BBC classes : further
reading, podcasts and slides
I recommend this article
by Laura Carter on BBC radio and education
https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/7316
You will find here the MP3
of lecture number 5 on the history of the BBC- the story begins in 1955.
Just click here.
The accompanying PowerPoint
is here
I looked in class at the newspaper
article, the obituary of Olive Shapley. As I mentioned, there are many ways of
doing a good commentary on such a document, but in class I gave you some hints
on how to approach this document. Here is the Mp3 of that part of the class
Just click here.
And here is the document
I was commenting on :
Olive Shapley obituary
Letting the people speak
By Anne Karpf
The Guardian Mon 15 Mar 1999 03.39 GMT
Olive Shapley, who has died aged 88, was a pioneering radio producer, one
of the first to midwife the voices of ordinary people onto the airwaves. In a
career spanning 40 years, which reads like an ordnance survey of British
broadcasting, she also worked as a prominent presenter in radio and television.
Her private experiences - of two nervous breakdowns, of psychoanalysis, as a
socialist, professional woman and single parent - anticipated current concerns
by 50 years.
Paddy Scannell, the historian of early radio, has argued that Shapley was
one of the first British programme-makers not to seek to impose their own
vision on their subject but to allow the subject to define themselves. To help
her, she seized on the mobile recording van, a seven-ton vehicle, whose
creative possibilities Shapley immediately recognised and which she used to
develop her own broadcasting style.
Born in Peckham into a lower-middle-class Unitarian family, she was named
after Olive Schreiner, author of Story of an African Farm. Like so many of her
contemporaries she was radicalised at Oxford, where she read history at St
Hugh's. (Her fleeting membership of the Communist Party was to dog her for the
rest of her institutional life.) Shapley got a job as Children's Hour organiser
in Manchester. In 1934 it was a crucible of creative, radical programming,
initiated by Archie Harding, a Marxist intellectual whom Reith had banished
from London to where he couldn't 'do so much damage'.
At a time when 'the regions' mattered much more in the BBC than they do
today, the North Region under Harding had its own distinct culture: members
included Wilfred Pickles, Joan Littlewood, the singer Ewan McColl, documentary
producer, Geoffrey Bridson, and Shapley. In 1939 Shapley was promoted to
assistant producer, and so began a stream of remarkable documentaries which,
for the first time in British broadcasting, made imaginative use of recorded
actuality.
Her first, presented by Wilfred Pickles, was on shopping. It was followed
by features on canal workers, long distance lorry drivers, homeless people,
miners' wives, and 24 hours in the life of a big hotel from the staff's point
of view (so much for the 'innovation' of the recent TV docu-soap Hotel). Apart
from the introductions and links, they were unscripted and unrehearsed, with
ordinary people speaking about their lives to an extent previously unheard on
British radio.
Her most famous feature, the 1939 The Classic Soil, was one of the most
radical programmes the BBC had ever broadcast. Scripted by Joan Littlewood and
produced by Shapley, it opened with a plummy BBC voice announcing a programme
inspired by the book The Condition of the Working-Class in 1844 by Friedrich
Engels and proceeded to put in question a century's social progress. Even now
it stands in striking contrast to BBC notions of 'balance'.
At the end of an evening of GPO Film Unit documentaries at the Academy
Cinema in London, Alberto Cavalcanti played Shapley's Homeless People and
invited her to collaborate with them on a film and radio project, Health of the
Nation. She did so, and worked alongside Humphrey Jennings for a time during
the war.
In the meantime Shapley had met John Salt, the BBC's north region programme
director. In June 1939 the Daily Mail and Daily Dispatch leaked his engagement
to 'the girl whose voice is known to millions of radio listeners'. There was
considerable opposition then to married women working, and BBC policy was not
to employ staff married to each other. After their marriage in July 1939,
Shapley resigned and worked for the BBC on a contract basis, producing
documentaries about ordinary people's experience of the war. In 1941 Salt was
posted to New York as deputy North American director of the BBC.
America energised them. They lived for a time in the stylish Fifth Avenue
apartment of Alistair Cooke, and employed Mabel, Cooke's part-time Harlem maid.
Through their friendship, Shapley gained access to the black community,
enabling her to send back programmes about black people in America. She also
sent a vivid fortnightly newsletter to Children's Hour which included memorable
interviews with Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson. They were the precursor of
Cooke's version for adults, initiated four years later.
…
In 1949 Shapley became the presenter (sometimes called 'commere') of the
daily Woman's Hour. She brought formerly taboo subjects, like menopause and
women without men, onto the air. When domestic crises occurred, she brought her
children into work with her; they learned to sit quietly and draw on the back
of old scripts and became expert cutters of tape.
By now the family was living in Hampstead and Shapley was writing articles
for Modern Woman magazine. In 1950 she began working in television, presenting
the Women of Today series, and narrating tales for very young children in Olive
Shapley Tells a Story. In 1952 she married Manchester businessman Christopher
Gorton, and the following year they moved back to Manchester, into Rose Hill,
an enormous Victorian Gothic house in Didsbury. By the late 1950s Shapley
decided to shift to TV production rather than presentation and devised an
innovative books programme, Something to Read. She had to fight the BBC to get
Guardian journalist Brian Redhead as the presenter - they objected to his
supposedly incomprehensible Geordie accent.
…
