Listening to the Law: Famous Trials on BBC Radio, 1934–1969
| Author | Suzanne Shale (formerly Gibson) |
| Published date | 01 November 1996 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1996.tb02696.x |
| Date | 01 November 1996 |
Listening to the Law: Famous Trials
on
BBC
Radio,
1934-1969
Suzanne Shale (formerly
Gibson)*’
Introduction
In
his contribution to the
Yule
Law
Journal,
‘Symposium on Law, Lawyers and
Popular Culture,’ Lawrence Friedman argued that American popular culture holds
only a highly distorted mirror to America’s legal present.
No
songs have been composed about the Robinson-Pateman Act, no movies produced about
the capital gains tax
. .
.
there are also
no
songs,
movies or
TV
programs about medicare, dog
licenses, zoning laws,
or
overtime parking
. . .
On the other hand, television would shrivel
up
and die without cops, detectives, crimes, judges, prisons, guns, and trials.
Friedman then goes on to argue that, even in American television’s rich
profusion of cop shows and trial dramas, there is little to be learnt about the legal
system.
[Tlhe products of popular culture
are
wildly off-key even with respect to those parts of the
legal
system that they deal with obsessively. Cop shows
aim
for entertainment, excitement,
dramatic effect
.
.
.
What people actually think about law, what they wony about, what they
hope for, what they
use,
what they contend with,
are
not congruent with what
goes
into the
picture tube, or with what comes out.’
Friedman expresses what is undoubtedly common consensus about the terms in
which popular culture represents law. In important respects, that common
consensus
is
unchallengeable. Popular culture inevitably operates according to
its own practices and principles. It necessarily selects its subjects and represents
those subjects in its own terms. Popular culture
does,
therefore, misunderstand,
misrepresent, trivialise and offer sensational accounts
of
the legal system. But that
is not all it does. And anyway, no medium, be it human speech, sign language, the
plastic arts, television, radio or film, can do otherwise than represent subjects in its
own terms.
No
medium offers neutral representations of the object or ideal world.
If it is true that law, legal ideas and legal ideals are selectively misrepresented by
our media of popular culture, it is equally true that it is only through something
called culture that law, legal ideas
and
legal ideals come into existence. It is
through the media of popular culture (by which
I
mean, in this article, the mass
media) that many people will have learned much
of
what they know and believe
*Fellow in Law, New College, Oxford.
My thanks
to
Nicola Lacey for her comments on an earlier draft and to Hugh Collins for useful editorial
advice. Very special thanks to Kerry Shale for encouraging me to pursue my pleasures as research.
Research for this article was conducted by kind permission
of
the BBC at their Written Archive
Centre in Caversham.
I
am grateful to Mrs Jacqueline Kavanagh and her helpful staff at the archive
for their assistance. My thanks especially to Jeff Walden who graciously showed me the
ropes,
retrieved many files and photocopied huge quantities of material. The archive policy is
to
permit
access only
to
programme files more than
25
years old, hence the boundaries placed upon my
discussions in this article. Archive material is cited
as
BBC WAC with its identifying number.
Quotations from BBC documents are BBC copyright.
Friedman, ‘Symposium: Popular Legal Culture: Law, Lawyers and Popular Culture’
(1988)
98
Yale
LJ
1579,
1588.
1
2
813
0
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1996
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about law. We need to look more closely at what knowledge flows, at how it
courses and eddies in its voyage to the popular mind.
We discover when we are attentive to popular culture not only that it represents
more of law
in
more ways that we might expect, but also that it can become quite
difficult to determine where the boundary between law and popular culture lies. In
this article, for example, I note the shame experienced by families of notorious
criminals whose trials were reconstructed
as
radio broadcasts. What is the
difference between the shame elicited by the trial and the shame elicited by the
radio reconstruction of the trial? If the procurement of shame is one of the
sociological functions of the criminal trial, then the boundary between real law and
radio law is, in that important respect, at least a little blurred.
In this article
I
consider a form of popular culture peculiarly British, BBC radio,
and examine the development of an immensely popular programme form, the
reconstruction of notorious legal cases. The history of BBC trial reconstructions
reflects the changing nature of the BBC itself, as the Corporation moved from the
days of patrician Edwardian austerity into a more liberal and egalitarian postwar
Britain. It records the changing nature of the society of which the BBC was a part.
It suggests changes in the way the trial system is perceived and represented.
Tracing the evolution of famous trials programmes helps us to understand a little of
how knowledge of law moves from the legal to the popular domain and, in turn,
how the conventions of popular culture structure popular legal knowledge.
The medium
For
a large part of the twentieth century, radio has been a significant medium of
communication of social knowledge. In the first part of this article, I sketch an
introduction to British radio broadcasting which illustrates the reach, the scope
and, importantly, the authority of BBC radio output. I go
on
to consider the nature
of
radio as a
medium
and to suggest that famous trials programmes adopted
broadcasting conventions which would have persuaded listeners of the authenticity
and accuracy of the programme’s presentation of original trial material.
