Why you shouldn’t always believe what you hear
What does authenticity sound like? Audio is a medium that promises intimacy, real voices, unvarnished honesty. But it’s an illusion: hours of editing and sleight-of-hand often go into even straightforward-sounding stories, as producers manipulate interviews to construct a simple, sellable narrative from the strands of someone else’s life.
A documentary about documentaries, Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative (Radiotopia) ended last week. I binged the whole thing, but I’m still not confident what it was. It could have been called Sprawling, Frustrating, Directionless – but that was the point. It was both a navel-gazing mess and a fascinating experiment in honesty. It highlighted its granular workings at each step (from budgeting to editing to sound design), even if it meant losing sight of the purpose of the programme.
Its Canadian producer Jess Shane has spent her career packaging other people’s lives as entertainment, assuring them that “sharing their stories” will help them – but she’s no longer sure that’s true. In the opening episode, she recalled the first programme she ever made, about her neighbour, a 16-year-old gymnast whose Olympics hopes were derailed by an injury. The girl heard it, and hated it. They lost touch. But the injury that ended her career had launched Shane’s; her programme was a hit.
Still, Shane had done nothing wrong, had she? Over the years, she diligently followed the usual rules: don’t pay interviewees; stay objective; be wary of anyone too desperate to “star” in a show; control the final cut.
Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative ditched those rules, in an attempt to shift documentaries’ traditional balance of power away from the producer and towards the subject. Shane held open auditions, paid interviewees $20 an hour, hung out with them like a friend and – most radically – offered to let them shape their own stories. The result, she hoped, would be fairer to all parties: good ethics and good radio. As it turns out, though, most people don’t have much idea what makes a good story.
She had three people: Michael, an ex-convict trying to launch a career as a motivational speaker; Ernesto, a “notably beautiful” constructionworker and catwalk model recovering from drug addiction; and Judy, an elderly woman who’d become homeless after her husband’s death.
Any one of them might, in theory, have been a good subject – but Judy monopolised Shane’s time for the best part of a year, after the producer had naively promised to help with complex legal wrangling over her old flat.
Disaster struck when, days before the deadline to complete the series, Judy asked for her part of the show to be entirely rewritten. The request did not go down well. “I have your release form. Technically, I can do whatever I want,” Shane told Judy, seemingly forgetting her ideals for the show, in a slightly pushy phonecall which – to her great credit – she included in the final programme. Listening back to it, she felt “embarrassed”: “Here I am, neck-deep in my documentary ethics programme, and I basically threatened an unhoused woman.”
She went back to the drawing board, cut out all the parts Judy didn’t like, and missed her boss’s deadline by several months. It was a noble failure, one driven by an important question: what’s the best way to tell a true story?
This week marks the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After two years of unbroken news bulletins, it can be hard to keep a clear sense of the individual human stories amid the statistics. But A Small, Stubborn Town (Radio 4, yesterday) tried to bring us close to individual personalities, by giving the war the full Afternoon Play treatment. Gamely performed by a Ukrainian and Russian cast, it told the story of the battle of Voznesensk – the backwater that played an unlikely but crucial role in holding back the Russian advance on Odesa in March 2022.
There were Dad’s Army-esque squabbles, as volunteers were given a crash course in throwing grenades. “Throw it like it’s your favourite kitten.” “Why would you throw your favourite kitten?” “Can we forget the kittens?”
It was stirring and affecting, but, grappling with a chaotic, complex situation and a large cast, it somehow felt both over-explained and overcrowded. It was, however, compelling enough to make me buy foreign correspondent Andrew Harding’s terrific short book of the same name – in which the characters hurriedly sketched on the radio come to life in three dimensions, thanks to his novelistic prose. An unabridged three-hour audiobook, read by Harding, is available – perhaps start there.