Interviews with Alan Hall
(and Piers Plowright)

Resonance FM Magazine
(Autumn 2004)
Musical Listening – Martin Williams
Piers Plowright and Alan Hall are two of the UK's most consistently interesting feature makers. Here they talk about making radio documentaries with a musical sensibility, and about their own work in the context of public-service radio.

Resonance: How did you both become interested and involved in radio?

Piers Plowright: I joined the BBC in 1968, having worked in the Sudan for the British Council doing a bit of radio and television. I'd always been interested in radio, that was my first way of being touched and moved by what goes on in the world. But I didn't really want to do language teaching by radio, which was what I started doing, and nor really, funnily enough, drama, though I thought drama was what I wanted, but it deeply dissatisfied me because it was all laid down—good script – you hoped; good actors – you tried to get—and there wasn't much for you to do, it seemed to me. And the result was sometimes rather unbelievable.

R: Was much attention paid to sound design then?

PP: No, it was a much simpler world in a way. Stereo had made its appearance and was very seriously taken in drama so that actors moved about a floor that was chalk-marked from point to point, tremendous trouble was taken to ensure that they went out one way and didn't suddenly come back another way. Like a piece of stagecraft. So stereo was carefully thought about, but not really sound design or elaborate mixing of levels, backgrounds, tracks, effects. And of course it was all pre-digital, which is not to say that you couldn't do some marvellous things. The Radiophonic Workshop was the great source of that kind of adventurous, experimental, innovative radio-making. They started off as a sort of Goon Show and Doctor Who factory and they developed into some of the best producers of interesting radio around. And they were free. So I used to go and work with composers at the Radiophonic Workshop and that's really how I began to think about radio as being more than voices in a studio. But I really found my metier once I'd discovered the feature/documentary, which often used real people and readings and actors and things mixed up together, and that was the form I preferred and stayed working on until I retired at the end of 1997.

Alan Hall: In 1990 I managed to get a job in the Radio 3 music department. Before then I'd worked within the BBC, but as a paper-pusher, and I'd started off doing that because I was studying composition post-grad at Goldsmiths and I needed a way of making a living. It became very apparent to me early on that I was never going to be a composer, but I did finish the course. I started off as a music producer, but over the next few years became ever-more a features producer. As a music producer you're doing a lot of music sessions in studios. That was fine, I could deal with that, but it didn't set my world alight in the way that it sets certain people's worlds alight. I was very lucky though to be asked to be the second producer on a series called Soundings which was presented by Michael Oliver, who was one of the great figures of music broadcasting. It was a fortnightly documentary strand, an hour every other Sunday. That was fantastic. I knew nothing about anything when I started work on that series, after a year I knew quite a lot. Again that's pre-digital, endless de-'um'-ing of tape and allocating of inserts to different reels, loops running around studios and deciding actually that there's no way you could recreate what you've just attempted so it'll just have to be good enough and you'd better move on to the next sequence, because you were never going to get the music to peak at the right point or the atmos to do what it did.

R: Do you think your background in composition is important to the kind of programmes you've ended up making?

AH: What struck me when Piers and I first met was that, when he knew that I'd studied music, he said, "Well, of course, because you're composing radio". And it had never occurred to me that I was composing radio in any way. I just thought I was cutting bits of things together and making it work, and I hadn't been conscious that actually that process is very similar to composition. And now it's a central tenet—although it's not something I articulate very often—but it is central to my thinking about what radio is. There's a terrible danger that the moment you start reflecting on what it is that you do you begin to sound a bit pretentious.

PP: I don't think that's pretentious to call yourself a composer. I'm coming from the other end, not being a musician at all but loving music and only gradually realising that what I was also doing was composing words and voices and sounds and sometimes music into a pattern that I suppose is a bit like a composer does. And I learnt from the Radiophonic guys when I watched them at work. One particular programme about death, which we did as a multi-track at Radiophonic Workshop with Malcolm Clarke, who was a full-time composer, and there was no music in it, apart from a recording of a man playing an organ in a church, everything else was atmosphere and voices, but the way that Malcolm set to work and the luxury of having multi-track opened my ears completely to a new way of working.

AH: Most radio is based on everyday listening, it's based on fact and information, but what musical listening offers is that appreciation of the weight and the space required, the weight of each word or the weight of each effect, or moment and the space it needs in time. A news report takes no prisoners, it doesn't weigh the immensity of what's being conveyed or even barely allows time for a laugh if there's a joke, it's relentless and it's not concerned with such things, whereas making documentaries with a musical sensibility gives them a rhythm and a contour, whether it's an emotional contour or a dramatic contour, that is more natural, hopefully.

