Tribune, 1 FEBRUARY 1946
In last week’s Observer, Mr. W. E. Williams, discussing the recent raising of radio licences from ten shillings to a pound, made the pertinent remark that ‘the trouble with British broadcasting is that it is far too cheap.’ It seems to me that his remark is worth expanding, because the relationship between the amount of money brought in by a radio programme, and the amount of work that can be put into it, is not generally grasped. Nor is it realised that the badness of many radio programmes is due to the fact that to write and produce them better would be impossibly expensive.
Radio-listening costs at most a few pence a day, and if you like you can keep your radio turned on for the whole twenty-four hours. As it is what might be called a low-pressure entertainment, not giving you nearly such acute pleasure as you get from watching a film or drinking a glass of beer, most people feel that they pay quite a high enough price for it. Actually, the tiny price that they pay, measured against the heavy cost of the mechanical side of broadcasting, makes for a dull, cut-off-the-joint type of programme, and discourages innovation and experiment. This is best illustrated by plays, features and short stories, because it is especially in this type of programme that the vast possibilities of radio have remained unrealised.
The writer of a play or feature which is to take 30 minutes is usually paid about 30 guineas. He may get rather more if he is a ‘name,’ and he may get a small extra fee if his piece is re-broadcast: but, in general, 30 guineas is the most he can expect,1 and he may get much less, since many programmes of this type are written by salaried employees who turn out several of them a week. Even if he is not a salaried employee, he is not likely to have much choice about his subject or his manner of treating it. The need to produce fresh programmes every day means that schedules have to be produced months in advance, and nothing can be accepted unless it fits in with some predetermined series. If you get a good idea for a novel or magazine article you can sit down and write it without consulting anyone else, and if you make a good job of it you can probably sell it. It would be no use going on this principle with a radio programme. Either it fits in somewhere or other, or it is unsaleable, however good it may be in itself.
When this play, story or whatever it may be, is ready, it will in all probability go on the air only once. It is, therefore, impossible to spend much time and money in producing it. What actually happens is that it is broadcast by a company of stock actors who are taking part in several totally different programmes every week. They may be given copies of their parts a day or two before they go on the air, but quite often they arrive in the studio without even having heard the name of the programme in which they are to take part. In any case, there is no question of their learning their parts by heart: they simply read them from the typewritten script. The rehearsals, for a 30-minute programme, will probably take four, or at most, six hours. There is no time for more, and to do more on any one day would simply exhaust the actors and producer to no purpose. Finally the programme goes on the air, and there is an end of it. If it is ever re-broadcast, it will probably not be by a fresh performance, in which the actors might improve on their first effort, but by a mechanical recording of the first one.
Now compare this with what happens in the case of a stage play. Writing a play is speculative. Most plays fail to reach the stage, and many of those that do get acted are a flop. Still, anyone who writes a play hopes that it will run for months and bring him several hundred pounds: also, he can choose his theme, and within limits he can even vary the length to suit himself. Even on a one-act play, therefore, he will probably do weeks or months of work, and he will shed a drop of sweat on every semi-colon. Before the play opens there will be weeks of careful rehearsal, and the actors will not only be word-perfect, but will have studied their parts and done their best to pack the utmost significance into every speech. Produced in this manner, the play can be acted, whereas the average radio programme is merely read. Yet how would it be possible to take all this trouble with a programme which is to be broadcast only once, and which the public pays for at a much lower rate than it pays for drinking water?
Criticism of the B.B.C., both in the press and by the general public, is usually unfavourable, but what most people appear to demand is simply a better version of the programmes they are getting already. They want better music, funnier jokes, more intelligent discussions, more truthful news. What is much less often pointed out is that the radio as a medium of literary expression has been very little studied. The microphone is a new instrument, and it ought to call into being a new attitude towards verse, drama and stories. Actually very little thought has been given to this subject, and still less concrete experiment. When an experimental programme does get broadcast, it is usually because there happens to be inside the B.B.C. some imaginative person who can pull the necessary wires and overcome bureaucratic opposition. There is nothing to tempt a free-lance writer into trying innovations.
If a radio play, for instance, could be performed night after night for months, like a stage play, it would be possible to spend more money and do more work on it; and the radio play, as an art-form, might then begin to be taken seriously. However, there is an obvious reason why the same programme cannot be broadcast over and over again. This being so, serious work along certain lines is only possible if commercial considerations are ignored. This means, first of all, setting aside one wavelength for uncompromisingly ‘highbrow’ programmes.2 It is curious how strongly this idea is resisted, and by what people. Even Frederick Laws, of the News Chronicle, one of the best radio critics we have, has pronounced against it. Yet it is difficult to see how any genuinely new idea can be tested if every programme that goes on the air has to make an immediate appeal to millions, or at any rate, hundreds of thousands of people. There is enough fuss already over the meagre periods devoted to broadcasting poetry. In the long run, no doubt, anything that is good becomes popular; but any innovation, in any of the arts, needs protection during its experimental stage. It is significant that during the war the most intelligent— though not the most technically efficient—broadcasting has been done on the overseas’ services, where no commercial consideration entered and, in many cases, a large audience was not aimed at.
The other thing that is needed is more facilities for experiment—not experiment in the technical side of radio, of which there is no doubt plenty already, but experiment on the problem of adapting existing literary forms to the air. Various difficulties which may in reality be quite simple have never yet been overcome. To name just one (it is discussed in the introduction to Edward Sackville West’s radio play, The Rescue): no one has yet discovered how to present a play or dramatised story in such a way that the audience can discover what is happening, without the use of a ‘narrator’ who ruins the dramatic effect. To solve such problems it would be necessary to make use of closed circuits and to employ teams of musicians, actors and producers—in other words, it would be necessary to spend a lot of money. But then oceans of money are spent already, and nearly all of it on rubbish.
The sort of competition that would be presented by ‘sponsored’ radio is not likely to have a beneficial effect on the B.B.C. It might tend to keep the B.B.C. up to the mark in the matter of brightness and efficiency, but people who are broadcasting in order to advertise Bile Beans or Player’s Cigarettes are not going to aim at the minority public. If the possibilities latent in radio are ever realised, it will be because the people who have ideas get a chance to test them and are not choked off by being told that this or that ‘would not fit in’ or ‘would not have a wide enough appeal.’ Also, it should be possible to produce a radio programme with the same care and seriousness as is devoted to a stage play, and the writer should receive a large enough fee to encourage him to spend sufficient time on the work. All of which demands money, and might even, lamentable though that would be, mean raising the price of a radio licence by a few shillings more.