Raw & Cooked, Jerry Springer: Contextually Analysed
Piers Plowright’s second session with us today, with more examples of creative radio. By his definition, “cooked” means elaborately produced programmes. So conversely “raw” means having a rougher edge to it.
An aside - I didn’t realize Piers had a Malaysian connection. Apparently he served with the British Army there, and just last year he was in Cameron Highlands to record a programme. Well, the conversation really started when he asked me what my first language was. And when I said “Malay”, he responded at once, “Cakap Melayu?”
Back to the business of radio – there’s an interesting quote by Virginia Madsen of the University of New South Wales:
“The studio was not jettisoned (in the 1970s) but…became more akin to the photographer’s darkroom where some almost magical transformation was required to occur in the mix between reality and fiction. The artisan of radio could no longer work only with a fantasy world conjured in the studio, using all the old radio trick; one had to get out of the padded cell that the radio had become, meet the world, find oneself not so much reporting on it anymore, from the outside, but rather, and more profoundly, become deeply immersed and engaged in its interior life.”
Therein lies one of the shortcomings of Singapore radio. We do not get out there enough. And even when we do, most of it becomes interview-based rather than exploring raw actuality. I’ve long told students to get out there, feel the ground and bring it back to the listener. Now I realize it is difficult when there is no such listening culture. It would be interesting to take note of just how many programmes on Singapore radio actually get out of the “padded cell”.
Some interesting programmes:
Example 1 “Von trapped”
The presenter was telling her own story about being besotted with Austria, and she cleverly linked excerpts from “The Sound of Music”, soundbites from an Austrian woman who lived through the war, news broadcasts, etc. Would you believe that about a quarter of my classmates have never watched “The Sound of Music”? Horrors!
Example 2 Lance Corporal Baranowski’s Vietnam
The subject was a soldier during the Vietnam War. He had a battered cassette recorder on which he recorded his letters home. The archived material was very poignantly interlaced with actuality of his brother speaking in present times. Dominic, my classmate, says he has recordings of himself as a baby gurgling to his grandma, who by that time had contracted throat cancer and therefore had a raspy voice. That’s so meaningful. I should start recording something for the family archives. There’s just something magical about hearing something so intimately, rather than watching it on a videocam recording. Well, they do say that hearing is the first sense to be developed, and the last sense to go (what would proponents of “your life flashes before you in an instant” say?).
Springing to Jerry now, he was the subject of a lecture on Contextual Analysis. CA is a big word, and it was one those lectures without any visuals (never do that to students), but I gather it assumes that artefacts (this includes media output) promote values, ideas and beliefs. For example, the Jerry Springer show reinforces the normal code of social behaviour by demonstrating abnormal behaviour.
But we have to ask ourselves what is deemed acceptable. The example used - a Jerry Springer episode which featured a man who married his pony (only in America!). In the end, the actual episode was not aired because it was considered indecent. However the “making of” science documentary on the same subject was permitted. Moral of the story – don’t horse around too much :)
An aside - I didn’t realize Piers had a Malaysian connection. Apparently he served with the British Army there, and just last year he was in Cameron Highlands to record a programme. Well, the conversation really started when he asked me what my first language was. And when I said “Malay”, he responded at once, “Cakap Melayu?”
Back to the business of radio – there’s an interesting quote by Virginia Madsen of the University of New South Wales:
“The studio was not jettisoned (in the 1970s) but…became more akin to the photographer’s darkroom where some almost magical transformation was required to occur in the mix between reality and fiction. The artisan of radio could no longer work only with a fantasy world conjured in the studio, using all the old radio trick; one had to get out of the padded cell that the radio had become, meet the world, find oneself not so much reporting on it anymore, from the outside, but rather, and more profoundly, become deeply immersed and engaged in its interior life.”
Therein lies one of the shortcomings of Singapore radio. We do not get out there enough. And even when we do, most of it becomes interview-based rather than exploring raw actuality. I’ve long told students to get out there, feel the ground and bring it back to the listener. Now I realize it is difficult when there is no such listening culture. It would be interesting to take note of just how many programmes on Singapore radio actually get out of the “padded cell”.
Some interesting programmes:
Example 1 “Von trapped”
The presenter was telling her own story about being besotted with Austria, and she cleverly linked excerpts from “The Sound of Music”, soundbites from an Austrian woman who lived through the war, news broadcasts, etc. Would you believe that about a quarter of my classmates have never watched “The Sound of Music”? Horrors!
Example 2 Lance Corporal Baranowski’s Vietnam
The subject was a soldier during the Vietnam War. He had a battered cassette recorder on which he recorded his letters home. The archived material was very poignantly interlaced with actuality of his brother speaking in present times. Dominic, my classmate, says he has recordings of himself as a baby gurgling to his grandma, who by that time had contracted throat cancer and therefore had a raspy voice. That’s so meaningful. I should start recording something for the family archives. There’s just something magical about hearing something so intimately, rather than watching it on a videocam recording. Well, they do say that hearing is the first sense to be developed, and the last sense to go (what would proponents of “your life flashes before you in an instant” say?).
Springing to Jerry now, he was the subject of a lecture on Contextual Analysis. CA is a big word, and it was one those lectures without any visuals (never do that to students), but I gather it assumes that artefacts (this includes media output) promote values, ideas and beliefs. For example, the Jerry Springer show reinforces the normal code of social behaviour by demonstrating abnormal behaviour.
But we have to ask ourselves what is deemed acceptable. The example used - a Jerry Springer episode which featured a man who married his pony (only in America!). In the end, the actual episode was not aired because it was considered indecent. However the “making of” science documentary on the same subject was permitted. Moral of the story – don’t horse around too much :)
posted by BIG! Mama @ 7:05 AM
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