The Unseen Voice by Lesley Johnson

Author:Lesley Johnson [Johnson, Lesley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138209398
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Highbrow versus lowbrow

In the 1920s the radio audience had been spoken of as constituted elsewhere, outside the world of radio – as having interests, concerns or cultural preferences derived from other worlds or other spheres of their life. In the mid-1920s, and increasingly in the late 1920s, the radio audience was defined as being made up of ‘varied tastes’. This notion suggested a diversity of desires, pleasures and interests to be satisfied by radio, and implied that the sum total of radio programmes could cater for that diversity. But in the 1930s, the terms ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ emerged as key descriptions of the radio audience. These terms represented the audience as clearly divisible into two sets of cultural preferences, two set of tastes in radio programmes.

In the mid-1920s, the labels highbrow versus lowbrow had been used occasionally to describe different programmes; by the end of the decade they had become terms to describe listeners, and terms used by listeners in their letters to radio magazines and the daily press to identify themselves. For the most part the labels specified particular tastes in music to be heard on radio, but were applied more broadly to mark out orientations to all types of radio programmes. Highbrows loved classical or ‘serious’ music, ‘serious’ talks and plays; lowbrows loved jazz, ‘light’ music (including crooning and dance music), comedy, sport perhaps, and variety. The content of these labels was seldom questioned, and similarly, the distinction or differentiation between them was presented as a taken-for-granted. Additional qualities were at times mentioned -serious versus light, cerebral versus relaxing, heavy versus popular – but again the content of these categories and the distinctions drawn between them were not contested. The debate centred instead on the proportion of the listening audience that was highbrow or lowbrow and the proportion of programming hours that should be devoted to the interests of each group. As part of this debate other issues were raised focusing on the relative merits of highbrows versus lowbrows: highbrows were accused of being snobbish and arrogant; lowbrows were degenerate and ignorant.

Common to all these disputes was the assumption that radio programmes were commodities – cultural goods to be consumed. All participants in the debates and arguments shared the basic premise that broadcast programmes constituted a market of pleasures, a range of amusements, entertainments and edifying treasures to be consumed by listeners in their ‘free’ hours. The radio audience, it was implied, necessarily adopted a passive role, ready for radio to provide them with relaxation, solace, escape, or perhaps for some, intellectual stimulation, after a hard day’s work. This expectation of the passivity of the listener -the consumer attitude – underpinned the view that radio should be an agency of cultural uplift or education of the masses in the same way as it formed the basis of the view of radio as entertainment. Culture and education were commodity goods in the context of the highbrow versus lowbrow debate.

At various times, throughout the 1930s, the debate about the relative

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