It was people that you got to know. You lived in their houses for a bit, you sat around with them, talking in pubs and things, and you got them relaxed enough to talk freely.
Olive Shapley was born in Peckham in 1910 into a lower middle class family. Her upbringing gave rise to the driving force for her broadcast career – her belief in the potential of the ordinary person.
She began to work with the ±«Óãtv as Children's Hour organiser in 1934, but her real passion was for the social documentary. She was the first producer to routinely leave the studios behind: using enormous mobile recording vans to travel across the region, she would interview people in their own homes or workplaces, encouraging them to speak directly into the ±«Óãtv microphone.
This was not without its problems - during a live programme called Men Talking Shapley had to use placards requesting Durham miners "do not to say bugger or bloody", for fear it would take the programme off-air. She also covered the stories of canal workers, long-distance lorry drivers, homeless people, miners' wives, and recorded 24-hours in the life of a big hotel from the staff's point of view.
Apart from the introductions and links, the programmes were unscripted and unrehearsed, with working class people speaking about their lives to an extent previously unheard on British radio.
One of her outstanding productions was The Classic Soil, broadcast in July 1939. Scripted by Joan Littlewood, it drew inspiration from Friedrich Engels’ Victorian survey, The Condition of the Working Class in England. It offered listeners what the Radio Times called "a microphone impression" of Manchester "today and a hundred years ago".
Following WWII, in 1949, Shapley became a regular producer and presenter of Woman’s Hour, a programme with which she was associated for over twenty years. Again, she gave voice to a broader diversity of people, and aired content about many previously taboo subjects such as divorce, menopause and the financial independence of women.
Olive Shapley lived her beliefs, and in the mid-1960s, her Manchester home became a refuge for single mothers and in the late 1970s for the Vietnamese boat people.
She published her autobiography, Broadcasting a Life, in 1996.
