Tag: BBC

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Together . . . to Gaza? The Media and the Worthy Cause

The British Broadcasting Corporation has had its share of problems lately, what with its use of licensee fees to indulge celebrity clowns in their juvenile follies.  Now, the BBC, which is a non-profit public service broadcaster established by Royal Charter, is coming under attack for what the paying multitudes do not get to see and hear, specifically for its refusal to broadcast a Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for aid to Gaza.  According to the BBC, the decision was made to “avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of an ongoing news story.”  To be sure, if the story were not “ongoing,” the need for financial support could hardly be argued to be quite as pressing.

In its long history, the BBC has often made its facilities available for the making of appeals and thereby assisted in the raising of funds for causes deemed worthy by those who approached the microphone for that purpose.  Indeed, BBC radio used to schedule weekly “Good Cause” broadcasts to create or increase public awareness of crises big and small.  Listener pledges were duly recorded in the annual BBC Handbook.

From the 1940 edition I glean, for instance, that on this day, 29 January, in 1939, two “scholars” raised the amount of £1,310 for a London orphanage.  Later that year, an “unknown cripple” raised £768, while singer-comedienne Gracie Fields’s speech on behalf of the Manchester Royal Infirmary brought in £2,315.  The pleas were not all in the name of infants and invalids, either.  The Student Movement House generated funds by using BBC microphones, as did the Hedingham Scout Training Scheme.

While money for Gaza remains unraised, the decision not to get involved in the conflict raises questions as to the role of the BBC, its ethics, and its ostensible partiality.  Just what constitutes a “worthy” cause? Does the support for the civilian casualties of war signal an endorsement of the government of the nation at war? Is it possible to separate humanitarian aid from politics?

It strikes me that the attempt to staying well out of it is going to influence history as much as it would to make airtime available for an appeal. In other words, the saving of lives need not be hindered by the pledged commitment to report news rather than make it.

Impartiality and service in the public interest were principles to which the US networks were expected to adhere as well, however different their operations were from those of the BBC.  In 1941, the FCC prohibited a station or network from speaking “in its own person,” from editorializing, e.g. urging voters to support a particular Presidential candidate; it ruled that “the broadcaster cannot be an advocate”; but this did not mean that airtime, which could be bought to advertise wares and services, could not be purchased as well for the promotion of ideas, ideals, and ideologies.

The broadcasting of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats or his public addresses on behalf of the March of Dimes and the War Loan Drives did not imply the broadcasters’ favoring of the man or the cause.

On this day in 1944, all four major networks allotted time for the special America Salutes the President’s Birthday.  Never mind that it was not even FDR’s birthday until a day later. The cause was the fight against infantile paralysis; but that did not prevent Bob Hope from making a few jokes at the expense of the Republicans, who, he quipped, had all “mailed their dimes to President Roosevelt in Washington.  It’s the only chance they get to see any change in the White House.”

A little change can bring about big changes; but, as a result of the BBC’s position on “impartiality,” much of that change seems to remain in the pockets of the public it presumes to inform rather than influence.

Related writings

Go Tell Auntie: Listener Complaints Create Drama at BBC
Election Day Special: Could This Hollywood Heavy Push You to the Polls?

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The Sound of Second-Hand Clapping: In Town To-Night

I enjoy spending time by myself. It’s a good thing I do, considering that I am pretty much on my own in my enthusiasm for old and largely obscure radio programs, especially those that I only get to hear about. Listening, like reading, is a solitary experience; to share your thoughts about what went on in your head can be as difficult and frustrating as it is to put into words the visions and voices of a dream. Besides, unless you are talking to somebody who gets paid to listen, your dreams and reveries are rarely as stimulating to others as they are to yourself. This isn’t exactly a dream, much less one come true—but it’s a jolly good facsimile thereof.

A few weeks ago, I walked into a second-hand bookstore in Hampstead, London. Second hands down, a used bookshop is the place to be initiated into worlds you cannot experience firsthand, no matter how deep you dig or vigorously you claw. The volume I had my dusty hands on was a signed copy of In Town To-Night, a truly forgotten book promising, as the subtitle has it, “The Story of the Popular BBC Feature Told from Within.” In other words, a close-up of something quite out of reach.

The compendium was published in 1935, at a time when dramatics had not yet come to the fore on American radio. According to a 1938 study by William Albig, a researcher who compiled data to establish the percentages of airtime devoted to various types of programs on nine American radio stations between 1925 to 1935, dramatic broadcasts (including plays, sketches, and serials) were not a significant aspect of programming, even though they had increased considerably in frequency during that period, namely from 0.13% in February 1922 to 8.85% in July 1934. Radio plays were even less frequently heard on the BBC; nor were there any signs of change. Dramatic programs constituted 2.14% of the BBC’s offerings in February 1925, as compared to 2.04% in July 1934.

