Front row standing (L-R): Hall Johnson, Alan Lomax, D. G. Bridson, Canada Lee, Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters.

Post by Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin-Madison

I have been so overwhelmed, and humbled, by the recent sequence of posts here on Antenna, sparked by the wonderful podcast assembled by Andrew Bottomley, Jeremy Morris, and Christopher Cwynar, that I wanted first of all to thank all of you who cast so many kind words in my direction, and second to say something about what I’ll be getting up to in retirement.

It was especially gratifying to hear so many of you acknowledge the importance of an historical perspective on the present, to enable us to see it more clearly. This works the other way too: to paraphrase Foucault, the perspective of the present continuously helps us to see things that were obscured in the past, such as the agency of whole classes of people – women, minorities, those outside the mainstream’s scope – as well as the significance of work done long ago and forgotten but now finding new relevance as we push the borders of our field ever wider.

One example of this in the field of sound is the first ever collection of critical essays on the creative work of Norman Corwin forthcoming from California in the spring, edited by Neil Verma with contributions from many of you reading this. It took a new generation of media scholarship, combined with the new interest in sound sparked by the digital present, to enable us once again to perceive the value of Corwin’s innovations, so long unheard and unappreciated.

Langston Hughes

Another example involves one of those amazingly serendipitous archival stories we sometimes get to tell. About five years ago, I was at the Library of Congress following up on research for Network Nations. One thing I was looking for was any trace of some of the radio features produced in the US during the WWII years by D. G. Bridson, an important innovator of the radio documentary feature form at the BBC. In his biography, Prospero and Ariel, Bridson describes his experiences working with people like Alan Lomax and Langston Hughes, the premier poet of the Harlem Renaissance, whom Bridson commissioned in late 1943 to write an original “ballad opera” in support of the war effort.[1]

Hughes’ script of The Man Who Went To War was produced in New York in February 1944, featuring some of the most significant African-American performers of the era. Paul Robeson introduced the show and provided the “Voice of God” at the end; Josh White performed the sung narration, with Ethel Waters and Canada Lee playing the central roles of Sally and Johnny. Alan Lomax arranged the music, which was sung by the Hall Johnson Choir, accompanied by noted bluesmen Sonny Terry playing harmonica and Brownie McGhee on guitar.

Hughes, whose struggle to get his scripts on the air in the US had led to frustration and disappointment, wrote to Erik Barnouw in March 1945:

“Probably my best script is THE MAN WHO WENT TO WAR as performed on BBC for England and the colonies last spring…Considering the seriousness of the race problem in our country, I do not feel that radio is serving the public interest in that regard very well… Personally, I DO NOT LIKE RADIO, and I feel that it is almost as far from being a free medium of expression for Negro writers as Hitler’s airlanes are for the Jews.”[2]

Hughes’ answer to US radio’s silence on race was to construct a musical drama that simply refuses to acknowledge that African-American and British identity might not be thoroughly elidable, or that the language of blues and gospel music might not speak for “all freedom-loving people,” without distinction. More musical poetry than drama, Hughes and Bridson built on the “radio ballad” or “ballad opera” form pioneered by Alan Lomax in the US and later developed by Charles Parker in Britain.

Listen here to the opening sequence of The Man Who Went to War:

Paul Robeson

The show was never aired in the US, due to rights issues, but was recorded and broadcast over the BBC in the spring of 1944, with highly favorable reception. But here, according to Bridson, its story ends; the last remaining recording – made on glass discs – was shattered soon after. And thus faded The Man Who Went To War, one of the very few of Hughes’ scripts for radio actually broadcast, unheard by the American public and inaccessible to scholars.

But not so! As I found out that day in 2010, the Library of Congress amazingly preserved a recorded copy – not the best sound quality in places, faded and scratched, but bringing to human ears for the first time in more than six decades voices and performances unique to the historical radio soundscape. It has now been digitized and can be found in the LOC collection, though not alas online. I look forward not only to digging into the history and reception of this unique work, but to making it the centerpiece of a history of the radio feature in the United States – the creative tradition that underlies current innovative soundwork like This American Life and Serial but that, like Corwin and so much else in American radio, remains missing from history – until media scholars like us go looking.

