Name: Herschel Backpacks: Marketing or Lying? by Carson Frame in Frame, Carson
Duration: 4 min 59 s
Description: A short reported feature that explores the hazy origins of the Herschel backpack, now billed as an American icon.

Frame, Carson

Narrative piece I produced during an NYU workshop with Yowei Shaw in August 2015. It explores how construction workers often find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Their work is inherently dangerous, but so is the public.

Construction Worker Piece - -NYU Audio Workshop

A fierce drought in Oklahoma’s ‘No Man’s Land’ – a region that was the heart of the 1930s Dust Bowl – stirs up dust storms, memories and myths. In this parched terrain of ghost towns and abandoned ranches, the wells are running dry, but the stories continue to flow.

Around ‘the Liars’ table’ at a roadside diner in the small prairie town of Boise City, old timers and young farmers share tales of dust storms past and present, trying to outdo each other in the retelling of local legends. Voices of Dust Bowl survivors entwine with stories of today’s drought. Stories blow out like drifts of sand, embellished with fine layers of imaginative silt.

Storytelling spins out of the landscape itself. Boise City was founded on a fiction by fraudsters who enticed people to buy plots of land in a town that did not exist. Expecting elegant, tree-lined streets and fountains, the newcomers found nothing but dirt. And when they ploughed it up, the dirt soon turned to dust.

Millard Fowler (who has sadly died since being recorded) was 102 years old, and remembers the ‘Dirty Thirties’, when relentless winds scooped up the topsoil and rolled it through the town in billowing black clouds, turning day to night.

Many families packed up and left, but those who stayed have a deep attachment to the land. The stories that echo through it today “may not all be straight down the bean line,” but they offer a subtle architecture of hope and survival.

Produced by Cicely Fell
First broadcast 5th July 2016, BBC Radio 4

Dust Bowl Ballads

Graffiti’s modern role is evolving rapidly. From Europe to Brazil, street artists are displaying their anger about inequality, invisibility, corruption and control. Powerful images and words on walls are creating international headlines. But can breaking one law help to change another? Where should the line be drawn between democracy and vandalism, vandalism and art?

In an era of rapid political, social and economic change, graffiti in Paris and Barcelona has become more prolific – and less tolerated – than ever before. Artists including Blek Le Rat (the “father of stencil graffiti”), Roc Blackblock, Suriani and Vegan Bunnies defend their actions, and discuss whether such “freedom of expression” on walls should have any limits. 

Presented and produced by Steve Urquhart
First broadcast 26th July 2016, BBC Radio 4

Graffiti: Paint and Protest in Europe

When tanks rolled into Moscow on 19 August 1991 during a dramatic anti-Perestroika coup by Soviet hardliners, the USSR's state-controlled airwaves offered a curious response - a continuous loop of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Ballet, of all things, served as balm for the revolution underway.

Yet most Soviets weren't fooled. A series of deaths by recent Soviet premiers - all greeted by broadcasts of the regime's beloved Swans on television - had taught Russians to view Tchaikovsky's classic as far more than art. It was a harbinger for political wrangling deep inside the Kremlin. Amid the dancing and pirouettes on a grainy screen, Russians saw hidden choreography affecting their lives and country. Tchaikovsky's swans had become canaries in the coalmine, sparking mass protests that brought an end to the Soviet empire.

A quarter of a century on, this programme traces the strange and elaborate pas de deux between Tchaikovsky's ballet classic and the Russian psyche - revealing how a work considered a flop upon its premiere emerged as a powerful instrument of Soviet propaganda, and - later - a soundtrack that failed to disguise impending political turmoil.

A mosaic of Russian voices recall their impressions of the swans through a richly layered tale of 'looped reporting' and encounters, rare archival audio, contemporary interviews and digital mash-ups to chronicle how Swan Lake has shaped the history of modern Russia and - even now - emerged as a powerful political meme in the Putin era.

First broadcast 18th August 2016, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Charles Maynes and Cicely Fell

Looping Swans

A short reported feature that explores the hazy origins of the Herschel backpack, now billed as an American icon.

Herschel Backpacks: Marketing or Lying?

Two skateboarders... on hitting the concrete.

Herschel Backpacks: Marketing or Lying?

Carson Frame

Related tracks