Broadcasting The Queen's English

Taxi-driver Gary Hastie recently presented a documentary about stammering for BBC Radio Merseyside. Performance poet and writer David Bateman is one of those who took part.

Gary Hastie

The Queen's English is a radio documentary about stammering made by Gary Hastie of Liverpool. It was co-produced by Gary Hastie with Pauline McAdam of BBC Radio Merseyside, and first broadcast in February and March 2011.

Though its title draws on the recent phenomenal popularity of the film, The King's Speech, this is a documentary that has been nearly two years in the making, including a technical disaster in 2010 that resulted in the loss of all material recorded up to that point.

I first became aware of the project in May 2009, when Gary Hastie contacted me through my author's page on the Write Out Loud website, which mentions my stutter. At that stage Gary, a taxi-driver with an M.A. in Theatre Studies, was working on a series of programmes about communication for BBC Radio Merseyside, and was planning a feature about people with a stammer who perform in front of audiences. He himself had performed in theatre, and felt that, as a poet and performer, I was likely material.

By the time Gary came to record me later that summer, the plan had already evolved somewhat. The programme was to be a more general look at stammering, focussed through Gary's own experience, but balancing this with the experience of other people who stammer. Gary still wanted to record some poetry to do with stammering, but the performance angle had been dropped completely.

With the interview and poems in the bag, my part was done — or so I thought, until 11 months later when I received a sad email beginning: "Hello David. I hope you are well. There has been no radio programme because, to cut a long story short, all my interviews [...] have been lost on a hard drive at the BBC." And thus began Gary's re-interviewing of all the participants.

Focussing on stories

"At 15, Gary was nearly killed in the tragic crush at Hillsborough football ground."

I believe that Gary's overall vision of the documentary, and therefore the project itself, became even more focussed at this stage. The resulting programme is, as it says at the start, Gary's own story, and the story of those around him. It doesn't try to talk about stammering in a comprehensive way; but that's one of its strengths. By concentrating on Gary himself and a few other people who stammer plus friends and family, it manages to remain personal while at the same time bringing out a surprising range of issues.

Gary began stammering when he was 8: only mildly, but enough for him to be referred to speech therapy at the age of 10. He was discharged at age 14, and wasn't particularly bothered by his remaining slight stammer. But unusually, both Gary and his mother emphasise the importance of trauma in his case. At 15, Gary was nearly killed in the tragic crush at Hillsborough football ground which left 96 Liverpool supporters dead and over 700 injured, and from this time his stammer became far more severe. He became withdrawn, avoiding friends, refusing to answer the phone, and generally avoiding all speaking situations as far as possible.

David Bateman

The programme is full of anecdote: memories of being forced to read out in class; of problems in shops, bars and ordinary conversations; and of casual rudeness — "At one point, I was stammering for that long, that this lad went in his pocket and got his phone out." It also brings out the differences, ambivalences and contradictions in the extent to which we see our stammers as part of ourselves, as well as the issue of covert stammering — an area that for obvious reasons is largely unknown to non-stammerers.

Mary Collings, lead speech and language therapist at Liverpool's Willy Russell Centre, also contributes — and was an important voice on Roger Phillips's phone-in which followed the first broadcast of the documentary. Mary, who was the lead therapist for Gary, Tom, Mark and myself, the four people who stammer featuring in the programme, emphasises Dr Joseph Sheehan's approach, to "stammer openly and freely."

But besides its subject matter, perhaps the extra importance of the programme is in featuring stammerers ourselves as the main speakers. My girlfriend Vik remarked that until hearing this programme, mine was the only stammer she'd really known, and that it was a revelation to hear the variety of other voices with stammers too. Obviously anyone who stammers will face challenges as a presenter, but this programme shows how it can be done. Gary Hastie says that he and co-producer Pauline McAdam had spent quite some time discussing the issue of whether any of the stammering in the programme should be digitally edited, deciding in the end that only Gary's own stammer would be edited at all, a process which Gary says he's glad he left to Pauline: "She wanted to give a true reflection of the stammer without killing the radio. I was happy with that."

We have not as yet been able to make the programme available to listen to online from this web page, as we have not been able to get copyright permission for background music used in it.

From the Summer 2011 issue of 'Speaking Out', page 19