The Radio Journal – International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media
Volume 2 Number 3. © Intellect Ltd 2004.
Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/rajo.2.3.131/1
British radio and the politics of culture in
post-war Britain: the work of Charles
Parker
Paul Long University of Central England
Abstract
Keywords
There has been little academic consideration of the life, work and ideas of the BBC
radio producer Charles Parker. Where he is remembered it is for his work on the
prize-winning series known as the Radio Ballads. Beginning with ‘The Ballad of
John Axon’ in 1958 the series addressed the lives and work of working-class
people, and was one of the first programmes to use ‘actuality’ incorporating original, spontaneous testimonies. The author values Parker’s work as an expression
of the mentalités of welfare-state Britain and that wider project evinced by his
colleagues and collaborators that sought to challenge the circumscribed lineaments of class, culture, history, education and language. However, an appreciation of Parker and his role in the process of democratizing the cultural sphere also
lends itself to a critique of the assumptions behind categories such as class,
authenticity and experience that proved to be so useful in this moment.
Charles Parker
British radio
BBC features
post-war Britain
cultural politics
‘And the individual, powerless, has to exert the
Powers of will and choice
And choose between enormous evils, either
Of which depends on somebody else’s voice’
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal
Introduction: a case for Charles Parker
In a recent meditation on the autobiographical impulse, novelist Martin
Amis comments that
We live in the age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate
talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur. Nothing, for now,
can compete with experience - so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally
and democratically dispensed. Experience is the only thing we share equally,
and everyone senses this.
(Amis: 2000: 2)
While this observation might be a useful addition to understanding the
RJ–ISBAM 2 (3) 131–152 © Intellect Ltd 2004
131
Charles Parker in typical pose.
[Photographer – Bob Ethridge]
[Published courtesy of the Charles Parker Archive Trust – thanks to Pam Bishop]
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Paul Long
contemporary ubiquity of genres such as docu-soaps, docu-dramas and
reality TV programmes, this ‘loquacity’ has a history. Indeed, if one listens
for how particular perspectives have been lent authenticity and authority
over others - in the past and present - it is apparent that what ‘experience’
is has not always been assumed to be either self-evident or so egalitarian.
A sense of the democratization of experience, of the increasing sound of
a plurality of social and personal narratives in a British context can be
illustrated by turning to the relatively recent past. On the eve of the 1960s
for instance, a precocious university graduate by the name of Dennis
Potter suggested that the majority of working-class people and their values
and perceptions were still excluded from any place in the nation’s cultural
life. Considering the obvious benefits of post-war affluence, he wrote that
‘it has become ... hard to comprehend any method by which a more satisfactory common culture can be realized. How are people to begin seeing
themselves as people and not digits in the huge machines of the admass
soporifics?’ (Potter 1960:121, emphasis added).
Potter was a good example of the new post-war social type that was
worrying radicals such as E.P. Thompson, preoccupied as they were with
culture to the neglect of ‘politics’. Potter, for instance, argued that in view
of the post-war settlement and the proliferation of mass communications,
the economic focus of socialism now seemed outmoded, on the verge of
ideological defeat. For him, it was in the cultural sphere where there was
cause for optimism and a possible ‘revival on the Left’ was signalled by a
concatenation of events. These included the staging of John Osborne’s play
Look Back in Anger (1956), the publication of a range of essays by leading
radicals collected by Tom Maschler under the title Declaration (1957), the
appearance of the journal Universities and Left Review (1957) and Richard
Hoggart’s bestseller The Uses of Literacy (1957). Representing a renewal of
concepts such as involvement and commitment in the arts, such work represented a new ‘oblique’ approach to social problems, and a recognition
‘that the quality of our whole culture, particularly as expressed and
exploited by the mass media, is a potent factor in creating that better and
more noble society which is the one constant quality of the Socialist
vision’ (Potter 1960: 101).
Aspects of this ‘oblique’ approach are revealed in the work and ideas of
BBC producer Charles Parker who, alongside Ewan MacColl and Peggy
Seeger, created the seminal series known as the Radio Ballads. Eight programmes appeared on BBC radio over a period from 1958 to 1963, beginning with ‘The Ballad of John Axon’ and ending with ‘The Travelling
People’. A minor controversy surrounded the series and its eventual cancellation by the BBC, ostensibly on economic grounds. Its creators insisted that
this was a politically motivated move, a consequence of the radical nature
and promise of a form which investigated aspects of ordinary life, utilizing
original, unscripted testimony (‘actuality’) melded to musical commentary.
Scant as it is, any attention afforded the Radio Ballads has tended to
pinpoint the contribution of Ewan MacColl and his radical politics and
British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain...
133
1. There is little recognition of his part in the
historiography of oral
history. Paul
Thompson in his
landmark work The
Voice of the Past
(1978), provides an
exhaustive list of ‘The
Achievement of Oral
History’ (pp. 230-36),
but finds no place for
Parker. As far as I can
tell, neither is there
an acknowledgement
in his allusively titled
Living the Fishing
(1983).
2. See http://www.topicrecords.co.uk/topic_r
ecords_tscd801808_the_radio-ballad
s.html and
www.media.bournem
outh.ac.uk/charlespar
ker.html.
3. Biographical sources:
Paul Shilston (1997),
‘Charles Parker - Man
With a Microphone’,
Queens’ College Record,
p. 18; Donnellan
(1980); Anon.
(1988), ‘Richard
Groves - A Tribute’,
Charles Parker Archive
Trust Annual Report,
November; Calthrop
and Owens (1971).
His degree is
registered under
‘Historical Tripos
Division (Dsc Parker,
H.C. Queens’ 1948)’
in The Cambridge
University Calendar for
the Year 1948-49
(Cambridge:
Cambridge University
Press, 1948), p. 246.
This conflicts with the
accounts of Philip
Donnellan
(unpublished (draft)
biographical entry for
the National Dictionary
of Biography, loaned
by Mary Baker to the
author) and Shilston,
who suggest that
Parker graduated in
English Literature.
Given that F.R. Leavis
was at the height of
creative lineage (see Laing 1986; Porter 1998; MacColl 1990; Paget 1990).
