BBC Producer Research Articles

Translating Radio Productions into Television Programmes: The Post-War Career of BBC Writer/Producer Nesta Pain

When BBC Television resumed broadcasting in 1946, BBC radio still dominated the airwaves. However, within a decade, television had swiftly become the dominant medium. BBC radio producers from the Features Department were eager to try their hand at translating their audio productions into visual ones, although few were successful. BBC producer Nesta Pain ultimately remained in radio production, but she successfully translated some of her radio plays and productions into television programmes, including John Mortimer’s The Dock Brief (1957), A Shaft of Light (1958), and Simon Raven’s The Move Up Country (1961). As one of the few women, and one of the more successful BBC Features writer/producers of the 1940s and 1950s, Nesta Pain’s approaches to translating her work to television and the obstacles she encountered trying to move from audio storytelling to a more visual media offers a glimpse into the difficulties radio producers faced in switching to new methods. This article discusses the successful, as well as challenging, moments she faced in attempting this transition and also explores how access to Pain’s personal papers has greatly enhanced this understanding.

The Reluctant Broadcaster: C.S. Lewis Finds a New Voice

ABSTRACT C.S. Lewis conquered a variety of communication outlets before being asked to address the British people over the airwaves. In the eyes of the BBC, Lewis was the perfect candidate to speak to the nation about what it meant to be a Christian in a time of crisis. However, Lewis was not a natural behind a microphone; the BBC producers shaped him into a masterful broadcaster. This training would have a lasting effect on Lewis’s audiences and writing style. Very little has been written about the historical context of Lewis as a wartime broadcaster, its impact on him, his relationship with the BBC, and his role in creating contemporary Christian-mediated apologetics. This study utilizes a historical, cultural approach to explore C.S. Lewis’s transition from writer and lecturer to religious broadcaster and his influence on Britain’s cultural and religious attitudes during wartime as he mastered a new communication style. Early in the Second World War, Lewis contemplated the significance of scholarly activities while the world was at war. A wounded veteran of the First World War, he understood the realities of war. As a middle-aged writer, lecturer, and apologist, he was now looking to define his potential contribution to the raging global conflict. In the end, the answer to Lewis’s question was found in the most unlikely place … behind a microphone.

Nesta Pain

The ‘cultural translator’ is an individual who expresses the essence of entanglement in their career choices, moving between genres, media, or nations. This article suggests that the BBC producer and writer, Nesta Pain, was such an individual. Over the course of her career, Pain not only wrote and produced radio features and radio dramas but was also a successful journalist and author. She translated her experience in radio production onto the stage and on television by exploiting the different possibilities offered by these visual media—all evidence of her transmedial cultural translation. Further adding to the transgressive nature of her career, was her place as a woman in male-dominated radio production arenas.

Dylan Thomas's ‘Return Journey to Swansea’: A Collaborative Radio Poetic

This article explores how Dylan Thomas's engagement with radio created an innovative collaborative radio poetic. Thomas contributed many broadcast essays and features to the Third Programme, the Home Service, the Welsh Home Service and the Eastern Service. Scholars have also long been aware of Thomas's important creative relationship with BBC producers such as Douglas Cleverdon (who produced Under Milk Wood). Yet there remains little analysis of his features for radio. Drawing on archival memos from the BBC's Literary Output Committee (held at the BBC's Written Archives in Caversham), this article initially considers the institutional relationship between poets and the BBC during the 1940s. Against this institutional backdrop, it then focuses on a specific 1947 BBC feature that Thomas wrote about post-blitz Swansea: ‘Return Journey to Swansea’. Examining the history and practicalities of the collaboration involved between Thomas and the producer P. H. Burton, the discussion links the feature's social commentary to the audio radio poetic collaboratively created between poet, broadcast institution, producer, and medium.