So, what kind of program was In Town To-Night? “[A]s every one knows,” the blurb on the dust jacket reads, it is what the BBC called a “feature,” a highly inclusive term for a series of broadcasts produced or written by the same team or featuring the same host. While rather more formulaic, Fred Allen’s Town Hall Tonight came to mind, as did many of the hour-long variety programs broadcast in the US during the mid- to late 1930s.

In Town To-Night prided itself on being a program of many voices. Whatever the sound produced by such friction may be, it was on this feature that chimney-sweeps were heard

rubb[ing] shoulders with film-stars, and cat’s-meat merchants with peers of the realm. Poets, down and outs, playwrights, pearly kings and queens, and interesting people from all parts of the world have been gathered within its framework.

J. C. Cannell, the author of the book, was a talent scout for the Saturday night feature, which, at the time of publication, was in its third season; his role was to ensure a “queer medley” of personalities,

chosen with haste, though with care. A mixed lot, picked as though from a lucky dip, surprising because listeners did not know beforehand whom they would hear, and nearly always, I think, delightful for some reason or other.

Heard on this rehearsed and scripted variety program were many familiar voices from Broadway, Hollywood, and the West End; among them Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Merle Oberon, Ethel Barrymore, Paul Muni, Johnny Weissmuller, Vivien Leigh, Polly Moran, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. Ida Lupino was interviewed by her actor-father Stanley; and Hermione Gingold was heard in conversation with her dresser.

Jimmy Walker, formerly Mayor of New York City, was featured, as were movie director James Whale, author Algernon Blackwood, and Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn, who was “anxious to talk about his constant search for interesting screen personalities.”

Cab Calloway performed, as did Leonard Hawke, the first man ever to sing on a BBC program, along with assorted groups of Welsh miners and Swiss yodelers. Wilhelm Grosz, composer of “Isle of Capri,” played a medley of Strauss waltzes he had discovered in a bookshop in Venice.

The greater attractions, though, were the real folks and the curious ones telling their stories, many of which are retold in Cannell’s illustrated account. As the program found its voice, the stars made way for the stories of everyday—or not so everyday—folk, their struggles and successes. There was Pan The Ming, for instance, who stopped by while touring the world on foot (apart from brief intervals on his bicycle); there was a singing laundryman, a woman detective, a one-armed parachutist, as well as “one hundred grandfathers from the Upper Holloway Baptist Grandfathers’ Club”; Molly Moore, a knocker-up from Limehouse; Mrs. Wheelabread, “The Chocolate Lady” from Kensington Gardens, and Jack Morgan, “The Boy with the Large Ears.”

And then there was a visit from Clayton “Peg” Bates, the one-legged tap dancer who inspired listeners with his philosophy when he urged them to “forget” their “self-pity and go right ahead and do as other men do.”

In Town To-Night sounds like a program to stay in for—not just for the stories, which Cannell can recount, but for the voices that he cannot. Say, what is the sound of second-hand clapping?

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"Samson, made captive, blind": Milton on the Wireless

BBC Radio 3 is in the middle of a Milton season, designed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the poet’s birth. This week, John Milton’s works are the subject of The Essay; his views, their significance and influence, are discussed on this week’s Sunday Feature, while excerpts from his poetry are recited on Words and Music. On 14 December, a new production of Milton’s Samson Agonistes will be presented by Drama on 3.

The wireless gave birth to the career of many a Milton, from announcers Milton Cross and John Milton Kennedy to comic Milton Berle. Among its writers numbers Milton Geiger, a playwright whom Best Broadcasts anthologist Max Wylie singled out for his ability to bring “reality and movement to a property that is in every sense an allegory.” More than any of those Miltons on the air, John, the poet and essayist, is truly in his element in the so-called blind medium of radio. His struggle to combat metaphorical blindness while being afflicted with physical sightlessness—a challenge that became the subject of a radio play (previously discussed here) was frequently the theme of his poetry, from “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner Upon His Blindness” to Paradise Lost and, finally, Samson Agonistes:

“O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!” the captured Samson, blinded and bereft of his powers, laments:

Blind among enemies! O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!
Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased.
Inferior to the vilest now become
Of man or worm, the vilest here excel me:
They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own—
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.

