Midsummer night's dream
Radio 3 presents a mind-expanding, curated soundworld through the night to herald the solstice
Illustration by Darrel Rees
- Anna Jones
Midsummer Dreaming is on Saturday from 9.30pm on Radio 3. Add it to your collection
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Radio at its best is a private experience; the problem in the modern world is whether there is any continuing place for it.” These prescient words are not plucked from a recent audio focus group but were written in 1959 by Donald McWhinnie in his seminal text The Art of Radio. He was talking about radios falling silent because of the huge rise in the number of television sets in family homes. Yet only this May a report entitled Podcasts in the Living Room proudly declared, “Video podcasts are now the default in the UK.”
Is there still a space for imaginative radio programming where the sounds – not the pictures – are the stars? The answer is a resounding yes and, were proof needed, this Saturday Radio 3 is devoting nine hours to mind-expanding features that push the boundaries, interspersed with music that “speaks to the theme of the night”, reflecting this year’s summer solstice.
Most of these documentaries are drawn from the BBC archive, but there is also a new creation called Dancing on Air, a fresh addition to Radio 3’s Between the Ears canon, at 11.08pm. And, fittingly, this special evening has been curated by Alan Hall and Eleanor McDowall, from the Falling Tree production company, who have not only made a plethora of programmes for the Between the Ears strand but have also won multiple awards for their innovative audio work.
Back in 1993, Alan Hall produced the first ever edition of Between the Ears called Monument. It was a masterful mix of archive voices from the 1930s to the 90s, blended with a score composed by leftfield musician Ian Gardiner, and it went on to win Radio 3’s first Prix Italia – a prestigious international award.
Hall is very down to earth about this breakthrough moment in the classical music station’s output: “I said to Ian, surely we can think about the archive as a resource in the same way we talk about a cast of voices? It’s not just what’s being said but how it’s being said. And then he had the idea that it should be almost like a symphony over the history of broadcasting.”
You can hear people talking about their dreams from the 1960s
The network was conscious that this unusual programme was a one-off, making it difficult to place in what Hall refers to as the “mosaic” schedules of the early 90s. So, all credit to then controller Nicholas Kenyon, who commissioned a further five “experimental” pieces and thus the Between the Ears slot was born.
Both Hall and McDowall are wary of the word experimental. “It used to upset me that it was called an experimental slot,” says Hall. “I thought it should just be a space for good radio that was perhaps more imaginative or innovative, but I didn’t think it should be experimental, particularly – that’s like making a rod for your own back.”
McDowall is swift to back up her co-creator, noting that the BBC had a history of making radio programmes that pushed the boundaries decades before Between the Ears arrived: “You can go all the way back to the Lance Sieveking broadcast of Kaleidoscope in 1928, a really ambitious playing with the medium and [for the listeners] a slightly odd hallucinatory art form that emerged out of a box. And even now, in your home, it’s like a kind of ghostly voice. It’s always had these odd imaginative edges.”
With this rather mystical thinking in mind, what can listeners expect to hear this Midsummer’s Eve? The driving force behind the duo’s collaboration is to celebrate the wealth of output in the archive and tailor it to the summer solstice. Hall explains, “It’s a magical night and there’s a lot of metaphor that you can play with. In a way, the solstice theme helped us limit the things we looked for – although we still ended up with a shortlist of 107 programmes to listen to!”
“I think it’s the things that kind of hum with the human spirit and are not necessarily tied to a specific moment in time that we’ve selected,” says McDowell. “You can expect to hear people talking about their dreams from the 1960s [in Inventions for Radio: The Dreams from 1964, at 11.58pm] and it’s alive and in the moment. I think there’s something in this kind of midsummer dreaming energy that speaks to that.”
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So, if you’re not dancing naked around a fire or banging drums with druids at Stonehenge this year, why not settle back with R3 and celebrate the longest day and shortest night in a mind-expanding way. McDowall hopes that this collection will be “right in the kind of dark space that meets the listener in a way that will engage them. The dream is someone scans the radio, happens upon it and gets drawn in, which has always been the way I get most excited about hearing the radio.”
Authors
Anna Jones
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