The Complete Story of the Grail: Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval and Its Continuations by Chrétien de Troyes

Reviewed by: The Complete Story of the Grail: Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval and Its Continuations by Chrétien de Troyes Susan Brooks Chrétien de Troyes, The Complete Story of the Grail: Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval and Its Continuations, trans. Nigel Bryant (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2015) 580 pp. The Quest for the Holy Grail is an iconic story in Western culture. The first writer to set it down in literature was Chrétien de Troyes, the twelfth-century French trouvère poet associated with the courts of Marie of Champagne and Philip of Flanders. It is believed to be the latter patron who commissioned the creation of Chrétien’s last great work, Perceval, the tale of the Grail knight. Author of several Arthurian works including Yvain, The Knight of the Lion and Cligés, Chrétien is considered the preeminent poet of chivalric culture. His Grail manuscript breaks off, and it is commonly thought that its unfinished state can be attributed to his death. What remains is of such rare quality that it became a medieval obsession, with continuations by no fewer than four subsequent poets and prequels by two additional writers. BBC Producer and former [End Page 351] head of drama at Marlborough College Nigel Bryant has translated and gathered all of the versions into one volume, The Complete Story of the Grail, published by Boydell & Brewer imprint D. S. Brewer and edited by noted Arthurian authority Norris J. Lacy, professor emeritus of Pennsylvania State University. Bryant himself is the translator of numerous books including Perlesvaus and Perceforest and the author of more including a forthcoming biography of William Marshal. This fine edition of the Grail story surrenders many treasures to a close read. Bryant capsulizes the seminal Chrétien version and the continuations in the introductory section, providing a helpful guide through the nearly six hundred pages that follow. The book begins with a presentation of the facts. Perceval was likely written in the 1180s not long before Philip of Flanders died in the Third Crusade. The continuations appear over the following years, with the last possibly written as late as the 1230s. Perceval survives in fifteen manuscripts, some of which contain only the original and others which also incorporate one or more of the continuations in various redactions. Bryant addresses some scholarly appraisal of the continuations as being of lesser consequence than other medieval works by utilizing the example of modern entertainment franchises as a comparison. One of the objections to the continuations has been their divergence from Chrétien’s original and their lack of continuity. Bryant comments that modern viewers do not necessarily expect perfect continuity in film serials, nor did the medieval audience demand it in their romances. His roots as a dramatist are on display as he stresses that the works were clearly intended to be read aloud. Created in an era of limited literacy, he calls them “scripts for performance” and notes their merits as such. Bearing that in mind, it’s easy to see that Chrétien at least, a master storyteller, used words to paint a visual picture of astounding beauty for his audience. He employed color as the primary means to invoke the imagination: the green forest, the Red Knight, and the blood drops on the white snow that transport Perceval into a transcendent state recalling the feminine fairness of his love Blanchefleur. Other tools he deftly wielded to activate the capacity of visualization are symbols that even today speak to the unconscious: the Grail, the lance, the quiet of the glade and the panoply of the tournament. Perceval himself is an archetype, the Holy Fool who personifies innocence of the profane. He is also a genius of chivalry, descended from a line of notable knights, and such a quick study once introduced to the knightly concept that he seems like a superhero. It’s almost as if something encoded in his DNA is activated by the energies of the other men, and he bursts into bloom by subtle instinct. His interactions with others reveal both his initial raw edges and his ability to learn. The laughing girl and the fool at court come to...

