TIMECODE NAME Dialogue MUSIC 00.00.01 NARRATOR This is the BBC Academy Podcast, essential listening for the production, journalism and technology broadcast communities, your guide to everything from craft skills to taking your next step in the industry. 00.00.13 KRIS Hello and welcome to this week’s BBC Academy Podcast, with me Kris Bramwell. A few weeks ago the BBC Academy organised their annual storytelling festival and this year it was in Leicester, to mark 50 years of BBC Radio Leicester. One of the talks was about weaving stories for the most visual of mediums, radio, the talk featured the multi award winning radio journalist, Hugh Sykes who reports for PM, and the World This Weekend. Firstly here’s Hugh telling us a bit about himself, as a foreign correspondent. 00.00.50 HUGH I’ve worked kind of all over the world over the past 13, 14 years since the invasion of Iraq, all the way from there and Iran and Pakistan and India and China and most of the countries in the Middle East and most of the countries in the Arab Spring and South Africa and America and lots of places in Europe as well. KRIS Whilst listening to a news report on radio we don’t often think about it but the background sounds used are integral to telling the story effectively, sound sets the scene, explains situations where words fail and can stir up emotions like no other. In this podcast we will learn the treatment given to different stories, the power of sound and how to get the best sound for each story, you’ll hear several clips of sound recordings, done by Hugh, across the world as he explains how radio always paints the best pictures. KRIS Hugh began by speaking about why people are generally more willing to speak to for radio, rather than television. 00.01.55 HUGH One thing I think that everywhere that I go has in common is that people are much more willing to talk to radio reporters than they are to television reporters, because you can guarantee people anonymity if there’s good reason to give them anonymity. And as long as you’ve done all the right kind of assessments about whether they’re bonafide’s are good, to make sure they’re not trying to propagandise you, to make sure that the reason they want to remain anonymous is a good one. 00.02.22 And so access for radio reporters in my experience is nearly always infinitely better than it is for television reporters, and I can speak from both perspectives, because when I worked in Iraq I worked for News Gathering, that department of the BBC which furnishes reports for radio and television and online and so I’m wearing two or three hats when I’m there in particular, and there when I’m, I always do the radio piece firsts, the radio interviews first, partly because the TV piece is always inevitably much shorter. 00.02.55 And if I do the radio interviews first i know what the best answers are going to be when I come to thinking what questions to ask for television, but quite often the person that I’ve interviewed for the radio then says, no, no, no, no, no TV, sorry, you can use the sound of my voice if you like, but I’m not going to do a TV interview for you. So the joy of radio is generally the willingness of people to talk www..co.uk/academy

to you, greater accessibility. And for me, the joy of radio is simply the sound. I think that sound is very evocative of a place, now of course if I’ve been somewhere and I’ve recorded lots of sound I’ve got to explain what the sounds are, roughly, but I did a little thing on the way, just walking up her from Leicester Station, I thought okay I’ll just stop and record this and I don’t think, you know I could probably get away with a script that said something along the lines of before, asking a random selection of people in Leicester about what they think about, I don’t know, Brexit or Article 50 or something like that. 00.03.59 I think I could get away with a lead in which simply said, and before meeting some of the people of Leicester i dropped in to a famous Leicester institution in the centre of town. PLAYING RECORDING 00.04.25 HUGH The radio equivalent of pictures, and interestingly I started properly as a journalist, as a television reporter and as those of you who have worked in television or even just watched it, you’ve probably worked out that the pictures dominant and you write the script to the pictures that you’ve asked the editor to select for them. And I think quite often, instinctively I think of a soundtrack, almost before I think of the content, not at the expense of the editorial content but in order to draw the listener in, engage the listener who might be doing something else, might be distracted by domestic duties, being in a hurry to go and catch the train all the rest of it, and I think there the essence is that you have to grab them. 00.05.08 And I quite often just record sounds almost randomly, not knowing whether I’m going to use them or not, last week for instance I woke up to incessant reminders that there was, was it Hurricane Doreen, or storm Doris, or something like that, you know some fancifully named storm in Britain which really doesn’t match up to hurricanes. And I thought I wonder if World At One or PM would like a few sound effects. SOUND EFFECTS 00.05.37 HUGH So I recorded the wind in my own home, this is in London. SOUND EFFECTS 00.05.44 HUGH A window that’s a bit leaky, I should get it fixed, and they used it on The World At One, or Islamabad. SOUND EFFECTS 00.05.55 HUGH Pakistan capital. SOUND EFFECTS 00.05.59 HUGH Woke up one morning – SOUND EFFECTS – couldn’t be easier really get that out, put it on the window sill, leave it there and snooze, that’s got five hour recording time. – and it’s pretty easy to find the good bits if you look at the waveform, because you can see all the chirps there and nothing’s lost. One of my golden rules is that a radio reporter has to wear headphones like a camera operator has to look through the view finder. Imagine somebody filming something and not looking through the viewfinder to see what he’s filming, you don’t know what you’re recording unless you’ve got headphones on, however experienced you are, because there’s

