Listening projects: the BBC, oral history and the nation in fractured times

This article tunes in to the BBC’s heart-warming radio program, The Listening Project (TLP), aired from 2012 until 2022. Comparing TLP to its source model from the U.S., StoryCorps, to previous British public access broadcasting initiatives such as Open Door and Video Nation, as well as to social media, I highlight the interests at stake in the BBC’s presentation of listening in the service of imagined national community, an idea echoed by the British Library’s Oral History department where the TLP interviews are archived. I posit that TLP’s homely chats between family, friends or caring strangers – about everything from bath times to Brexit – reflect a feminist and forgiving public, nurtured by the BBC civic ideals. This can be enjoyed and valued as a counterweight to social media riven with post-democratic, divisive nationalism. After introducing the scope and scale of the project, I explore criticisms of TLP as cozy confessions for comfortable BBC audiences. I go on to weigh them against the BBC’s inhouse oral history, which reveals the broadcaster’s people and policies, including its struggles to be as well as shape a national community that is multicultural, diverse and inclusive. I argue that the BBC’s decision, through a partnership with the University of Sussex, to open the archive as a public catalog and online guided exhibit in Voices of the BBC, is a listening project in its own way. These very different forms of interviews confirm, however, the serious civic ambitions behind TLP. The conversations testify to everyday resilience in the face of a troubled and unequal modern Britain, but the project’s closure reflects how difficult it is for the BBC to fulfil its mission, values and public purposes in fractured times.