Listening Projects: The BBC, Oral History, and the Nation in Fractured Times

ABSTRACT This article tunes in to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) heart-warming radio program, The Listening Project (TLP), aired from 2012 until 2022. Comparing TLP to its source model from the US, StoryCorps, to previous British public access broadcasting initiatives (such as Open Door and Video Nation), as well as to social media, I highlight the interests at stake in the BBC’s presentation of listening in the service of imagined national community, an idea echoed by the British Library’s Oral History department where the TLP interviews are archived. I posit that TLP’s homely chats between family, friends, or caring strangers—about everything from bath times to Brexit—reflect a feminist and forgiving public, nurtured by the BBC civic ideals. This can be enjoyed and valued as a counterweight to social media riven with postdemocratic, divisive nationalism. After introducing the scope and scale of the project, I explore criticisms of TLP as cozy confessions for comfortable BBC audiences. I go on to weigh them against the BBC’s in-house oral history, which reveals the broadcaster’s people and policies, including its struggles to be as well as shape a national community that is multicultural, diverse, and inclusive. I argue that the BBC’s decision through a partnership with the University of Sussex to open the archive as a public catalog and online guided exhibit in Voices of the BBC is a listening project in its own way. These very different forms of interviews confirm, however, the serious civic ambitions behind TLP. The conversations testify to everyday resilience in the face of a troubled and unequal modern Britain, but the project’s closure reflects how difficult it is for the BBC to fulfill its mission, values, and public purposes in fractured times.1

We should care about the British Broadcasting Corporation's history, present and future.Why?As the world's longest-running public service broadcaster, having turned one hundred in 2022, the BBC-as you may know it better-has an unparalleled reputation for trustworthy news, quality entertainment, and an educational mission.But for oral historians, it is also important because it has pioneered so much life history-based social documentary reporting.I focus in the next pages on its radio show The Listening Project (TLP) as a recent example, in which volunteers were invited to "have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before." 2 Launched in 2012, TLP was impressive, I argue, both for its large speech and inclusivity, and the opportunities that a life story-based approach might afford in enhancing tolerance.One of the insights and pleasures I hope to offer readers is that the evidence for this comes from the BBC's own inhouse oral history and other oral history projects on media production in the UK.These are wonderful resources recently brought together for easier public use, as I show.While in the first half of this article I situate TLP within other BBC projects and partnerships, I devote the second half to an in-depth explanation of what these collections have to offer those interested in media history, as well as the uses of oral history by broadcasters.
While I question the historic elitism of the BBC and respect the concerns of Freund and others about public storytelling being seen as some kind of simple social panacea, I argue that the idea of listening as a civic act is too important for oral historians to dismiss.Indeed, it is here that the underpinning structure of a broadcaster like the BBC, mandated to public service and largely nonprofit, 5 has an important role to play in modeling and maintaining this civic purpose, lifting the personal into the national and reframing the idea of the nation in doing so.I come to these points in the conclusion, where I also spell out exactly how challenging it is to uphold that civic purpose when the value of this kind of media is doubted by audiences and by politicians who determine the BBC's funding.

The Listening Project as "The Nation in Conversation"
Do you cock an ear to snippets of conversation heard on the bus or in a pub?Do you relish uplifting radio about real people's kitchen sink chats, perhaps when you are ironing, eating, or washing up?If so-and I do-you might have enjoyed TLP's airing of conversations between ordinary people around the UK.Lasting up to an hour, these "intimate conversations" were captured in a studio or traveling booth with one producer present, then edited "to extract the key moment of connection between the participants."The resulting threeminute features were broadcast across BBC local radio stations covering the UK, sometimes with phone-ins to expand a topic or with longer conversation, while national Radio 4 also played three conversations across the week in programs scripted by presenter Fi Glover, followed by a Sunday afternoon omnibus and clips, animations, and highlights posted online.At the time of this writing, these are still available to download from BBC Sounds. 6lover emphasized, "they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference." 7Introducing episodes as "Your chance to chat, our chance to listen," the TLP website outlines an aim "to capture the nation in conversation to build a unique picture of our lives today." 8Curator Jonnie Robinson, who oversees their permanent storage at the British Library, talks of them "becoming part of the listening life in the UK." 9 The first episode presented Chick, a former miner from Yorkshire, discussing his life with his granddaughter, Lindsay, who hopes to become a lawyer but still feels working class.Sasha, from Berkshire, and son, Paddy, who has an inherited heart condition, talked about life together at home.Alison and Willie, a couple in their midsixties from Northern Ireland, reflected on uncertainties as old age approaches.From Stoke on Trent, Paula and Maddie shared memories of Paula's comedian father. 10Illness, age, relationships, family, survival, home, work, and legacy -these were the stories that the "nation" apparently wished to share, even tenyear-old friends like Jesse and Roan imagining a sci-fi, climate-changed future, or sisters Claudia and Izzy on sisterly hierarchy. 11ational or international questions were certainly raised.At least fifty-two conversations concerned the UK referendum of 2016 triggering Brexit.Unlike mainstream media coverage, however, TLP featured people who know and care about each other revealing themes of separation, loss, and identity. 12riends Andy and Andrew, expats in France, share anxieties about the effect on their income. 13A German mother and her dual-citizen son share despair at possible forced expatriation; 14 others relate their minority ethnicity or gay identity to voting "Remain" (in the EU), 15 or concerns about business or nationalism. 16Some talked about fault lines between friends or family-a son who persuades his father to vote Remain, 17 as well as sons disappointed that their dad voted Leave. 18Fewer seemed in favor of Leave, though one couple shared mutual pleasure that their campaigning to leave had triumphed. 19A number reflect on the conundrums that Brexit brings to Northern Ireland-again, situated in the contexts of life stage, work, and relationships.Shane shares his worries about a career change and parenthood with friend Steven, who, working for political change through Northern Ireland's Alliance Party, speaks sadly of his partner's miscarriage. 20Young friends Zainab and Thandiwe speak of Brexit as part of a discussion about growing up as minority kids in South London-they thought predominantly white areas voted Leave.But stifling their giggles, they are just as interested in dancing the "ney ney" and their relationship with their mobile phones. 21e might interpret this texture in French scholar Michel de Certeau's terms as the "practice of everyday life," in which, through routine and tactical adjustment, ordinary people without special influence make sense of, and sometimes resist, broader political and economic conditions, weaving the immediate into the longer rhythms of life course. 22At the same time, TLP does not idealize the domestic as any simple haven.As the UK lived through COVID-19 lockdown, an omnibus TLP in May 2020 billed "When Talking Matters" included a mother and daughter talking about their late husband/ father's alcoholism and death: What would it be like if he were still living with them during lockdown? 23As the daughter asks why her mother stayed with a terrorizing husband and father, we hear loving memories of tiny covert expressions of solidarity.The mother acquiesces in a quiet, middle-class voice, at times trying not to cry.This heart-rending critique of family relations is tempered by much lighter discussions, such as a reprise of a pre-COVID feature on a quite different family in which an older sister admires her younger sister's transformation to a nearly responsible adult, having moved from Belfast to Calgary; they laugh together about a washing-up (dish) brush whose handle can be filled with Fairy dishwashing liquid.
