People power | 11 April 2019

He is said to ‘have changed the sound of speech radio’, not just by giving voice to those who until then (the 1960s) had not been given air time, the richness of their county accents too far removed from Broadcasting House’s Received Pronunciation. He won awards for his pioneering use of the new midget tape recorders, taking his microphone out of the studio and down the mines, to the fishing harbours, into the boxing rings and talking to teenagers. He was also a genius at editing, able to cut away an errant ‘s’ or insert a single note into the soundscape with the rudimentary tools then available, a sharp razor blade and a steady hand. But most of all he did away with the omniscient narrator with his RP pronunciation and perfect vowels, using music instead, written and performed by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. The stories that emerged in his programmes did so through the songs which held them together, not via a disembodied, detached voiceover at one remove. Yet, in spite of his creative expertise, Charles Parker was, in 1972, ‘sacked’ by the BBC as too expensive a radio producer, too profligate, with time and money, and too political. He was already out of step with management, who questioned the value of his work.

Parker, the creator of the extraordinary Radio Ballads, broadcast from 1958 to 1964 on the BBC Home Service (as it was then called), was profiled for Archive on 4 by Sean Street, the poet and radio professor, in a programme produced by Andy Cartwright, who keeps alive the Parker flame by overseeing an annual radio production prize for students. Parker, we heard, was fascinated by the musicality of everyday speech, regarding it as oral poetry as well as social history, preserving memories of lives once lived.