‘We hear women’s voices differently from men’s,’ concluded Anne Karpf at the end of her search back through the radio archives to seek out the first women newsreaders on the airwaves. In Spoken Like a Woman (Radio 4, Saturday night), she decided this was the reason why it took so long for women to make it up through the plummy-voiced ranks to the heady heights of the newsroom.
In 1922 when radio broadcasting began from 2LO on the Strand, there were plenty of female executives (such as Hilda Matheson, Olive Shapley and Mary Somerville) organising schedules, booking talent, coming up with ideas for programmes. Yet very few of them were allowed behind the mike for that all-important job, reading the news. The female timbre was not thought of as having enough professional authority. Their voices, it was said, were too high and screechy to be convincing, or too low and breathy, i.e., sexy. Unless, of course, they were ‘Miss V. Sackville-West’, who was given a slot to talk about the journey she had just undertaken from Syria into Persia. She passed the sex text and was allowed to comment on things other than hearth rugs and marmalade because her voice was as crisp as a man’s, if not as low.
The following night on Radio 3, her friend and contemporary Virginia Woolf could be heard in a clip from a talk she gave about ‘words’, her ghost-like voice coming back to us eerily from the past. ‘Words seem to like people to think before they use them and to feel before they use them,’ we heard her say, as if from outer space, in Will Self’s intriguingly obtuse feature, Modernism Redux.
Self (Radio 4’s newly appointed writer-in-residence) played around with the idea of an ‘archive’ of sound by suggesting that in the basement of New Broadcasting House there has been discovered a curious machine from the first days of radio, the RP-1 Ethermatic Remitter. This dust-clad collection of coils and wires and circuit boards, Self claimed, could retrieve, or ‘remit’, signals out of the ether from the entire history of broadcasting and from all corners of the earth. Instead of transmitting ‘live’ broadcasts, with the aid of this machine you can begin remitting everything and anything that has once been said on air.
To activate the remitter a new very 21st-century laptop has been latched on to the ancient machine to give it an interair search engine. Type in ‘modernism’, imagines Self, and cue a series of strange whirrs and beeps and clicking noises as a zoo-like cacophony of voices and snatches of music is unleashed on the listener. One second we heard James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake, the next H.G. Wells talking about his Time Machine, and Aldous Huxley discussing his brave new world. It was so well put together by Self and his producer James Cook that the existence of RP-1 was almost convincing.
This was Self as ringmaster, commandeering the archives to argue persuasively about the way the new technologies in broadcasting and now the internet are affecting the way we think. Just remember, he reminded us, Bram Stoker’s Dracula had a telephone in the 1890s. The idea of the disembodied voice making contact with a far-distant listener was around even then, setting off a whole new questioning of the self. If your voice can be made invisible, detached from your body, and your mind, what then is the mind, the true self? Who are you?
This was tough stuff for a Sunday night when the brain is not exactly on the alert. But Self draws you in with his lugubrious voice, and his habit of mixing things up so you don’t know whether you’re supposed to agree with him or violently disagree. If everything said on air can be retrieved, how do you find meaning in the fragmented confusion of snippets that results whenever you type a query into the search engine?
But over on Radio 2 on Wednesday night Stuart Maconie was urging us to use the internet and log on to YouTube to search out Millie Small and an obscure Finnish TV programme from 1964. It’s the internet that’s rescued Small’s version of ‘My Boy Lollipop’, says Maconie, from the miles and miles of footage that lies abandoned on the shelves of TV executives. It’s given us back her joyous version of the song, which she recorded in Helsinki, dancing around in simple Capri pants and white jumper, on a minimalist black-and-white studio set with just a few desultory go-go dancers as backdrop. It’s also a piece of pop music history, said Maconie, because Small’s success with that song introduced black-and-white Britain to the reggae beat.
‘I can remember her sort of jumping out of the screen…She looked like us. She was black. She was singing on the TV,’ declared Maconie’s interviewees on The People’s Songs, his history of the past 50 or so years through 50 records and the memories of those who first bought them. Small’s voice made a big difference.
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