"Warning: this program contains reference to travel for fun, world adventures, Canadian prairies," introduces TLP's presenter Fi Glover wryly.This archetypal leaving home story feels good because family endures through the miles and the talk.The program concludes with another redemptive (if apparently unremarkable) chat, as "Acquaintances share how they are managing their time in lockdown and the things they have in common"; a man living alone talks with his married neighbor in Wales.
TLP's homely content in some ways echoes early YouTube and Facebook cats, kids, jokes, and community noticeboards, blended with the informal "snap" aesthetic of Instagram, and the occasional "clown/rebel" voice of TikTok. 24Yet TLP is articulated more as an alternative to social media, a repudiation of its promotional and violent forms.This reflects the mechanism and motive for participation through the BBC.This is especially true for those who listen to local or regional radio, or national Radio 4. TLP's web page features silhouetted abstract heads in profile against colored square backgrounds, differentiated by the outline of an ear on the central head.But the site's most prominent image is a motif of two mugs of tea on a kitchen table, patterned in blue: the national beverage, drunk not from fancy cups, the tea bags steeping.Just touching rims, handles facing outwards, the mugs converse as we should, trustingly, about the world from home.
The people who are featured over ten years are in no sense a representative sample of the British population.As previously stated, there were more voices supporting Remain in the programming (about membership of the EU), though Leave gained 52 percent of the vote.But the British Library and the BBC monitored the spread and fed back to TLP's producers which groups were underrepresented (and where), and the program took its booth and publicity around the country attempting to redress imbalances.By its final episode, conversations numbered approximately 2,300, and its demographic roughly corresponded to the UK's percentage of ethnicities, religions, and income, except for the very rich and the very poor, and a few regions. 25This diversity of the separate nations within the UK is also audibly reflected in its range of accents and idioms.Indeed, linguists are studying the long-form interviews at the British Library as examples of language use, including gender differences. 26Fifty-five percent of TLP speakers reported as female, 44 percent male, and 1 percent as other genders (though the latter category was more explicitly captured from 2017). 27Occupations were mostly retired, student, or working in arts/media, with relatively few from finance or professional services.The number of recordings averaged two hundred per year, dropping during the pandemic.Nine hundred thirty-five recordings were made in BBC studios, 598 in the traveling Listening Booth, 727 elsewhere (mostly participants' homes).Nine hundred seventy-one conversations were between family members or partners, more than eighty were between strangers, and eight speakers recorded solo, mainly addressing a deceased loved one.The program featured ten sets of twins and five speakers aged more than one hundred years. 28ot all who applied were accepted, sometimes because the topic was well covered (presenter Glover cited palliative care or "let's look back on a life" stories), other times because the producers considered the applicant was looking for revenge or therapy, or expecting something the program could not fulfill. 29Nor was every conversation broadcast, largely because of the sheer number.TLP thus reflects and constructs an idea of the public through rhetoric, thematization, and curation.It calls on an idea of "listening" and of "the nation," which is diverse, redemptive, and capacious, guaranteed by the BBC's mission "to act in the public interest."But this is no propaganda.As communications scholar Paddy Scannell has theorized, it instead epitomizes the way that ordinary people talking about ordinary topics on radio can repeople and make real abstract ideals of community, sociality, equal access, and communicative rights. 30This is further supported by the British Library's own mission to provide "living knowledge-for everyone." 31

Precedents and Partners: StoryCorps, the BBC, and the British Library
The concept of TLP comes from the nonprofit US venture StoryCorps, whose mission is to record, preserve, and share the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs.StoryCorps grew out of Sound Portraits Productions, founded in 2003 by radio producer David Isay, who gathered interviews via a "StoryBooth" in Grand Central Terminal in New York City.This was followed in 2005 by two "MobileBooths" in the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center (AFC) and the launch of weekly broadcasts on NPR's Morning Edition.Blessed by oral history titan Studs Terkel as celebrating the lives of the uncelebrated, these quick, unscripted conversations by two people who know each other gained an appreciative audience, scooped awards, and generated spin-off bestseller publications and television premieres. 32toryCorps also developed themed collections, including its 2008 "Griot initiative" (forming "the largest collection of African-American stories collected in history"), commemorations of the September 11 terrorist attacks, an LGBTQI "Outloud" initiative, and its 2017 Justice Project to preserve and amplify the stories of those impacted by mass incarceration.
StoryCorps caught the eye of BBC Commissioning Editor of Arts Tony Phillips, who had long admired African American oral history. 33He won the backing of Gwyneth Williams, Controller of BBC Radio 4, who then brought Isay and the StoryCorps team to London to train BBC producers, including in how to record and manage potentially ethically sensitive conversations. 34The British Library got involved via Director Roly Keating and Rob Perks, then Head of Oral History, who agreed to house the full recordings, allowing permanent public access: paralleling StoryCorps' collaboration with the US Library of Congress.In both projects, participants hope to be recorded for posterity.AFC StoryCorps Digital Innovation Lab director Nicole Sayer points out that relatives often come purposefully to Washington, DC, to hear a loved one's voice, when they could easily do so on their phone at home. 35This suggests a striking desire to feel part of a symbolic, country-wide community.These national libraries offer distinctive investments in the projects, authenticating their value as national treasures, as data for researchers, as digital experiments (StoryCorps developed an app for recording during the COVID-19 pandemic), and as a source for the AFC's Ethnographic Thesaurus.
