Real British voices?

November 13, 2008 12:52 PM

Can anyone point me to a British equivalent of Studs Terkel's work?

I am doing a course in creative writing in the UK at the moment. I find it very hard to develop unique, credible voices for different characters.

I strongly feel that I would benefit from reading monologues from the mouths of different real British people. I may well also benefit from hearing such monologues. I was wondering if anyone could point me to such a resource. Something like the stuff Studs Terkel did in "Working", but for British people.

Can anyone help? I would vastly prefer interviews with real British people, rather than examples of literary/fictional mastery of voice. I would also prefer these Brits to be talking in as close to a monologue as possible - an unobtrusive, or non-existent, interviewer. Finally, I also would like the source to cover a varied range of Brits (e.g. a wide diversity of race, class, sex, age, location, etc) as possible.

posted by laumry to writing & language (11 comments total)

Try Bill Buford's "Among the Thugs"
posted by vito90 at 1:00 PM on November 13, 2008

How about this
posted by zeoslap at 1:36 PM on November 13, 2008

How about Creature Comforts?
posted by blue_beetle at 1:48 PM on November 13, 2008

I would cautiously recommend the Up Series. They interview the same group of Brits every seven years from the age of 7 to 49, and whats interesting is that the people they picked at 7 don't all turn into people you'd chose to put in a documentary at 49, so you end up with kind of a nice cross section of people - a jockey turned cab driver, a lawyer, a stay at home mom. You get to see them evolve, too, which is nice.

Also, there's a lot in there about class issues, which would be appropriate if the Studs Terkel book you're most interested in is Working.

Its not going to have a huge sample size like a Studs Terkel work, though.
posted by Kiablokirk at 1:52 PM on November 13, 2008

"Among The Thugs" is a great book, but Buford is American, and as someone who grew up in the era of Football he documents, it's all very much filtered through an American's-eye-view. Not necessarily a bad thing at all, but I'm not sure if it's quite what the OP is after.
posted by coach_mcguirk at 2:00 PM on November 13, 2008

Mass Observation. (History.)
posted by languagehat at 2:09 PM on November 13, 2008

Tony Parker was considered to be a British equivalent of Studs Terkel -- I'm afraid the only work of his I've read is A Place Called Bird, but Wikipedia will give you a list of his other works; see Tony Parker (author).
posted by davemack at 2:58 PM on November 13, 2008

It's a long time since I've read Danziger's Britain, but that might fit some of what you're looking for. Not sure about the monologue style though.
posted by rjt at 3:12 PM on November 13, 2008

Ronald Blythe's Akenfield is a classic work of oral history constructed around reminiscences from one Suffolk village. George Ewart Evans's Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay is an earlier work in the same tradition.

For more contemporary oral history, have a look at (or a listen to) some of the projects on the Hidden Histories website, e.g. Carry on Canals (audio), Our Brick Lane (video).
posted by verstegan at 3:35 PM on November 13, 2008

Are you familiar with Alan Bennett's Talking Heads? Of course they are fictional but they do sound peculiarly English.
posted by boudicca at 4:46 AM on November 14, 2008

Dear all,

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll go through them over the next couple of weeks.
posted by laumry at 6:37 AM on November 14, 2008