Thanks to the field we have together built up, and thanks too to some important historical projects you’ve read about here – the Radio Preservation Task Force, the Archive of American Public Broadcasting, and others in progress – much more of our missing media history promises to be revealed, after decades of silence.   It is my hope, and a goal in retirement, that what I have elsewhere referred to as the “lost critical history of radio”[3] – and by that I mean the critical heritage of American soundwork, in particular – can be revived and made meaningful to those of us who create, listen to, and reflect on soundwork today.

______________

[1] My grateful thanks to Lisa Hollenbach for sharing with me her research in Langston Hughes’ papers in Yale’s Beinecke Collection.

[2] Letter from Langston Hughes to Erik Barnouw, 27 March 1945. B1 F10, Erik Barnouw papers, Columbia University.

[3] Michele Hilmes, “Radio’s Lost Critical History,” Australian Journalism Review Special Edition “Radio Reinvented: the enduring appeal of audio in the digital age,” 36:2, Spring 2015.

First, a definition: transnational television co-production is the practice through which a producer/distributor based in one nation agrees to contribute up-front funding to a program produced by a company based in another nation in exchange for distribution rights as well as for some degree of creative input into the production.  Often the subject matter of such a production reflects or refers to its transnational roots by self-consciously including elements of cultural negotiation within the narrative situation; other times transnational convergence can be seen in elements of style, structure, aesthetics, or address. It is specific to television, with its strong national basis and its unique serial form, as well as its semantic flexibility enabled by practices such as scheduling, presentation, and promotion.  It is a transcultural form.

Though much attention has been paid to the reality format in the scholarship on global television, my focus here is on prime-time drama and documentary, where issues of national culture, media policy, audience specificity, and authorial integrity are more difficult to negotiate and often become the subject of considerable debate.  This type of production also differs from the more traditional “international co-ventures” that scholars such as Serra Tinic, Barbara Selznick, and Timothy Havens have discussed.  There are important and interesting distinctions to be made here, between a co-venture and a co-production, between co-financing and off-the-shelf sales, between format and fiction, but I will skip over these for now to focus on why and how transnational co-productions come about.

Co-production screen credits for Sherlock.

Most explanations go right for the money: co-production is a way of bringing in another source of finance that can have an immediate effect on the production, enabling bigger stars, better locations, and a glossier production all around.  This usually comes with exclusive distribution rights in a specific territory; so, for instance, when WGBH/Masterpiece puts a million dollars or two into a BBC production it expects to have the first, sole window of distribution in the United States.  BBC Worldwide, the BBC’s commercial sales arm, might be slightly miffed to miss out on chance to sell Sherlock more widely in the States (though in this case they participated as a co-production partner as well) but the existence of co-production funding can be the ticket to getting a high-cost production greenlighted when others are not.

Yet because success on the global market means an ability to address and attract broader- than-national audiences, another rationale for entering into transnational partnerships is precisely the opportunity to think trans-culturally.  Inclusion of characters or production teams from both countries (the easiest technique), narratives and subjects that span cultural locations, properties (like Sherlock) that already have transnational recognition and can work that imaginary identification into their narrative focus:  these are qualities that mark the most successful co-productions, and that draw together transnational publics.

Co-production can also help to support other forms of programming that are necessarily more nationally-specific and often of higher priority.  For WGBH, in this example, the investment of a relatively small amount of money in a co-produced prime-time drama, as opposed to sinking many more millions into an original production, means that scarce funding can go into news, public affairs, and children’s programs that are a more central part of PBS’s mandate.

Rebecca Eaton, Executive Producer of Masterpiece, with Benedict Cumberbatch at a season kick-off event in New York.

However, given the strong national focus of television – particularly for public broadcasters, though commercial channels also have their home markets to please – this kind of cultural negotiation can have its drawbacks.  Most notably on the British side this has involved accusations of cultural dilution, of using the television license fee paid by all British TV viewers on programs made for Americans.  Implied here is that making programs that appeal to Americans somehow weakens their essential Britishness.  This has come out in criticism of the recent transnational hit Downton Abbey (an ITV/WGBH co-production) for its substitution of melodrama for historical accuracy, though it has proved very successful with British audiences as well.  More to the point, both the BBC and ITV (Britain’s two central broadcasters) are specifically charged with producing a high proportion of original British programming in all categories – how much co-producer influence can there be before this claim becomes weakened?

