The Halls of Congress

Just read another entry in the Barnouw book, Radio Drama in Action, which I haven't looked into for a while. This entry was a broadcast of a program called The Halls of Congress, which presented excerpts from congressional debates. Barnouw's introduction remarks that the producer of another prospective program with a similar theme had failed in his attempts to broadcast actual recordings of congressional debates. Members of congress had objected to this proposal on various grounds, including their stated objection to being taken out of context (if radio were to broadcast parts but not all of speeches) and to having their privacy violated (if microphones picked up things that they said in confidence while waiting their turn to speak on the floor). Due to such objections, The Halls of Congress used actors to reenact speeches taken from the Congressional Record. Seems a little old fashioned until you consider the present Supreme Court's refusal to allow sound or image recording.

I'm reminded of Ian Rodger's discussion (in Radio Drama) of the cooperation that blossomed between the BBC's drama and features divisions in the days before easily portable tape-recording equipment. When compiling documentary features based on interviews taken in the field, producers had to use a two-part process involving transcription of interviews, followed by in-studio reenactments by actors. Rodger makes it sound as if the limitation that initiated this process actually ended up providing a great benefit in many ways. The actors, writers, and producers all worked closely together, with the drama-minded folks helping the features staff inject dramatic excitement to the productions. And, of course, the features producers, who were experimenting with how to turn compilations of interviews into something with dramatic interest, were in many ways a step ahead of the drama department in figuring out how to use radio for dramatic purposes.

I bet that programs like The Halls of Congress and the British pre-tape-recording features were more exciting and entertaining than what we have today as a result of tape (and now digital) recording. I think of Nina Totenberg's fine recaps of Supreme Court arguments--she takes the accurately reported words of the justices but condenses and synthesizes their speeches into something that works as a coherent whole. It seems that these earlier dramatized documentaries probably worked similarly.

You can also see in The Halls of Congress an awareness of the need of helping the listener out when translating the transcript of the Congressional Record into a dramatized radio program. There are elements like "voices" that rise up when a break in the transcript (what would be ellipses in print) is introduced. And the narrator is careful to introduce each speaker when he (no women in these 1945 congressional debates) begins to speak, even if he has spoken several times before.