Finding a Family

Being part of the University after years on my own as a writer is a weird old feeling. It makes me think about communities of practice I've belonged to and reacted against; the BBC community 20 years ago for example, and that sense of being initiated into a way of being that had an identity, a membership and a quality to it that was almost tangible.

I got into BBC’s Greater London Radio (GLR) by the back door after spending my first five years in the media as a freelancer picking up my skills as I went along. It was like that in those days; you’d learn on the job and hear of the next work through a camera-man or sound guy. But when I first listened to GLR, I was determined to become one of the people who were making that kind of radio. As a listener, it felt like my mates had all gone to a party and forgotten to invite me. At that age, I was still super-confident to think that it was just an oversight, and that it was just a matter of my popping down there to join in. I was so convinced that this was my place, that I talked my way in and shadowed one of the producers. When he was off for a couple of weeks with a particularly bad cold, I was the first to be called. Once in, I wasn’t going to leave, and as soon as a researcher’s job became available, I applied and got it.

There’s a certain kind of person who works at the BBC, and at the time, I felt I was one of them. It wasn’t that I was particularly brilliant as a researcher, although I was bright and self motivated which counts for a lot in radio where you’re expected to multi-task and pick up the reins as soon as they’re dropped. This was an unusual station in that it was small and very deliberately allowing a new generation of radio talent (Chris Evans, Chris Morris, Nigel Barden and a little later, Fi Glover) to experiment with all the ingredients we’d brought with us, so although it was a little more experimental, the foundations were pure BBC – solid, reliable and very good at crossing the Ts. I was trained up and given more opportunities than I have ever been given since, and yet it was the pub after work where the seams were sewn and the feeling of belonging zipped so tightly that 20 years on, many of us are still in contact, both through work and socially. Understanding the collective ‘ways of knowing and thinking’ of the group seemed to happen by osmosis over a glass or two.

That mix of social and professional cohesion is what I have in my head when I teach my students, although I haven’t experienced it since leaving it for the far less tribal world of TV, and then writing (from home, where I am utterly alone – apart from the dogs). From that cosy world of BBC radio, TV was a draughty one in which as one of many freelancers on a fixed term contract, the ghost of Christmas Future was always poking me on the shoulder, pointing out that if I didn’t watch where I was going, I would be the only one out of a job in a few months. The gravitational pull was not towards a community of practice but into the good books of the execs responsible for renewing the contracts. One of the companies I worked for was Planet 24 , apparently so-called because its production team barely left the premises in a bid to show its loyalty. Exploitation was the name of the game and the self worth pumped through the air vents of the BBC’s ‘community of practice’ was replaced by anxiety and one-upmanship in TV. I ran screaming.

I spent the next 15 years making my own way, bumping into other ‘communities of practice’ such as the world of food I write mostly about, and for my foray into publishing with the Juicy Guide to Brighton, the ‘architects’ of the city in the widest sense of the word, the people who made Brighton Brighton. The books were even designed to help relocators to make a home in the city, with information on the schools, restaurants and bars helping them find their tribe.

But while this move away from a specific community of practice has left me without one of my own, it has given me a mix of skills that are essential for anyone working in Broadcast Media these days. There are very few jobs for life in the industry and even that cosy BBC world is packed with freelancers looking over their shoulders now. They may come from newspapers, but newspapers no longer offer jobs for the boys either and a new mix of entrepreneur and story-teller, social butterfly and reliable workhorse is what we have to teach our students to be if they are to become fully functioning members of the community of Broadcast Media.

This new community of media freelancers talks to each other while quietly parading its wares in social networks, and is less likely to make each other a coffee than to meet for one in a bid to hop onto the next rung of the ladder. There’s less time for Lave and Wenger’s ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ on the job as there was when I was passing a fellow researcher the splicing tape and studying how he was doing it; God forbid that you try to get into TV these days without a degree film behind you or that you apply for a job in radio without already knowing how to edit a programme. Perhaps it’s the shared experience of knowing that once they’re out in the real world, it’s everyone for themselves that is the new glue.

Etienne Wenger described this ‘community of practice’ in 1991 as ‘a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression’ and although times have changed, I do still encourage this in class. The difference is that I do it less for their well-being and more to train them up as a better catch than the next person.