Yet co-production is on the rise.  Changing structures in the British TV industry since the 1990s – from the “outsourcing” mandate of the 1990s to the 2004 Code of Practice that acted something like the fin/syn rules in the US – have greatly increased the number of independent producers and strengthened their hold on program rights (Chalaby 2010).  How can the rise in global partnerships be reconciled with mandates for national specificity?  What kinds of creative practices have been employed on both sides of the British/US co-production nexus to work within these constraints?  I’ll pursue those questions in my next post.

But I think it’s time to come out with a bold statement:  somewhere in the British/American relationship, a distinct genre of television has originated, which I propose (tongue in cheek, in the best British manner) to call “Trollywood”:  that transnational creative space created by the collaboration of British and American television producers over the last 50 years.  Furthermore, Trollywood’s operations have called into being a transnational public, not only composed of US and British audiences but assembling others from across the globe, whose members arguably have as much as or more in common with each other in terms of cultural affinities and shared affective experience, across national boundaries, than they have with other audiences in their home countries.  This despite the fact that the extent of the relationship has been downplayed in both nations, has been criticized on both sides, and is exceedingly hard to tease out.

But I will try, with a few numbers and statistics.  Let me assure you from the outset that these numbers are entirely unreliable – they are compiled through the BFI database, a wonderful instrument that nonetheless has enough quirks and omissions that the actual numbers given here should be understood as the roughest of approximations.  For instance, sometimes each episode in a series is counted as a separate production, sometimes not; some productions are counted twice or more since they have more than two co-production partners, etc.  But key patterns and formations emerge.

From 1980 to 2010, BFI tells us, a total of 2,237 programs have resulted from US/UK co-production.  Of those, the BBC has produced 1,345, or slightly more than half.  Other major UK co-producers are Channel Four and the various ITV companies. Since the re-structuring of the UK television industry in the 1990s, a host of independent production companies has emerged, many of them headed by former BBC and ITV co-production execs: Carnival, Left Bank, Kudos, Mammoth, and many others.  One of the most important forces to enter the scene in recent years has been BBC America, now itself often a co-production partner with both British and American companies.

On the US side, the dominant force by far is WGBH/Masterpiece, with 690 co-productions listed by the BFI between 1980 and 2010.  Cable channel A&E and New York public TV station WNET/Thirteen follow, with 287 and 216, respectively, dating from the 1980s.  But more recent cable and pay-cable partners like HBO, Discovery, Animal Planet, and Showtime are moving up, while important historical players, like Time-Life Films, have faded away.

What emerges clearly from these highly tentative numbers, however, is that the BBC/WGBH connection has been and still is by far the dominant one, with 548 prominent co-productions over this period, consisting of more than 200 series (some only 2 or 3 episodes, others running much longer) and many other one-off productions.  This is a considerable output, rivaling all but the biggest studios in commercial TV production, and indicating that this transnational partnership is important for public service broadcasting on both sides of the Atlantic.  And its audience numbers in the millions, across cultural and linguistic borders – all tuned into Trollywood.

Of course, the most popular US commercial programs obtain much bigger audiences through global distribution.  But what is distinct about Trollywood as I am defining it here is that these programs are co-productions:  not made in one place and shipped off the shelf across the globe, but arising from a long-standing relationship of mutual influence, creative input, and distinctly transnational production practices.  They also face unique challenges in their home nations, as well as taking advantage of unique opportunities.

I’ll explore the issues behind transnational co-production in future posts.  But next time you watch Sherlock, or Downton Abbey, or Torchwood, think “I am Trollywood nation” – a transnational public sharing affinities for a certain type of TV, a distinct set of productive practices and concerns, a historic constellation of affective cultural experience.  Not sure what difference that will make, but it’s worth trying on for size.

Its approach to literary adaptation was innovative, as Shawn VanCour argued; Josh Shepperd demonstrated its impact on the history of communication research; and both Debra Rae Cohen and Jacob Smith showed us that the innovative aesthetics of The Mercury Theatre on the Air were not limited to WOTW alone.  Kathy Battles pointed to its cultural resonance at the time, and Cynthia Meyers to its continuing relevance as a teaching tool.