As a political writer eager to get his word out, Milton might have embraced the swift spreading of ideas that wireless technology makes possible. He would have seen in broadcasting the dissemination of so much good mingled “almost inseparably” with so much evil, from which the good is “hardly to be discerned.” To him, though, discernment was not the result of a shutting out of anything potentially harmful or ostensibly bad, but of a taking in of it all and an informed judging of its qualities. He would have welcomed the chance to have his words reach the ears of the multitude in a single broadcast, and of hearing the voices of others in an open forum.

Yet was there ever such a forum on the air? As he did in his Areopagitica, Milton would have objected to the licensing and censorship that threaten and curtail the freedom of speech. Commercial broadcasting, he might have argued, is not unlike Samson, betrayed, imprisoned and abused: “in power of others, never in [its] own,” a “moving grave” awaiting death by television. Even when it was still capable of bringing down the house, radio, like Samson, went down in the process before ever entirely convincing anyone of the power and virtue of sightless vision.

So, if Samson is Radio, who is his Delilah? Would it be television, the sponsors, radio executives, or, perhaps, the Philistine public at large?

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Nyuk, Nyuk! Who’s Not There?

“Ladies and gentlemen. We take you now to New York City for the annual tree lighting ceremony: Click.” Imagine the thrill of being presented with such a spectacle . . . on the radio. You might as well go fondle a rainbow or listen to a bar of chocolate. Even if it could be done, you know that you have not come to your senses in a way that gets you the sensation to be had. I pretty much had the same response when I read that BBC Radio 4 was going to air a documentary on the Three Stooges.

According to the Radio Times, “The Three Stooges: Movie Maniacs” (first aired on BBC Radio 4 on 4 December in 2008) promises a “detailed overview” of the career of the comedy trio and its six (that’s right, six) members (not counting Emil Sitka). That there were six Stooges is about the only revelation of this half-hour program, other than that attempting an audio documentary on this most visual of slapstick comics is almost as dumb (but not nearly as funny) as anything the Three Stooges might be seen doing, if only they were to be seen.

There is a lot that radio can do better than television or the movies; but bringing home the appeal of physical comedy is not one of them. Matters are not helped by historian Glenn Mitchell, who delivers what Radio Times‘s David Crawford calls a “rather dry analysis” in a flat, humorless voice that makes you reach for a jug of water or, alternatively, for the proverbial off button of whatever device you use to tune in these days. Pratfalls never sounded this dull.

“Their wild knockabout and lunatic spirit continued to endear [the Three Stooges] to fans worldwide,” Mitchell tells us, “albeit less so in Britain.” Why? “It may be that British tastes run less to the direct brand of slapstick that was their stock in trade,” Mitchell suggests, only to point out that “they were enormously popular” in Britain during the 1930s and ‘40s. This “lack of familiarity” Mitchell attributes to the fact that the Stooges were rarely seen in Britain thereafter, whereas they have been television stalwarts in the US since the late 1950s. Obviously, those guys have to be seen to be appreciated. Heck, they have to be seen to be loathed.

Comparative obscurity aside, their disappearance from British screens seems to have translated into a lack of funding for a television documentary that might have contributed to a reappraisal of their work. Without visuals, you end up with explanatory—and rhetorically slipshod—notes like this one: “It must be said that the Stooges films maintain a constant stream of slapping, eye-poking, and bashes over the head that some people find relentless to the point of irresponsibility.”

While clearly out of its element on the airwaves, “The Three Stooges: Movie Maniacs” is not an out-and-out dud. Tracing the comedians’ career from their vaudeville beginnings to their work in pictures, big and small, the lecture is enlivened by numerous sound bites from films and television interviews. Among the voices you’ll hear are those of Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Joe Besser, Curly Joe DeRita, and Lucille Ball.

For all its swift editing, the program still leaves you with that “you had to be there” feeling, the shrug that might have been a chuckle; and to take you there via radio takes consummate professionals like Edward R. Murrow or Ted Husing, or a Herbert “Oh, the humanity” Morrison describing the Hindenburg go down in flames. This one simply deflates before your very ears.

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"Everybody talks too much": Dylan Thomas and the Long-Lost "Art of Conversation"

“To begin at the beginning.” Thus opens what is undoubtedly the most famous of all plays written for radio: Under Milk Wood, by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. BBC radio first produced the play in January 1954, with fellow Welshman Richard Burton in the role of the narrator. It had been previously performed in New York, shortly before Thomas’s death in November 1953 (which is the subject of a new book, Fatal Neglect by David N. Thomas, whose previous biography was the source for the motion picture The Edge of Love. Thomas’s poetry is still widely read today; but little is known generally about his other works for the wireless, about which there is generally little talk these days.