Christopher Logue and the Iliad

Christopher Logue and the Iliad* CHARLES ROWAN BEYE Icame to the Greek text of the Iliad when I was in my late teens after an outing with Plato’s Apology and Homer’s Odyssey. I never looked back: ancient Greek literature became my undergraduate major, Homeric epic my graduate specialty, a narrative technique of the poet of the Iliad my dissertation topic. I had the singular pleasure of introducing students to the ancient Greek language for almost every one of the forty-two years that I taught. And in almost every one of those forty-two years I also taught them either an introduction to Homeric Greek using the Iliad as my text, or a course in Homeric epic in English translation, sometimes both when enthusiasm for classical antiquity reached a dramatic peak in the sixties. In the English language course, I used to fret over my choice of the translation of the text of the Iliad. Because I could read the poem in the Greek of Homer I was acutely sensitive to the intricate structure of the phraseology which formed the basis of the Homeric language. Nobody talked like Homer; the text of the Iliad and Odyssey is sui generis, a language created over centuries by professional singers of tales who composed, collaborated, transmitted over time and place, all manner of stories. Like hip-hop which nobody speaks, only far more intricate. Out of that there came down to us the Iliad and the Odyssey. This simple bald statement, like equally unequivocal statements about the nature of God, can set off the equivalent of religious wars among professional Homerists. So we shall *Christopher Logue, War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad, Christopher Reid, ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 352 pages. arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 leave it. The point is that the language in which the Homeric texts are written, and probably originally sung, is a thing of intricate, exquisite, complex beauty, well worth the effort to learn, and laughably unlike anything to be found in the so called “translations” of Homer. That there are thousands of them—and more being turned out every day when the readership is dramatically, if not fatally, declining—is testament to what is instinct in anyone who becomes intimate with the Homeric language: dammit, I can turn this into something that will bring across the ancient Greek. It doesn’t happen, didn’t happen to Richmond Lattimore who so very carefully retained the repeated epithets, the repeated phraseology; he was the translator du jour of the 1950s, albeit for many readers the great classroom snooze. Robert Fitzgerald, the favorite of English professors in those days—his more cautious, his more “poetic,” effort certainly was not action-packed; and although things got better with Robert Fagles—nowadays the almost authorized text, if only because Bernard Knox’s introduction to it is like the Homeric seal of approval—reading page after page of those interminable battles is not pleasant. Recently, I introduced a small group of senior citizens to the Iliad in a refreshingly honest course where the students were not examined and had the option of reading the poem or a brief precis—nothing concentrates one’s attention like realizing your days are numbered. After a few weeks, one gentleman brought up the tedium of reading the Fagles translation in toto, pointing out that page after page produced such boredom as to be unendurable. “All too true,” I said, adding with the freedom and candor of someone retired from his job; “I just don’t think translations work.” Which brings me to Christopher Logue’s account of the Iliad. And behind him the miracle of his being prompted, quite unwillingly, into the whole enterprise. BBC producer D. S. Carne-Ross has gained his fifteen minutes of fame for convincing Logue to make an English language script for a BBC broadcast of Homer’s telling of the great scene when Achilles fights with the river god, Scamander. Logue’s hesitachristopher logue and the ILIAD 166 tion was because he read no Greek. The genius moment was when Carne-Ross said he would tell him the story line for line, word...

Book Review: Women and Journalism, by Suzanne Franks

Women and Journalism. Suzanne Franks. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. 85 pp. $28 pbk.In her short but insightful book, Women and Journalism, author Suzanne Franks spends much time pointing out the ironies and contradictions inherent in women's employment in journalism. Women outnumber men in most college journalism departments, and many who have entered the field in the last few decades are better educated than their male counterparts. Yet very few women hold top executive posts at media companies, and those who work in newsrooms are often paid less than their male colleagues. And, nearly fifty years after the second wave of feminism, women are still viewed primarily as feature rather than news writers. She subtitles her Introduction, Backwards and forwards, onwards and upwards.Women and Journalism accomplishes a lot in a short space, and it is written in a direct and concise style-there is little or no fat in this book, indicating that either Franks herself is a tight and seamless writer, or that she has an excellent editor. Numbers and survey results form the backbone of this book-making it credible-and Franks does not shout from a soapbox to bemoan the fact that women have yet to achieve equality in the newsrooms of the United States and much of Western Europe. But the book is far from dry and soulless, and would be compelling to anyone interested in newsroom employment and women in the media. Franks, a professor at City University London, is a former BBC producer, and the focus of the book is journalism in England. But she also discusses the media environment for women in the United States-which parallels that of England in many ways-so the book is relevant for American readers.Women and Journalism differs from books on similar topics for two reasons: first, the author maintains, advancing technology and the rapidly changing journalistic landscape have rendered obsolete the often-used term glass ceiling. Society and the media culture have become so complex that the term is an oversimplification, she believes. She examines the role of society and culture in shaping the industry because she believes the subject of women in journalism cannot be examined in a vacuum. For instance, she notes that sources quoted in hard news stories have always been predominately male, reinforcing the view that it is men who hold the real authority when discussing serious matters in Western society. She implies that until women are seen as authoritative in all aspects of society and are widely quoted as experts, their role in newsrooms may not change. …