But Glover insists "we are British, so our version is a bit different." 36StoryCorps' tagline is "listening is an act of love," while the BBC with the British Library aimed to create an "archive of modern times."TLP is funded by the BBC license fee as opposed to StoryCorps' funding by donations and members.In fact, TLP descends from specifically British genealogies: the Mass Observation social research project begun in 1937, 37 as well as the British Library's Oral History department, whose roots entwine with socialist "history from below" movements of the 1960s. 38Paul Thompson's memories of the first national meeting of oral historians in 1969 note how this was quite independent from the American oral history ventures of the time.Moreover, the society's first chairman, Theo Barker, argued from the outset that the BBC (and the British Library) should be involved, though connections took time and evolved alongside a fiercely grassroots approach. 39The BBC's CPU from 1973 to 2002 gave the "marginalised, unheard, and ignored" the opportunity to make programs under their own editorial control, as did the Disability Unit from 1992 to 2002. 40The Domesday project of 1985 aimed to create a twentieth century version of the legendary nine-hundred-year-old snapshot of English life, the Domesday Book. 41More than a million people submitted photographs and written accounts of their ordinary lives and local geographies.In another BBC-British Library collaboration, the 1997-98 The Century Speaks, 5,500 regionally produced "oral histories from and about community life" were archived as The Millennium Memory Bank. 42The CPU's Video Diaries, later Video Nation, ran from 1994 to 2000.These too were pitched as a democratization of the historical record. 43Contributors across the UK were given a Hi-8 camera to film their everyday lives, from which some 1,300 shorts were edited and televised. 44Video Nation survived until 2011 as online participation became easier, inviting views on the London 2012 Olympic Games, or "films about your own high street and help create a bit of living history." 45It also called for "ordinary people with EXTRAordinary true stories." These exercises in participatory media evidently reflect technological development, as any oral historian will appreciate.It is also interesting to consider how often the BBC's Research and Development arm has been involved, notably in the Domesday project, which was promoted through the BBC's pioneering schools' computer.Video Nation offered training in using early camcorders. 46TLP's investment in production was similarly intensive; relationships with speakers were sometimes maintained long after the program.Despite the understated presentation-a gentle piano jingle introduces two voices talking-this was a large and complex set of relationships to manage, and Glover insisted that the producers for each conversation were credited by name.Kay Richardson theorized TLP as a prime example of nonbelligerent, "caring" radio that depends on exceptional coordination where broadcaster and participants collaborate in evading, minimizing, and redressing potential conflict. 47Glover remembers the team's astonished laughter at the press launch at the British Library when a journalist for News International (now News UK) asked if they'd consider tapping people's phones to listen to conversations.
It's never there to trip people up, I mean, that's the difference, isn't it?I mean, reality TV no matter how you might try and sell it, it's about waiting for someone to do something stupid or salacious or fall out or, you know, make a fool of themselves. 48

Critiques of Public Storytelling in the Intimate Publics of Post-democracy
We will return to TLP's work and the BBC's strategic interests in "caring" programming shortly.Let me first offer a wider perspective on the socioeconomic shifts they speak to, including the growing phenomenon of public storytelling itself.Women's greater enfranchisement and presence in the labor market is one key to understanding the focus on domestic work, body politics, and sexual experiences, for instance.Nicole Matthews had already made this point about Video Nation in the 1990s, contrasting it to the street scenes, sports fields, and pubs of the 1930s Mass Observation project.Matthews interpreted this as a significant move in British public culture, expressing feminist conceptions of the public sphere that acknowledge mutual dependencies and emotional life. 49The rights gained by disabled people and sexual and gender minorities in the UK since the 1990s can likewise be related to a model of community that includes coming-out conversations, cancer support groups, and dyslexia pride, some of which are touchingly animated on TLP project pages. 50We may assume that this more inclusive model of public life is to be celebrated.But, as Nicole Matthews warned already of Video Nation, such use of first-person media, even when managed through consent and ethical guidance, involves cultures of self-surveillance and guilty confession.Oral historian Alexander Freund has vocally critiqued the StoryCorps format and its counterparts in the UK, Australia, and Canada on similar grounds, arguing they have more in common with a fashion for public autobiography than they admit.The setup of two people chatting in a livingroom styled booth evokes emotion because catharsis is programmed in; its cultural script, already brought by the participants, is enhanced by the quasitherapeutic set up and shaped by editing and website curation.The ensuing stream of three-minute stories of "hardship and eventual triumph" cumulatively reinforces neoliberal values of competitive individualism, in which survival (or victimhood) becomes the currency of identity promotion.Where public disasters are shared, these formats depoliticize. 51More subtly, they may capture the deep desire by the working or lower middle classes to avoid or disengage with the political forces that shape (or even ruin) their life chances.
We could interpret the feminized character of these "intimate publics" (which "usually flourish to one side of politics," as Lauren Berlant put it) as bringing men into the same indirect relation to protest that women traditionally occupied. 52Video Nation again seems a harbinger of how in TLP, a personalized nation involves self-surveillance.While the former arose at the same time as reality TV, TLP must navigate the far more thorough "microcelebrification" and commodification of the first-person story promoted through social media platforms. 53Consider again the episode on domestic violence in lockdown as a cathartic and deeply intimate conversation in the context of social media's use by "manosphere" advocates.I am not equating TLP with such use, of course, but rather acknowledging the complexity of media and mediation through which such material must make its way, as well as how the BBC's own presenters use social media themselves-Fi Glover, for example, regularly promoted TLP on Twitter.