However, friends, colleagues and supporters claim a place for Parker himself
as a pioneer of media and cultural studies as well as the field of oral history
(Groves, Baker and Donnellan 1983). These are grandiose claims, implying
that Parker is something of a forgotten yet important man, good reasons to
explore and evaluate such a life.1 And this life has begun to be recognized
and celebrated. The Radio Ballads were recently released on CD by the Topic
record label while 2004 saw the launch of an annual conference in Parker’s
name where radio practitioners such as Piers Plowright and Simon Elmes of
the BBC acknowledged his continued influence.2
Parker’s personal development was certainly intriguing, described by
himself as ‘how a liberal bourgeois journalist became a socialist artist’
(Parker 1975: 98). He worked and corresponded with some key figures
from the period, including Richard Hoggart, Arnold Wesker, Stuart Hall,
E.P. Thompson and the oral historian George Ewart Evans. Here, I outline
how his engagement with their projects situates his work within a wider
field of achievement. Focusing upon claims about the quality, meaning
and uses of the English language in relation to class, his ideas about
culture questioned the circumscribed role of the BBC in British life, as well
as guiding assumptions in the study of history, educational imperatives
and practices. In turn however, the terms of his triumphs and ideas offer a
mode of historicizing a range of concepts shared with his contemporaries
and informing their achievements. Of late, cultural commentators and historians have begun to critique and interrogate the solidity and endurance
of the very tools upon which their insights have traditionally been built.
As has been suggested, foundational concepts such as culture, class, consciousness, the social and indeed ‘experience’ are no longer taken to be the
unalloyed categories they once were (for instance, see Butler and Scott
1992; Bourke 1994; Boyd and McWilliam 1995; Eagleton 2000). Here
then, I wish to celebrate Parker but also recognize the limits of his work
and the wider discourses he engaged with and contributed to.
Into ‘life’: origins of the Radio Ballads
Hubert Charles Parker was born on 5 April 1919 to a middle-class
Bournemouth family. Although the family had fallen on hard times he
attended the town’s grammar school and upon leaving took a job with the
National Physical Laboratory where he trained as a metallurgist. A Royal
Navy reservist, he was called up when war was declared in 1939 and for
the duration of hostilities served as First Lieutenant on the submarine
HMS Sceptre, later commanding HMS Umbra and winning a DSC in the
process. After demobilization he pursued a degree in History at Queens
College Cambridge, graduating in 1948. Taking a new career direction he
applied to and was taken on by the BBC, initially working for the North
American Service, at home and in the United States itself. In 1953 he was
appointed Senior Features Producer for BBC Radio in the Midlands Region,
which took him to the city of Birmingham.3
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Paul Long
Two significant events from this period informed Parker’s personal
outlook and approach to work, leading directly to the first actuality ballad
of 1958. The first concerns technological innovation in the development
of newer, smaller yet efficient means of tape-recording which entailed new
practices and freedoms for programme-makers. Of the encounter with the
EMI portable tape recorder, first produced in Britain in 1952, Parker’s colleague and occasional collaborator Philip Donnellan has claimed that ‘For
many of us it was a radicalising experience, technically, politically and
socially’ (Donnellan 1980: 11). Hitherto, broadcasting producers and
their creative teams had been bound to the studio or limited by the financial burden imposed by the large vehicle and cumbersome equipment necessary for field trips or outside broadcasts. From now on the pursuit of
material would not be subject to the formality and mystique of the studio
and the scrutiny of professional technician and presenter. For Parker, it
meant that ‘you could go into “life”’ (Parker 1975: 98, emphasis added),
and what was meant by ‘life’ and who best expressed it is a key issue here.
A second galvanizing event occurred in 1957 when Parker received a
tape of an American radio broadcast of The Lonesome Train, a cantata
written by Millard Lampell and Earl Robinson. This told the story of the
transportation of Abraham Lincoln’s body to its resting place through the
use of song and the testimony of witnesses. Robinson (1910-91) was a
left-wing American composer (subject to a House Un-American Activities
Committee blacklisting in 1952) who collaborated with Woodie Guthrie,
Paul Robeson, Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter, Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax,
for whom he had collected various folk and blues recordings. Writer of the
seminal ‘Joe Hill’, he joined the Workers’ Theater Project, conducted the
American People’s Chorus and took part in various American folk-music
radio shows (see Hardy and Laing 1990: 676; Denning 1998).
This was work that was well known in Britain amongst cultural progressives. Robinson’s Ballad for Americans, written with Jack La Touche
and starring Paul Robeson, drew enthusiastic notices when it was broadcast in December 1940 on the BBC Home Service. The Daily Worker
praised it for its ‘fresh, uncommercial spirit’, suggesting that it was of and
for ‘the people’ (Anon. 1941a: 5). Such work was valuable because it
offered a template for a democratic culture, and as one correspondent to
the BBC commented, ‘A similar piece of work would find a place in this
country, since it expresses the desire of the common people to make the
country their own’ (quoted in Anon. 1941b: 3).
The Lonesome Train itself was the fruit of song-collecting, oral history and the
creative interpretation of such material. Its creators were described as having:
wandered over the country, listened to the people sing, watched them dance;
they steeped themselves in the rhythms of the American people, on the field,
in the factories, in the mines and in the tall cities. They live and understand
this music of ours.
(Fast 1945: n.p.).
British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain...
135
his powers and influence at Downing
College, and with people like Raymond
Williams there at the
same time, it would
place Parker within a
formidable intellectual
milieu.
4. Charles Parker, ‘John
Axon and the Radio
Ballad’, sleevenotes to
Ewan MacColl and
Charles Parker, The
Ballad of John Axon,
original broadcast
released as Argo
Recording RG 474,
1965: n.p.
5. Parker, ‘John Axon
and the Radio Ballad’.
6. Quotes here from City
of Birmingham
Central Library,
Charles Parker
Archive (Hereafter
CPA) 2/64/2/1,
‘Charles Parker:
Programmes and
Projects’; ‘BBC
Audience Research
Department.
LR/58/1051, Week
27, “The Ballad of
John Axon” (Wed. 2
July 1958)’,
document dated 16
July 1958. The main
file is indicated by the
first two numbers
(e.g. 1/3). The main
title of the file is given
in each initial
citation.