Style, Space And Seriality In Early Children’s Television Drama: Puck Of Pook’s Hill, Five Children and It (BBC, 1951) and Man In Armour (1951–1954)

In 1948, BBC producer Cecil Madden speculated in the BBC Quarterly about ‘where television drama is going, whether it aims to be a photographed stage play, a competitor to the film, or an illustrated broadcast. The truth probably belongs somewhere between them all’ (John Caughie, Television Drama: realism, modernism and British culture; Oxford, 2000, 41). Madden’s construction of early television drama as an innately hybridised form of media was arguably not borne out of a desire for radical experimentation but, rather, a logical extension of his long-standing association with theatre, show business and television. His motto, ‘A play a day,’ also suggested his approach to drama as both popular form and part of the foundations of the BBC schedules. Two years later, Madden was made acting Head of the new Children’s Programmes department, remaining in post for only eight months before being replaced by Freda Lingstrom. This article will argue that, during the brief period of his administration, Madden’s ‘expansive’ and popular approach to drama significantly influenced the drama output of the Children’s Department. It will analyse the form, style and spaces of Puck of Pook’s Hill (BBC, 1951), Five Children and It (BBC, 1951) and Man in Armour (BBC, 1951–1954) and situate them within Madden’s own explication of television drama as hybridised and spectacular. Using archival research, it will compare the approaches to children’s television drama articulated by Madden and Lingstrom and examine how these affect the discourse of children’s television within British public service broadcasting.

Representing the fragmented mind: Reinterpreting a classic radio feature as ‘sonic psychology’

Abstract This article explores the intertwining of ideas about radio and popular psychology in broadcasting’s formative years by focusing on the case study of one pioneering BBC producer, Lance Sieveking. Using Sieveking’s private papers and other archival sources, the article attempts to reconstruct his private and emotional life in order to help us understand more fully the unusual and experimental programmes he made in the late 1920s. A focus on Sieveking shows an early example of radio being used as a medium capable of representing – and exploring – one’s ‘inner life’. More specifically, in the 1920s, Sieveking’s work is an example of radio being used as a means of working through anxieties and neuroses that are a recognized feature of life in Britain in the aftermath of World War I. It argues that when analysing the creative process in radio – which is, after all, what Paddy Scannell has called a ‘human-made’ thing – we might want to attend more closely to the personal psychology of its producers.

BIOGRAPHY AND THE EMOTIONS AS A MISSING ‘NARRATIVE’ IN MEDIA HISTORY

Drawing on the unpublished private papers and fictional writing of the pioneering BBC producer Lance Sieveking (1896–1972), this article argues that a sustained focus on the biographical background of media professionals can broaden the scope of broadcasting history while offering a necessary narrative coherence. In the case of Sieveking, the article provides new detail on his family background, his wartime experience, and the part he played in the broader cultural networks of interwar Britain, in order to argue that many of the programmes he and his contemporaries made in the 1920s and 1930s should be understood as highly personal responses to the artistic and political world trends of the period. Further, in arguing for the merits of biography, the article draws on recent scholarship in ‘the history of emotions’ to suggest that a focus on the private life histories of media professionals can also advance our understanding of bodies such as the BBC as complex ‘emotional communities’ rather than as ‘total’ institutions.