Underpinning this is an ideology of "storytelling" or public talk about oneself across the modern West, which promises "miracle cures" of healing from trauma-socially, politically, and personally-while evading analysis of the inequalities which shape our everyday lives. 54Although the roots of this storytelling include the democratization of public life and legal equalities since the social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, they equally grow from motivational business and public relations.In the extreme precarity and inequality characteristic of post-Fordist capitalism, we might describe TLP as another facet of "positive thinking," or even as "cruel optimism" of "survival tacticians" who share personal accounts of "not being defeated by what is overwhelming" in times of downward mobility and political turbulence. 55reund, writing in 2014, was also concerned about the way that such storytelling could be used or instrumentalized on a larger scale by insurgent antidemocratic movements.In the era of populism, he considers that StoryCorps-style interviewing for survivor stories ironically silences citizen critique.Since Freund's objections a decade ago, these tensions have become even greater.Far-right politics is mobilizing, often in postdemocratic situations where "strong leader" populists have gained power.Hypercompetition in a global capitalist economy is accompanied by dramatically increasing inequality and anger from those who feel dispossessed, as well as those claiming first-time rights.We see social and broadcast media at the forefront, with poorly regulated digital platforms accused of interfering in elections through algorithmic targeting, a flood of trolling and shaming, and a rightwing counterculture promoting its own coming-out, confessions, and rights to be heard while promulgating an absolutist model of free speech that is divorced from or overrides governmental, social, or media governance.Here a "storytelling" assertion of identity and intimacy may easily demonize or challenge minorities or majorities who have come to or fought for public representation, while the nation has become a reinvigorated imaginary for anti-immigrant nationalists.
In this context, Mohit Bakaya, who replaced Gwyneth Williams as Radio 4 Controller in 2019, asked TLP to encourage applications from individuals to converse with strangers on a topic of disagreement.This followed StoryCorps' 2017 initiative "One Small Step," described as "an effort to remind the country of the humanity in all of us, even those with whom we disagree." 56Glover further explained this new direction on the website.Reassuring listeners they have "no intention of turning our Listening Project Booth, or any of our local radio studios into dens of aural iniquity," with the "cacophonous noise" of our "polarised times," she continued, Perhaps someone whose life you brush past on a regular basis but would actually like to know more about.Someone who you pass by in your everyday life who you think "I wonder what their life is really like?" Someone on your street, someone at your work, someone in your neighbourhood whose opinion you'd like to hear-and vice versa.We'd like the TLP to become a public space where you don't just bump into someone and rush on-but a place where you can stop and make time to find a bit more of a connection. 57 the program's final year, TLP conversations had become less domestic and more issue-shaped.The episode billed as "Who are we?" in July 2021 featured Laurie from Stroud (which topped a "best place to live" list) chatting to town crier Les in Halifax (featured in a top ten list of "worst places to live"); Lee, from Belfast, who supports Northern Ireland's union with Great Britain and Andrew, from Glasgow, who supports independence for Scotland, discussing devolution and what being British means to them; and Shabir and Niki sharing the struggles of applying for British citizenship. 58In July 2022, Norman and Steve remembered the Miners' Strike of 1984-one a former striker, the other a young policeman who kept order on the picket lines; Ayesha and Imran talked about Muslim representation in the media and the positive impact of Ms. Marvel, a new Disney series with a female Muslim superhero. 59A new motto capped the web page: "Bringing Britain together, one conversation at a time," with links to other programs, such as on what happens cognitively "to your brain when you get offended" or "why talking to strangers will improve your mind." 60The mission remains the same-to provide a space for people to talk to each other and more importantly, to listen," says the BBC website.At issue in this heightened conception of listening are shifting ideas of the public sphere, as well as what opportunities they offer the BBC in the conflicted, pluralized media marketplace of twenty-first-century intimate publics.To consider this, let us go further behind the scenes via a very different set of interviews created by the BBC: its own staff members in its institutional archive.Here we will also go back to the long history of popular documentary initiatives in the BBC before returning to the implications for TLP.

Corporate Listening and the Oral History of the BBC
Initiated by Frank Gillard (former director of BBC Radio and going strong in 2023 as I write), the Oral History of the BBC is a relatively little-known project and archive. 61I hold a special interest in this project as part of the team at the University of Sussex funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council to help bring the archive to the public through a digital catalog. 62ut the oral history of the BBC is rich, evidenced by the BBC programming and history I discuss here, and it concerns not only media history but also race relations, the role of producers, as well as how TLP/StoryCorps reprise pioneering access television from the 1970s.Thus, in this article, I explore what it can tell us about the BBC's policies and practices of public access media.What, relatedly, does it convey about its internal listening and its internal imagined community?Spending time with the history of the organization helps us appreciate what is at stake in TLP as a civic initiative and how this works with the preference for consensus within the BBC.It also helps us understand what oral history itself means to the organization.
The oral history project began in 1975 as sound only, switching to film and video in 1985 when it became part of television production under the banner "Reminiscences of the BBC."Gillard's associations with the BBC went back to 1935, and as he helped with a fiftieth anniversary reception at Broadcasting House in 1972, his idea of interviewing "stalwarts" and "leading captains" was encouraged by his successor, Ian Trethowan. 63Along with veterans of the BBC's pretelevision days, Gillard sought to record staff who could illuminate the BBC's contribution to the development of the art of broadcasting and its role in politics and culture. 64To date, it contains some 650 interviews, from directors-general through to personalities such as David Attenborough, pioneering editors of political programmes such as Grace Wyndham Goldie, and influential producers such as Sydney Newman (responsible for creating the Doctor Who TV series).
