Christine Geraghty

Television often has subtitles in my household and not just when we are
watching Euro-dramas on BBC4. I hadn't given much thought to this until
I read an excellent article on the topic by [Maggie Brown in the Royal
Television Society's
magazine](https://rts.org.uk/article/sounding-inaudible-dialogue-rife-among-dramas)
(Television, May 2016), entitled 'Sounding off about the unheard'. I
thoroughly recommend it, particularly to anyone who teaches film/video
making.

At home, we began to turn on the subtitles during our box-set watching
of *The Wire* some years ago. My hard-of-hearing husband complained he
couldn't hear any of the dialogue and I had to confess to difficulties
too. I can understand why *The Wire*'s makers objected to what became a
common practice but the choice was subtitles or not watching at all as
far as we were concerned.

After that, the subtitles came on more frequently, partly because the
high level of sound otherwise required might threaten our friendly
relationship with the neighbours. The presence of subtitles is
undoubtedly distracting and interferes with the carefully composed
image. And with anything live, such as the news, the titles are so far
behind the sound as to be too hard to follow. But for contemporary drama
productions from *Line of Duty* to *Richard III*, we now regularly turn
on the subtitles.

We are not alone. Maggie Brown reports that in 2009, Jay Hunt, then the
BBC One Controller launched an "audibility project", involving a
20,000-strong panel of viewers and listeners. Despite that in in 2014,
*Jamaica Inn*, on BBC One, notoriously generated more than 2,000
complaints about mumbled conversations; its adaptor, Emma Frost,
admitted that it "sounded like listening through mud."

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And, more recently, the first episode of the third series of *Happy
Valley* sent BBC Controller of TV Channels Charlotte Moore back to the
edit suite ' to work very hard to make it crisper, and change these
\[sound\] levels'.

So why might there be problems? The main problem identified by viewers
is that of 'mumbling' actors. Certainly it would seem that the
theatrical mode of clear pronunciation, so strongly associated with
British acting is dying out, and being replaced by what seems to be
thought of as a more realist style of speaking which means talking very
quickly, in a low voice and often turned away from the camera. Sarah
Lancashire and Shirley Henderson in *Happy Valley* did indeed exemplify
this approach.

In real life, of course, we might ask someone to speak up or repeat what
just been said but in a drama that would carry 'realism' too far. But
connected with this change in acting is, I think, a change in what is
deemed to be a more realist style of writing dialogue. We can see this
change if we compare soap opera writing with writing in other forms of
drama. British soap opera actors adopt a version of the realist style of
speaking but soap opera dialogue makes sure that key points are clearly
articulated, often through repetition. Indeed because gossip continues
to be an important element in soaps, the 'redundant' dialogue which
carries this process of mulling over the important narrative events
ensures that audiences can easily catch up with what they might have
initially missed.

Other dramas particularly those which rely on the unfolding of a mystery
or the detection of a crime are much more likely now to avoid making the
clues look too obvious. So instead of the clarity of the traditional
detective (*Morse, Miss Marple, Tennison*), the current practice is for
the protagonists to be more confused and more emotionally engaged. Hence
the tendency for them to be on location and to deliver exclamations of
half-understood explanation while they run towards the next crisis.

There is though a third factor which is the notion that good television
is defined by being 'cinematic' so that the emphasis is all on the
stunning images, the composition within the frame, the beautiful
locations. In adaptation studies, the mantra that novels use words and
films use images is criticised as one of the key scriptwriting fallacies
which seriously underestimates cinema's use of the aural, including
dialogue. Television in the digital era seems to be at risk of falling
into that trap.

And as Maggie Brown interestingly discusses the dominance of flat screen
television technology is a factor in all of this. While giving ever more
clarity to the picture, the sound seems to be getting murkier. She
quotes a Which magazine review which concluded that 'Modern TVs might
have fantastic picture quality, but their sound is often disappointing,
because new, slimline TVs have limited space for built-in speakers'.
Considerations of sound are almost always secondary to those of picture
on set."

Brown quotes Tom Harper, Director of the BBC's production of *War and
Peace* simply blames the technology. Audibility problems, he says
dismissively, 'arise at the broadcast and TV reception point, as the
soundtrack is played out on reduced bandwidth to two tiny speakers'. I
was quite shocked at the arrogance of this as if it were not his
responsibility to offer the audience the best possible experience,
taking the viewing (and hearing) conditions into account. His words seem
to confirm that considerations of sound are indeed secondary to
pictures.

By contrast, Chris Ashworth, a sound engineer who also worked on War and
Peace, refutes the idea that sound problems can be solved by simply
upping the levels. A number of sound practitioners suggest that there
are ways of dealing with the problem but that they require a commitment
from actors, director, producer and commissioner. They can involve
directing the actors with sound in mind, positioning mikes differently,
checking the sound properly when viewing rushes (ie not on an iphone),
automatic dialogue replacement and swapping sound from other takes,
mixing and matching to create the best track.

But all this costs money which won't be forthcoming if sound is not
valued and if the diversity of the audience in terms of hearing is not
appreciated. In my experience of watching student films at Goldsmiths
and Glasgow as well as when organising the RTS student awards for
Scotland, sound is nearly always a problem even in the most visually
sophisticated offering. Which is why I would be interested to know how
far the creation of a creative and audible soundtrack is a priority on
filmmaking courses which are training the next wave of television
directors and producers.

**Christine Geraghty** is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the
University of Glasgow. Her publications on television include a
contribution to the 1981 BFI monograph on *Coronation Street; Women and
Soap Opera (*Polity, 1991); and *My Beautiful Laundrette* (I B Taurus,
2004). Her BFI TV Classic on *Bleak House* was published in 2012 and her
reflections on the beginning of her work on soap opera appears in 'The
BFI women and film study group 1976 -- ?', Renewing Feminisms, Radical
Narratives, Fantasies and Futures in Media Studies H. Thornham and E.
Weissmann (eds) I B Taurus 2013. She is on the editorial board of the
Journal of British Cinema and Television and sits on the advisory boards
of a number of journals, including *Screen*.


Television often has subtitles in my household and not just when we are watching Euro-dramas on BBC4. I hadn’t given much thought to this until I read an excellent article on the topic by Maggie Brown in the Royal Television Society’s magazine (Television, May 2016), entitled ‘Sounding off about the unheard’. I thoroughly recommend it, particularly to anyone who teaches film/video making.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

CAN YOU TURN IT UP A BIT?: HEARING DIALOGUE IN MODERN TV DRAMA