R: A lack of identity can be connected to a lack of vocabulary. You've talked about 'documentaries' and 'features'. How do you refer to your own programmes?

PP: I'm interchangeable about that, it's never fussed me much. The old definition might be that a feature is a mixture of the found and the specially made, whereas a documentary is all found, but then you find that that breaks down for lots of reasons. I just think that it's real life at some point. Documentary would suggest that there's a document in it, and that could be read by actors and was traditionally. But nowadays we much more mean that everybody in it speaks their own words without a script. So I move between the two, and I like the thought of being a composer, or a dramatist if you like, to make all these things, whether they're features or documentaries, sound harmonious.

AH: I don't know what they're called. Documentary-features, features, documentaries. Robyn Ravlich from the ABC once talked about a "musicalised sound-text feature" as being something like Knoxville: Summer of 1995 that I made. The semantics, the terminology is not hugely interesting.

R: Similarly, do you see distinctions between sound artists and public-service radio producers making "musicalised sound-text features" as being primarily about nomenclature as well?

AH: I think I'm a public-service radio producer. I don't think I'm a sound artist working in public-service radio and I don't think I'm a composer working in public-service radio. I think I'm a producer and I think I have a producer's sensibility and sense of responsibilities. I do work with composers and I do work with sound artists and I think they come with their own aesthetics and sensitivities. There's a danger about radio producers becoming rather pretentious, you are there ultimately to serve a public, you're not there to just indulge yourself, whereas you could say that a composer is there to indulge his or herself, and a sound artist too.

PP: But they still have to think a little bit about an audience. When I retired I was very flattered to have a programme made about me called An Artist in Sound, but I'd never really thought about me being that. Like Alan I see myself as a radio producer, but also a composer in the widest sense. If we're looking at sound art, let's just take a concrete example, at the moment there's an exhibit at the V&A called Shhhhhh, which I was disappointed in because I thought an opportunity had been missed. The idea is that different musicians, composers, sound artists were given a room of their choice at the V&A to make a sound piece that you listen to as you stand in the room. I felt that it was muddled, because the pieces were so powerful that the very subjective reaction of each composer was an interference for me, I didn't know what to do, whether to look or to listen, sit down, stand up, walk around, what? And yet I love the idea of it, that somebody should have been asked to respond to a public place like that. I think sound art works best when it's almost a son et lumiere, you don't need the lumiere particularly, but the space is empty and the artist creates something which you get by being in that space. Now that's not at all what I'm doing on radio. I have one piece of heresy, which is that primarily I'm thinking of myself when I make the programme and then the audience second, on the rather conceited grounds that if it works for me it'll work for them.

AH: I agree, I make programmes for myself. I have an awareness that there's an audience and I might do slightly different things for a Radio 4 documentary from a Radio 3 Between the Ears, but not necessarily very much. In fact I disapprove of the distinctions, the idea that there's a space allowed for occasional sound artistry on Radio 3, that being Between the Ears. I think that's nonsense. That's creating a ghetto, and also creating the expectation that people are going to be experimental, whereas if you're going to experiment you should do it in private and then present something which is considered and finished. Something adventurous, fine. But then why can't you be adventurous in other slots, or even during the day?

PP: Good radio is good radio, and it can crop up in all sorts of places. Sometimes news can be at the edge that we can never reach because some reporter somewhere is suddenly faced with a situation. The classic archive example is the Hindenburg going up in flames before our ears, nobody could recreate that or would want to. And I suppose I'm always very moved when something in a documentary has the feel of the Hindenburg, without sounding too grim, in other words you hear a person stumble upon a conflagration in their own mind and they tell it to you.

AH: But there is a different approach and there is a different expectation between what a sound artist, or someone with slightly more artistic ambition, and what a producer does.

R: In part it's about an absence of tradition, a lack of discourse.

AH: There's no tradition, certainly not in the UK. If Piers Plowright, who is referred to constantly as the 'Godfather of the British Feature' doesn't think that there's any elevated status to that then why should anybody else? People talk about the immediacy of radio, but it's the modesty of radio that really appeals to me, so maybe it would be immodest for us all to walk around feeling that we're sound artists. If you become a composer you become a composer aware of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, if you come into radio, most people have very little sense of a history or a canon of work, or a way of talking about it.

PP: There are now professors of radio, and of course there is a canon, if we just look at the BBC the names I would pluck out are the ones you might expect: Douglas Clevedon, Charles Parker and Ewan MacColl, Nester Payne—these are all from 'the golden age of radio'—and then going on through Michael Mason. For me where everything changed was going to the International Features Conference in Sydney in 1988 and suddenly hearing people from all over the world playing their stuff and talking about it and sharing their enthusiasms and although I'd been present at discussions about programmes at the BBC we'd never really had anything quite like this before. I also heard an enormous amount of rubbish, I thought, pretentious rubbish, but some absolutely wonderful stuff too. It was wonderful to have a dialogue and a narration and a crossing of experience which I hadn't found at the Beeb and that changed me, I don't know if it changed my programme making, but it changed my feelings about programme making.

