Lives of others | 19 May 2012

He was accused of listening too much to the ‘wrong people’, of being ‘too deferential’, not judgmental enough. Sometimes those he interviewed afterwards said that he was like ‘a ferret’, who pried too deeply into their lives, ‘looking for the facts that he wanted’. But Tony Parker, who died in 1996, gave a voice to those who were not usually heard or cared about. He made their lives sound special, individually important. In books such as Life After Life, The People of Providence, Lighthouse and Red Hill he opened up the lives of murderers, working people on a south-east London estate, lighthouse-keepers and miners, telling their stories in their own words. On Archive on 4 on Saturday, that other ‘great listener’ Alan Dein looked back on Parker’s work to find out how he did it. How did he get thieves to let slip their wallet-lifting methods? Why did murderers tell him about their awful past lives in such a frank but totally unsentimental way? What made repeat offenders explain to him, without pity, how shutting people up in institutions for even just a month or two will change them, ‘and not for the better’?

Little archive footage now remains of Parker’s own voice, but on Saturday we heard him explaining his technique. ‘I always try and sit at a slightly lower level than the person I’m interviewing,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the sensation of talking down.’

Contrary to what you might think, he actually made sure his tape recorder was very ‘conspicuous’ and would spend the first few minutes fumbling about with it, as if he were a complete idiot and useless with the technology. He always made sure to point out the ‘stop’ button, and that it could be pressed at any time. At the end of the session he would say, ‘Ask me anything you want to know,’ as if to make sure there was a perceived (if not actual) equality between interviewer and interviewee.

Perhaps the key to his success in eliciting the essential truths about the lives of the people he was so keen to give voice to was his ‘concern’, in the Quaker sense, not his interest, his reaction, his curiosity.