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, The World At One 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 reporters 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.bbc.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.