An introduction
to
British radio broadcasting3
It
has been estimated that, by
1928,
six years after the BBC started broadcasting,
radio audiences were rarely fewer than one million listeners and that they
sometimes swelled to
as
many
as
15
milli~n.~ By
1939,
nine
million Britons
possessed radio licences and most middle-class and skilled working-class families
would have been able
to
listen to the wireless together. With the arrivy of cheap
‘utility’ radios
in
1944,
wireless was within reach of virtually everybody and BBC
radio was entitled to
be
called a
truly
national mass medium.
The technology of radio reception largely determined the social context of radio
listening. Early radio receivers were crude affairs, equipped with headphones, and
3
See Scannell’s beautifully written account of the early days
of
the BBC,
A
Social History ofBrirish
Broadcasting,
vol
I,
1922-39
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1991);
and Crissell,
Understanding Radio
(London: Routledge, 2nd ed,
1994).
These
books
have been invaluable in preparing this article.
4
Crissell, n3 above, p
19,
citing Black,
The
Biggest Aspidistra in
the
World
(London: British
Broadcasting Corporation,
1972).
5
Crissell,
n3
above,
p
19,
citing Pegg,
Broadcasting and
Sociefy,
1918-1939
(London and Canberra:
Croom Helm,
1983).
814
8
The
Modem
Law Review Limited
1996
November
19961
Listening
to
the
Law:
Famous
Trials
on the
BBC
demanding much twitching
of
wires and twiddling with knobs. In
the
early
days,
therefore, tuning
in
was a solitary activity, tied
as
each member of the audience
was to the receiver headphones. When the loudspeaker set
-
expensive, heavy and
anchored by its aerial
-
was introduced, it became natural to gather round the
radio and listen in family groups. Since the
1960s,
the transistor has made radio
so
cheap and
so
portable that listening habits have changed once again. Many people
will listen to the radio alone in the car
or
in their own room at home, for example.
Listening is once again a solitary activity.6
Technological developments have also entailed changes
in
the audience’s
attentiveness to broadcast programmes. In the early days
of
solitary headphone
listening and later, as the technology progressed, in the days when the family group
assembled around the set to listen to the evening’s entertainment, audiences
probably sat down to listen intending, at least, to exercise a concentrated
ear.
‘Make sure your set is working properly before you settle down to listen,’ the
BBC
Year
Book
exhorted in
1930.
‘Listen
as
carefully at home
as
you do in a theatre
or
concert hall.
You
can’t get the best out
of
a
programme if your mind is wandering,
or
if you are playing bridge or reading.’7 Nowadays, radio is most likely
a
source
of background music
or
talk while listeners are driving, studying, shopping,
working, taking a shower: and
so
on.9
In
our current age, when broadcasting choice is celebrated, programming
diversity pursued and fragmentation of audiences inevitable, it is important to
recall that in the first
few
decades of its existence, BBC radio was a virtual
broadcasting monopoly. The BBC was Britain’s only licensed radio broadcast
organisation until
1973,
when the Independent Broadcasting Authority awarded
licences to two independent local radio stations.
lo
Re ular television broadcasts
were not established until after the Second World War.
Although the BBC enjoyed an official broadcasting monopoly, it did have to
contend with competition from European commercial radio. The European stations
addressed themselves to audiences unsatisfied by programmes which emerged
from the BBC’s somewhat joyless interpretation of the concept of public service
broadcasting. Lord Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, had
as
his
paramount concerns to educate and enlighten the BBC’s listeners, and to impose
upon them a broadcasting service dedicated to preserving the highest moral tone.
By the end of its first decade of existence, the BBC was derided, even from within,
as elitist, middle class and out of touch with its listeners, a dour band of
pedagogues delivering dull programmes to an audience
of
auto-didacts. As one
rebel wrote despairingly of the state of the Corporation at the end of the
1930s:
41
dullness lifted its head once
again
and rejoiced to think of its
escape
from extinction. Talks
ran again
in
series,
more
solid than
ever;
topicality was eschewed; assistants continued to
6 Crissell,
n
3 above, p
I
I,
citing Pegg,
ibid.
7 Cited
in
Scannell, n3 above, p371.
8
An
advertisement running on the London popular music station ‘Capital Radio’
in
April 1996
exhorted potential advertisers to consider the benefits of advertising on commercial radio,
a
medium
which follows the listening subject everywhere.
In
it,
a
precocious newspaper lad enters
a
young
lady’s bathroom in order to read her the newspaper advertisements. She is understandably aggrieved.
9
A
correspondent to the BBC’s ‘Feedback’ programme (tx w.e. 23/3/96) complained of the radio
announcer’s frequent recourse to the platitude ‘You are listening to
...I
I
am
not
listening,
she
objected,
I
am dining, cooking, doing the ironing, or whatever.
10
London Broadcasting Company and Capital Radio.
11
The BBC enjoyed
a
monopoly on television until 1955 when the second commercial television
network was established.
8
The
Modern
Law
Review Limited
1996
815
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