Interviewed several times himself, Gillard acknowledged that "the printed record of the BBC, of course, has been well taken care of."He continued, "But books can't speak.And they cannot produce moving pictures and this supplementary oral record, alongside the printed account, provides the BBC with a 'broadcastable' version of its Radio and Television story." 65Gillard knew that the BBC's internal workings are of historical importance, from its incorporation in 1926 to its governance on the basis of a royal charter and its everpresent, often tetchy negotiations with governments over public license fee funding and independence. 66He was adamant that the oral history would follow the BBC's broadcast principle of "fair balance."While sensitive content could be embargoed during a speaker's lifetime, he would seek to interview anyone that an interviewee spoke unfavorably about, with "total editorial freedom" to back it up. 67Part of the oral history's interest lies in humanizing this immense corporation, particularly as staff had experienced the Second World War.Gillard spoke passionately about the BBC's wartime significance as a new BBC, and it was a BBC that was, I would say, totally identified with the life of ordinary, everyday people.Every day, twice a day, you had these sessions of Music While You Work . . .you had Workers' Playtime broadcast from factories . . .variety stars entertaining workers and so on.The emphasis was all that way.The BBC was with the people we were doing something that was important for the morale of the country, we were part of the great national war-effort. 68is "absolutely revolutionised" the BBC, 69 and after the war, three national radio networks were launched to offer something for everyone while maintaining a balance between leading and following public taste, reflecting the Corporation's view of itself as citizen-maker.John Arkell, director of administration overseeing human resources from 1949 to 1970 and an advocate for friendly trade union relations, spoke of "the public service angle" as the key to staff's high morale: "It sounds very, perhaps rather pompous and priggish, but an enormous number of people did enormously value the fact that they were doing something of national importance." 70y the 1960s, however, the BBC was forced to acknowledge that it was out of touch with the nation.Independent television repeatedly scored higher ratings for prime-time entertainment, while pirate radio stations were stealing youth audiences.This reflected many things, including the BBC's complacency, rights obligations, relations with the trade unions, an incipient right-wing backlash against the Corporation's perceived liberalization under Director-General Hugh Carleton-Greene on the one hand, and criticisms about BBC elitism by new social movements on the other.But it also reflected its personnel.The oral history of Robin Scott, controller of the Light Programme in the 1960s and then BBC2, captures the tension.We hear him explaining how he launched Radios 1 and 2 in 1967 in the face of internal opposition, poaching the pirate radio star DJ Tony Blackburn, dispensing with scripts, and introducing jingles and "self-operating" studios. 71We also hear about his life: public school before Cambridge, wartime service, and thirty years with the BBC.Dubbed the "White Tornado" due to his "distinctive flock of white hair and the fact that he was always rushing around," 72 Scott's interview is fascinating for his cultural brokerage and the personal acts of translation between management, producers, and listeners as the BBC entered the 1970s.

Open Door: The Original "Listening Project"
But it is Scott's description of how he agreed in 1972 to the BBC's first public access media experiment, Open Door, that is most relevant to TLP's later ambitions.Scott learned of the idea from Gillard, who had written about an experimental "people's radio" show on American WGBH in Boston.David Attenborough, then director of programs, appointed Scott and iconoclastic producer Rowan Ayers to create a BBC television version, in Scott's words, as a "Speakers' Corner of the air." 73The BBC Governors agreed but demanded reassurances that an editorial and overview board would prohibit cranks or political opportunists.Open Door attracted sufficient viewers (notably with an episode on cystitis sufferers) such that, by 1973, a CPU was founded.Scott remembers that its directors (Paul Bonner, and subsequently Mike Fentiman and Tony Laryea) were dedicated to "bringing out of people the message that they wanted to get across" in contrast to what he considered the "let it all hang out" approach of the American model, which in his and Attenborough's view resulted in boring viewing. 74ike Phillips, however, presents a more nuanced picture.Interviewed not by Gillard but by David Hendy for the University of Sussex-BBC Centenary oral history, Phillips articulates a struggle for self-representation within, as well as outside, the Corporation.Joining Open Door in 1973, he recalls colleagues who were "all nice people" but laments the lack of Black or working-class producers and broadcasters and the prevailing culture: "The sense of who was entitled to speak and who was not entitled to speak, was stifling." 75At a time when a Black British second generation was coming of age, "trying to decide who the hell we were," Phillips contends that a program like Caribbean Magazine, which he was asked to work on, failed to grasp the differences between what its Caribbean and local audiences wanted, the producers featuring "any black person who did anything, walked down the street." 76Phillips tried to bring meaning to the program, but in Manchester in 1975, documented in a memo revealingly headed "antipathy in immigrant areas," he found himself "confronted with an entire community which was neither impressed nor interested by the fact that the BBC was doing a programme about them." 77hillips was, therefore, another kind of broker.Working for the BBC had crystallized his own sense of identity precisely because he was in such a minority, and yet, uncomfortably at times, also conferred power within its clever, ideas-testing community. 78n this context, Phillips describes the invitation to present his own views of race on Open Door as "kind of astonishing."Also unusual, but reassuring, was that the approach came from Tony Laryea, a "mixed race producer" who was the "only one in the news strand."He led the resulting program, Black Teacher, in which Phillips and others implore viewers to understand why they are so "passionately angry about the prospects of black kids in schools." 79 this hour was abnormal.And we realised that they weren't-they weren't asking us to make a BBC programme.They were asking us to use our own voices to speak for ourselves.Which we did. 80 the other hand, Tony Laryea's oral history, recorded for the British Entertainment History Project (BEHP), 81 illuminates what was still "normal."He recounts how Head of Light Entertainment Bill Cotton defended The Black and White Minstrel Show as necessary to win the scheduling war with Independent Television (ITV), the UK's primary free-access commercial broadcaster: "Racism writ large on the BBC," remembers Laryea.The show (which featured white people in blackface) ran until 1978. 82"They were aware that there was a lack of black presence or an Asian presence within the BBC both in front and behind the cameras," he continues.Cotton asked Laryea to head a recruitment initiative to get more Black people into the BBC, but he refused."I liked programming too much," he says; moreover, he felt "institutionalised" and not sufficiently a "firebrand."He did, however, help recruit twelve young Black filmmakers, develop the pioneering series The Black Man in Britain with Phillips via the BBC's Continuing Education Unit, and in 1985, became head of the CPU. 83"The BBC was sort of establishment," he explains, while Open Door gave the mic to "loads of unrepresented or misrepresented ideas and communities out there." 84 These included "women's groups, sexual minorities, libertarians, trade unionists, transsexuals, cleaners, vegans" (the latter being the Monty Python members' favorite cheer-up program), among others.