Thomas’s most popular story, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (published posthumously in 1955) was originally written for radio, as may be deduced from the attention Thomas’s pays to descriptions of sounds and voices, from the “most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow” to that “small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time,” a “small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole.”

Indeed, as I learned from Douglas Cleverdon’s introduction to the Folio edition of Under Milk Wood, Thomas had been on the air, whether as poet, critic, or actor, since 1939. Among his broadcast features is “Return Journey” (1947), a precursor to “Mad Town” (as Under Milk Wood was initially titled); it has been published in the anthology Wales on the Wireless (1988). Earlier this year, another play for voices by Dylan Thomas has been discovered and is now being given its first production on the air. Titled “The Art of Conversation,” it is available online until 9 December.

The title is somewhat misleading, since the play is really about shutting up. It is a Second World War propaganda piece, commissioned as part of a “Loose Lips Sink Ships” campaign, the sort of cautionary talk on the virtue of silence exemplified in the US by mystery writer Mignon Eberhart’s “The Enemy Is Listening” (Cavalcade of America, 7 June 1943). In it, a sinister voice (Everett Sloane’s) replies to remark that no “real American intends to give information to the enemy,” that

sometimes, sometimes someone forgets.  A word overheard and repeated. A small fact passed on to someone else may mean little to you.  It may mean nothing to the person to whom you repeat it.  But the third or the fourth person or the tenth or the twentieth may be your enemy. Your enemy.

Thomas’s “The Art of Conversation” is a rather more subtle performance. It permits us to indulge in the excesses of talk by Britain’s most celebrated conversationalists, only to remind us that there are times when—and subjects about which—the word should be “mum.” “I don’t think you’ll find Mr. Hitler with a little notebook under our table, do you?” one careless talker quips; but, just to be on the safe side, the idle talk that ensures is being censored.

Like Eberhart, Thomas weaves a web of compromising voices; yet he dispenses with melodrama and, indeed, as is typical of his compositions, with plot altogether. Instead, he opts for an informal lecture (replete with audience) punctuated by “the lantern slides of sound”: a multitude of voices, some distinct, others choric. All are preliminaries and subject to shushing:

Hundreds of odds and ends of hundreds of hearsays and rumours may, and can, be brought together into such a pattern that a whole Allied enterprise is thwarted or destroyed. A wagging tongue may sink a ship; a stray word over a mild-and-bitter may help to murder children.

However chatty and playful, “The Art of Conversation” eventually gets down to business and brings its message across; at least, it might have done, had it not disappeared for decades—apparently before it was ever broadcast. According to the current issue of the Radio Times, there is no evidence that the play was intended for radio; but you need only to listen to know that it could have hardly been written with any other medium in mind.

Alison Hindell’s belated production slightly condenses the original script (available here in its entirety), but otherwise takes few liberties with Thomas’s prose and directions; a 1920s “nigger” is turned into “negro,” a concession to our politically corrected sensibilities. Few US radio dramatists were treated with such respect.

The single exception is the rather pointless addition of an opening line that is not part of Thomas’s “Art,” but the famous introduction to Under Milk Wood, quoted above. No doubt, the presenters intended to draw the famous poet into his forgotten “Conversation,” so as to validate this lesser performance; but, instead of indulging in such self-conscious reverberations, they should have left themselves out of it, especially since there is enough of Thomas in it to make the lecture worth our while.

If only a discovery like this could get us talking again about radio . . .

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Radio Was . . . “Stud’s Place”

“The importance of the ‘word’ was lost when television took over the living rooms of America. Sure, there were plenty of trivial programs on radio at the time, but there were also brilliance and creativity that have never been equaled by television.” This is how Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian Studs Terkel (1912-2008) summed up the decline in our regard for and funding of the medium in which he, as an interviewer, excelled. “The arrival of television was a horrendous thing for the medium of radio,” Terkel told Michael C. Keith, editor of Talking Radio (2000). “It was devastating for the radio artists as well as the public. Television was a very poor replacement.”

In the late 1940s, when radio had not yet been superseded by television in all but talk and music, Terkel was frequently heard on Destination Freedom, a history program dramatizing the stories of America’s negro people, including notable Americans like Joe Louis, Richard Wright, and Jackie Robinson.

