Lloyd, Justine. "Listening to the Listener: Constructing Woman's
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Lloyd, Justine. "Listening to the Listener: Constructing Woman’s Hour at the BBC, 1946–1955." Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age: Women’s Radio Programming at the BBC, CBC, and ABC. New York,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 97–136. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 3 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501318801.ch-006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 3 October 2021, 20:25 UTC. Copyright © Justine Lloyd 2020. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 5 Listening to the Listener: Constructing Woman’s Hour at the BBC, 1946–1955 Here, with my hand on the latch, I am two persons. I am the woman with the basket, the passer-by in the street, Unnoticed, anonymous, an infinitesimal part Of a great multitude that, with purposeful feet Plodding the pavements, streams on perpetually Into the abyss of time past. One person: I have only to push the gate open, And, in a step, I shall be wholly that other; For here, where so small a plot contains a world, I have a face, a name; I am wife and mother, Blessedly beloved. The stored years wait in the house, And as I cross the threshold, their warm sweet breath Will welcome me again into that happy bondage Intangible as the hearth smoke, and stronger than death. With familiar incompetent click the gate half-closes behind me, I have all things, I am myself, I have come home. Mrs Vera M. Prince, The Oast, Spot Lane, Bearsted, Near Maidstone, Kent (Prince, “The Gate,” Poem written to BBC Woman’s Hour, 07/27 1956) An article in the British national tabloid Daily Mirror in January 1944 noted that the BBC’s “Irish-born, Oxford graduate” talks assistant Miss Janet Quigley was to receive an M.B.E. Quigley had been nominated for her work at the BBC since 1936 within a “special department [to] find out what talks appealed to women listeners” (“Ordinary Men and Women (910 of You) Honoured: Talks Expert” (1944)). Quigley’s central role in wartime broadcasting represents a decisive shift in the BBC’s ongoing interest in gendered programming. From its first days the BBC explicitly included programs addressing a gendered audience, with a “Men’s Hour” and a “Women’s Hour” from London on 2LO during 1923, as outlined in Chapter 2. In contrast to the other broadcasters documented in this book, 98 Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age this kind of programming continues today on the BBC, with Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4. And from 2010 to 2015, Radio 5 Live, the BBC network’s rolling news and sports service, ran a “Men’s Hour”—described as “the men’s magazine for the modern man” (BBC 2015). This chapter explores the consolidation and institutionalization of gendered programming on the BBC through the work of Quigley and others on Woman’s Hour during the first decade of its existence. This chapter also aims to map these new connections as imbricated with new kinds of relationships between the home and the state, and the role of public service broadcasting as a mediator of these relations. Quigley’s career parallels the BBC’s intricate role within British postwar society as independent from government influence yet closely connected to the ideological project of the welfare state. She joined its Foreign Department in 1930 on the recommendation of her university friend Isa Benzie, who was later to become foreign director from 1933 to 1938 (Murphy 2016: 158, 178). The “special department” mentioned in the Daily Mirror report was the Talks Department, which Quigley joined in August 1936. While it was not, as the paper reported, solely tasked with finding out “what talks appealed to women listeners,” daytime talks for women were certainly central. As part of Talks, Quigley was also a driving force behind several programs aimed at both a male and a general audience. During the late 1930s, she worked on several “high- profile evening programs includingMen Talking and … Towards National Health” (Murphy 2014: 213). The Talks Department did specifically target a female audience during this period, with gendered programming including Five O’Clock, Tea Time Talks, This Week in Westminster, Other Women’s Lives, Sickness in the House, and a series entitled Housewives and Careers for Girls, all worked on by Quigley and broadcast on the BBC’s National Service (Murphy 2014: 216). The BBC’s prewar women’s programming, a foreshadowing of its wartime efflorescence, is exemplified by an item in the “Radionews” column of the Gloucester Journal during March 1939, which advertised (presumably drawing closely on BBC publicity material) that Janet Quigley, of the BBC Talks Department, has prepared some interesting new daytime talks, including series on cookery, to be broadcast in the April to June quarter. Entitled “Foreign Fare” these talks will be