Blasts from the Megaphone

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BBC Radio 4 - Blasts from the Megaphone

Paul Farley speaks up for the humble megaphone that has been raising voices for centuries.

Megaphones are by now synonymous with protest. But as Paul Farley discovers, their history and uses run much deeper - the megaphone has been making itself heard for centuries.

It’s one of the most instinctive of human actions - to cup our hands around our mouths in order to amplify our voices - and the megaphone has been doing the same job for us for centuries. 

The poet Paul Farley wants to listen back through history to the megaphone’s many and various echoes, finding out where and when it’s been put to use. 

He starts out in Ancient Greece and the birth of theatre - where masks not only transformed the look of actors, they also served to raise the volume of their voices so audiences could get their full quota of catharsis.  From there, Paul travels to the northern seas of pre-Viking Europe where megaphones appear to have been used to keep oarsmen in time with one another. 

Engineers of the industrial revolution honed the shape and quality of the megaphone, allowing artists, musicians, film directors, avant-garde poets - and marchers and protestors as well as the authorities standing against them - to raise their lips to the mouthpiece and belt out their voices loud and proud ever since. 

Are these simple instruments, Paul wants to know, chiefly instruments of power or resistance, and do they succeed in raising the voices of the oppressed or finally just add to the impenetrable cacophony of modern life? 

With special thanks to film historian, Kevin Brownlow.

Presented by Paul Farley
Produced by Geoff Bird 
Executive Producer: Eloise Whitmore
A Naked production for BBC Radio 4

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