The philosophy and practice of such work and the progressive, welfare
culture of the New Deal that endorsed it, were acknowledged inspirations
for the Radio Ballads, the post-war folk revival and the development of oral
history.
Broadcast before Today in Parliament, ‘The Ballad of John Axon’ originally appeared at ten o’clock on the night of Wednesday 2 July 1958. It
told the story of the eponymous railwayman who had died in the previous
year while trying to halt a runaway train and had been awarded a posthumous George Cross. The programme was unusual enough in form and
content to warrant some justification. It had been commissioned in
autumn 1957, quite soon after the driver’s death: ‘still early days for a
programme which could be placed in the “obituaries for distinguished personages” category’.4 Despite his heroic sacrifice Axon was after all just an
‘ordinary’ working man. Trailing the programme in an article for the
Radio Times, Parker wrote of the deliberately eclectic nature of the music
and form, warning that ‘you will find that we take liberties with conventions you may cherish ... relying upon the real people ... to tell their story
simply and directly’ (Parker 1958: 330). This liberty lay in the fact that it
eschewed conventional narration by an authorial Corporation voice.
Commentary and guidance was provided by original songs and music, the
direction of which was guided by the words and voices of the participants
themselves.
The source material appealed to Parker’s tastes due to its similarities with
American folk songs such as ‘Casey Jones’, which he enjoyed performing to
delighted dinner-party audiences. However, the point of departure from traditional BBC practice occurred when he went on a research trip to Axon’s
home town of Stockport, accompanied by MacColl and armed with his
midget recorder, then still used mainly as a tool for radio journalism. The
intention was to record conversations with locals in order to provide source
material for the development of a script that would be laced with occasional
direct quotes, giving a little local flavour. As was the convention then, actors
would voice these quotes. However, after several hours of interviews Parker
was taken with what he perceived to be the idiosyncratic speech of locals
and railway workers, of how it conveyed a ‘built-in oral charge’ that ‘held an
authenticity of a quite different order from that attainable in a studio’.5
Based upon the raw field recordings, the resulting programme went beyond
the heroic individual narrative to examine the reasons for John Axon’s selfsacrifice, his fealty to the job and his colleagues. As Parker later put it in the
argot of the period, it sought to portray the work of the railwayman as part
of a ‘whole way of life’ (Parker 1963: 25).
Responses to the Radio Ballads: new voices, new sounds
A BBC survey of listeners revealed plenty of criticism in response to such
daring. Nonetheless, praise was of a high order too, recognizing that here
was ‘a real break into a new art form’; it was welcomed for being ‘unconventional, untraditional, but all completely right’.6 Amongst newspaper
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Paul Long
critics the programme received extensive coverage as an ‘event’ as well as
universal praise for its innovations and as an artistic success. The Evening
Sentinel, held to be the most important outlet for radio criticism by the
BBC, found the programme both gripping and humbling. The Daily Mail
afforded it a double-page feature, concentrating on its ‘ruthlessly realistic’
tone, commenting that it was ‘weird, shocking’. Paul Ferris of The Observer
found the BBC tones of presenter John Snagge that bookended it to be an
intrusion. The Daily Worker found it one of the few things in that year’s
radio output to be worthy of celebration.7 Tom Driberg in the New
Statesman noted the ‘Gilpinesque colloquialism of the narrative’ (i.e. the
linking songs), generously commenting that: ‘Fletcher’s dream of being
read by a poet living a thousand years hence is unlikely to be realised! But
a generation from now - I would even say centuries from now - listeners
will surely still be moved by the recording of The Ballad of John Axon’
(Driberg 1958: 46-47). For Philip Henderson in The Listener there was a
congruence of the tone of worker and work, the ‘flat Lancashire accents
went well with the clang and hiss of the engines themselves’ (Henderson
1958: 68). William Webb of the Manchester Guardian opined that, ‘This
really was some of the characteristic poetry of the idiom of the people’
(‘W.L.W.’ 1958: 3). Despite reservations about the music, most memorable
and worthy or remark were the ‘gentle reminiscing Northern voices’ of the
people themselves.
This contemporary commentary suggests that despite some liberalization during the war, the presence of working-class voices and experiences
was still a rarity on British radio. For instance, when the BBC’s charter
came under review in 1949 it was an issue barely acknowledged by Lord
Beveridge’s Broadcasting Committee. However, one of the Committee’s
members, A.L. Binns, Director of Education for Lancashire, bemoaned the
fact that British broadcasting was too ‘high-brow’. As Asa Briggs reports,
Binns sought to communicate the views of ordinary people of the north to
the southerners of the Committee, explaining ‘that somebody had told him
in a Yorkshire pub that broadcasting consisted of “posh voices talking
down to us”’ (Briggs 1979: 301).
After the advent of commercial television, Richard Hoggart offered a
similar observation by way of explanation for the significant losses in audience figures experienced by the Corporation. Commenting on its public
image he enlisted his description from The Uses of Literacy to suggest that,
‘Great numbers of people simply assume that the BBC is “Them”’ (Hoggart
1958: 33). Of course, it had high standards and produced remarkable programmes, yet this quality also pinpointed its enduring weakness:
that they do not have a sufficiently wide sense, or one sufficiently sensitive
outside recognised intellectual or ‘cultured’ areas, of the strengths of British
life. One is repeatedly struck by their lack of closeness to the ‘thisness’ of
people’s lives, the communications missed through a narrowness of tone.
(Hoggart 1958: 35)
British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain...
137
7. Reviews quoted in
CPA 2/64/2/1,
‘Charles Parker:
Programmes and
Projects’, memos, BBC
Midland Region
Publicity Department,
3 and 10 July 1958.
The problem lay in the way that the Corporation spoke at, rather than with
the majority. One remedy for this situation that had been offered by Binns
was that ‘more use should be made of the voices of intelligent working
men speaking as “authorities in their own right”’ (Briggs 1979: 301).
