Remembering master documentary maker, Chris Brookes
His St. John’s production house, Battery Radio, influenced radio makers worldwide
Celebrated documentary producer Chris Brookes died from an accidental fall on Monday, April 10, 2023. As tribute to his audio legacy, IDEAS revisits a 2009 documentary, entitled Hark!, which he produced with longtime collaborator, Paolo Pietropaolo.
Sometime in 2008, Chris Brookes called me up and invited me to work with him as a kind of junior partner on a new documentary he was planning. He said he wanted to imagine what the world — specifically, London, England — would have sounded like 400 years ago.
By this point, Chris had already become a cherished mentor and friend to me for several years, so I could pretty much hear the twinkle in his eye.
Every time you spoke to Chris, you could hear that twinkle in his eye. It was a combination of curiosity and a sense of play, mixed with a generous dose of mischief.
He'd have these wonderfully zany ideas, like calling payphones in London to ask random strangers to hold the receiver up and record the sounds of the city for 30 seconds. And that made it into Hark!
There was never, ever, a sense that even the most serious topic had to be treated with earnest gravitas.
For Chris, it had to be fun, you had to throw caution to the wind, at least a little. Otherwise, what was the point?
'Radio is like a swimming pool'
He believed in the power of sound to move listeners, to alter our perception of the world, if only for a few moments.
He used to say that radio was like a swimming pool. It frustrated him that many radio programmers pushed listeners into that pool, instructing them what to listen for, and robbing them of the sense of discovery.
"You have to gently nudge the listener into the pool, invite them in, get them to jump in with you," he'd say, while making a slight nudging gesture with both his hands.
And whenever he created his sonic swimming pools, you'd find yourself wanting to dive right in — and before you knew it, you'd become immersed and somehow transformed, whether it was a documentary about the soundscape of Elizabethan England, or the demise of Newfoundland's cod fishery, or whatever topic had attracted his voracious curiosity.
'Making the world bigger'
When Chris died, the news dealt a crushing blow to the local theatre and storytelling communities in St. John's, where he'd been a leading light for decades. The blow was also felt by a radio family stretching around the world, for whom he was a beloved elder, and a professional beacon.
Poetically, and fittingly, Chris wove his sonic tapestries in his home studio at the foot of Signal Hill, under the very cliff where Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901. From this perch on the edge of the continent, from this apparently remote location in The Battery, he became a focal point for countless people.
"Some people are lighthouses. They are far away across the ocean and although you may not see them often, you know they are there, making the world bigger," said Danish radio producer, Rikke Houd.
For former CBC Radio producer, Neil Sandell, "Chris was a master documentary maker, a unique voice. His stories about the collapse of the cod fishery were poetic, heartbreaking, and enduring. His sensibility was firmly rooted in Newfoundland, but his curiosity was vast.
"If you broke bread with Chris, you were treated to his warmth, wisdom, and wit. And you laughed so hard that it made you gasp for air."
I remember gasping for air like that, along with our friend and collaborator, Jowi Taylor when we were working on the series The Wire for CBC Radio.
Jowi got it right: "There was no one more lively, more genuine, more generous, more curious, more collaborative, more open, more enthused, more excited to be on the journey than Chris Brookes.
"The word that comes to mind the moment I think of him is 'joy'. He took joy in so many things in his work and in his daily life."
'Can we really put that on the radio?'
There was one issue while we were making Hark! that we debated for some time. Chris had travelled to a traditional farm in Warwickshire, which perhaps offered one of the closest approximations to the sounds of Elizabethan England that could actually be recorded. It was there that he made the most glorious recording of pigs being fed.
As they wait for their slops, the pigs would grunt. They'd squeal. They'd groan. Loudly. Very, very loudly. This would go on for a full minute. I said to Chris: "Can we really put that on the radio? A whole minute of squealing pigs?"
Yes, we could, he said, but not only that: we should.
And once again, I could hear the twinkle in his eye.
As I listen to those pigs now, I think of how Chris understood the visceral power of sound.
After their slops arrive and the pigs begin eating, the sound of the countryside filters in, quietly. You're there. You feel your ears have been stretched wide open. You hear things differently.
Chris, thank you for opening our ears.
*Hark! was produced in 2009 by Chris Brookes, Paolo Pietropaolo and Allan Hall.
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