For Laryea, Open Door was part of democratizing the BBC itself. 85Phillips, too, considered it "quite ground-breaking," remembering the disdain of the "hardened journalists" who thought that "all we were talking about was our own experience." 86In fact, Laryea's successor, Paul Bonner, went on to suggest that "public access media" was bringing in what he called "the subjective dimension" in a 1976 report he submitted to the Annan Committee on the Future of Broadcasting. 87This was a harbinger of the first-person documentaries in the 1990s with Video Diaries and Video Nation, launched by Laryea, in which newly accessible video cameras gave people "even more control." 88This golden age of the CPU was feminist, disability-inclusive, and youth-centered.But its individualized approach allowed the literalism of identity politics, as well as ethical blurriness, and was eventually overtaken by reality TV-just as we have seen regarding Alexander Freund's concerns about StoryCorps.Video Diaries's proto-YouTube confessionals can be visualized through the example of a woman speaking to the camera while her pregnancy test results come through with her partner sleeping behind her.Further, as professionals learned to mobilize the shaky, handheld look, the authenticity could become more format than substance.By 1994, only half the broadcast slots went to the public, with the other half given to media producers.Budget cuts led to the end of the CPU in 2002. 89he promises of the "Subjective Dimension," as Bonner foresaw, contained another danger.If the BBC rescinded editorial control, then who was to prevent abuse, whether by politicians or malevolent community groups?Despite the promises of advisory board oversight, Scott admitted to Gillard, we knew we were on dangerous ground. . . .And we fairly soon ran into trouble because politicians objected to certain things, and we had to sort of semi give right to reply on one occasion when the rights of old age pensioners were being paraded.But this was part and parcel of the thing; there was bound to be that sort of trouble. 90rhaps most ominous was the decision in 1976 to allow the British Stop Immigration Group to "have its say in its own way" via Open Door.Anti-racist groups complained that the program incited racial hatred, likely contravened the nascent Race Relations Bill, and compromised the program's terms and conditions since the anti-immigration campaigners were linked with the fascist National Front.Astonishingly, the BBC later aired the program a second time. 91The solution was again the "right to reply."Open Door screened It Ain't Half Racist Mum from the Campaign Against Racism in the Media (fronted by actress Maggie Steed and cultural critic and BBC Open University presenter Stuart Hall), which criticized the BBC itself. 92But when BBC presenter Robin Day subsequently complained about how he had been represented in it, the governors apologized to him.

The Challenge of Open Media in Divided Societies
The principle of self-representation sat uneasily alongside the BBC's confident sense of itself as enlightened authority.Bonner's "Subjective Dimension" report acknowledged that the British Stop Immigration Group program tested the principles of "access broadcasting" but also the BBC's primary commitment to impartiality. 93Laryea explains, "what you've got to remember is that the BBC was all about balance.But of course, these were effectively propaganda programs made by members of the public under their own editorial control. . . .So, we were sort of juggling the argument about balance over time or balance within a series of programs." 94In contrast, Laryea proudly cites "Taking Liberties," where miners were given editorial control to argue about police abuse and indeed, BBC misreporting during the Miners' Strike of 1984. 95Again, the BBC Governors insisted the police should have the right to reply.Though "we all objected at the time," Laryea concludes, "it was a small price to pay."He laughs, "there were always people who were unhappy about the 'Communist Party Unit' " (the senior managers' name for the CPU), but "it was sort of tolerated." 96ut the difficulty of maintaining "balance over time" (and more fundamentally, the BBC's very place in a world of dizzying social and technological change) vividly anticipates TLP's challenges.Bonner's Report put his finger on the fact that "people who want to use access airtime are likely to be those who feel that there is a bias against them-or a neglect of their viewpoint in television generally."Critically, in a society increasingly divided against itself . . .an increasing number of groups (and individuals) feel that their viewpoints on social and political issues are distinctive, important and should be heard by the nation.This is a potentially healthy process, and access broadcasting is the only open forum for that sort of national debate.Giving access to these divergent views may be seen as a threat to the balance of broadcasting-in the same way that the very pluralism that gives rise to this demand is seen by some as a threat to the national democratic structure. 97nner concluded that a more open media platform was worth the risk, to be treated as "a matter of care rather than fear." 98He himself left the BBC to help establish Channel 4 in 1980.For him, audience dislike of overt propaganda would keep political interference and harm in check.Indeed, he suggests that allowing the Stop Immigration Group helped expose its extremism while puncturing the view of a "conspiracy of silence between politicians and the media" on the topic."Perhaps the only truly objective broadcasting is subjective broadcasting perceived by an objective audience," he perceptively wondered. 99e see then that devolving editorial control or sharing technology does not necessarily reveal a tolerant public.Rather, the oral histories expose how the BBC's attempt to address the nation as a whole was fraying as constituencies diversified in the 1970s.They also mark the moment when public access philosophy intersected with a growing trend to commercialize and challenge the BBC-ITV duopoly.Finally, they show how the BBC's own staff demography needed diversifying.Here the history of the oral history itself is relevant.Gillard's interviewees were senior leaders, leading practitioners, celebrity personalities, or politicians.His method-invite them to his London Club to agree to an interview schedule-exemplifies institutional exclusiveness, despite its ideal of a public sphere of voices engaged in rational conversation. 100In contrast, BEHP, which launched in 1987 and interviewed Laryea, selected interviewees to reveal the working lives of media professionals and practitioners, reflecting the founder partnership of BECTU (the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph, and Theatre Union) and the project's reliance on volunteers.The criteria for the Sussex-BBC Centenary Collection, which includes Mike Phillips, explicitly sought people who were underrepresented in the original collection, exploring experiences of social justice and their own media childhoods and choices.So, while we must acknowledge Gillard's catalyzing role and his love of listening (he had been head of radio), we can also discern the limited range of his interview choices.