AH: That's curious, because I went to the International Features Conference in Sydney when it was next held there which was in 2001 or 2002, and I felt it was all rather stale. There is an alternative history of radio that takes the medium much less as a news instrument, or an instrument of information and much more as an outlet for art and expression, but the BBC has been uniquely impervious to that tradition.

PP: Yes, it's much criticised by other people, other nations, because of its journalistic base, not much interest in sound per se.

AH: Having said that, when Between the Ears started in 1993 there were four programmes, there are now thirty programmes every year, so that's an advance. And there have been occasional responses from Radio 4 to do something slightly more adventurous. They have this problem where they think it always has to be an 'experimental slot'. I don't know what experimental means to Radio 4. But built into the whole Radio 4 commissioning setup is this sense that montage is difficult. And if you think montage is difficult then you're a long way from what will routinely be discussed at an international features conference or what will be appreciated at the Prix Italias. There is a gulf between those two things.

R: But, at the same time, there's also a perceived difficulty in presenting a single spoken voice. A programme of the form of Piers' Mr. Fletcher the Poet is quite hard to come by.

PP: It is really a piece of oral history isn't it. I love it amongst the best of all my programmes, because it moves me very much and it really is just long stories from this old man with a little bit of journeying around the pits that are lying idle because it was the miner's strike on one particular June day in 1984. There were no gimmicks in that at all, it's simple storytelling. It is quite cunningly arranged. Alan was saying this morning about editing something that the material almost tells you what to choose and in that case it was very clear, we had the chronology of a man's life with some cut away shots talking to miners, people standing and sitting in the sun around where he lived.

R: One of the programmes you made together, The Nightstairs, was broadcast with a two-minute spoken introduction by Piers. Was that thought necessary for fear that some listeners might not understand what was going on?

PP: I think we'd both agree that The Nightstairs wasn't a success. There were too many cooks.

AH: We didn't really work together. It was, "After you." "No, after you."

PP: We were being frightfully polite and it needed a strong pair of hands, and I think there are at least two or three storylines in there that you don't need. But it was a good idea. For the introduction, I think I got in a panic and thought we should put that on the front. But somebody said at a review board meeting how patronised she felt by that, that if we had to say all that what was the point of making the programme. Did you feel that?

R: I didn't feel patronised, but I did think it was perhaps unnecessary.

PP: Yes, but it raises some interesting questions, because a friend of mine who's older, about 75, said, "Thank God you put that thing on the front because I wouldn't have known what was going on otherwise."

AH: It was quite common in the early years of Between the Ears to put a little two-minute introduction onto things.

R: Are you aware of how your work is perceived within the BBC itself?

PP: There seems to be a growth of interest in particularly well-made and thoughtful programmes, on the other hand the publicity is not there where once it was.

AH: When I did that first programme ever broadcast in Between the Ears, Monument, which involved the composer Ian Gardiner, we were given a budget and we had a designer make a poster and that was fired off to people along with copies of the programme and that must have cost a pretty penny, but it was thought to be worth it to draw the attention to this one-off. The programme that won the Sony Award this year [Hall's Corporal Baronowski's Vietnam] was not even in the Radio 4 highlights of the week, the précis of tips that they send out to the press, because there was something else on that day that Radio 4 thought was of higher priority. The BBC tends to appreciate things after they've won an award or after its done something rather than in anticipation and similarly, the other programme I'm most proud of—Knoxville: Summer of 1995—had no publicity, no interest in the press, no interest from Radio 3 publicity and that won the Prix Italia.

PP: The programme about death that I made, called Setting Sail, I couldn't sell it, couldn't get any interest in it, so with Malcolm [Clarke] we started going out together on expeditions, finding a grave digger who wasn't doing much, talking to him and so on, and gradually we had enough stuff to bring a rough cut home and say, "Look, it's not going to be too gloomy, I think it might be rather interesting." And sometimes whole programmes were made like that. I don't think you could do that now, even if you were prepared to climb through your office window at night like Charles Parker used to do.

AH: There is an increasingly process-driven business to getting ideas accepted, and of course there is an inevitable shadow between the appearance of an offer and the reality of the finished programme, they don't necessarily match.

Knoxville: Summer of 1995

An interview by Julie Shapiro of Third Coast International Audio Festival, October 2001
(external link)