The Art Of The Vox Pop

Like buses or general elections, job offers have a tendency to come in twos or threes, and I drove into Middlesbrough on a Sunday night, not exactly sure if I’d said yes to the right one. It would take me a few months to work it out for sure. Cleveland, as it was in 1987, had its fair share of challenges. I think it probably had North Yorkshire’s share and that of a few other places too.

I wandered the streets on the night before I started. The roads were a mass of metal shutters and graffiti. I’d been driving around for ages looking for a hotel but couldn’t find one anywhere. I thought I’d have to drive down to Whitby and its bed and breakfasts on the West Cliff, but then, on Borough Road, a sign came into view— “Hotel”. It was only when I’d actually walked through the front door and paid for the room that I realised I’d not seen the extra letter.

There is a world of difference between a hotel and a hostel.

A man shuffled past in a pair of unlaced boots, a t-shirt and shorts.

“Is there a safe car park?”

“No.”

I lugged all my worldly belongings out of the car and into the hostel, helped by David. He, like most of the residents, was there for the long haul.

“They pay for it, not me. If I were paying, I’d be an idiot to stay here.”

None taken.

Welcome to Middlesbrough. I lay awake in bed. It was a hot night, and there seemed to be a swarm of midges congregating above the foot of the bed. They were edging towards me, but I stayed exactly where I was because the alternative (running out into the corridor) posed more of a risk. It was bedlam out there with people shouting and slamming doors. Just before dawn, a fight broke out next door. Or they might have been having sex. It was hard to tell. At half past five, I’d had enough, got dressed, grabbed my things, and scarpered.

My job at Radio Cleveland involved lots of technical work, but one day a week, I was allowed to go out and record my own interviews for the afternoon show.

My job, more often than not, was to gauge the opinions of the Great British Public. It’s called a Vox Pop and involves asking unsuspecting people the pertinent question of the day. In theory.

“What do you think of the plans for a new motorway?”

“Who should take over as Prime Minister?”

“What was the last piece of furniture you got stuck in?”

The last one didn’t get many replies, but the few that had got stuck in furniture were BRILLIANT!

Over the years, I’ve honed the way I approach people, and I can tell who’s going to talk to me and who’s not at thirty paces. It’s not much of a life skill, admittedly, but it’s set me up for a great future career as a charity mugger or someone wanting to know when you last bought Kellogg’s All-Bran. Shoppers are easy prey if you ask the right, open question, but you have to pick your moment. Approaching someone as they come out of a massage parlour is unlikely to get you a good clip of audio, but if you can catch someone just as they’ve got off the bus or come out of a shop or just finished a phone call, you’re onto a winner. The hardest part of doing one is the first approach. Once you’ve humiliated yourself and grovelled your way into someone’s good books once, you’re easily able to keep doing it.

Over the years, I’ve probably recorded more profanity than wit or wisdom, but while most reporters hate doing Voxes, there’s an art to doing them well and an art to editing them well. Chopping the interviewees’ answers into an entertaining order is a skill. You can hide someone’s daft answer in a medley of other fairly crass responses or highlight it by placing it alongside some other really clever ones.

Most of the time, you never learn anything from a Vox, but there’ve been one or two I’ve been really proud of.

I was rather chuffed with the ones I gathered in Barnsley after an MP was convicted of fiddling his expenses.

“Eric Illsley?” one man snorted. “Eric Fingers-In-The-Tillsley, more like.”

Twenty-four years’ worth of reputation as an MP wrecked in a single sentence.

In Scunthorpe, Elliot Morley, the town’s MP, was sent to prison after claiming expenses for a mortgage that had already been paid off. He pleaded guilty to two counts of false accounting and was sentenced to 16 months’ imprisonment. After his plea, I was sent to Scunny to get the public reaction. I stood in the middle of a pedestrianised shopping area and stopped someone to talk to. Another shopper heard me interviewing them and waited till I’d finished and asked if they could give their views. Then another did the same. And another. By this time, there was an orderly queue of people wanting to vent their collective and individual spleens. Not one had a good word to say about Morley, who was condemned by the very people he’d represented.

These days, Vox Pops are derided by many people working in the “media” (whatever that means, these days). Yes they are unscientific, yes, they are open to editorial bias from the reporter but come on - they’re normally just a bit of fun. Lighten up funsponge! For me, the best Vox I ever did was in Huddersfield where I was told to go and “do something about people who wear their jeans so low you can see half their arse.” That was as far as the editorial discussion went - which was often the way on 5 Live. I loved it because it gave me the freedom to have a bit of fun. Have a listen to Peter Allen and Fi Glover hand over to me.. at which point, the Vox takes over.

It’s in the format of what’s become known as a “PoshVox”. PoshVoxes are ones where the people’s voices become the main content (the BBC’s even made a mini-format for this now, calling it ‘Your Voice, Your BBC News’ - and the ‘proper’ interviews are done away with - the Voice of the People (for those who don’t know any Latin). Watch the BBC 10 o’clock News and you’ll quite often see PoshVoxes being done - the presenter will usually say something along the lines of “we’ve been gauging reaction to today’s news.. in Darlington,” before a quite senior reporter will come on, walk down a road, chat to a couple of people (wobble-cam, reverse shot, wobble-cam, piece to camera, pithy last comment from couple as they shake their heads and wander off down the road) before delivering a hand-waving final thought with a knowing look into the camera. Remember the name: PoshVox.

I digress. Back to Radio Cleveland.

As well as people working in Middlesbrough itself, we had reporters based in district offices around the region. One in Darlington, one in Hartlepool, one in Whitby. Each day they’d send in a report for the Breakfast Show based on what was happening in their patch. Often the result involved the words “F*ck” and “all”. You see, the criteria for what constituted a news story from Hartlepool is (are?) quite low. I once called into the studio there— a cupboard of an office in a remote part of the town’s civic centre— and on the wall was a whiteboard for story ideas. The only things on it were:

“Six weeks till Christmas”

and

“Book it all off as annual leave.”

But the amazing thing was that, every day, without fail, they’d find something happening and turn it into radio.

I understand, better than most, that, for district reporters, it must be brain-numbingly boring to do these stories day after day, year after year and that’s why one reporter had an idea. He was our reporter in the fishing town of Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast. Whitby is a fantastic, amazing town full of interesting people with a plethora of local interests - fishing, tourism, history, health issues, a smattering of social deprivation mixed with a burgeoning second-home-owning middle-age middle class. But after ten years of covering stories there, the reporter was - let’s be honest - a bit jaded. He’d had enough of asking the people of Whitby what they thought about the new traffic lights that were planned outside the Co-Op and so he started recording ‘special’ Vox Pops.

These ‘special’ recordings involved him keeping every answer he recorded so that, eventually, he had enough for three full reels of tape.

Tape one was full of positive answers:

“Oh, that’s a great idea - I think it’s brilliant.”

“Yep, totally in favour of that - what a terrific scheme”

The next tape was more equivocal:

“I’m not sure, I’d have to see a lot more detail about it.”

“But that doesn’t solve the bigger problem, does it? They’ve got to work harder to convince me.”

The third was completely negative:

“That’s stupid, that is.”

“Typical - they haven’t thought it through at all, have they? Why do we pay good money for these people?”

Each report would have a couple of Ones, a few Twos and the odd Three. He had so many of these interviews that, by jiggling the order up, nobody ever realised what was going on.

Until now!