Ewan MacColl: BBC Manchester in the 1930s
Archie Harding
I had started doing occasional radio work in 1933 when I had been approached by Archie Harding, the North Regional Programme Director, to read some verses in a feature programme about May Day in England. 'We need a working-class voice,' Harding explained. I was it. For several years afterwards I was the 'working-class voice', the 'rough voice', 'sailor's voice', 'navvy's voice', 'tramp's voice', and sometimes '2nd Narrator (northern voice)'.
Harding, the grey eminence of creative broadcasting had, almost singlehanded, created the form of radio documentary known as the feature programme. On leaving Oxford, he had gone straight into radio, convinced that this new medium held the key to a new, important art form in which the spoken work would really come into its own. He maintained that radio was a tool for poets; with it one could manipulate words in the way that John Heartfield manipulated visual images to create his photomontages.
After a brief studio apprenticeship, he became part of an experimental unit at Broadcasting House, and there produced his radio adaptation of John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, a work which, though never actually broadcast, was said to be a near masterpiece. Harding was unusually modest about it and said that his role as adapter had been a simple one.
His next major work, a superbly documented account of a rising by Asturian miners - Crisis in Spain - was indeed brilliant. I can still recall the feeling of tremendous excitement that I experienced when I listened to it for the first time. It had the sweep and intellectual passion of Eisenstein at his best, combined with the kind of inexorable unfolding of events which one encounters in the great ballads.
With the production of Crisis, Harding left the comparatively obscure world of experimental broadcasting for the limelight of public broadcasting. He had become a force to be reckoned with. From now on, he was told, the writing and production of documentary programmes was to be his sole activity. 'Choose your own subjects, old boy.'
Any misgivings as to the subject matter of Crisis in Spain were quickly shrugged off. Harding was a very bright young man. Just up from Oxford. Got to give him his head for a while. A certain degree of rebelliousness is inevitable in the young. He'll grow out of it. Give him a few responsibilities and he'll knuckle under. You'll see, he'll turn out to be a very useful chap in the Corporation.
So this white-headed boy, this establishment nominee was given the go-ahead to produce more brilliant programmes. And he did, a whole fistful of them, and they were outstanding, and each one was more politically pointed than the one before. The 'heid yins' became more disturbed and began to ask each other whether young Harding was ever going to toe the line. Their support was finally withdrawn after the production of his Portrait of Warsaw, a much publicised New Year's Eve broadcast of a programme which juxtaposed Chopin's romantic Poland against the realities of the Pilsudski regime. It brought the Polish Ambassador to Broadcasting House the next morning demanding an apology.
As a result, Harding was exiled to the North Region and promoted to a position where he would neither write nor produce scripts. He settled down there to the task of cultivating a circle of young writers and. no, not actors but readers. He despised actors and was never able to convince himself that they possessed even the most rudimentary intelligence. (...)
Harding was someone I admired; he had a passionate belief in radio and had actually created a new art form, the radio feature. He loved words and understood their power and he had a vision of a radio art form which could assist the forward march of mankind. He was a big man who occasionally made himself small by making cruel remarks. I learned a great deal from Archie Harding, and through my work with him I built up a gallery of rough voices and mastered several dialects and accents. Later, I graduated to becoming a narrator and poetry reader.
John Pudney
It was John Pudney who gaye me my first real chance as a scriptwriter. Pudney, a producer on loan from the London headquarters of the BBC, arrived in Manchester with a considerable reputation as a feature producer. It was a reputation well-earned, for he was far and away the most talented producer I ever worked with in radio. He was a poet of some standing and was able to attract artists of the calibre of Auden and Britten to work with him. He had a nice sense of irony and an engaging schoolboyish sense of humour.
(...)here was this upstart from the south, this effete poet who looked like a prosperous farmer up for a day in town, intent on riding roughshod over the well-kept pastures of the featureocracy. No lengthy passages of beautifully crafted narration for Pudney, no dessicated prose that could be bent and angled by cunning inflections. No soloists and no choir. Instead there were the Caption Voices reading adverts about forgotten cures for warts, bunions, consumptions and the falling sickness; brisk statements culled from newspapers, official documents, government reports and royal circulars. In place of the undesignated voices, the rough, smooth, less smooth, official, angry and fluent voices of the classic feature programme, he introduced the characterised voice, almost always accented or in dialect. Not the italicised dialect of a Bridson script, where it was used as an interesting exhibit; now it was a counter of the harsh officialese of the Caption Voices.
Pudney's approach to radio documentary was not aimed at subverting the classic feature but at humanising it. Harding's early programmes were not only stylistically brilliant and innovative, they were also passionate, political statements, vibrant with anger and impatience. Form and content existed in perfect balance. In his Manchester period the scripts which he inspired others to write lacked the earlier political conviction and, consequently, the passion too was absent; the form had become all-important, and while this may have interested those who put the scripts together, it more often than not resulted in pomposity and a sententiousness which must have repelled many listeners. Pudney, on the other hand, was able to invest the dullest subject with humour and irony and one was never allowed to lose sight of the fact that a human intelligence was at work in even the most grandiose project.
In the same way that I had drifted into radio acting, so I drifted into scriptwriting and occasionally into working as a temporary producer of features. On two or three occasions I was even brought in to assist the junior programme engineer operating the 'grams' on which pre-recorded field material and effects were played. All these varied activities would, no doubt, have stood me in good stead had I been interested in pursuing a career in radio; but as far as I was concerned they were merely a means to an end, a necessary, and at times tiresome, detour on the journey to a revolutionary theatre. This is not to say that I found the work itself tiresome or uninteresting. On the contrary, I was frequently fascinated by it, particularly during the first year.