Thankfully, under Robert Seatter, who took over direction of BBC History in 2009, selection criteria and interview questions have become more critical and socially contextualized, the focus having widened to include organizational cultures, with bespoke LGBTQI and minority ethnic collections being created. 101Seatter also invited David Hendy to write a new book on the BBC as "authorised historian" for the Centenary; the invite came without pay but access to the hitherto unprocessed collection of oral histories. 102It was on this basis that Hendy and others (including myself at the University of Sussex) secured funding from the UK's Arts and Humanities Council to work with Seatter and his colleague John Escolme on a six-year project, "The Connected Histories of the BBC (CHBBC)." 103This concluded with the launch in October 2022 of a free, public, searchable online catalog giving access to more than 420 interviews across seven collections.Other partners played important roles-Mass Observation, the Science Museum Group, and BEHP.Scott's, Laryea's, and Phillips's interviews are there to explore.And the quotes in this article take advantage of the catalog's technology in hyperlinking directly to the relevant section in the interview-simply click to listen and/or view. 104Further, Hendy, Alban Webb, and others enriched dozens of oral history clips in "Voices of the BBC," a series of critically themed collections hosted on the BBC's own web pages.Hop over to Hendy's reflections on Open Door within an edition on "People, Nation, Empire": this lets you listen to Scott, Laryea, and Phillips; watch Phillips on Open Door itself; read the extraordinary minutes of the meeting about the protest against racism on the program; and download Bonner's report. 105e Listening Project: Evolution and Ending TLP, as discussed, has benefited from its own archival access partnership, in which the British Library offers the full-length recordings online, catalogued and supported by summaries of each conversation.Negotiated between British Library Director Roly Keating, Rob Perks (then British Library Oral History Lead Curator), and the BBC, this complements the BBC's TLP site.We might wonder why the BBC has not opened TLP's archives itself.After all, as the BBC's first director of archive content, Keating had a responsibility to maximize public access to its constantly expanding TV, radio, and multimedia content. 106The answer is that public access must be paid for somehow and by someone, and it is difficult to sustain, particularly if ethical and legal concerns are protected.The BBC's vast archive-and 250-strong team in 2023-was principally developed for broadcasting and record-keeping, not public access. 107These projects point to the challenges for traditional gatekeeping institutions as they balance responsibilities to new, diversifying publics and shrinking government budgets.Perks sees the British Library's support of TLP as "ideally in a linked data ecosystem not a BBC walled garden." 108t was in this spirit that I interviewed TLP's presenter Fi Glover in 2020 for the Sussex-BBC Centenary collection within the CHBBC project.Glover's love and identification with TLP was audible.Forty years removed from Open Door's experiment and surrounded by competing "brands," she remained convinced that it was unique in its regional, devolved, and caring production process alongside its "editorial clean sheet," allowing greater broadcast freedom. 109She revealed a whole career of positive everyday life broadcasting which, as with Phillips and Laryea, suggested how public access styles and feminist approaches together had influenced broadcasting from within.We see this from her Greater London Radio Breakfast Show where she "drove the desk" 110 to her magazine show based on listeners' domestic experiences, created to succeed the legendary DJ John Peel's Home Truths.Her trademark "glass half full" illuminated a World Service program of that name, where she chaired debates between optimists and pessimists.These ingredients blended in her most personal project, the hit podcast Fortunately . .., in which she and Jane Garvey rambunctiously played with "the subjective dimension" as they rambled and camped up with guests from showbiz "sharing stories they probably shouldn't." 111rom this perspective, Glover rejected criticisms that TLP was a weak form of oral history and cautiously supported Controller Mohit Bakaya's shift in the format, then still in planning, from conversations between those who knew each other to strangers who disagreed.She also backed efforts to attract the missing younger listeners to Radio 4, the rootstock of BBC broadcasting where its highest standards and emotional tone is set. 112More than ten million tune into Radio 4 each day, but teen listeners are rare. 113Admitting "it's not quite of your own volition as it is now," she cautioned that the BBC cannot and should not compete in a "race to the bottom." 114Reflecting on fears for her children online, Glover spoke of the BBC's need to be a constructive part of the digital world.
But this change in TLP proved a tall order, taking more production, not less, to engineer conversations between strangers while maintaining trust.The fundamental sound of the program was altered as the overlapping, laughing, or interrupting between intimates was replaced by mini-monologues and careful turn-taking.There may be more "listening," but the distinctive texture of everyday resilience is lost.Moreover, in 2022, Glover left the BBC for Times Radio to cohost a live, news-focused show Off Air with Garvey, a reboot of Fortunately . . . . 115Whether this reflected her frustration at the BBC's gender pay gap (Glover complained eloquently about this as a member of the group "Sound Women" in her oral history) or other opportunities the BBC could not match, TLP's dependence upon the Corporation's investment remains clear.The same year, Bakaya made the difficult decision to close the show.Its new format had not obviously increased the youth audience, and structure remained expensive relative to other forms of radio.Freund suggested that the storytelling labor market is "built on the ruins of print journalism, academic tenure, and the welfare state." 116The oral histories convey a less apocalyptic portrait of a BBC community increasingly aware of its need to connect, for legitimacy as well as audience, and serious about documenting its efforts to do so.But that does not come free.

Conclusion: Listening and Resistance
Listening has ideological significance in fractured times.In a world of diminishing attention spans, active listening has seeded from therapeutic frameworks into a good practice tool for corporate leaders and marketeers.In media contexts, there are clear political goals: listening to manage complaints, cancel culture, and culture wars in a world of intimate publics and competition for audiences.At the same time, listening is invoked as one response to ultralibertarian or New Right demands for freedom of speech without moderation or responsibility for consequence.This has given extra frequencies to StoryCorps' motto that "listening is an act of love."Virgina Millington from its Library of Congress team explains that they have rules around hate speech and derogatory language, but anyone can record an interview. 117TLP was covered by the BBC's editorial policies prohibiting hate speech unless justified by a reporting context. 118During the lockdown in 2020, TLP episodes included "The Power of Conversation," "The Power of Chat," and "When Talking Matters."Here we note the absence of far-right nationalists, "manosphere" women-haters, or religious fundamendalists, along with an emphasis on individuals volunteering to converse personally on largely personal topics.This contrasts with Open Door's attempt to manage a fragmenting civil society by handing the mic to community and campaign groups, including (briefly) the Far Right, nominally balanced through the right to reply.
