Live or Dead?

The U.S. home front has heard almost no U.S. broadcasts from the fighting fronts. Reason: even after 16 months of war, U.S. network radio still sticks largely to its peacetime ban on recordings.*

Meanwhile British radio, with no such ban, has brought the war closer to the English at home by recordings made at the front. Response has been enthusiastic.

Like documentary films, which Hollywood ignored and Britain developed into a vivid educational instrument, documentary radio is old stuff to BBC. It was inaugurated in 1935 by ruddy, jovial Lawrence Gilliam, Cambridgeman and BBC features director. Since then BBC sound trucks have poked about England recording fox hunts, hop-picking festivals, markets, and building them into first-rate documentary radio shows. They also went abroad to record the sounds (sidewalk conversation, cafe colloquies, shopping talk, parades, music) of foreign cities.

Sound War. When the blitz began, sound recording became an effective claymore against rumor. Censorship hid the facts of Liverpool's first severe bombing, and word of mouth had the city anything from pock-marked to a smoking ruin. BBC wheeled a sound truck into Liverpool, got inhabitants to talk into the microphone, recorded the sounds of traffic, of reconstruction, of life going on. The broadcast recording made it clear that Liverpool was unbroken and unafraid.

One morning during the worst of the blitz BBC's Gilliam parked a sound truck near a London shelter to record the comments of East Enders emerging after eight hours underground. A cocky cockney woman grabbed the microphone and said: "If 'itler thinks 'e can win this war by bombin' women and children, 'e's fahnd a big mistyke, that's all. Because we can tyke it, we can tyke it." According to Gilliam, the cockney woman's use of the phrase was the hit, became the popular answer to the blitz.

Sound trucks that accompany the British Eighth Army let the home folks overhear the talk and work of the British Tommy. Sound trucks have gone with the fighting tanks, sometimes, by accident, preceded them. One BBCman (Denis Johnston, Irish playwright) found himself alone facing an enemy column. BBC listeners later got a laugh from his bewilderment: "I can't see. ... I can't tell. . . . Good God! They're the enemy! . . . Oh. It's all right. They've got their hands up. They're Italians."

*The two big networks (NBC and CBS) argue that what they have to sell is live shows, that any tank-town studio can put on a recorded show, that listeners want shows that are "live."

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