SOMETHING'S GOING ON SO THE OBSERVER IS THERE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 120, 10 October 1941, Page 12

SOMETHING'S GOING ON

SO THE OBSERVER

IS THERE

How Special Events Are Covered In The "London |

Calling’ Programme: By

ELDON

MOORE

(Special to "The N.Z. Listener" by courtesy of the BBC)

6c K., John? -TIm_ going ahead in ten seconds from .. . NOW "-Those words must be burned deep into the minds of many British Observers and theif recording engineers. They are the starting gun of one of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s special events, or as the BBC terms them, "actuality broadcasts." An Observer is the radio equivalent of a reporter. He goes out hunting hot, reallife stories, taking a recording unit with him. "Live" actuality broadcasting, which the BBC had greatly developed during the last few years, was cracked down on by the censor on the very first day of the war. There’s too much risk of some incautious remark of the Observer’s giving useful information to the enemy-still more may the people he is interviewing. Brother Boche always wants to know, for instance, exactly where each of his bombs has fallen; and a live broadcast during a blitz would be almost bound to contain something like this: "Strewth, sounds like our packet! -No, it isn’t! Going right over St. Paul’s-Ah, well beyond! Plonk in Cannon Street." One just can’t help talking like that in a raid. The excitement of the fast-moving event jerks the truth out of you. Consequently "live" broadcasts are out for the duration. A " special event" must be recorded, so that it can be played back and the dangerous pasgages cut, A Mixed Crowd Observers are a mixed crowd — old BBC hands, ex-actors, ex-journalists, ex-

-_ sports commentators, ex- a good many other things. They need a sense of the drama of life, a sense of news, quick reactions, and, above all, the faculty of putting others at their ease so as to get radio " action photos." With those innate faculties must go the external equipment of a recording car and engineer. This is worth describing since it has been developed since the outbreak of war for the express purpose of going almost anywhere. It is simply a small, light car of that adaptable variety that can struggle over firemen’s hoses, piles of demolished masonry, roads full of pot-holes and the like. Inside is a miniature, but complete, recording apparatus, with microphone and several hundred yards of flex-so that the mike can go on beyond the car. Further, the whole apparatus, batterydriven, can be taken out and carried by hand. Getting the Story Through Sometimes even this degree of mobility is inadequate-you can’t take a recording unit on a corvette-and the Observer waves a tearful farewell to his steed and goes off, like any newspaper man, to get his story as best he can. When that happens, he usually begs, borrows, or steals a rapid passage back to the nearest broadcasting hook-up and, after satisfying the censor, gives his story "live" to the mike. -. The recording car, however, is the Observer’s usual equipment. Several of them were in France during that stage of suspended animation, when the war seemed to be immobilised on the Maginot and Siegfried Lines. When the Germans broke through, two cars were lost, and their staffs found their way back through streets that were being machine-gunned

ee = 7 by the invaders. Ever since then the Observers haye_ had _ increasingly good chances of being in the middle of things. Charles Gardner’s running commentary on one of the big dog-fights over Dover during the Battle of Britain made radio history-he, by the way, was waiting his turn in the queue for the Air Force at the time, and is’ now one of the pilots whose exploits he had pre viously reported. Bernard Stubbs was Observer with the Navy and Mercantile Marine until he succeeded an getting accepted by the Navy. He went down with the Hood last’ May. Dimbleby and Edward Ward have been covering the Middle Eastern fronts, members of that new

tribe of radio war correspondents and colleagues. of Chester Willmot of the ABC. On the home front, Bob Dougall and Terence de Marney have been busy ever since the raids started. Frequently they are out in a blitz, recording what is happening as it is happening. That, by the way, is how the BBC gets the air taid sound effects that are often heard in the plays and feature programmes of the Empire Service.* They are not as has sometimes been asked, the ersatz productions of ingenious engineers. They are the actual sounds of real raids. There is quite a good, classified library of them now! Many Disappointments An Observer has an interesting if strenuous time, interspersed with many disappointments and moments of maddening frustration — when, for instance, the nub of a first-class story is bluepencilled by the censor, or he misses another because bombing or*troop move--ments have interrupted communications. I have been out with one, Terence de Marney, chasing the blitz, in several of the great ports of Britain. We never caught it though it caught us in Lon- ' don just before we left and when we had no recording car! Against that put the experience of Bob Dougall, best known to Empire listeners as the Senior. Empire announcer, now an Observer because he prefers to be in the thick of it. He was lucky. He got to Plymouth the night after its first big blitz, and was out in the middle of the second. night, fighting fires, helping *They are NOT heard in the Home programmes. There are quite enough air raid alarms already.

