultures, Modernisms
The energy and experimentalism of the BBC Features Department in itself gives the lie to any assertion that the BBC, as a site of cultural production, was in any way monolithic; histories of its output need therefore to be similarly flexible, nuanced and grounded in its multifarious cultural contexts and intermedial relationships. Of course, what is often referred to as the âFeatures Departmentâ, referring mainly to its post-war incarnation, did not spring fully formed from the corridors of Broadcasting House. As early as 1928, the Radio Times used a full-page article to introduce its readers to the feature programme: a mixture of music, drama and talk, constituting âan original form of expression, peculiar to broadcastingâ.1 In the 1920s, such features were a result of artistic experiments in the direction of producing radiogenic drama, as distinct from dramas that were to an extent derivative of the stage. As a result of this formal experimentation, there was, as producer Rayner Heppenstall noted, âno short answer to the much-asked question: âWhat is a feature programme?ââ; he himself came up with perhaps the best answer by characterising features as âanything put out by a producer in Features Departmentâ.2 It is important to note that although production staff were proud to stake a claim to the feature as âpurely a BBC inventionâ,3 other national broadcasters were similarly engaged in pushing the boundaries of radiogenic form (compare, for example, the tradition of German Horspiel).
The generic boundaries of the feature form are fluid and generously adaptable to the meaning a writer and producer intended to be communicated through sound. Practically speaking, features utilise imaginative combinations of speech, drama, music, location recording and sound effects in order to suggest meaning, drawing selectively on, for example, the entire range of possible speech forms and arranging them artfully to prick listenersâ imaginations. Features may look, on the face of it, like documentaries, radio plays, radiophonic engagement with modernist poetry, wartime propaganda pieces, travelogues, social history, journalism, etc, but their modes of communication are protean. In the years before the sustained use of actuality and stereo sound became commonplace, for example, many features contained little location recording and sat more within the parameters of dramatic convention rather than in a format comprised of narrated links and contributor clips intercut with sound. The vernacular of features in the time period covered by this volume created rich imaginative worlds by embracing the fluidity of the in-between, interstitial, territory inhabited by the genre itselfâone that straddled the boundaries of realism and drama, fact and fiction.
The longstanding significance of the creative innovation of early feature writers including Tyrone Guthrie, Lance Sieveking and Mary Hope Allen is acknowledged by the post-war head of features Laurence Gilliam in his 1950 book BBC Features. He discusses the important origins of the Features Department in the form of the Research Unit which in the 1920s explored the dramatic and artistic possibilities of the medium; that unit developed into the Features Unit which, together with the Drama Unit, formed a department under the leadership of Val Gielgud. After the war, the Features Unit was granted the autonomy of a Department, which was led by Laurence Gilliam until his death in 1964, soon after which it was disb...