Yet, as I hope I have shown, we need not be as skeptical as Freund in how we interpret this merging of history with "storytelling."StoryCorps has helped revive US public radio and works within an infrastructure that has much in common with the community and could even be considered anticapitalist, with interests that are often found in oral history.In particular, it has partnered with schools, libraries, and support organizations that focus on populations such as veterans or people with dementia. 119The Library of Congress benefits from StoryCorps' popular appeal (now the most used collection in the AFC), staging "public listening sessions" with groups such as the Muslim American Leadership Alliance.As Kate Lacey stated in an analysis of earlier radio cultures, active "listening out" is reconstructed as a collective, civic practice against the privatized, personalized auditory stream of social media. 120With TLP in turn, the mantra of listening (both between citizens and between people working in BBC's regions and headquarters, as well as the British Library) aimed to pry open Little Englandism (i.e., the criticism that the English are overly parochial) within a narrative of tolerance and inclusion that builds on decades of participatory public access broadcasting, often at the cutting edge of the BBC's own practices.The British Library's public archive also offers ongoing public engagement through invitations to art students to animate the conversations, training for healthcare staff in listening techniques, and training for businesses in how to boost social confidence.The BBC's own oral history reveals its bedrock of public service ideals, and its decision to open its archive is a small but telling index of trust in a scholarly and appreciative public, expressed also in critical interviews with insider-outsiders.While its curation in Voices of the BBC was showcased in the BBC's Centenary celebrations, this is no public-relations-shaped corporate oral history.The BBC is itself listening and being forced to listen-in many directions and to many audiences.
But the closure of TLP also reveals the challenges the BBC faces, squeezed between commercial streamers and government antipathy.A bill to privatize the Corporation, sponsored by Conservative MP Sir Christopher Chope, is in the Commons as I write. 121Having previously accused the BBC of "groupthink" and "tokenism," then culture secretary Nadine Dorries tweeted in January 2022 that the BBC license fee will end, and we need to discuss new ways to fund and sell "great British content." 122Despite rating its news highly for trust and accuracy, Ofcom (the UK communications regulator) announced in 2022 that the "BBC must transform the way it serves audiences" based on a survey of two thousand people that showed impartiality "remains a key area of concern."Ofcom acknowledges, however, that "in the current politically polarized and emotionally charged cultural climate, some favor news outlets that take a single clear perspective on an issue and criticize some outlets for 'sitting on the fence.' " At the same time, "different audiences reach diametrically opposing conclusions when judging the due impartiality of the same news content" and that "audiences have higher expectations of the BBC's impartiality because of its unique position." 123Addressing these contexts depends upon the BBC's Board and managers, but also upon Parliament.BBC strategic adviser Mark Oliver commented that the main political parties in the UK focus only on the principles of the BBC's standards, fiscal impact, and its market inefficiencies, with no consensus about its public value in relation to cultural cohesion and plural democracy and what is worth subsidizing. 124The British Library, in this climate, also faces attacks from both left and right on its cultural representation.
All of this feeds the rhetoric of national identity, as well as the wobbly line that TLP had to walk for its imagined community of listening moms, kids, granddads, holidaymakers, school-leavers, commuters, second-homeowners, homeless people, and EU Remainers and Leavers.StoryCorps proposes "Americanness" as the term of recognition for the ordinary, excluded, and undocumented, at times drawing on the narrative of the immigrant nation.Within a different, postcolonial register, "Britishness" is invoked by both the BBC and the British Library in a language that emphasizes "unifying experiences," "place," and "universal access" alongside "diversity" and "variety."BBC Director of Policy Clare Sumner speaks of the BBC as a "very special British and global asset-locally, nationally within devolved nations." 125TLP's second iteration as conflict mediation was also part of a distinct civic offer.This is also audible in, for example, Adam Fleming's Radio 4/podcast series AntiSocial ("Peace talks for the culture wars") or Across the Red Line, both commissioned by Mohit Bakaya. 126David Dimbleby, in a frank BBC TV series "Days That Shook the BBC," commissioned for the BBC's Centenary in 2022, explains his decision to invite far-right British National Party politician Nick Griffin onto TV's Question Time in 2009 to answer the charge that the BBC did not give space for working-class white voices.Admitting that the risks of both representation and no-platforming have become greater, he concludes that listening to each other is the only solution.Jean Seaton, "official historian" of the BBC, comments that the BBC has "been obliged by structure and accountability to bring audiences together" in addition to catering to all ages and tastes as the basis for citizenship.Reflecting on how this relates to the bedrock principle of impartiality, she concludes, "In our hands we have institutions that make us listen to each other.Unless we abolish their capacity to do so." 127ack in 2018, StoryCorps proclaimed "we are just getting started."It had recorded more than half a million interviews; its app had been downloaded more than a million times.It now enables anyone to record a conversation for free that is then archived in the Library of Congress-all without the presence of any producer and accompanied by corporate offers such as "honoring" university alumni through a bespoke booking, or Delta Airlines commissioning an "on-site activation during a pivotal moment in leadership transition." 128TLP could never match this scale, just as it could never compete with social media for younger generations.The BBC did not have the resources to complete a planned equivalent to StoryCorp's app, as a public service broadcaster dependent on a national license fee and extensive regional networks that are currently being drastically reduced.Any programming initiatives must be further underpinned by investment in infrastructure such as BBC Sounds, created to bring all channels onto a single digital platform, and prominence-the discoverability of BBC material on electronic program guides on other platforms and devices.The Corporation has been pressing for legislation to protect such access to public service broadcasting since Ofcom recommended it. 129 have argued that the stories of getting by in everyday life captured in TLP can be heard as records of tactical, if not strategic, accommodation to forces over which people have little control.I suggest that the oral histories of those behind TLP and other public access projects reveal the BBC's own tactical responses to the expectations of its audiences and its attempts to be the tolerant, inclusive nation it projects in the face of increasingly contradictory political, cultural, and commercial demands.Publicly shared and connected, producer Tony Laryea's words demand your direct consideration: "If you lose the BBC, then who the hell is going to speak up for the nation?So that's why you have to be out there." 130