Audience views on user-generated content: exploring the value of news from the bottom up

News organizations increasingly view user-generated content (UGC) as a vital resource for audience engagement and empowerment. Researchers have investigated the production practices and journalistic cultures surrounding UGC, but have paid less attention to the audiences who produce and consume the content. This article seeks to fill this gap in knowledge, drawing on a series of focus groups to understand why audiences value particular forms of UGC and renounce others. Further, by comparing focus group findings to data from in-depth interviews with BBC producers and journalists, it explores how audience perceptions differ from those of producers. In particular, the article focuses on why and how audiences value news-based UGC (in the form of images, footages and eyewitness accounts), which is perceived as authentic, immediate and real. This is contrasted with a dislike for audience comment, or opinion-based contributions, seen as ill-informed, repetitive and extremist. By contrast, BBC producers and journalists are more concerned with UGC as a tool to supplement traditional news-gathering practices.

Getting into bed with charity

Public response to disasters depends on news coverage, writes BBC producer turned academic Franks, but as budgets continue to shrink, is the media becoming too reliant on aid agencies? "Disasters - both natural and man-made - only exist when covered by the media. Plenty of terrible things happen that remain unreported. Most disasters are known about only by those directly affected. And the crises that do get media attention are not necessarily those that kill and otherwise harm the most victims. There is invariably a random element in how much, or if at all, something is reported, but this is even more so in faraway, difficult locations." As a result, she claims, aid agencies are having to employ questionable methods to obtain media attention. "Today many aid campaigns are substantial global operations and it is in the public interest that they are reported rigorously and impartially. If journalists and aid workers embrace each other too tightly, that's unlikely to happen."

Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (review)

Reviewed by Debra Rae Cohen University of South Carolina Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938. Todd Avery. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. vii + 158. $89.95 (cloth). While the aural turn in modernist studies has been apparent for the last several years, with such pioneers as Garrett Stewart and Adelaide Morris foregrounding the sonic dimensions of textual production and the relation of the senses to mechanically reproduced sound, only recently has concerted scholarly investigation into the intersection of modernism and radio, in particular, begun to bear fruit. In last year's Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi, Timothy Campbell significantly extended past work on broadcasting's inscription in modernist text. Todd Avery's stimulating new book takes a different tack, focusing on writers' actual involvement with the BBC to add a valuable layer to our increasingly complex and nuanced picture of relations between modernism and mass culture. Avery's particular interest is the use of the BBC as both vehicle and crucible for ethical discourse. Examining the broadcasts of Bloomsburyites, T. S. Eliot, and—somewhat surprisingly—H. G. Wells, he argues forcefully that modernist writers "heard in the vibrations of radio waves the sonic architecture of twentieth-century ethical thought" (31). To avail oneself of the unprecedented mass audience of the BBC, however, entailed inevitable negotiation with the institution's own moral agenda, as articulated by its sternly hieratic Director-General, John Reith. Avery usefully reiterates familiar arguments about the Arnoldian and evangelical bases for Reith's paternalistic conception of public service broadcasting as "a vehicle of national discipline" and cultural improvement (15). Following D. L. LeMahieu and media scholar Paddy Scannell, however, Avery argues that "radio was more unwieldy and less totalizable a technocultural phenomenon than the [BBC] administration wished it to be" (38); despite Reith's internal policing, he concludes, the BBC offered "a great practical flexibility to its broadcasters in terms of ethical positions" (139). Avery expertly traces the interplay between BBC internal politics and the broadcasting forays of various members of the Bloomsbury group, who, he argues, "wielded their belief in conversation, friendship, and internationalism as a tactical weapon against the relentlessly centripetal strategies" of Reith's administration (44). He ties this project to the progressive policies of Hilda Matheson, Head of Talks from 1927–32, whose "Brechtian" attitude towards radio, says Avery, led her to develop a model for an intimate style of broadcasting conducive to "oppositional politics" (48) and particularly suited to Bloomsbury ethical concerns, which he aligns with those of Emmanuel Levinas in their focus on the active acknowledgment of the Other. "Bloomsbury's lifelong fascination with . . . the ethics of conversation" thus carried, at this key moment in broadcast history, "an ideologically destabilizing and transformative potential" (51). Avery builds on the work of Kate Whitehead to limn intriguingly, though briefly, the contours of various Bloomsbury broadcasting careers; indeed, this chapter could have easily itself made up a book. Particularly valuable here are Avery's close reading of Woolf's 1937 "Craftsmanship" and his section on Desmond MacCarthy, whose centrality to BBC cultural programming is often overlooked. Avery is careful to indicate in his discussion of Matheson that the "intimate" mode of address (which became the recommended approach for most BBC talks) was employed for various purposes, and by broadcasters of varied ethical and political stripes.1 Yet by stressing—without citing a source—the "trepidation" the style caused Reith, he emphasizes its subversive qualities. This is an intriguing argument, though not supported sufficiently to be fully convincing, especially in light of the fact that BBC producers were from the outset concerned with developing techniques to insinuate programming "into the home atmosphere"; such domestication of the [End Page 581] medium was itself part of the Reithian agenda.2 Indeed, the tensions resulting from the paradoxical implications of such intimacy left their mark in modernist texts. Thus one wishes Avery had more fully developed his analysis of the imbrication of ethical content and the...

