The Listening Project mobile recording booth
The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain, in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are gathered by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Fi Glover writes about some of the stories which have featured in the series.
Rachael and Dawn are friends and both of them have children with special needs. Dawn has two sons and Rachael one daughter. They talk a lot anyway but came together to have a chat for The Listening Project about their kids. It was ear-raising stuff. As an interviewer, now quite long in the tooth, I’ve often talked to parents of kids with special needs, several interviews have been about sex. It’s a difficult area but one that needs better understanding. I’ve tried to ask questions in a non-prurient but inquisitive way – but essentially I’m a total stranger and no interview has ever elicited the understanding that Rachael and Dawn’s conversation has. Dawn’s teenage son has discovered “magazines with ladies in them” and is doing what teenage sons do with those magazines. “Private time” is what Dawn has taught him to call it. It’s a good name because, as Dawn says, she has had to explain that if he wants to do certain things it does have to be “on your own, in your bedroom, in the bathroom but with the door shut!” not while walking across the sitting room in the middle of the afternoon.
It’s a conversation that leaves you in no doubt as to how difficult life can be – but it’s also an uplifting chat about friendship, family values and getting on with life. There is an extraordinary moment when the two women talk about how they feel about the prospect of leaving their vulnerable children alone in the world when they themselves pass away. This testament of maternal love has stayed with me ever since I heard it.
I’m not telling you about Rachael and Dawn’s chat to sensationalise The Listening Project, but it exemplifies what we are about – the experiences we all have. More than 1,300 people have sat down with a person they love or care about and had a conversation that really matters. I’ve had the privilege of listening to most of them for the show we do every week at Radio 4. What I enjoy in particular is that there is no interviewer involved. It gives the conversations a different quality, but perhaps I should be worried about that …
Two mothers talk openly about the sexual awakening of their special needs teenagers.
“People telling their own stories” is quite definitely a trend – from established podcasts such as The Moth to open-mic storytelling nights. I know of four in my part of London alone. Do they reflect our growing ability to talk openly? Do they reflect a greater desire to listen? Or is it just a cry to be heard? Whatever it is, we are part of it, albeit in a very formal way. All of our chats go on to be stored in our sound archive at the British Library. That already contains end-of-life conversations, testaments of love, loss, living with wolves, wild swimming, cultural identities, illness and desire. We are essentially an audio dragnet of life – and this summer we have a mobile booth to make it even easier. It’s a gorgeous thing – the kind of caravan some Hackney hipster might turn up at a festival in: sleek, padded, fake fire, mini-bar fridge and humourous sayings on the walls. I can already feel that a little bit of magic will be created by placing a microphone in front of two people who can shut off the rest of the world for 40 minutes. You wouldn’t want to be on a “Spinal Tap” level 11 of chat all the time – but just occasionally it feels pretty good to burst through the meniscus of low-level conversation.
Brian did when he sat down to talk with Valerie: they have been married for more than 40 years but are now legally separated. Seventeen years ago, Brian had an accident at work that left him with severe head injuries, resulting in a frontal lobotomy. He had to give up his job and he took to drink. Their marriage didn’t survive all of that, but he and Valerie are on good enough terms to agree to our producer Andrew Carter’s suggestion that they have a conversation for the project. It is remarkable. They talk, without rancour, about everything they have been through. And there is an incredible moment where Brian finally says sorry. Sorry for all the trouble the drinking caused, all the trouble his “doggedness” (as he puts it) caused Valerie and the family. And a whole lifetime of dashed hopes, dreams, patience, anger – and love – can be heard in the pause before Valerie says: “Thank you Brian … I have been waiting for that for years.”
Everyone’s life is remarkable in some way. We all have a story to tell. I hope hundreds of people come to tell us theirs in the booth over the summer. I might end up doing one myself: “I used to interview people – but then they got too good at it themselves …”
This article first appeared on the Guardian website.
Fi Glover is the presenter of the Listening Project on BBC Radio 4
- Listen to the live edition of Listening Project Live broadcast from the New Broadcasting House piazza on Tuesday 9 June 2015.
- The Listening Project mobile recording booth is going on tour - find out when it's visiting a location near you on the Radio 4 website.
- Most of the unedited conversations recorded for the Listening Project are being archived by the British Library Learn more about The Listening Project by visiting www.bbc.co.uk/listeningproject
