People power | 11 April 2019

He is said to ‘have changed the sound of speech radio’, not just by giving voice to those who until then (the 1960s) had not been given air time, the richness of their county accents too far removed from Broadcasting House’s Received Pronunciation. He won awards for his pioneering use of the new midget tape recorders, taking his microphone out of the studio and down the mines, to the fishing harbours, into the boxing rings and talking to teenagers. He was also a genius at editing, able to cut away an errant ‘s’ or insert a single note into the soundscape with the rudimentary tools then available, a sharp razor blade and a steady hand. But most of all he did away with the omniscient narrator with his RP pronunciation and perfect vowels, using music instead, written and performed by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. The stories that emerged in his programmes did so through the songs which held them together, not via a disembodied, detached voiceover at one remove.