Despite such critiques, the BBC was by no means homogenous in its
‘Themness’. In fact, Parker came to see himself as the inheritor of a particularly innovative tradition, what he termed the ‘liberal dispensation’
exemplified by figures such as Olive Shapley, Archie Harding, Val Gielgud,
Lawrence Gilliam, D.G. Bridson and especially Louis MacNeice (Parker
1972: 17). As with many of these figures, Parker’s work was a product of
the regional structure of the Corporation that allowed a producer some
independence. It certainly allowed him some space for experimentation
with this new form and over the next few years Parker managed to
produce several more programmes with fluctuating artistic and critical
success. ‘Song of the Road’ (broadcast on 5 November 1959), for instance,
dealt with the building of Britain’s first motorway and the men who made
it:
We built the canals, we laid the tracks
Of railways here to hell and back,
And now we’re going to have a crack
At the London-Yorkshire Highway.
This was followed by ‘Singing the Fishing’ (broadcast on 16 August
1960), about the fishing industry (this won the prestigious Prix d’Italia).
Thereafter came ‘The Big Hewer’ which was about mining (broadcast on
18 August 1961); ‘The Body Blow’ about polio and disability (broadcast
on 27 March 1962); ‘On the Edge’ about young people (broadcast on 13
February 1963); ‘The Fight Game’, about boxing (broadcast on 3 July
1963) and ‘The Travelling People’ which concerned Gypsies (broadcast on
17 April 1964).
From radio practice to cultural theory and social action
In his self-aggrandizing autobiography, MacColl suggests that his producer
was at best somewhat naïve about the import of the matters they were
dealing with in the series. Evidence suggests that, on the contrary, Parker
launched himself into the promotion, theorization and application of the
work in a manner indicating that he was highly conscious of its cultural
implications. In that first Radio Times article, he indicated the issues and
questions it raised for him about national identity, race, tradition, the
atrophy of popular culture and the need for its reinvigoration. As the series
developed he became increasingly committed to locating it as a contribution to contemporary cultural debates. In a variety of outlets he expended
much effort elaborating on the series as a new cultural form. Involving
enormous amounts of fieldwork and the recording of ‘conversations’
(never ‘interviews’) the task was to overcome social prejudice, communi138
Paul Long
cating a belief in the speech and experience of ‘ordinary people’ that was
so often devalued or completely ignored. The imperative for the intellectual therefore, was to go back to the people - fishermen, travellers and construction workers - to be educated in a new way, in front of language ‘on
the lips’, in use. Parker’s technique for eliciting articulate expression, for
disarming the suspicions of his subjects was indeed to sit at the feet of his
subjects, literally.
The impetus for his enthusiasm was a personal volte-face, after all this
was a man who would recall in his later years that, upon hearing of the
election victory of Atlee’s Labour party at the end of the war, he felt that
all he had been fighting for was lost. Of those who became his subjects, he
later confessed before one audience that,
I was brought up to believe that everywhere North of Winchester was an
industrial wilderness of wife-beaters and insanitary slums, and my formal
education did little to disabuse me of such an attitude to the true quality of
my countrymen.8
It says something of the nature of the history of class relations in Britain to
note that an individual like pioneering oral historian George Ewart Evans
could vividly recall (in 1987), ‘My first acquaintance with the thoughts
and opinions of ordinary people ... over half a century ago’ (Evans 1987:
1). Likewise, and despite the apparently levelling experience of the Second
World War, Philip Donnellan, who like Parker was of petit-bourgeois
origin, said of a meeting with one Charlie Andrews of Lowestoft in 1951,
that ‘It was the first time I had come face to face with a working man’
(quoted in Gilbert 1999: 16).9 Often physical or geographical, this kind of
encounter often lead to a kind of mental journey outside of a metropolitan
mindset - George Orwell’s being the most celebrated. Parker himself traced
a move that had been made by his inspiration and colleague in the BBC
Features Department, Louis MacNeice. In the 1930s, the poet had taken
up a post in Classics at the university of this ‘hazy city’, discovering that
Birmingham had its own refreshing intellectual character, ‘free of the
London trade-mark’ (MacNeice 1996b: 154). His students were drawn
from the locality and he found that they lacked the political obsessions of
his Oxbridge peers, particularly the fashionable ouvriérisme of 1930s radicals: ‘coming from the proletariat themselves, they were conscious of the
weaknesses of the Prolet-Cult’. This encounter challenged his inveterate
snobbery, and he found that it ‘reconciled me to ordinary people’
(MacNeice 1996b: 145).
Like so many before him then, Parker ventured into the wilderness and
encountered a genuine humanity where he had thought there was none,
reacting with humility and often guilt about his social prejudice and what
he felt to be his own middle-class inadequacies. Recalling his research
amongst various mining communities for ‘The Big Hewer’, he wrote that,
‘It was always with a sense of shock that, meeting with such men on the
British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain...
139
8. CPA 1/3/1/16,
‘Lectures Given by
Charles Parker’, ‘The
Missing Link: John B.
Sheldon Annual
Memorial Lecture, 30
September 1966’,
mss, p. 2.
9. Peripherally involved
with the original
Ballads, Donnellan
developed three of
them for television ‘Shoals of Herring’,
‘The Fight Game’ and
‘The Big Hewer’
(1972-73). Working
mainly in television
his concerns echoed
Parker’s and he
continued the venerable documentary
tradition of John
Grierson through his
films. ‘Private Faces’
(1962) caused a fearful reaction in his
boss, Grace
Wyndham Goldie,
and the film was suppressed. It was a
study of a Durham
miner who epitomized
the qualities that
Donnellan valued but
which worried his
bosses. He described
his subject as ‘an
absolutely stunning
man, eloquent, committed, humane,
unfaultable in terms
of his integrity, his
stance in the community, his conscious
sense of having learnt
from life what life had
to tell him, his
atheism, his socialism’
(quoted in Gilbert
1999). For an
account of
Donnellan’s work see
Mardy (1998) and
Pettitt (2000).
10. Transcript: Charles
Parker, The Tape
Recorder and the Oral
Tradition (broadcast
on 11 September
1971, Radio 3,
produced by Michael
Mason). Copy loaned
to the author by
Helen Lloyd, BBC
Radio WM.
11. Parker, The Tape
Recorder and the Oral
Tradition, pp. 1-2.
surface, fresh from the pithead baths, I found seemingly ordinary, quiet
spoken people much like other men’ (Parker 1961: 51).