Tonight, BBC Radio 4’s Archive Hour (in a broadcast available online until 5 December 2008) brings back the life of the legendary voice of the Bronx-born and Chicago-bred journalist. “Studs Terkel: Back in the Wax Museum” delves into the late historian’s personal collection of some seven thousand hours of recordings that he donated to the sound archive of the Chicago Historical Society; these interviews represent nearly half a century of broadcasting. As documentarian Alan Dein puts it, Terkel is the “undisputed hero and the modern pioneer of what we now know as oral history, the art of exploring living memory.”

To Terkel, America was deficient in memory, as well as the respect for its inconstancy; so, whether he interviewed and recorded noted figures of his day or the “so-called ordinary people”—workers, civilians, survivors of war—who could not count on a public platform elsewhere, Terkel did much to prevent listeners from forgetting.

Among the voices heard on the program, aside form Stud’s own, are those of beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Canadian-American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, film star Joan Crawford, fan dancer Sally Rand, Algonquin Round Table wit Dorothy Parker, Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, feminist Simone de Beauvoir, philosopher Bertrand Russell (interviewed at his home in Wales), Irish street singer Margaret Barry, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., African-American journalist Vernon Jarrett, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson venting her frustrations without song. “I haven’t the vaguest idea” how to operate a tape recorder, Terkel once confessed. “Yet, it is my right arm,” he marveled.

According to Terkel, who was discharged from military due to a perforated eardrum, the advent of television was “forcing radio to reinvent itself into something not quite as good”; but, the loss of radio dramatics notwithstanding, the audio documentary was surely the very best way in which to reinvigorate the airwaves. “Stud’s Place” was Terkel’s foray into television back in 1949 (cut short due to anti-Communist hysteria); but it was radio that remained his true domain.

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Once More Round the Horne

I just got back from Brighton, England, the popular seaside resort that is pretty much the gayest town in all of Britain. So, to speak in the cheek-lodged tongue of Polari, I was bound to have a “fantabulosa” time. And how “fantabulosa” was it for an old “omi-palone” like me to have Round the Horne playing just round the corner at Brighton’s Theatre Royal. Considering that Round the Horne is a British radio series whose last original episode aired back in 1968, I could hardly believe my “ogles” when I read that it was on while I was visiting. I was thrilled to get my “lills” on a pair of tickets to “aunt nell” some of the wittiest comedy act never seen by millions.

Round the Horne: Unseen and Uncut is an ingeniously—if deceptively—simple production. It merely presents two of the sixty-six 45-minute broadcasts from this much-loved and well-remembered BBC program (1965-68), separated by an intermission that only the most humorless of stick-in-the-muds would take as an opportunity to make a hasty retreat. The scripts are taken directly from the original series. You would not want to tinker with lines composed by Barry Took (Laugh In) and his writing partner Marty Feldman. You certainly would not have to.

The second act (or half, rather) builds on the first, allowing viewers to pick up the rhythm of the show, pick up on the slight but clever variations, and pick their favorite among the recurring characters in a line-up including Fiona and Charles, an aging pair of actors who reprise their preposterously Cowardesque silver screen dialogues (“I know you know I know”) in that posh and most unnatural anti-vernacular of BBC English; folk singer Rambling Syd Rumpo with yet another rendition of his Jabberwockian tunes; and, of course, Julian and his friend Sandy in all their Polari-riddled glory that was enjoyed by millions but understood and shared by only a few whose nature made them appreciate the subversiveness and desperation of such artifice. After all, homosexuality was still illegal at the time.

Of course, the production is not at all simple. The performers are called upon to impersonate well-known radio (and television) personalities, including Kenneth Horne (played by Jonathan Rigby), Kenneth Williams (Robin Sebastian), and Betty Marsden (Sally Grace). Standing behind a row of microphones, without any other props of scenery to speak of, the six cast members (not including the singers and orchestra members) have to sound the part and deliver their borrowed lines with an enthusiasm that is thoroughly rehearsed without sounding disingenuous. Along with the harmonizing quartet known as Not the Fraser Hayes Four, the seen voices of this stage show are fully deserving of a hearty cheer of “fantabulosa!”

However convincingly the experience of attending a live radio broadcast (or a recording session thereof) in a studio is being recreated, though, one aspect of such productions has been overlooked or obscured. Hidden from view were the indispensable sound effects artists whose presence would have completed the picture. I would have settled for an extra pressing a number of buttons while seated among the musicians who were in full view at all times. Instead, the recorded yet well-timed effects (from footsteps to horses hoofs) came from a loudspeaker, its makers or purveyors unseen and, a mention in the playbill aside, unacknowledged.