www.bbc.co.uk/academy

always unexpected sounds. 00.06.37 HUGH One of which quite often comes from those things above our heads there which I can’t hear them, but they usually make a 50 cycle mains hum, which then corrupts the whole recording that you’ve made. So I wear headphones to make sure that there isn’t that interference with what would otherwise be a great recording. And you quite often hear reporters coming back, even nowadays, to our office, saying, I’ve got some great stuff, I’ve got some great stuff, have you listened to it yet? No, no of course not, its fine, its fine, but okay, let’s hear it and they’ve actually recorded some really good interviews in a really noisy conference seminar or something like that, and the whole thing just sounds like a cocktail party, with the voices of the most important element of the piece, the interviewees fighting to break through this curtain of noise. 00.07.20 KRIS Another example Hugh brought along was his report on the shooting on a Tunisian beach, he went to Tunisia six months after the attack, to see how the area had been affected. 00.07.32 HUGH I’m playing this to you, so that you can kind of see a radio piece before its been mixed together. RADIO PIECE - “It’s a beautiful day for a stroll along the beach, deep blue sea, HUGH gentle waves, white sand, warm North African winter sunshine. But this beach is almost completely deserted, apart from one or two fishermen in the distance, because this is the beach in front of the Imperial Marhaba Hotel, the beach where 38 people died, plus the man who murdered them. The straw beach umbrellas are still here, some of them disintegrating and the hotel is closed and locked”. 00.08.17 HUGH I’ll just pause there, I think in some cases it’s really important, I think, that reporters speak all their words in the location, instead of going back to a hotel room afterwards and recording them there, for two reasons, one its more authentic if you’re there, you’re more likely to spot something which you suddenly think is worth describing, like those beach umbrellas, I hadn’t scripted that, the first bit I’d scripted but I reported it standing by the water. 00.08.40 HUGH When I listened back to it I thought, there’s not quite enough sea there to give the atmosphere, so I added sea sounds, small, technical detail but I think important for authenticity. In fact in this entire item all the interviews that I did were the first things that I did, I then went back to the beach and you know scribbled in a notebook the links that I used for the report. 00.09.03 RADIO PIECE _- “The Entertainment Director at the Hotel, Mohammed Ben Sliman, HUGH known as Mumadu was there that day”. MUMADU “we see the people running and then we hear like five shot, and then we see the people is running, some people is like with blood, and I see the man he start shooting the people, I saw him, he start shooting the people, the people is lying on the beach, enjoying themselves in the sunshine, men and ladies being shot, the German lady she shot in the back, some people die, some people die in my hands. I remember this English man, I was talking to him, his wife she’s already dead, and I said to him you okay sir, you okay, and he’s trying to say something and then he die. You see stuff like that only in a movie, in a movie; we’re not used to seeing

www.bbc.co.uk/academy

stuff like that.” 00.09.50 HUGH That illustrates to me quite often reporters are accused of being intrusive, now this man had had a very distressing experience, quite recently, when I visited him, and this is something I often find that quite the opposite of what we’re often accused of, far from being intrusive we’re very often welcomed by people who have had a horrible experience, and because we’re somebody completely neutral that they can tell it to. 00.10.16 HUGH And of course in a way its slightly parasitic, because it’s a huge advantage to people in my trade that people are willing to talk to me, and I’m very happy to take advantage of that, but if ever I feel that I’m being intrusive or that somebody is unwilling to talk about a personal distressing experience that they’ve had then I’ll always back off. But mostly, as with that man there, it just comes pouring out and all I have to do is hold the microphone and listen to him, not a single question was needed for Mumadu at that point. 00.10.50 HUGH And we, you know we often have to approach people totally cold without any idea of what they’re going to tell us. But there’s no harm in that, as long as you never promise to broadcast them, which I always make a point of saying we may or may not use this, there are no undertakings, because I wouldn’t be allowed to promise to anyway, because the decision to broadcast something is not mine, it’s my Editors, and he might say oh well sorry Hugh, you can promise as much as you like, but I think he’s a nutter, or something. 00.11.15 KRIS Here Hugh speaks about letting people talk to each other. 00.11.19 HUGH Let people talk to each other, that’s the other thing I like, it means I have to work even less hard, if there’s two or three people all engaged in a story, instead of going, and now to you and now to you and then to, if you can get them, especially if they disagree a little, just to talk to each other I think that’s much more engaging radio, certainly as a listener I prefer to hear that. 00.11.40 HUGH I remember once congratulating one of my colleagues in Baghdad, Caroline Hawley who was the Permanent Correspondent there for a while, on a report that she’d done and she said, don’t tell the Editors Hugh but its low hanging fruit. In other words everyone’s got something to say, everybody’s got a story, mostly they’re pretty awful, but they want to tell you. 00.11.59 KRIS Next Hugh spoke about some of the techniques he uses whilst out in the field, recording news stories. 00.12.05 HUGH One of my techniques, if it is one, is if anybody’s even remotely nervous and even if they’re not, I tend to say, they say sit down here, its nearly always he’s here or she’s here and I’m there and its immediately face to face and if he’s got his back at the wall, he can’t get away, psychologically and physically, so I often say, do you mind if we sit next to each other, and then we’re just like that and then we’re kind of equal and both looking out and I’m sure that the interview is much, much better, often, if you’re sitting alongside somebody, than if you’re face to face. 00.12.42 HUGH Here’s another example of let, keep it running, be prepared for the unexpected, this is about the Austrian Elections last year, which www.bbc.co.uk/academy