Unlike MacNeice however, Parker’s perception had all the traits of the
romantic convert. In his encounters something new and extraordinary
occurred, resultant of asking questions about particular experiences that
had not been asked before. For Parker, speakers themselves experienced a
kind of reverie when turning to contemplate anew the routine of their
lives - a miner collecting his lamp and docket as he goes down the pit, for
instance. Thus, ‘they take off into moments of extraordinary almost oral
exaltation if you like, in which the language really becomes incandescent,
and you are sort of washed away’.10 Unexceptional experience is conjured
up as something else when treated with the passionate speech of people
newly aware of a power and poetry of their words. In this manner the
‘ordinary’ was afforded significance and as a result (in theory at least),
‘ordinary’ people assumed a position of authority over the narration of
their own lives.
Parker reflected on the implications of this for BBC practice. An inhouse document, Principles and Practice in Documentary Programmes, outlined the nature of authority as claimed for and constructed by the
Corporation. Parker reported that it asserted that a speaker:
must be someone whom the audience recognises as having the right to
express a personal opinion, and whom they clearly understand as doing so
as himself and not as the BBC ... an expert, a scientist or politician, or professional man ... Equally a journalist or broadcaster can rise (sic) to a stature
in which he is expected to express judgment of his own ... like Malcolm
Muggeridge. (Quoted in Parker 1973: 134)
Parker dismissed any claim to an overall, reassuring or commanding
authority in his work. For him working-class language had its own
authority and value because it was informal, unfettered, ‘real’ and
organically connected to the individual. This was speech imbued with
‘life’. This was something that for him was understood to be outside of a
certain kind of educational process whose results were evinced by a stagnant elite, ‘preoccupied with manners, with beauty, with aesthetics ...
with polite usage, grace’, qualities which ‘turn on themselves and
become sterile’. Middle-class talk was ultimately ‘a barrier to hide
behind, not ... a means of communication’. The vernacular was that
‘which satisfied’, it was ‘rich ... accurate, economical’. At its most effective this could be found at the margins of the nation - amongst the
speakers of Gaelic and Welsh, but also in the ways that they used
English. It was particularly evident amongst groups such as the miners
who spoke in a manner ‘in which every syllable, every vowel is, so to
speak, caressed by the voice, and the concepts are felt with a passion’.11
In turn, the incorporation of this kind of talk into the Radio Ballads lent
the form the authority of authentic art, that it:
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Paul Long
makes something of the same imaginative demands upon its audience as
does the traditional ballad ... While the radio form is much more complex, it
retains that quality of authenticity, of concrete and direct utterance which
the ballad proper shares with the best of documentary.12
And the Radio Ballads were understood as serious art. In an article
drawing attention to the decline in BBC listeners Tom Driberg placed ‘The
Ballad of John Axon’ alongside a production of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk
Wood as broadcasts of ‘artistic importance’ and in need of encouragement
(Driberg 1958b: 142). In their influential appraisal of poplar culture
Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel suggested that alongside The Goons the
series represented ‘the only truly imaginative attempt to use sound broadcasting creatively’ (Hall and Whannel 1964: 259). When Argo - a subsidiary of the Decca label - issued the Radio Ballads on record, they were
sold alongside traditional folk records, classical music, recitations of contemporary poetry and Shakespeare’s plays.
The project of working-class culture
We can further understand the significance of Parker’s approach and the
response to his work, then, by situating them within a broader project in
post-war Britain that was concerned with the lineaments of class and
culture. Robert Hewison has suggested that the boundaries of national
identity were at issue in this period. The work of Raymond Williams, especially, suggested a redefinition of the social that would account for marginalized cultural traditions such as ‘the communitarian values of the
working class as opposed to the individualism, tempered by the notions of
“service”, of the bourgeoisie’ (Hewison 1997: 99). The rethinking of cultural imperatives and absolutes also contributed to official policy, which, as
Francis Mulhern observes, ‘sponsored a vision of classlessness - through
equality of opportunity - but, precisely in doing so, instated the working
class as a real cultural presence and topic’ (Mulhern 1996: 28). Alongside
the Thompsonian recovery of ordinary experience from ‘the enormous
condescension of posterity’ (E.P. Thompson 1979: 13), a broad range of
sociological investigation and pedagogical theory was prompted by the category of ‘working-class culture’. For instance, the Education Act of 1944
had endorsed a reappraisal of pedagogical imperatives and the identification of working-class children as both ‘culturally deprived’ and as the
inheritors of ‘very real values of their own, values which are perhaps
essential to civilization, and yet which do not flourish in other reaches of
society’ (Jackson and Marsden 1973: 245).
Recognizing the scarcity of serious and humane treatments of workingclass life in the broadcast media, on completion of ‘The Ballad of John Axon’
Parker had transcripts of the extensive actuality forwarded to the obvious
expert of the day - Richard Hoggart. Similarly, he initiated a correspondence
with archetypal ‘Angry Young Man’ and proletarian artist - Arnold Wesker
that would ultimately lead to their collaboration in the grandiose mission of
British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain...
141
12. Parker, ‘John Axon
and the Radio Ballad’.
13. CPA 1/6/8,
‘Publications’, Charles
Parker, ‘Social Change
in the 50s and 60s:
“The Media and the
Masses”’, mss, 31 July
1974. p. 2.
14. CPA 1/3/1/7, Letter,
20 November 1962,
Charles Parker to
Geoffrey Hodson
(London County
Council Education
Officer’s Department),
p. 2.
the Centre 42 project that sought to bring culture to deprived working-class
communities (see Watt 2003). In his exchange with such individuals Parker
engaged with the intensifying post-war debate about the perceived effects of
mass culture, encapsulated in the idea that, ‘Educated people are forever
asking other educated people, in a worried tone of voice, questions which
amount to “What do you think about popular culture?” (or “mass culture”
or “popular art” or “the mass media”, terms commonly interchanged)’
(Cannon 1963: 23). Despite the insights and contribution of Hoggart and
Raymond Williams, these were, of course, questions that concealed abiding
fears and assumptions about the tastes and nature of the ‘mob’ and the generally negative quality of the culture of affluence.