Yet what happened to this legacy of innovation in American radio drama that Welles’ career so emphatically marks?  We can trace the tradition of creative radio drama forward through the suspense serials of the 1940s and 50s, jump to the 1970s with Himan Brown’s CBS Mystery Theater – and then virtually nothing, certainly not on a regular basis, until we get to the present radio revival.

The conclusion to Neil Verma’s Theater of the Mind eloquently discusses the “mineralization” of works like WOTW, since we can never hear them as audiences in the 1940s did – and I would argue as he does that at least in part this is because listening to radio drama of any kind is no longer part of our everyday experience.

But let’s not forget that this is not true everywhere, or even very many other places – elsewhere in the world, radio drama has an unbroken tradition that incorporates old work with new, and where American radio’s influence is a living thing.  Just yesterday, from my temporary perch in England, I listened to a group of British and American actors perform their version of James M. Cain’s The Butterfly, complete with Western drawls and sound effects, in a joint BBC/Cymru Wales production.  It’s part of a Cain series.

Here, The Archers continues its 63-year daily run, and on the BBC Radio 4 Drama page, a list of 13 genres in the sidebar helps the listener sort through the hundreds of currently running dramatic productions: originals, adaptations, serials, and revivals of old time US radio shows. You can listen to them, too.  The launch of Radio 4 Extra in 2011 created a permanent digital platform for radio soundwork, though subject to odd release windows.

So – what happened here (putting my American hat back on)?  This is something that has never been adequately explained.  I’ve taken a stab at it, in my “Rethinking Radio” piece written some 10 years ago, but besides pointing to the re-localization of radio in the 1950s and its turn to musical formats, the other obvious difference is the lack of a national public broadcasting sector that remained strong, on task, and well funded throughout the post-TV decades and into the digital present.

The BBC never stopped producing innovative radio drama. Welles’ tradition jumped ship and emerged on distant shores.  Thanks to digital platforms and other nations’ public broadcasting systems, the legacy of American radio drama lives on – just not primarily in America.

This is the tenth post in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. Stay tuned, as there are still more entries to come! The next Antenna post in the series will be arriving from Jennifer Hyland Wang on January 20th.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

The answer, I believe, lies partly in the qualities of Corwin’s work, partly in the vagaries of broadcast history.  As with many other innovators in the field of radio production, as well as in radio research, the propagandistic fervor of World War II swept Corwin up into its too-hot embrace (to reference Mr. McLuhan) and led the emerging art of radio feature production into a too-close alliance with god and country and self-righteous patriotism.  Corwin’s two best-remembered works are We Hold These Truths, the nation-wide broadcast carried by all three networks on the brink of war (December 15, 1941), and On a Note of Triumph, his 1945 paen to Allied victory. Both are virtuoso examples of Corwin’s “kaleidosonic” technique (thank you Neil Verma), swooping from omniscent narrator to scenes of battle to church choirs to folksongs to dramatic dialogues to set speeches, underscored with bombastic music and pushing us to ever greater heights of patriotic self-congratulation with a now embarrassing lack of irony or restraint.  Corwin was anything but cool.

Another problem is that Corwin’s reputation, boosted by government-sponsored programs during the war, has eclipsed the larger tradition of US feature production, much better understood and perpetuated in Britain and Europe.  The radio feature represented the most creative aspect of sonic innovation in radio for decades, firmly established in the BBC where a Features Department nurtured the careers of  producers like D. G. Bridson, Marjorie Banks, Nesta Pain, Charles Parker, and Ewan McCall.  Corwin worked with some of these artists during the war, and his series An American in England, produced with the help of Edward R. Murrow and his CBS news team, with original scores by Benjamin Britten, remains among his best work, in my opinion.

Now that we have entered a “second golden age” of the radio feature, with work such as Ira Glass’s This American Life, the sound experiments of Jad Adumrad and Robert Krulwich’s Radiolab, and organizations like the Third Coast International Audio Festival bringing it all together, perhaps Corwin can be remembered again for what he contributed to sound form and style.  A few new books seem to indicate this:  Michael Keith and Mary Ann Watson’s publication of Corwin’s diary from his epic post-war work One World Flight, Matthew Ehrlich’s Radio Utopia on the post-war radio documentary, and Neil Verma’s forthcoming Theater of the Mind.  Norman Corwin lived just long enough to see this period emerging.  I hope it made up for the decades of neglect.