had to be re-run and were eventually, in which the far right candidate was a Presidential Election was eventually defeated, and this began as an earnest package about the Austrian elections, it was going to be he says, she says, they say, the far right say, the far left say, dressed up with a little bit of colour at the start to set the scene, but it turned into a very different report. 00.13.20 PLAYING REPORT 00.14.12 HUGH I play that to, it’s a good story, to illustrate how a story can change from what you think you are going to be covering to what you end up covering, nearly all the descriptions there did on site, because I think that’s again the only really authentic thing to do, is to say this is what it is here, this is the border and if you are hearing this at home I hope you’d also hear, you can hear the sound of me walking across the border, and I think it’s better to do your link there than again go back to a hotel room and do it there. 00.14.44 HUGH Well I have to get past the riot police and so I just tap one of them on the shoulder and he was a bit surprised, and I said, in German, I need to go through and he let me through, so i thought ah good, because quite often a reporter’s instinct is oh if there’s a police line you can’t go through it, well I would say well try, you might be able to and even if they say no you can’t, ask them why, because they may be stopping rioters from doing this that and the other, but i don’t think they should be stopping journalists from carrying out their assignments. 00.15.16 And I think it was useful and revealing that those anarchists immediately were happy to talk to me in English, although they weren’t saying very much, but the way they said what they said made it quite clear I think to me what kind of people they were. And I think that was worth putting on the radio. 00.15.35 KRIS After covering the process of recording sound at local markets and political protests Hugh spoke about his treatment of extremely sensitive stories. 00.15.45 HUGH There are times when something really horrible has happened and you don’t need to find an interviewee to talk to, you don’t need to record any extra sound effect and I was in Ataturk airport the night it was attacked, luckily I arrived at the airport twenty minutes after it had happened, my flight was late, it was then kept on the tarmac for five hours, afterwards I realised, ah, yeah five hours that’s about how long it takes to take the injured away and get them to hospital and take away forty-three dead bodies. And then finally we were allowed off the plane to make our way, and I just thought I’m going to have to do something, this is the best I can do for the morning bulletins on BBC. 00.16.32 RECORDING - After passport control, instead of going down a slope, confidently HUGH towards the baggage carousels, there are screens that have been put up but there are gaps between the screens and looking through the gaps you can see large sections of ceiling fallen on to the ground, huge panes of plate glass, partly shattered and blood on the ground. Calm, efficient, courteous and whenever I’ve caught anybody’s eye mutual recognition of the awfulness of this event, sombre faces. 00.17.22 HUGH Yes well sometimes you can just be the reporter, there’s a huge

www.bbc.co.uk/academy

pressure on radio, television reporters to get people to tell the story for you, sometimes its better if you tell it for yourself I think, especially if you have witnessed it or indirectly witnessed it, it isn’t always necessary, you don’t always have to find somebody else to tell your story for you, you can tell your story for you yourself, especially the facts, get the interviewee to do opinions if you want but you’re the one who’s likely to be the most expert assembling the facts in a most efficient and coherent way. 00.17.56 And then you get people to comment on whatever’s happened and give an opinion. But there you are, there’s a taste of life as an on the road radio reporter, I’m very lucky to have been sent to all these different places and in all of them to have met wonderful, wonderful people, so quite apart from the technology and the techniques and the questions and the answers and the hours and hours of editing, it’s been a very lovely, interesting time I’ve had in lots of great places with lovely people. 00.18.25 HUGH That was BBC News Journalist; Hugh Sykes at the Leicester Storytelling Festival talking about the power sound has to tell evocative stories. You can find out more about sound, presenting and covering news stories on the BBC Academy Website, to also follow us on Twitter or Facebook we’re at BBC Academy, for now, from me, Kris Bramwell, thanks very much for listening and goodbye. 00.8.51 NARRATOR You’ve been listening to the BBC Academy Podcast, if you want to find out more about this topic or to hear previous shows search online for the BBC Academy. 00.19.00 MUSIC 00.19.04 END OF RECORDING

www.bbc.co.uk/academy