Industry | 2009.01.10
Mark Lawson: Big Brother's grandpa
One tragic and one ridiculous event of the holiday period - the death of Harold Pinter and the return tonight of Celebrity Big Brother - are, improbably, connected. The early plays of Pinter and the rise of reality TV were both significant stages in the attempt to transmit the reality of how people speak: a movement, in fictional and factual entertainment, from dialogue that flatters everyday language to conversation that captures it.
Some of the dramatist\'s obituaries treated him as an intellectual obscurist who never quite broke through to the general public; but his plays for ITV in the 1960s were seen by dozens of millions, part of the democratisation of drama that the new medium achieved. Seen now, A Night Out - in which shifty young men keep secrets from craggy but canny matriarchs in exchanges littered with slang, euphemism and stutterings - feels like a Cockney grandma to numerous sitcoms and soap operas, up to EastEnders. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, writers of Hancock\'s Half-Hour and Steptoe & Son, have acknowledged that in Pinter they recognised a colleague in the project of showing the heights low London speech could reach.
In his renovation of theatrical dialogue, Pinter was much more alone. It was common for admirers of the plays to invoke an image of him skulking around pubs and bus queues with a tape recorder - Alan Bennett, a similar pioneer in the rendition of northern English speech, was accused of similar undercover operations in Leeds - but no great dramatist could rely on transcripts.
What goes into the writer\'s ear comes out of the characters\' mouths edited and poeticised. A market in Hackney makes you think of Pinter - just as a bar in the Bronx brings to mind the scripts of David Mamet, American theatre\'s speech specialist - but you wouldn\'t pay to listen to two hours of that stuff. Even so, these playwrights were giving us, for the first time, the patterns and tactics of authentic talk: repetition, silence, piss-taking, evasion. A key word in Pinter dialogue is "What?", spoken in infinite varieties of incomprehension and angry understanding. In Betrayal, a man, cornered by a woman on the status of the relationship, replies with a shattering double negative: "I don\'t think we don\'t love each other." That\'s brilliant writing, but comes from intense listening.
Even the best theatrical dialogue, though, is essentially artificial: the simple need for actors to be heard many yards from the stage makes the semi-articulate mumble of daily exchanges impossible to reproduce. And so the next development in the precise presentation of speech occurred in cinema and television, where microphone and camera can lean in close. The growing use of tape recorders in journalism and oral history projects - and perhaps also the release in the 70s of the Watergate tapes, catching for the first time exactly how public figures sounded in private - encouraged a documentary approach to conversation. Ken Loach and Mike Leigh - by using non-actors and/or improvisation - were the first to achieve the effect of leaving viewers genuinely unsure if they were watching fact or fiction.
After this, the logical next step was to cut out the middle-men and fill the media with actual speech: initially through observational documentary - led in the 70s by Paul Watson\'s The Family - and radio phone-ins. I\'ve met many writers and actors who listen religiously to the wireless whinge shows because they are such a gallery of language and accent habits. But even documentaries and phone-ins are edited and censored to some degree. Only with reality TV - especially in the streamed, all-night broadcasts - did we reach the ultimate result of the experiment with verbal realism that Pinter had started 50 years before: the sensation of eavesdropping on actual conversation.
Theatrical writing has had to adjust to this transcriptional quality in much screen speech. Too much has been made of Pinter\'s use of the pause, a minor aspect of his dramatic skill; but it\'s true that, where he often exposed the gaps in chitchat, the next generations of writers - led by Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp, David Hare, David Edgar and Roy Williams - increasingly examined overlaps. The greatest artificiality of theatrical speech - that the second speaker waited for the first neatly to finish - has been replaced by the insertion of slashes in dialogue to encourage interruption. This trick is echoed in television, where, in shows such as The Wire, several people are often speaking at once.
Verbal accuracy, however, is an elusive quarry. The more these realistic effects are repeated, the greater they risk becoming a convention. And the talk in the later seasons of Big Brother feels less authentic than when the format began: contestants imitate the tics and mannerisms of previous ones. But, even with these limitations, the speech of stage and screen is on the same wavelength as the speech of the street, and this is part of Pinter\'s vast legacy.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/reality-tv-pinter-big-brother
