Monday, October 31, 2016

Raw Tapes from a "Man On The Street" Type TV Show

 
 
Well, it's been a busy few weeks, with a couple more to come in advance of a big event I'm part of. And that's meant less posting here. It will pick up after the middle of the month, and I have a lot more to share.
 
For today, here's an interesting reel, one which captures the raw tapes for a show - I believe a local PBS show from the Maryland area - called "People In Process". I can find no references to this show, but admittedly haven't looked that hard.
 
The investigation here (such as it is) is into how people in a small town view life in a small town. That they chose the city of Annapolis, Maryland, which is the capital of the state, strikes me as weird, especially given that the town had 30,000 residents in the late '60's and early '70's, which is when I'm guessing this is from. Perhaps it's because I was raised in a town of 4000 people, but 30,000 people isn't a "small town" to me.
 
The questions the interviewer chooses to ask, particularly the different things he asks different people, are quite interesting, and deserve their own sociological study. There's also the woman who doesn't want to be on camera. And there's the way he tries so hard to feed several interviewees questions, asking them to answer in complete sentences, even telling them how to start the sentences, and the way that NONE of them seem to understand what he wants them to do. Beyond that, to my ears, he just isn't much of an interviewer, and that's being generous.
 
The entire tape runs about 56 minutes.
 
Play:
 
 

2 comments:

  1. Been gone a while, but it's always good to be back. Thanks for another fine upload, Bob!

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  2. Definitely a matter of perspective. I was born and raised in a city of nearly 100,000 in a region of a couple million. Now I live in a more sparsely-populated area where the largest town is about 32,000. To me, this is a VERY small town.

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