My friend had been telling me for a long time we should go
see The Fitzrovia Radio Hour, so at last we did.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but while
certainly I was entertained, I was also pleasantly surprised.
I expected a fairly po-faced
reading/performance of authentic 1930s or 1940s radio material, and in fact
Cycle of Violence, Ava Carter: Girl Pilot! and a unique rendition of
The Day Dorking Stood Silent were new
material by Martin Pengelly.
As I said before,
I am somewhat wary of retro for retro’s sake, and the inclusion of long, rather
charming advertising spots for Bairstow’s Home Stores pulled me out of the fun
and games.
Even if Reith expected all
his radio performers to be trussed up in evening wear when recording, he would
have been vehemently opposed to advertising (symptomatic of us commercialized
Yanks
,
crikey!).
In that sense, the Bairstow’s
Home Stores might make more sense if the Fitzrovia Radio Hour was meant to be
coming out of Radio Luxembourg (and perhaps, without saying as much, that was
their intent all along).
Other than this small niggle, however, the production
brought out the excitement of the days of live radio when effects weren’t
produced by computer banks (or even foley women walking through the BBC studio,
as on the occasions I was there) and sometimes there was only one mic for five
actors.
Now, I’ve read a lot recently on
the days when television went out live, but live radio even trumps this.
You can dry on live television, as in stage
theatre, and you ruin the show, but on radio, despite whatever madness is going
on in the studio, you can still somehow manage to save face to the millions of
listeners of the airwaves.
A great
summation of the chaos that can erupt (as well as a primer on the types of
sound effects used in OTR) can be seen in this clip from
Frasier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fkF008b-_Q
However, as in Neil Brand’s The Big Broadcast which was on Radio 4 last year (The Chicago
Beefsteak Hour of Charm!), being true to the period doesn’t necessarily mean
slavishly copying the sometimes dreadfully dull and formulaic content. I was delighted to discover that Cycle of Violence was a story about a
murderous bicycle in Cambridge with some post-modernist digs about class and
gender. There were also some great SFX
moments including someone’s head getting thumped via cabbage chop (eat your
heart out, Waris Hussein). At no point
were you supposed to take Ava
Carter: Girl Pilot! seriously, but I
was unable to take it even a little bit seriously because I kept being reminded
of Pendant Audio’s Dixie Stenberg and
Brassy Batallion Adventure Theater. This
one featured a great SFX moment when one of the actors tore up an entire crate
to make it sound like a plane crashing!
The Day Dorking Stood
Silent was meant to be a little-green-men-type science fiction story (I
think), but the production was highjacked by an Orson Welles-wannabe. Actually, I feel his version of Footsteps, Footsteps, Loneliness, Footsteps (!)
was more in keeping with German hörspiel and
the Brecht/Beckett school of abstract radio.
Daniel Gilfillan’s 2009 book about German experimental radio was one of
the best books on radio I’ve read, but there’s no doubt that to a BBC-reared
audience, stuff even more out there than the Third Programme was going to sound
ludicrous. Nevertheless, the
plate-spinning actors managed to salvage their production in the last two
minutes and save the day!
The Fitzrovia Radio Hour are
Jon Edgley Bond, Letty Butler, Samara Maclaren, Tom
Mallaburn, and Phil Mulryne