The production might also have benefited from a few glances behind the scene, with actors walking on, preparing for their roles or having a chat before each broadcast. No dirt, just an element of realism. Since Took’s widow serves as “script consultant” for this touring show, some insightful biographical notes might have been worked into this simulation. Kenneth Williams’s life, in particular, is worth exploring in a stage drama. According to the playbill, the “action takes place” at the “BBC Paris Recording Studios in Lower Regent Street, London”; but what there is of action hardly speaks as loudly as the words. This is “theater of the mind”; and once it is taken out of the wooden O of your cranium, you begin to wonder whether what you see is really what you get as you make an effort to wipe your “oglefakes.”

That said, I was glad for this chance to catch up with Round the Horne—and at such an opportune moment to boot. It so happens that, this Friday, 28 November, BBC Radio 7 is rebroadcasting the 7 March 1965 debut of the program, with subsequent episodes to follow sequentially in the weeks and months to come. My “aunt nells” are ready for it . . .

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“Von Ribbentrop’s Watch”: Thoughts on Kristallnacht

Perhaps I should call her. We have not talked in over a year. Could I have telephoned tonight, though? Not simply to exchange a few kind words, mind. From her, I would like to learn about the past that shaped our world; and who would not seize the opportunity to grasp that past firsthand? That said, I have never quizzed my German grandmother about life in the Third Reich, never attempted anything amounting to probing inquiry. I am more distressed by my failure to ask than by any responses I might get. Not that any number of answers could make me stop wondering.

Another watch, another (lost) wartime story

Tonight marks the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, and I am more keenly aware than usual that the past is not done with, that many of those who threw stones into shop windows or looked on as Jews were hauled off to the concentration camps are still among us. Their ideologies, their hypocrisies, and their indifference are alive as well.

My grandparents were not among those who resisted the Reich and its reign of terror. “Of course, we knew they were being shipped to the camps,” my paternal grandmother once told me. Frank about knowing, she was open rather than open-minded. Third Reich propaganda remained at work throughout her life, even some forty, fifty years after the defeat of the Nazi regime. Once she heard I was schwul (German for gay), she ceased to acknowledge me; not as much as a reply to my Christmas cards. My maternal grandmother, now in her nineties, continued to correspond, though, sending greetings and wishes to me and mine. Is she more open? Or is she, like so many of us, merely permitting her personal feelings for her own kind to gainsay thoughts that would otherwise dominate her mind?

My maternal grandmother worked for one of the leading Nazi families and remained loyal to them decades after the war, introducing me to the heirs when I was a child. My memories are vague. I remember being told about the guilt that made outcasts of the obviously well-to-do family for which grandmother worked as a seamstress. There was a boy, roughly my age, with whom I played while grandmother worked. As much as I would like to fill in the blanks, I cannot bring myself to ask about the past, about grandmother’s connection to the Von Ribbentrops.

On this Remembrance Sunday, as Britain commemorates the 90th anniversary of the 1918 armistice and those killed in war, I drift in and out of consciousness, sick with the commonest of colds. Swirling in the thick of my head are thoughts that just the right word cannot put into any conclusive or satisfying order. I continue to question myself rather than demanding answers from those who might help me to resolve matters.

Instead of proving that actions speak louder than words, Kristallnacht demonstrated that actions are louder than the silence of unvoiced dissent. A stone, in this respect, is like a resounding “no” to the potentialities of change latent in the troubled mind. Words can set nothing aright if they merely create the illusion of control, if they obscure the chaos within us rather than dispel it. I let my words bespeak confusion rather than answer conclusively, thus falsely. I let them run riot rather than underwrite what amounts to the hollow triumph of paper solutions.

A quandary is at the heart of “Von Ribbentrop’s Watch,” a radio play by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, which premiered 8 November 2008 on BBC Radio 4. It is the story of a Jewish shop owner in contemporary Britain who learns that the less-than-reliable watch he inherited from his father once belonged to Nazi Germany’s Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop. What to do? Keep the watch and ignore the Swastikas to which a watchmaker alerted him? Sell it to collectors of Nazi memorabilia in order to keep alive his own struggling business? Would that be retribution or profiteering?

The fascinating premise is undermined by the language in which the conflict is couched. It seems that the playwrights are rather too enamored of their at times desperate wordplay, too eager to elicit awkward chuckles from assorted squabbles at a Passover table when restraint might have served them better. Perhaps, the broadcast date for this dreadful piece of imitation Goldbergs was as unfortunate a choice as the playwrights’ mockery—a Jewish defense of Nazi crimes, the sounds of broken glass after a family quarrel, followed by an otherworldly visit from Von Ribbentrop—as it gave me reason to believe that “Von Ribbentrop’s Watch” was meant to coincide with and somehow commemorate the horrors of Kristallnacht. Armistice Day, by comparison, is given a solemn treatment on BBC Radio 3, with an adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front.

