Audio Drama Modernism: The Missing Link between Descriptive Phonograph Sketches and Microphone Plays on the Radio

342 Pages·2020·2.961 MB·English

by  Tim Crook

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN SOUND
Audio Drama Modernism
The Missing Link between Descriptive Phonograph Sketches and
Microphone Plays on the Radio
Tim Crook
Palgrave Studies in Sound
Series Editor
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard
Musik
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Palgrave Studies in Sound is an interdisciplinary series devoted to the
topic of sound with each volume framing and focusing on sound as it is
conceptualized in a specific context or field. In its broad reach, Studies in
Sound aims to illuminate not only the diversity and complexity of our
understanding and experience of sound but also the myriad ways in
which sound is conceptualized and utilized in diverse domains. The series
is edited by Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, The Obel Professor of Music at
Aalborg University, and is curated by members of the university’s Music
and Sound Knowledge Group.
Editorial Board
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (series editor)
Martin Knakkergaard
Mads Walther-Hansen
Editorial Committee
Michael Bull
Barry Truax
Trevor Cox
Karen Collins
More information about this series at
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Tim Crook
Audio Drama
Modernism
The Missing Link between Descriptive
Phonograph Sketches and
Microphone Plays on the Radio
Tim Crook
Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London
London, UK
ISSN 2633-5875 ISSN 2633-5883 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Sound
ISBN 978-981-15-8240-0 ISBN 978-981-15-8241-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8241-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd. 2020
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Acknowledgements
I dedicate this book to my partner and wife Marja Giejgo for all her sup-
port, encouragement and inspiration during my academic career.
Many thanks also to Professor Chris Townsend and colleagues at Royal
Holloway, the University of London for giving me confidence, opportu-
nity and guidance in researching the media arts.
I am also enormously grateful to librarians at the British Library, St
Pancras, BBC Written Archives in Caversham, Goldsmiths, the University
of London library in New Cross, Royal Holloway, the University of
London library, Egham and members of the City of London Phonograph
and Gramophone Society for their expert assistance.
And last and not least, Goldsmiths, the University of London which so
kindly employed me for thirty years, accommodated my enlightened
career in Higher Education and was kind enough to appoint me as one of
their professors.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Audio Drama and Modernism: Gordon Lea 1926, the
First Manifesto 11
3 R adio Drama and the Avant-Garde: Lance Sieveking
1934, the Second Manifesto 27
4 Th e Modernist Turn in Literature and Radio Studies: How
It Changes Understanding of the History of Sound Drama 41
5 B ridging Political Modernism Between Descriptive
Phonographs, 1920s Political BBC Radio Drama and the
1930s Agitational Radio Features 55
6 Modernist Phonograph Drama in a Belfast Street and a
Montage on War: The Sonic Genius of Russell Hunting 79
7 Great War Descriptive Sketches 87
vii
viii Contents
8 A ngels of Mons and the Divine Service for King and
Country 133
9 Are the Sound Drama Phonographs Examples of
‘Modernist’ Propaganda? 167
10 Reginald Berkeley: Pioneering Modernist Playwright and
Political Radio Drama as Agitational Contemporaneity 195
11 Direct BBC Censorship of Modernist Texts by
D.G. Bridson and His Negotiation with Joan Littlewood
and Olive Shapley of ‘Institutional Containment’ 247
12 Sound Drama as Political and Agitational
Contemporaneity and Modernist Expression 277
Bibliography 291
Index 325
1
Introduction
Radio drama emerged during the early part of the twentieth century as a
new dimension of the storytelling medium and a key part of the first
broadcasting format. In more recent years, there has been a rich and pow-
erful extension of radio drama art into audio fiction in podcasting. This
book is an investigative history. It tells the story of a twenty-year research
journey into radio drama’s origins primarily in the United Kingdom and
asks new questions of key radio drama events in the 1920s and 1930s.
Hopefully, it identifies the significance and contribution of political dra-
matists in progressing radio and sound drama as an art form and the
important contribution of its innovation to the cultural phenomenon of
modernism.
A fair number of shibboleths have been put to rest. Sound drama did
not begin at the BBC or indeed via radio transmission of speech by any-
one else. For a good twenty to thirty years between the Victorian and
Edwardian eras, this book discovers and celebrates the brilliant and cre-
ative sound storytellers who used a long-lost mechanical technology of
metallic horns, needles and wax cylinders to produce the first audio dra-
mas. This was the phonograph age. There was no electricity or digital
software to fashion special effects and conjure imaginative worlds in
© The Author(s) 2020 1
T. Crook, Audio Drama Modernism, Palgrave Studies in Sound,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8241-7_1
2 T. Crook
audio-visual multi-track design formats. There were no clever micro-
phones with multiplicity of arrangements to capture spatial and sensitive
options in fields of recording and immersive sonic experience. The under-
standing of sound was naturally based and the technology and technique
far more cognitive of what was capable of being heard at the very moment
of utterance and physical generation. Illusion was a matter of under-
standing the physical and imaginative potential of the space being used
for the performance. The sound shamans of live theatre had traditions
and secrets to be respected and followed.
There is an exposition through the early chapters that unfolds and pro-
vides the evidence of innovation and dramatic intensity enchanting the
human heart, mind and everyday being with comedy, politics, pathos
and bathos. There are genius writers, producers and performers such as
Russell Hunting who in the space of only a few years was a theatrical
Mephistopheles in red tights, a jailbird doing time for making sound
pornography instead of phonography, and originating best-selling mon-
tage that captured the patriotic and imperialist zeitgeist of the British
people getting used to parting, longing and returning of soldiers and civil
servants dominating the world in trade, military and cultural power
through Royal Naval troopship. The Departure and Return of Troopships
phonograph montage would be an after-dinner favourite of King George
V who was also a subjugating Emperor of India. Hunting’s dramatization
of the Battle of the Marne in 1914 aspired to modernist and realistic
sound drama that the film industry struggled to achieve twenty years later.
The Great War of 1914–1918 created a thriving and lucrative market
for short audio drama representations of the conflict at home, on the sea,
at the Western Front and in the air. Major Alfred Edward Rees, who had
been a building surveyor for the London County Council in civilian life,
accelerated his achievement in the audio fiction art form from recording
drill commands when a Captain in 1915 to scripting, directing and pro-
ducing the earliest surviving evidence of a sound drama series in 1917.
‘On Active Service’ comprises around 21 minutes of drama and six sepa-
rate episodes in the lives of soldiers Tippy and Ginger—two friends who
go to the war, survive the horrors of trench fighting and return home as
heroes. There is, of course, a sanitizing fantasy of everyone living happily
ever after and the suggestion that the courage displayed and horror