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Archive on 4: The Great Listener

The Great Listener

12/05/2012

BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4, The Great Listener

Alan Dein tells the story of pioneering oral historian Tony Parker.

4 Extra Debut. Alan Dein tells the story of pioneering oral historian Tony Parker and tries to track down some of his interviewees. From May 2012.

Tony Parker was a ground-breaking writer and oral historian - the master of the tape-recorded interview. Whether talking to convicted murderers, the homeless, impotent men or unmarried mothers, his enigmatic quiet empathy meant that people opened up to him with immense honesty and trust. He was the Great Listener. 

The result was a unique and expansive body of work, in which he shaped these real-life stories into compelling thematic narratives. By the time of his death in 1996, he had published scores of books, made documentaries for radio and television, and pioneered the genre of verbatim drama.

Although his work was always based on real people in real places, Parker gave all his interviewees and their locations pseudonyms, and he scrupulously destroyed all traces of the interviews-the tapes and the transcripts-once the books were published.

Alan Dein traces the story of Tony Parker through the archive that remains and along the way tries to get behind the pseudonyms and obfuscation and track down some of Tony Parker's interviewees to find out what it was like to open up to the Great Listener.

Producer: Martin Williams.

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