Tag: Television

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A Soundscape of Britain?

Princess Diana Memorial Fountain,
Hyde Park, London

A few days ago I went to the Tate Gallery in London to see A Picture of Britain. This exhibition of paintings, coinciding with a BBC television series, did not exactly get rave reviews. Critics complained that the real Britain was, for the most part, left out of the picture. The works on display mainly feature idyllic representations of what Britain could be or ought to be, according to followers of the Picturesque or romantically inclined artists. In short, plenty of nature, little naturalism. I wonder how A Soundscape of Britain would turn out, if ever there were such a showcase devoted to national noise. What would be the representative sounds of Britain?

In the US, during radio’s so-called golden age, the Columbia Workshop and the later CBS Radio Workshop offered listeners aural snapshots and panoramas of New York, London, and Paris. “A Portrait of London,” for instance, which aired over CBS on 20 July 1956, took listeners to Big Ben, the city zoo, and Buckingham Palace, with Sarah Churchill (daughter of the former Prime Minister) serving as tour guide.

A few weeks earlier (7 July 1956), the Workshop had taken tuners-in to Paris, while “The Sounds of a Nation” (18 November 1956) sonically evoked the history of the United States. Some twenty years earlier, the Columbia Workshop had presented a “Broadway Evening” (25 July 1936), a noisy report from the bustling Big Apple. Other such programs include “Crosstown Manhattan” (8 December 1938) and Norman Corwin’s “New York: A Tapestry for Radio” (14 May 1944).

While more concerned with the spoken word than with the creation of collages in sound, Corwin conducted frequent experiments in bringing faraway places home to the radio audience with travelogue series like An American in England (1942) and Passport for Adams (1943), as well as the ambitious documentary One World Flight (1947), which consisted of interviews and recorded sounds from actual locations in Italy, India, and Australia.

Corwin’s travelogues did not simply revel in sound qua spectacle; they were propagandistic or didactic in nature, designed to glean messages from or impose meaning on bits and bites of sound. As Alexander Pope once put it, the “sound must seem an echo to the sense.” How, then, could one make sense of Britain through sound? What, besides the tolling of Big Ben, or the water gurgling in the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain (pictured above), or the chirping of robins, or the roaring North sea, or raindrops falling on hedgerows, might be A Soundscape of Britain?

Many years ago, visiting New York City for the first time, I walked through the streets of Manhattan to capture the sounds of the sirens, the pedestrians on the pavement, the honking of cars and the hollering of cabbies during rush hour. It gave me immense pleasure listening to these recordings back in the misery that was my home across the Atlantic. I could drown out the silence and loneliness in ways that a few pictures in my photo album could not accomplish. I have always loved wrapping myself in sound’s cape, escaping in sound . . .

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“. . . and a small herd of morons”: Fred Allen on Jerrybuilt Entertainment

This morning, The Springer Show had its UK debut on ITV1.  It is the beginning of a limited run of talkshows (if you can call them that) hosted by super-smug US schlockmeister Jerry Springer.  Even though it is recorded at the Granada studios in Manchester, one wonders in what ways this Mancunian version could possibly differ from the Chicago-based original—accents, hairstyles, and chav wear excepting.  Will locals recognize each other and compete over who is going to be trashiest? Sounds like John Waters’s Baltimore.  At least, it would be community service.

Springer recently derided UK television for being “ten years behind” stateside entertainment.  Might that be a compliment? Is it even an accurate assessment, given that many of the post-Springer reality formats—shows that make Jerry seem quaint—were developed in the UK?

No doubt the UK Springer season was greenlighted in response to the highly controversial but hugely successful London production of Jerry Springer—The Opera, which aired earlier this year on BBC1 to a storm of protests. Given the reawakening of the religious right in the West, Springer might still be able to push some holier-than-thou buttons, sanctimonious as his own curtain call commentaries are. Still, it all seems so old hat.

Some fifty years ago, US radio comedian and satirist Fred Allen (1894-1956) had this to say about so-called reality shows, which “became popular with the sponsors long before the listeners at home were conditioned to them,” programs that

appealed to the businessman because they were cheap. Reduced to essentials, a quiz show required one master of ceremonies, preferably with prominent teeth, two underpaid girls to do the research and supply the quiz questions and a small herd of morons, stampeded in the studio audience and rounded up at the microphone to compete for prizes. The prizes generally [. . .] were donated by their makers in return for a mention of their merchandise on the program.

The audience-participation show varied slightly. This pseudo-entertainment consisted of a covey of frowsy housewives, flushed at a neighborhood supermarket, and an assortment of tottering male extroverts gathered from park benches. The purpose of the program was to establish the senility of the participants in the process of playing an antiquated parlor game. These shows not only were inexpensive—some of them became very popular, which justified their existence in advertising and corporate circles.

The commercials have gotten longer, the attention span shorter, and the vocabulary smaller—but the “herd of morons” is forever flocking to the trough.  By the way, just how long do the commercial breaks have to get until we all refuse to chomp? Meanwhile, Fred Allen’s wit is alive and well worth our time.   Just listen to recordings of his popular comedy-variety series to discover how he, along with a small herd of writers that at one time included novelist Herman Wouk, tickled and uplifted the multitude with a verbal virtuosity rarely attempted, let alone achieved, by today’s television entertainers.