For many commentators and interpreters Hoggart and Williams identified and validated what was acceptable and authentic about working-class
life in the face of the threat of commercial culture. Parker’s work was
offered and understood in this manner. Thus, he argued that in their
proper unaffected speech, working-class people exhibited a quality and an
innate creativity. Once recognized, and in tandem with ‘the fundamental
potential of the new technology’ of the media, this creativity promised ‘a
popular cultural renaissance of Elizabethan proportions’.13 Alongside, if
not superseding the vibrancy of the contemporary folk revival, this conjunction offered a reinvigoration of a common culture for the modern age.
Thus, ‘The essential genius of tape recorded actuality is it seems to me in
its insistent reassertion of the oral tradition and the use of language which
gives us back a type of truly popular poetry’.14 This implied a reappraisal
of the identification of English, as an academic subject, with the literary
tradition and of the way in which educational imperatives actually inhibited word-of-mouth communication. Indeed, for Parker as with many
others, his project was a didactic and missionary one, to return people
‘back’ to their authentic traditions that could be opposed to the synthetic,
Americanized versions conveyed by the mass media.
The end of the Ballads and the end of radio?
One way of accounting for the appreciative critical reception of Parker’s
work was its status qua radio and for its privileging of the word. Of all the
modern media, radio as a form, and as locus of practices directed by
Reithian values, accorded with a particularly puritan approach to culture.
Reflecting on contemporary prejudices, veteran documentary film-maker
John Grierson observed that in outlets such as The Times, the potential and
achievement of television was regularly sniffed at, implying ‘that “steam
radio” is a purer medium altogether, with “therapeutic and restorative”
powers to which television cannot aspire’ (Grierson 1963: 220).
Essentially iconoclastic, this kind of rhetoric was echoed by generations of
intellectuals schooled in the critique of mass culture formulated by F.R.
Leavis. As Leavis’s collaborator Denys Thompson wrote: ‘Pictures are a
coarse medium, and as Sir George Barnes has noted, “in a picture age the
use of language must be coarsened”’ (Denys Thompson 1961: vii).
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Paul Long
The preference for radio among the cultured as the acceptable technological medium was articulated in reactions to publication of the anticipatory BBC report of 1969, Broadcasting in the Seventies. For many, this
document heralded the end of the great age of sound broadcasting. With
familiarly puritan overtones, oral historian and broadcaster George Ewart
Evans later commented of this moment that: ‘Television was now completely in the saddle and the Third Programme was effectively scrapped.
Before long it would have only the occasional feature and would be filled
with music. The word was being demoted’ (Evans 1987: 144, original
emphasis). The institutional and cultural disaster precipitated by the
report was sketched in human terms with Parker playing a central and
symbolic role when he was prematurely ‘retired’ by the BBC in 1972 as a
direct result of these changes.
His ousting generated a considerable amount of protest. Unions,
celebrities and academics voiced their support while journalists constructed the arguments of his case around wider attempts to stem the perceived decline in cultural standards. The case was even raised in the House
of Commons and discussed in these terms. MP Phillip Whitehead suggested that Parker’s ‘main fault seems to be that he wishes to go on producing creative programmes rather than being a cog in a machine
creating mass-produced ones’ (Hansard 1972: 1308). Several notables
signed a letter of protest in The Times. They wrote that ‘As writers concerned with education, culture and the mass media, we question the
wisdom and justice of this decision’ (Abbs et al. 1972: 17). They argued
that via his career and particular concern with vernacular speech, Parker
had shown what radio could achieve as a creative medium. The Radio
Ballads provided ‘a valuable body of materials which are being employed
more and more extensively in our schools to reveal, among other things,
the power of the spoken word’.
Endorsements such as these temper any tendency to dismiss Parker’s
perception of the extraordinariness of ordinary speech as idiosyncratic or
even eccentric. Not entirely exceptional, his aestheticization of workingclass life and language can be placed in the context of changing attitudes
towards the nature of spoken English in the post-1945 era, an expression
of the mentalités of a welfare state culture.
Parker and the politics and pedagogies of speech
Some traditionalists in post-war Britain continued to champion ideas and
versions of ‘proper’ speech despite the interventions of more progressive
educational ideas. A confused conception of Standard English speech was
still offered as innately superior to any other accent, amongst which ‘the
urban accents are the worst offender against good speech, especially in the
large cities which have grown up as a result of the industrial revolution’
(Hill 1953: 135). Such evaluations were based on a pathological fantasy.
‘Urban’ dialects - for which read ‘working-class’ - were felt to be false, lazy,
harsh and ugly. They were the products of environments where shouting
British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain...
143
15. CPA 1/3/3/1, Charles
Parker, ‘Why Can’t
the Educated Speak
English?’, mss, 1969.
in smoky atmospheres had been required, where the hurried pace of city
life had demanded speedy communication and thus a diminution of form
and meaning. Amongst those who expressed scepticism about such conclusions were progressive and radical teachers of English, receptive as they
were to the more relativistic arguments of modern linguistics as they filtered into the educational sphere.
Felicitously, ‘The Ballad of John Axon’ was broadcast in the same year
that Basil Bernstein first advanced his controversial sociology of speech
and formulation of ‘elaborated’ and ‘restricted’ codes (see Bernstein 1971;
Labov 1972; Rosen 1972). In short, the elaborated code is abstract,
explicit and independent of context. In contrast, the restricted code is
descriptive, based upon narrative and avoids analysis and abstraction. It is
predictable, simple and limited in its meaning and variety. Context bound,
it relies upon the understanding of speaker and listener, and ‘arises whenever the culture of a group emphasizes we rather than I and occurs to
reinforce social relationships and create social solidarity’ (Reid 1984:
183). Despite the finesse of Bernstein’s argument the elaborated code
became equated with the middle classes and the restricted code with the
working classes.
Ostensibly, this work was offered as an observation on the continued
and general academic failure of working-class children. Bernstein suggested that this group was disempowered by the need to negotiate between
the ‘restricted’ code of the home and the ‘elaborated’ code of school and
the academic world - which favoured the middle classes. Described as
‘perhaps naïve’ in his approach, certainly vague in method, Bernstein’s
conclusions were taken by some as attributing the failure of working-class
children to a collective cognitive defect (See Burke et al. 2000: 444). This
was particularly attractive to those who were ill-disposed towards egalitarian impulses and particular modes of education designed to alleviate the
‘cultural deficit’ of a class-ridden society. For them, Bernstein codified and
supported familiar prejudices about the low intelligence of the majority.
