Life-changing moments are not always as dramatic as Saint Paul’s Damascene experience. Often they emerge from conversations that begin with mundane exchanges about last night’s Masterchef, the film you saw last week, the last time there was a drought. Then gradually the talk moves on to other, deeper matters. Something is said, some connection is made which opens up a shaft of light on a problem, a question, a source of confusion that’s been troubling you for years. You might not realise for a while that the conversation marks a change, but looking back on what was said leads you to recognise how from that moment your life has taken a different (though not necessarily dramatically different) tack.
It’s these moments that the Listening Project is hoping to catch, snapshots of life, not of the formal events, the studied scenes, the larger-than-life characters, but the private exchanges, the informal chats, the day-to-day difficulties which run through our lives. This is not about Desert Island Discs conversations, but the kind of frank, startling, fearless exchanges you sometimes, if you’re lucky, overhear on the bus, which are so direct and compelling they make you almost miss your stop.
The project is being launched by Radio 4, together with the British Library and BBC Local Radio, and is designed to collect these moments, like photographs in an album, gathering an audio portrait of life in Britain — what we’re thinking, hoping for, dreading, believing. It’s a radio version of the Video Nation series on TV, which in the early 1990s took advantage of the new, easily available video-recording technology to encourage anyone and everyone to film themselves going about their lives. Not all of them worked, but when they did it was like being taken inside that person’s mind. Anyone can take part in this new listening venture simply by logging on to the website and finding out how to make a recording and how to submit it.
This weekend the project is being launched in Bristol at the More Than Words festival, three days of free events in that seafaring West Country city, which will explore the art of listening, really listening, not just the surface words but what lies behind them. We’ll be encouraged to switch off our smartphones and iPods and to start listening to the people we live alongside. Sessions entitled ‘Sound Adventures’ will celebrate the way that radio can take us anywhere, even to the edge of the universe, but it’s ‘How to Listen, Really Listen’ which will suggest that only by learning how to listen properly can we make the most of talking to people. Listening does not come naturally. We’re usually far more ready to talk.
So much can be said in so few words on radio, as a 15-minute short story on Radio 4 on Friday afternoon illustrated. I was tempted to listen to Under My Skin because it was read by Calista Flockhart, the winsome star of the American TV series Ally McBeal. Could she cope with the demands of radio, which are so much about the voice and above all timing? The script was over-written, two women becoming friends in Manhattan, then falling out over the rights to a film made from a novel written by one of them. But Flockhart’s reading (directed by Martin Jarvis) was so perfectly judged, a pause here, an embarrassed giggle there, that what was quite simplistic in words became a much richer analysis of the ebb and flow of friendship, as reticence slides into betrayal, unthinking trust into astonished recognition. ‘I loved it before you wrote it,’ says the deceitful Julie, a line that will send shivers through anyone who has ever asked a friend to give them advice on their writing.
That the playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah chooses to write for BBC Radio (rather than Hollywood), and not 6Music but Radio 3, suggests that there’s something about radio which he recognises is of this moment. It’s not exclusive, or irrelevant, but accessible, and it’s a quick and easy way to make a point, tell a story, spread the message to those who might otherwise not understand. On Saturday night, his new play Father, Son and Holy Ghost took us to a gospel church somewhere in the inner city. Pastor T (played by David Harewood of Homeland), a reformed hard man, is facing up to his boss Bishop Andrews, who’s been corrupted not so much by money but by the desire to outdo his rivals in the ministry.
The director (Jo Wheeler) should win a Sony for her clever use of chords from the Hammond organ as an accompaniment to the Bishop’s sermons, adding the beat, the atmosphere of the crowded church. The gospel singing was great too. But it was Kwei-Armah’s characterisation that took me on to the streets where Pastor T struggles to relinquish his past, a bad man made good but needing now to listen.
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