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Recent Reissues of British Electronic Music From 1955–1996

With the CD release this year by the British Library of Samuel Beckett's seven works written for BBC radio comes a chance to reevaluate the commercial releases from the effects studio that made these recordings possible, the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) Radiophonic Workshop. The Radiophonic Workshop (RW) was the BBC's in-house electronic music studio from 1958 to 1998. During those years, the workshop's largely anonymous composers wrote thousands of works for television and exerting an enormous influence on the development of electronic music in both the popular and, to a lesser extent, academic realms. For millions of people, including musicians and composers such as The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Luciano Berio, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and more recently, Orbital and the Pet Shop Boys, the RW was British electronic music. The kind of primitive but effective electronic tape music and effects employed in several of Beckett's works, available now for the first time on CD, quickly shifted to a more mainstream tonal style, before finally settling on a purely synthesizer-based model of composition by the early 1970s. This essay will sample a collection of recordings and DVDs from throughout the RW's history. In the beginning, the RW was in some ways the equivalent of the more famous Groupe de recherches musicales formed by Pierre Schaeffer for the production of musique concrete at the Parisian Radiodiffusion television francaise. The two studios initially shared similar methods of musical production, i.e., tape manipulation of recorded sounds and minimal electronic generation. In this, both studios differed from the predominantly electronically generated works emerging from the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio as populated by composers like Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Both the French and German studios, however, were accompanied by associated schools of composition; Schaeffer's complex system of objets sonores guided his studio's output, and the Germans saw their music as the continuation of the development of serial techniques. No such philosophical mandate controlled the direction of the RW's productions. Rather, owing to the overwhelmingly hostile reaction both French and German electronic music received from within the BBC's Music Department, individuals from within that same organization's Drama and Features Departments worked to create a commensurate electronic studio in Britain. Working outside the heated contemporary musical debates of the time, these two departments were able to forge a studio free from the particular ideological musical forces at work on the Continent. Two BBC producers in particular were the driving force behind its creation, broadcasting several early experiments in electronic music as part of dramatic productions. Douglas Cleverdon and Donald McWhinnie found inspiration in Schaeffer's experimentation with manipulated sounds, seeing a vast new area of fit for exploration. The growing desire in the mid-1950s for a wider array of effects in dramatic productions reflected a larger desire by British producers and playwrights for a new kind of production: what McWhinnie called pure radio, a blending of spoken dialogue, effects, and music into an entirely organic whole, and only possible in the medium of radio. (1) The emergence and popularity of a revolutionary new avant-garde continental theatre in the mid-fifties, the Theatre of the Absurd, gave these producers a new willingness to invest their productions with an anti-realist aesthetic that embraced techniques geared towards the odd, surreal, and distorted. This world, borrowed and expanded upon from comedy and science fiction, existed as a bridge between music and reality. By alienating its audience from a familiar reality, the works combined electronics and words in a way unique to Britain. The first of the productions utilizing radiophonic sound (the name chosen by the BBC for these new electro-musical effects in an attempt to avoid comparison with both Germanic elektronische Musik and French musique concrete) to gain serious critical and popular attention was Beckett's All That Fall (1957), the first play on the British Library's CD collection and Beckett's first work specifically for the medium of radio. …

