Radio Broadcast (Nov 1926-Apr 1927)

AS Till I I rum r jd a. o q a (s;-^o — q Drawings by Stuart Hay The High and Mighty Place of the Announcer THE hope has been expressed in some quarters that our most popular announcers may shortly be raised to the dizzy eminence of movie stars. When the day comes, the announcers will be such god-like figures that to tell the truth about them and their trade will be to incur the risk of prosecution for blasphemy. Therefore let us scrutinize them now and hope that the copy gets into print before the ascension. Almost every man outside of the deaf and dumb asylum believes in his heart that he can announce, just as everybody thinks that the story of his life would make a thrilling novel, which he would be capable of writing with a little practice. What does an announcer have to do? Just talk? Anybody can do that. When a broadcasting station advertises for an announcer, several hundred candidates usually present themselves. Of these, perhaps ten might be considered for the job, after several months of breaking in. Perhaps one out of the lot can be developed into a capable announcer, not a planet of the first magnitude, but merely a tolerably bright luminary. As for the genuine stars, one comes across them by luck; they occur like pearls in oysters. Possibly if ten thousand superficially qualified college men were weighed in the balance, one by one, a single specimen of the really first-rate, polished and gilded, metropolitan announcer would be discovered. And, if he also possessed brains, he could probably make $15,000 a year selling bonds; hence he would not be willing to announce for less than a quarter of that sum. The popular idea that the ability to announce or put one's thoughts across in writing are common traits is true to this extent: anybody can so express himself to his own satisfaction. But it is an altogether different job to do it to the satisfaction of the public and get paid for it. A capable announcer must, obviously, know the language of the country in which he is to pursue his calling well enough to impress the average auditor. This amounts to saying that his solecisms, errors in speech, and misjudgments in choice of words must not be gross or frequent enough to jar any great number of listeners. I speak now of conditions as they are, rather than as they should be. In this country, announcers who speak correct and beautiful English are rare. Any well-educated listener, spending an evening on the air with many of those who pass as good, can jot down six or eight instances of common mistakes in grammar or obviously unesthetic choice of words. I have heard such mutilations as " Those kind of people" perpetrated in metropolitan stations, without any action being taken against the guilty announcer by either the program manager or the populace. As for some of the small station attaches who take the air, they talk like bootblacks. Taking them by and large, radio announcers do not treat the language nearly as well as junior public speaking instructors in universities, or even high school teachers in English, although I believe the announcers are better in this respect than the general run of elementary grade teachers. There are no doubt a few announcers in the United States who are impeccable most of the time, but if their number exceeds six, I should like to hear their names. There is room for improvement here, and probably standards will gradually be raised. As matters stand, the beneficial influence which radio might exert in raising the standards of spoken English is being realized only in small part. In foreign languages, the deficiencies of American announcers, as a class, are even more glaring. In pronouncing French names, the rule seems to be that something midway between the actual French sounds and the English equivalents represents the safest course on the air. The subtle differences in vocalization and articulation which constitute part of the flavor, so to speak, of a foreign tongue, are missed ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Most of the announcers remain totally insensible to them, and the fact that few Americans who pass as well-educated are really at home in French, German, Spanish, and Italian, enables the announcers to get away with their barbarities. Even such relatively elementary considerations as the proper value of a French u or an umlauted German vowel are sublimely disregarded. British announcers, I have been told, are much superior to our men in this regard. I do not wish to lay undue stress on the subject of purity in speech, both domestic and foreign, nor to insist on unremitting correctness, which is an impossibility, whether we insist on it or not. A man may make occasional mistakes, and become conscious of them only after the words are out of his mouth; this no doubt happens to every announcer. I believe that the best of contemporary slang, judiciously employed, adds to the force and gracefulness of language, whether spoken or written. Above all, I should avoid stiffness and affectation; it is better to be casual and natural, with occasional grammatical lapses, than to talk like a pedant. But when all this is conceded, the indifference of the average announcer to the qualities of accuracy and beauty latent in his language remains a grave fault, toward the removal of which program directors might well devote a little of their surplus energy, if they have any. It should be noted at this point that in many of the larger stations, particularly those which specialize in toll broadcasting, the announcer is not altogether responsible for what he says. The material is written out for him, as like as not, and all that remains for him is to read it with an air of spontaneity. He should not be blamed for all his bad jokes and circumlocutions; they may hurt him as much as his hearers. In general, announcers are not prodigies of intellect; they don't need to be, and if they were they would probably be handicapped in their work. I do not mean that, as a class, the announcers are stupid; on the contrary, most of them are facile and clever, and seem to know more than they actually do. Most of them are confident, amiable young fellows, with plenty of brass in their systems and no tendency toward an inferiority complex. They are the greatest pack of publicity-hounds in Christendom. Do you know why? Simply because they get it so readily. Given the same opportunities, most of the rest of us would chase publicity just as avidly. That is the fault of the age, rather than of the announcers, who have not been at work long enough to exert much influence on the Zeitgeist, whatever they may do in the future. Let us not be hypocrites; there are few Spinozas or Oliver Heavisides among us. Nevertheless, personal publicity has a harmful effect on some of the announcing boys; they get it too easily, and fail to realize that they have fallen into a disproportionate share, compared to any other class of workers. The magnification of the ego resulting from this misunderstanding is sometimes alarming, and much good announcer material is ruined thereby. The delusions of grandeur burst with a loud report when the victim gets fired and discovers that once he is separated from his carrier wave, nobody pays any attention to him at all. What constitutes personality in an announcer — that elusive combination of qualities which divides the merely passable announcer from the star with a great popular following? Broadly, it is the knack of transmitting emotions through the voice only, with the skill of the actor or the elocutionist, confined within narrower limits. Yet these emotions originate, to some extent, in the inherent character of the man himself, and an excess of the theatrical element alienates that portion of the audience whose members are sensitise to pretense. The best symphonic