the wardens, and getting the sort of story Observers and reporters dream about, until five-thirty the next morning. Not only that, but it happened to be at the time when Mr. Menzies was inspecting the South coast and was through the blitz himself. Bob was with him thereafter, and records that the very next morning he turned up, apparently as fresh as if he had had a peaceful night’s sleep, with a sprig of mimosa-Austra-lian wattle-in his buttonhole. Meeting Menzies was one of Bob’s best experiences. He found himself captured by "his tremendous charm and magnetic personality — a big man in every sense of the word, with a freshness and spontaneity entirely his own, besides an ability to adapt himself to any sort of company." Dancing on the Green It was at Plymouth too that Bob was lucky enough to see one of those unrehearsed exhibitions of public feeling that would be incredible if they were not true. ‘The day following that particular blitz on Plymouth, Lord Astor (ex-M.P. for the town and husband of its present M.P.) realised that all the dance halls had been destroyed, and asked a nearby regiment to send its band along to play on the Hoe-where Drake played bowls on a previous occasion. Within a quarter of an hour the townspeople were dancing on the green round his statue-not out of bravado, but because music and dancing seemed the right way to spend a (Continued on next page)

SOMETHING'S GOING ON (Continued from previous page)

fine evening, even if it was to be followed, as everybody expected, by a third night of raids. Bob also visited New. York the day after it was bombed, and Bunker’s Hill -without leaving England. They are both villages in Lincolnshire’s Fen country, and nobody knows where they got their names. Both appear to be "modern" villages, being between 100 and 150 years old, developed out of the fens by drainage. So local tradition may be correct in believing that they were named after their U.S. namesakes. If so, they are probably unique. The Lincolnshire hamlet, by the way, is Bunker’s, not Bunker Hill. At New York, Bob was chasing the village sexton, Tanty Trafford, the origin of whose name is "wropt in mystery." That has been his name for the whole 73 years he has spent in the village where he has buried everyone for something like 50 years. After about an hour of his reminiscences Bob felt rather like Hamlet in the gravediggers’ scene. The reason why he was after Tanty was that New York’s bomb, the only one, had fallen in his wheatfield. But perhaps the thing that has most struck Bob Dougall is’ the contrast between the war as he knew it last summer, and as it is going on to-day. Last summer on the coast the beaches were mined, wired, guarded, and all summer activities had stopped. There was no bathing. Overhead were roaring the squadrons of the Luftwaffe on the first stage of the expected blitzkrieg, while

the far smaller numbers of the R.A.F. fought them back in an unending series of dog fights. The Scene Changes To-day-when I saw Bob he had just come back from a tour of the coastthe whole scene has been changed. Civilian life is getting back to normal, bathing is re-starting in many places, and the roar of aeroplanes is louder than ever. But this time it is the continuous roar of our own bombers, our own fighters, sweeping out over the coast, day as well as night, to take the offensive against the enemy, to give him large doses of his own medicine. "It’s no longer a question of Britain taking it,’ says Bob, " Britain is dishing it out." These words are underlined by every Englishman-and man includes woman -whom one meets. Overseas listeners ought to know it. We are all, frankly, fed up with being told "Britain can take it.’ We knew that, if nobody else did, before the blitz ever began. It has all been just a question not of "taking it," but of restraining our impatience to "get at the blighters"-and until we could build up our striking power. Now that that time has come, Overseas listeners will be getting newer, more | invigorating stuff from the BBC’s Observers.