The Poetry of Radio by Street Seán;

Author:Street, Seán;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Harding embraced the move, and within three years had established a thriving features department, surrounding himself with new, talented writers and producers committed to making radio a medium for the voice of ordinary people. In 1936 he returned to London initially as a chief instructor in the BBC Staff Training Department, finally becoming its director. After the war, in 1948, he became deputy director of the Drama Department under Val Gielgud; it was Harding who recruited Louis MacNeice, and in MacNeice’s poem, Autumn Sequel, he is represented as the character, ‘Harrap’. It may be seen from this brief sketch of events that there was a political and creative continuity that linked programme-makers to the time when Charles Parker was a fledgling producer, joining the BBC, going to the North American Service – and being exposed to the work of Norman Corwin.

Tragedy and Opportunity

In 1957 Parker wrote to Ewan MacColl about a project that he felt would be ‘absolutely up your street’ (quoted in Cox 2008: 1). A railway worker named John Axon had been killed in an accident in Derbyshire and was subsequently awarded the George Cross for bravery. Parker wanted to use the incident as the subject of a programme, and the concept was to be a radical one: a sound picture of railway workers, with actuality and location-based interview and conversation, linked, not by a spoken scripted narrative but by music. In fact the original idea may well have been nearer to the ‘cantata’-like form of Corwin’s The Lonesome Train:

a shape built around the last journey of John Axon, giving a reiterated ‘bass tune’ of the doomed goods train working up to a climax, out of which he [Parker] anticipates flashbacks into the dead man’s life. From meetings with Axon’s workmates they could create ‘impressionistic dramatics vignettes to build up the character of the man’.

(Cox 2008: 50)

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