At least, the titular chronometer of “Von Ribbentrop’s Watch” seems to suggest that even belated justice is preferable to terminal ignorance; time catches up with timepiece in question, however exasperating and offensive the ninety minutes that it takes us to hear about it. Not that the conclusion is rewarding: in its tacky irony, the play insists that the Jews end up confessing their guilt by association.

In response to this appalling piece of misjudged comedy, which is supposedly based on a true story, I retrieved the watch shown above. Like so many stories of so many objects around me, the story of this watch cannot be recovered, the one who could have helped to pieced it together having died many years ago. It was given to my partner, whose father brought it back from the Second World War. My camera failed to capture it, but the face bears the Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the Resistance.

What we need to resist, always, is the convenient answer, the conclusive remark, the word to extinguish the doubt that is the life of thought, the hope for change; and the doubt we should all permit ourselves to voice on this day is whether the past is truly over or whether we are still victims of the same prejudices, susceptible to the same talk, capable of the same actions. Those are the questions we cannot expect anyone to answer on our behalf.

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Go Tell Auntie: Listener Complaints Create BBC Drama

“The next programme contains some strong language which some listeners may find offensive.” That disclaimer, apparently, is not enough to keep old Auntie (the BBC) out of trouble with the strongest censors out there: the public. Several thousand listeners (or, roughly, one percent of those who tuned in) voiced their complaints about a broadcast in which British pop-culture personalities Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross made prank phone calls to Andrew Sachs, an actor mainly remembered for being a cast member of Fawlty Towers. It all happened on 18 October—but the force of those faded soundwaves is just beginning to make itself felt in a sweep of ever more dramatic repercussions. Never mind rolling waves. It’s heads now.

Here is what happened: Sachs was to appear on Brand’s radio program; when the guest backed out, the host and his guest, Jonathan Ross, left a number of rather obscene messages on the no-show’s answering machine. Encouraged by Ross, Brand revealed, in no uncertain terms, that he had intercourse with Sachs’s granddaughter, who is in her twenties. “If he’s like most people of a certain age,” Ross quipped about Sachs,

he probably got a picture of his grandchildren when they’re young right by the phone. So while he’s listening to the messages, he’s looking at a picture of her about nine on a swing . . .

. . . and thinking, if I may complete the sentence, what nerve those two men at the mike have to alert the masses to her change of playground.

Listener protest compelled the BBC to suspend both Ross and Brand; their respective programs on radio and television will not air until the matter has been thoroughly investigated, the director general of the trust governing the corporation announced. Apparently, even the Prime Minister has gotten involved in the matter by issuing a statement condemning such uncensored reality-meets-insult comedy on the air.

Today, 29 October, Brand resigned, offering the following apology:

I got a bit caught up in the moment and forgot that at the core of the rude comments and silly songs were the real feelings of a beloved and brilliant comic actor.

Rarely have a few dirty words and evidence of poor taste so outraged a vocal minority of a United Kingdom also known as Little Britain. That, incidentally, is the title of another BBC program, and hardly one bespeaking British wit and cultural refinement. Aside from reassuring me that folks still listen to the old wireless, that radio it is more than a source of ambient noise by which to work and play, the whole case (detailed in this BBC timeline) brings home how much power those private individuals among us wield who make their opinions as public as the chatter to which they object.

The output of the media, like the outcome of elections, is determined both by the silent many who let things happen and the outspoken few who do not; but, if it is change you are for or after, remember this: it requires far fewer naysayers to kick Auntie than it takes to shift Uncle Sam.

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Hattie Tatty Coram Girl: A Casting Note on the BBC’s Little Dorrit

They are still after him, those producers of television drama. And they know that many of us are eager to follow. In a way, we cannot help being After Dickens, to borrow the title of a study on “Reading, Adaptation and Performance” by John Glavin. It is a sly title, that. After all, we are belated in our pursuit; we do more than simply try to catch up. We are bringing something to the game that is the act of reading. We are making sense, and we remake it, too.

Andrew Davies, the writer responsible for the award-winning dramatization of Bleak House, subsequently tackled Little Dorrit (1855-57), one of the lesser-known works in the Dickens canon. Having greatly enjoyed Bleak House when it first aired back in 2005, I was again drawn away from the wireless, to which most of the posts in this blog are dedicated, to go after what is being shared out—in installments, not unlike in Dickens’ day—by radio’s distant and rich relation.

