Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

72 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER RADIO AND THEATRE Documentary is not the copyright of the film people. The method is in fact appropriate to any medium which reaches many people simultaneously. On these pages, two well-known figures in broadcasting and drama examine documentary ideas as they affect their own work. We begin with Laurence Gilliam : the career of the documentary radio or 'feature' programme in British broadcasting offers many parallels to the course of the documentary film. Both had their roots in the realist movement that followed the first world war and attracted so many active and curious minds to explore the mysteries and excitements of a new medium of expression. Both drew inspiration and strength from the 'social awareness' that permeated the thinking and feeling of so many young artists, thinkers, leaders and talkers of the twenties and thirties who passed out of the middle-class schools and universities, or pushed their way from uncongenial desk jobs or pedagogic backwaters to the more exciting forms of expression offered by the microphone and the cutting bench. Documentary radio, as well as documentary film, recruited its writers and directors from this new, impulsive and purposeful class of young people with ideas. Both forms have on the whole, I suspect the people of these two worlds know little about each other's work. The history of the 'feature' programme, which is what radio producers in documentary call their product, falls easily and inevitably into three parts. Part one — 'Early Struggles'; part two — 'War'; part three — 'Back to Peace'. These divisions may suggest a parallel to documentary films. I wouldn't know. The story of the early days was one of struggle for recognition; for incessant hammering at a pleasure-crazed world that the drama of fact was more exciting than the gilded butterflies of the drama of make believe. With rare exceptions, the pleasure-crazed world was not convinced. The exceptions were interesting, because they pointed the way to future successes. There was Job to be Done, a dramatized exposition of American boom and slump which opened many eyes and ears; that was an American production by Pare Lorentz and Bill Robson DOCUMENTARY RADIO by LAURENCE GILLIAM Feature Programme Director of the British Broadcasting Corporation drawn with profit on the talents thrown generously and enthusiastically into their service. Writers, both poets and journalists, composers and painters, architects and actors have all found score for experiment and the satisfaction of fulfln ent in both these fields There have, in the past fifteen years, been examples of intermingling of talents between documentary film and radio. But in the main the two groups have followed parallel lines without meeting. 1 his. I think, has been mainly due to the exigcrc ies of the job, and, more recently, to the inhuman pressures of the war, rather than to any icc| looted differences. I don't know how mat.'. < : mentary film people listen seriously to rat id features. ! do know that radio producers are, as a 1 ody, avid film-goers. I remember, some years ai o, with the aid of Basil Wright, trying to arrange a regular get together of film and radio docun erlary people, but it soon fizzled out. More concrete evidence ol radio interest in documentary films has been the various instances of outstanding documentaries adapted for broadcasting. There was Western Approaches and Humphrey Jennings' Welsh village reconstruction ol 1 idice, and several others. Soon a radio version of Jill Craigie's The II ay II <■ Live will be presented in the Home Service. I ilms as a wholeare being treated in 'Picture Parade', the film maga/me in the Light Programme, and documentary matters get their share of attention. Hut for the Columbia Workshop. There was Twenty Years Ago, a radio report on the cause of the first world war. There were experiments by Olive Stapley and Francis Dillon and others in the field of actuality, showing the new possibilities of sound and speech recorded in its own setting and its own rhythm. And, as a matter of history, there were the special hook-up programmes for Christmas, the Coronation and the Jubilee, which really did convince the widest audience of the interest and entertainment possibilities of actuality. But, on the whole, features before the war were tentative and experimental, a true workshop for determined believers in the an of radio. With the war. as with documentarj films, the situation changed dramatically. Now fact was indisputably more exciting than fiction. The experimentalists of 1939 became the 'prioritj one' propagandists of 1940. The recording car which had browsed happily in the hop-fields of Kent was now smothered with dirty brown painl and sent to browse among the sickening ruins of the Old Kent Road. I arlier. the documentary method was used to dramatize and personalize the enemy in the series Shadow of the Swastika, which immediately captured an audience oi millions. The Christmas Day 'hook-ups' continued, but the radio magic that had linked homely families all over the I mpire was now used to demonstrate to a dubious world that Britain was still able to celebrate t rtristmas, even 'under tire'. I don't think I shall ever forget the flat Lancastrian voice of Geoffrey Bridson over the line from Manchester saying that I 'couldn't have the Merchant Navy Club because there are four land mines round it". So it went on. Cecil McGivern made an outstanding name for himself among wartime radio writers for his telling of the R.A.F. story, and later the Mulberry story, and later the Radar story. Robert Barr, John Glyn-Jones, and Gordon Boshell brought a new combination of journalistic attack and theatrical flair to the topical war magazine feature 'Marching On'. Month by month, year by year, the documentary feature grew in importance. Writers new to radio like Louis MacNeice, learnt a new technique in the service of war documentary. Promising newcomers like Jennifer Wayne and Nesta Pain served their apprenticeship in these vears. Prewar experimentalists like Stephen Potter and Geoffrey Bridson revealed unsuspected versatility under war conditions. It was a tumultuous, exacting and exciting time, and it has left its mark, for good and ill, on the post-war practice of documentary radio. There was one wartime programme 'War Report' which outstripped all theories of documentary, and by matching many broadcasting techniques to the speed and pressure of events produced something which blazed with topicality. From D-Day onwards, by means of a combined operation between commentator, feature producers, and news men. British radio gave a daily sound picture of the war. unique in reporting history. Reporters and engineers risked their lives every day to get their microphones to the scene of action. The fighting services cooperated magnificent!) with transport, communications and fast censorship facilities. The last link was the intricate editing organization which put 'War Report' on the air every night. red-hot from the front line. This job could not have been done without the experience painfully gathered by the experimental pioneers. It set a standard which peacetime broadcasting will find difficult to match. Radio documentarj faces the peace with a record of solid apprenticeship and honourable war service. Its practitioners have passed the stage of experimental measles. Thej no longer stop the recording car to enshrine the golden untouched speech of every fisherman and shepherd they meet. Indeed. the> drive faster, for the danger today is that the radio-wise rustic will now stop them and demand to be put immediate!) 'In Town ronight' or 'Countrj Maga/me'! The peacetime set-up of the B.B.C. offers documental) producers a practicall) unrestricted field for their craft. I he Regional stations, after a period ol enforced rationing, are bursting into new life. Such programmes as 'The Naturalist' and 'All are Welcome' from the West. Town Meeting' and 'Have a Go' from the North, are evidence that the documentary spirit is no 1 ondon prerogative. The London producers are ex