For progressives, Bernstein failed to take account of these prejudices, provided a superficial analysis of class, and over-emphasized the values of the
‘elaborated’ code at the expense of those of the ‘restricted’ - not least of all
in his choice of terms. As Raymond Williams has suggested: ‘A definition of
language is always implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in
the world’ (Williams 1977: 21).
Predicated upon an analogy of ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ with ‘oral’
and ‘literate’, Parker’s was one of the earliest voices raised in protest at the
implications of Bernstein’s ideas, and on at least one occasion he shared a
platform with him. His own position was articulated in the title of one
paper, which asked ‘Why Can’t the Educated Speak English?’15 As we have
seen, in his celebration of its ‘realism’, veracity and lack of abstraction, his
validation of working-class speech was based upon the very aspects that
Bernstein highlighted as social impediments yet were taken to be qualitative defects.
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‘Oracy’ was one name given to the pedagogy of talk (see Atkinson et al.
1964). This was the subject of a landmark conference held at the
University of Birmingham in Easter 1965. It was here that Parker held
forth on the superiority of vernacular speech, and while not every one was
in sympathy with his inversion of existing prejudices, there were many
who were prepared to accept that it was at least as equally valid as
‘Received Pronunciation’ or concepts of ‘Standard English’ (see Parker
1965; Halliday 1965). Keynote speaker Andrew Wilkinson underscored
this position. In his address, he condemned as shameful the neglect of a
vibrant oral culture, how children spoke and what they spoke about.
Advocating that language work should be based upon precepts of creativity, rather than the repetition of the ideas and words of others, he stated
that
acceptance of the concept of Oracy implies a reorientation in our educational
practice which in places will need to be drastic. The key word in our school
disciplinary system has been ‘Shut up!’; we have been obeyed only too well.
(Wilkinson 1965: 4)
Parker’s contribution to debates about society, language and education
was initially recognized and encouraged by individual schoolteachers.
They sought copies of the ballads and advice about how properly to go
about investigating talk with children in order to make teaching relevant
and meaningful to them.
A great music: the Long March of Everyman
After the cancellation of the Radio Ballad series Parker’s cultural project
was one that he increasingly posed as part of a wider radical struggle on
behalf of working-class identity and consciousness. To this end he helped
establish the Birmingham and Midland Folk Centre in 1965 in order to
collect and disseminate traditional folk material. He was also a founder
member of the highly popular Grey Cock Folk Club (established in 1966)
in Birmingham, which boasted E.P. Thompson as its honorary vice-president.16 His collaboration with individuals such as MacColl, A.L. Lloyd and
others in the folk movement brought him into contact with Communist
Party cultural analyses and in 1965 he joined a Marxist Study Group in
Birmingham that was guided by the influential critic and theorist George
Thomson.
Professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham, Thomson had
been a key figure in the Cultural Committee of the Communist Party of
Great Britain (CPGB) since the 1930s. His work had a clear social and
political purpose. His Marxist reading of the Classics was a world away
from that of the public school tradition and the rarefied atmosphere of
academia. His work was aimed at ‘the people’ in order to ‘rescue the poet
from ... scholasticism’ (Thomson 1966: viii). His own observation that ‘the
historian of the past is a citizen of the present’, was an idea echoed in the
British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain...
145
16. Source: Mike Turner,
‘The Grey Cock’,
Charles Parker Archive
Trust Annual Report
1984.
ethos of the CPGB Historian’s Group and the projects of individuals such
as Christopher Hill, John Saville, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson.
Parker himself became interested in the traditions of oral culture and
linked his work directly to the project of ‘History from below’. Thus, he
met with the work of contemporary historians directly in the landmark
Radio 4 series The Long March of Everyman (1971-72) where, despite
‘retirement’, Parker was employed as ‘Producer for the Voices of the
People’. Raymond Williams was enlisted as a literary consultant while
contributors included Asa Briggs, George Rudé, Gwyn Williams, Stuart
Hall, Christopher Hill and Raphael Samuel. Running for 26 weeks, the
series was conceived as ‘an exploratory act of faith’ into the possibility
(pace Tolstoy) of developing a history of the ‘swarm life’ of society’s
‘unknown soldiers’ (Barker 1975: 295). Without recordings of historical
accounts from the perspective of ordinary people beyond living memory,
suitable material was sought in works like Dorothy Thompson’s The Early
Chartists (1971) and A.L. Lloyd’s folk song treatises such as Come all Ye
Bold Miners (1952). Folk songs were sung by renowned performers, and
other lines spoken by ‘ordinary’ people to convey the experience of those of
the past.
For producer Michael Mason this programme was an attempt to give
back to the people as a whole a sense of their history, fulfilling a need to
revivify national traditions and roots that had been cut since 1945. He
waxed lyrical over the technique of the series, that the marshalling of this
material conveyed a ‘Great Music’. Voices, music and sounds gave a historical texture, conveying an impressionistic portrait of historical events at a
micro level. Echoing Parker, he talked of great new popular art forms developing from such work,
This gradual emergence of Everyman’s voice is something which the series
must itself enact in its early programmes - and it must also show how the
split between elitist poetry and common speech is a feature of later literate
society rather than earlier oral tradition.
(Mason 1971: 684)
Mason’s assistant Daniel Snowman suggested that a view of history ‘from
the bottom up’ qualified a democratic pedagogical imperative that, in the
hands of teachers, pupils might be allowed ‘to think of the past, not as a
forced diet of “Them”, but as a banquet of “Us”’ (Snowman 1971: 685).
Evaluating and critiquing Parker’s achievement
I do not wish to devalue this wider project of cultural democratization, which
is truly one of the considerable and undervalued achievements of the postwar period. However, we should not ignore some of the problems underwriting the assumptions that prompted such projects, which can be illustrated in
Parker’s own work. His approach to sound, for instance, was consistent with
that of the British documentary tradition in the cinema. For John Grierson
146
Paul Long
the documentary form was creative in the same manner as music hall, ballet,
post-impressionist painting or the blank verse of Shakespeare, but could claim
something more as a result of its subject matter:
when we come to documentary we come to the actual world, to the world of
the streets, of the tenements and the factories, the living people and the
observation of living people ... We have to give creative shapes to it, we have
to be profound about it before our documentary art is as good or better than
the art of the studio.