given each Tuesday and will deal with everyday dishes from various countries, such America, France, Germany and Spain. The speakers will either be natives of those countries or people with first-hand experience in the preparation and consumption of the recipes they describe. (Wellington 1939) Listening to the Listener 99 After the outbreak of war, these cosmopolitan nuances would be replaced by more patriotic subject matter. During the early 1940s, Quigley worked on wartime women’s programming for the Home Service, including The Kitchen Front (“a talk about what to eat and where to get it”), Calling All Women (“a five-minute talk on matters of urgent concern to women behind the fighting line”), Your Health in Wartime (“topical notes on wartime health, mainly by doctors”), and Talking It Over (weekly afternoon talks on topics related to living during wartime) (see Murphy 2014: 216–217; taglines from various listings in Radio Times 1939–1942). This body of work represented the female-targeted element of what Nicholas has called the “home front propaganda” of the wartime BBC (Nicholas 1996). Like the BBC’s early experiments during the 1920s with informational talks for women, these programs were the direct antecedents of the postwar Woman’s Hour. Woman’s Hour was a spoken-word fixture of the popular music- heavy BBC Light Programme from 1946 until 1967 (when the Light Programme was rebranded as Radio 2) and a flagship program on the more highbrow BBC Radio 4 since 1973 (Leman 1996; Rewinkel 2013). While the programs Quigley worked on were originally envisioned as primarily educational, and marked by a highly didactic form of address, the way that they were reformulated over time by their producers, presenters, editorial, and technical staff drew on and promoted new ways of talking about social issues within the frame of personal experience. Taken as whole, this programming went well beyond the original model of “service talks” for women. This “shifting register of broadcasting strategies” (Cardiff 1980: 29) toward a more informal address to audiences within radio was broadly institutionalized within the BBC in the 1970s. Whether BBC executives were aware of it or not, this register had been long-established in women’s programming. It was only when it was manifest as an editorial directive in general programming that it emerged as a conspicuous style of public intimacy. Hendy describes a “therapeutic sensibility” permeating the BBC at this time, a tone of address and structure of feeling that was most prominent (and contested) in the first decade of BBC Radio 4 (Hendy 2007: 227). In the vision of Tony Whitby, Radio 4 controller during the early 1970s, the station was to become a place to make “programmes about people’s human situation and emotions as opposed to their political and purely social problems” (Whitby quoted in Hendy 2007: 227).1 Hendy argues that once this vision was made into policy with the appointment of Whitby in 1974, What remained to be worked out [by the staff of the broadcaster] was how on earth therapy could be offered in public without the airwaves being filled with 100 Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age a torrent of dark secrets, self-indulgence and exhibitionism—characteristics that seemed not just uncomfortable to witness, but somewhat ill-becoming for a public service broadcaster. They were the kinds of questions that would only be resolved by more than a decade of experimentation and dispute. (Hendy 2007: 227) According to Hendy, this shift from the BBC’s long-defended role of heroically uplifting the masses—associated with its first director general, John Reith— to listening more closely to the intimate lives of the British public provoked widespread alarm among Radio 4 staff. This deliberate shift to representing everyday experience in the public sphere was foretold by its opponents as a descent into a mirrored hall of mediated narcissism, in which the audience potentially was to be given free range for emotional outbursts and traumatic repetition. I argue that this apprehension needs to be understood as having a history, as it rests on a separation of spheres that attempts to keep politics and emotion apart in a gendered binary. The model of Woman’s Hour during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the proto-feminist politics it embodied during its first decade, demonstrates that there were already existing modes of public discourse that spoke directly of human experience in ways that were neither “self-indulgent” nor “exhibitionistic,” but rather signaled new and salient connections between private experience and public issues. Woman’s Hour’s collective project during the late 1940s and 1950s to give voice to intimate lives was not a radically new one, as it was drawing on minor modes of expression already circulating for some time in popular media such as women’s magazines (Duffy 2013; Forster 2015; Johnson and Lloyd 2004; Leman 1980).