Now, it has been some time since I read Little Dorrit. During my graduate studies, the novel tantalized me with its perplexing nomenclature, an uncrackable code of names and monikers that inspired me to dabble in the dark art of onomastic speculation. The result of my academic labors, “Nominal Control: Dickens’s Little Dorrit and the Challenges of Onomancy,” is available online.

While many of the names heard in the adaptation of Little Dorrit still ring the proverbial bell for me, some of the faces, as made up for us by the adaptor, seem less familiar. Never mind Arthur Clennam, who is rather younger than the middle-aged man Dickens was so bold to place at the center of his novelistic commentary on the manners, mores, and money matters of Victorian Britain. The character of Tattycoram is the one to watch out for and puzzle over: a foundling turned changeling.

In the original story, Tattycoram (alias Harriet Beadle, alias Hattey—the act of naming is that complicated in Little Dorrit) is introduced as a “handsome girl with lustrous dark hair and eyes, and very neatly dressed.” As portrayed by Freema Agyeman, the televisualized Tatty certainly fits the bill: a young woman with dark hair and eyes, and, my metaphorical hat off to the costume department, handsomely outfitted.

Hang on, though. The color of her skin, to which no reference is made in the novel, appears to have been adjusted; and, in a crowd of pale faces, it is a change that really makes a difference. Has Tattycoram just “growed” that way?

It surely is not simply a case of equal opportunity for television actors like Agyeman, if such cases are ever simple. A black Tattycoram transforms the very fabric of Little Dorrit. It imposes an historical subtext on our reading of the story and the young woman’s part in it.

Adaptors, like translators, frequently engage in such updates, if that is the word for what can amount not only to anachronisms but to presentism, the latter being the imposition of a viewpoint contemporary with the audience of the new version. I was not bothered by the lesbian characters the BBC insisted on sneaking into the staid and psychologically none too complex mysteries of Agatha Christie, even though such reorientations seem gratuitous. The determination adaptors made regarding Tattycoram’s ethnicity is altogether more problematic.

While slavery was abolished in Britain prior to its publication, Little Dorrit is set some thirty years in the past, the possible implications of which present-day television audiences are not given sufficient context to ponder and may not even notice. I had certainly forgotten about the dating of the action prior to the coronation of Queen Victoria. Little Dorrit, unlike Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge, is not an historical novel, however; nor is it a commentary on the slave trade.

Concerned with prison reform, and the injustices of the debtor’s prison in particular, the novel refers to slavery only metaphorically to signify systems of oppression and forms of thraldom, perceived or actual. At one point, the orphan Harriet is taken in as a companion by the fiercely independent Miss Wade who, in readings of the novel, has been outed as a lesbian. In a first-person narrative, Miss Wade reflects on her earlier experience as a governess: “I was not bought, body and soul. She [Miss Wade’s employer] seemed to think that her distinguished nephew had gone into a slave-market and purchased a wife.” Clearly, in this questionable equation of servitude and slavery, no comment on the reality of the slave trade was intended by Dickens in this expression of a character’s anger regarding her station and the transgression of which she believes herself to have been accused.

In the Victorian novel, the black or “mulatto” figure remained largely invisible, or else was the brunt of derision. One such laughing-stock character is Thackeray’s Miss Swartz, the “rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitt’s” who parades through Vanity Fair being “about as elegantly decorated as a she chimney-sweep on May-day.” In Dickens’ Bleak House, concerns about black lives in the colonies are dismissed as the folly of “educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger.”

Of the nearly one hundred, mostly flat characters that flit in and out of Little Dorrit—which, according to the Radio Times, were reduced to around seventy-five in the process of compression—it is Tattycoram, an orphan named after the notorious Coram hospital in London, who now stands out as an individual struggling to emerge from a socially imposed conspicuous invisibility that, the adaptation insists, is owing to her ethnicity. Thus, a marginal character takes center stage by an imposed discourse on the nature of her marginalization. In other words, the attention paid to her, belatedly, is justified mainly by the postcolonial narrative grafted on the novel in which the Harriet in question is treated as if she were the brainchild of Beecher Stowe.

Showing a little skin, and revealing it to be black, Davies’ retailoring may strike some audiences who are acquainted with the genuine article as a bold new cut. And yet, in the process of giving the old Empire new clothes, the Dickensian fabric is suggested to be more than a little Tatty. Perhaps, instead of such alterations, the assumption that, with strategic trimming, Dickens can still meet our aspirations needs adjusting.

They are still after Dickens, all right. The question is: are they even trying to get him or, riding on his coat-tails, are they out get at something he just hasn’t got?