BOOK REVIEW | Muhajababes

‘Muhajababes’ is hardly a title most academic journals would be interested in. But to ignore this book, which sets out to investigate the ‘new Middle East—cool, sexy and devout,’ purely because it targets a wide audience would be a grave mistake. In fact, there are very good reasons to take this book seriously. First, its author, Allegra Stratton, is herself a media professional (a BBC producer) who has valuable industry insight to bring to the study of Middle East media. Second, Stratton succeeds in moving ‘behind the scenes’[1] to look at industries of cultural production from the inside. She certainly does not neglect cultural consumers, but also investigates a range of producers and sites of production from Zen TV and Superstar auditions to EMI Arabia and Hizbullah’s Central Internet Bureau. Third, this book breaks the mould of popular literature on media and society in the Middle East. Out with Al Jazeera, democracy, terrorism, and Iraq; in with popular culture, fashion, TV preachers, and the hijab. For its willingness to ask questions about the trajectory of Arab Islamic modernity which are so often left unasked, this book deserves to be taken seriously. The book begins with an important insight: the population of the Middle East is younger and more educated than ever but remains locked in economic stagnation. As a recipe for long-term unrest, this predicament is the lens through which Stratton explores today’s generation of middle class Arab youth. Flitting from Beirut to Damascus the long way—via Amman, Cairo, Dubai, and Kuwait—this work leans more towards a ‘multi-site’ travelogue than a ‘multi-year’ ethnography; but then it never claims to be anything more than a piece of extended journalism. Exploring popular understandings of what it means to be young, Stratton finds two principle cultural developments—the rise of Prince Alaweed’s video-clips and the emergence of Islamic stars such as TV preacher Amr Khaled and singer Sami Yusuf. The equation she draws is that the ‘space between the video-clipper and the veiled-again’ is ‘diminishing.’(199) This is not cultural collision so much as cultural convergence; ultimately Stratton feels that alternative expressions of youth identity are being increasingly clouded out. In her view, the effect for young Arabs is ‘suffocating.’

Woman's hour at the women's library

This article, written by a BBC Producer, describes a Woman's Hour Radio Four programme that was broadcast from the new Women's Library, London Guildhall University, on Thursday 31 January 2002 to celebrate the Library's opening.

Portrayal of Violence in TV Programs New BBC Guidelines

The report of the BBC working party headed by Monica Sims on “The Portrayal of Violence in Television Programs” was published on March 21. The report contains suggestions for a revised note of guidance for BBC producers. (The last guidance was published in 1972.) At the launching of the report Alasdair Milne, Managing Director, BBC Television said, “I am glad the working party decided that the subject was far too complex to control through a simple list of ‘Thou Shalt not’ commandments. What is really required is that programs should continue to be made with a sense of care and responsibility.” The 56pp report looks at factual and fictional programs and programs for children and teenagers. Following is Appendix 2 which covers recent research on television and violence.

The Last Ten Years of English Poetry

Mr. Mac Beth, the poet and BBC producer, spoke informally to members of the poetry commission, and read a number of poems. The following account has been reconstructed from notes and a recording of that session.