(Grierson 1998: 76-77, emphasis added)
He wrote that it was important to make a distinction between ‘a method
which describes only the surface values of a subject’ and that which ‘more
explosively reveals the reality of it. You photograph the natural life, but
you also, by your own juxtaposition of detail, create an interpretation of it’
(Grierson 1966: 148). Such work was not about mere reproduction but
about the correct kind of mediation and interpretation of the world. This
was based upon the notion that the subject, i.e. ‘ordinary people’, was
itself the guarantor of truth, qualifying a particularly prescriptive interpretation of the world. As Parker revealed:
I am concerned politically and culturally at this moment with expressing
what I consider to be positive and assertive and revolutionary in workingclass experience. I consider that the role of any artist seriously committed to
the working class is that of eliciting from the working class in its many
aspects those areas in which it triumphantly demonstrates the potential for a
true proletarian consciousness and culture which sections of the working
class are capable of creating.
(Parker 1975: 102, emphasis added)
Parker’s argument (echoing Grierson and resonating in the ideas of many
of those others mentioned in this article) is that ‘criteria for selection’ must
be applied a priori, for it is not possible to appreciate the nature of consciousness from hours of unedited speech gathered in research. An idea of
political consciousness is distilled from that speech, ‘which may be ahead
of the everyday awareness of the working-class audience you then play it
to’ (Parker 1975: 103). Assuming the benign authority of the theorist and
convinced of the essential qualities of working-classness, he dismissed
‘other’ interpretations of life and the world, the understanding and perception of banality and the common-place, the everyday contingent existence
that he termed ‘the manipulated awareness of the working class that just
wants a quiet life’ (Parker 1975: 103).
Parker’s perception of language was the result of his concentration on
particularly ‘authentic’ working-class sites. While they branched out into
coverage of the disabled, travellers, boxers and ‘youth’ it is noteworthy
that the first and most successfully executed of the Radio Ballads dealt with
British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain...
147
17. CPA 1/8/12/1,
Charles Parker,
‘Miscellaneous notes
to group meeting 7
January 1967’, n.p.
18. Phillip Donnellan, ‘A
Tribute to Charles
Parker (1919-1980)’,
Programme of
Commemoration, 11
December 1981, n.p.
(emphasis added).
highly traditional, masculine, working-class occupations: in rail, labouring,
fishing and mining. At a time of substantial change in the nature of work
these fields were ossified and romanticized for the evidence they provided of
a genuine and enduring working-class consciousness. These professions
involve a highly visible and self-evident form of labour, the aestheticization
of which enjoins with a strong lineage. William Morris, for instance, said
that ‘the thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man of
his pleasure in labour’. Similarly, at George Thomson’s Marxist Study
Group, Parker learned that ‘Art is a form of mental labour, and is creative in
the sense that all human labour is creative i.e. creates value’.17 Of course it
validates the necessary activity of a majority yet at the same time identifies
this as the defining character of life, self-evident from the term ‘workingclass’ which itself becomes limited in its application.
Similarly, Parker’s claims to validate ‘experience’ are limited. What
resulted was a constant disavowal of individuality - literally so in the fact
that respondents whose voices comprise the actuality of the Radio Ballads
remained uncredited and generally anonymous. When figures such as
fishermen Sam Larner and Ronnie Balls were lauded, it was as representative men. Their idiomatic expressions became examples of ‘collective’
expression, not their own property as such. This was a characteristic of
the series that drew some criticism as it drew to a close. A critic at The
Times noted that any ‘everyday independent-minded statement’ when
merged with folk-song was used to ‘transform the speakers from individuals into absolute representations of the working-classes’ (Anon. 1963: 5).
Such discoveries and representations of the working classes, descriptions of their positive or negative qualities, have been a curiously recurrent
and instructive event in British life. I would argue that consistent features
in such descriptions, whether from ‘within’ or ‘without’, involve claims for
the authenticity of what is exhibited, the authority of the ‘explorer’, and
the implication, explicit or otherwise, that the working class is an object
that never knows itself. What is known or knowable proves problematic
too, always derived from the nature of the distance between observer and
observed and the curious relationship that is entered into. As MacNeice
observed, ‘Educated people in England, if they consort with members of
the working classes, tend to think of them as ‘characters ... all the time the
yokels are on the stage and you are in the stalls’ (MacNeice 1996b: 140).
Conclusion
According to Philip Donnellan, Parker’s story is that ‘of a genuinely honest
man who, largely by accident found himself confronting Reality. All artists
seek such a confrontation: in paint, in print, in film - but very few pursue
it to the end with such unrelenting persistence or at such personal cost.
He was indeed a man to be remembered’.18 The cost was met in the
increasingly desperate vision of a cultural utopia and his over-extension in
a dizzying array of projects that contributed to his premature death in
1980. When he died both The Times and Morning Star carried obituaries,
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Paul Long
celebrating his artistry and in the latter, his status as a true champion of
the working class (see Cohen 1980; Bishop and Wrend 1980).
Clearly, there are reasons for celebrating his life and his contribution to
radio but also to the intellectual work and democratic changes that have
taken place over the last half-century which have accorded respect to each
and every life. By the same degree, it is important to understand the limits
of how the ‘ordinary’ was (and is) validated in relation to particular definitions and demands of ‘authenticity’, ‘experience’ and ‘culture’.
Acknowledgement
This article has been developed from ‘Parker’s Politics - Charles Parker and
Society’ presented at the first Charles Parker Day hosted by the
Bournemouth Media School on 5 April 2004. I would like to thank those
individuals who offered comments and suggestions on this work, particularly Seán Street. Thanks also go to Sîan Roberts and Fiona Tait of the City
Archives at Birmingham Central Library.
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Contributor details
Paul Long is Course Director at the University of Central England in Birmingham
where he teaches media history and theory. His recent publications concern the
redesign and image of this city as a cultural destination. In relation, and in conjunction with Tim Wall, he is in the process of establishing a new research centre Urban Cultures: Popular Music, Radio, and the Politics of the City. Contact:
Department of Media and Communication, University of Central England, Perry
Barr, Birmingham, B42 2SU
E-mail: paul.long@uce.ac.uk
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Paul Long