The Night People
Bob Dickinson goes in search of the presenter of a 1966 radio documentary about after-dark Manchester.
This article contains quotes from the 1960s that use outdated and offensive language.
For a long time now, I’ve been interested in a radio documentary made in Manchester nearly sixty years ago, entitled The Night People. It’s almost thirty minutes long, and consists of conversations with individuals, couples or small groups, recorded in the city centre after dark. In many cases, what these interviewees were doing wasn’t legal. For some of them, sex work, homosexuality, drug addiction or theft provided a secret way of life. Talking to them, and gently coaxing out answers, was a reporter called Barbara McDonald, a woman I once knew.
The Night People was first broadcast on 4th April 1966 by the BBC, on what was then called the North of England Home Service – now known nationally as Radio 4. It begins with the bells of Manchester Town Hall clock, tolling midnight. Then, as they begin to fade, you hear Barbara McDonald’s voice – confident and urbane – announcing, ‘I’m in the centre of Manchester on a freezing cold night… between now and about five o’clock in the morning, I’m going to roam the streets seeking out the kind of people that hover in the shadows, people we normally avoid…’
How can you possibly stop listening after an introduction like that? Even now, The Night People makes compelling listening. When McDonald invites herself to sit next to a young man on a bench, he tells her, ‘I’m waiting for my boyfriend.’ She asks him about his life and he admits, ‘I’m worried about my family and the way the law is’ – this, don’t forget, being one year before homosexuality was legalised. When he tells her how difficult it is to get a job because he is ‘one of “those”’, McDonald observes, ‘Well, if you don’t mind me saying so, you’ve got your hair dyed blonde, you’re wearing makeup’. The young man’s reply is perfectly assured. ‘I’m lucky where I work because they don’t mind,’ he says, ‘if I tried to hide it, then it would be like I was ashamed of it, and I’m not. I don’t mind letting other people know what I am… It’s them that are ignorant, not me. That’s how I was born. The normal way for me to act is the way I do’.
I’ve listened to my old cassette copy of The Night People a lot. When I worked in BBC Radio, it was a programme we often discussed. Everyone who heard it was fascinated by the sound of those lost voices from the 1960s. I’m pretty sure Jarvis Cocker’s occasional series Wireless Nights, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, was inspired by The Night People. Outside the Beeb, awareness of The Night People has grown slowly. It’s mentioned in books and, occasionally, extracts from it are played at public events. Thinking about The Night People in 2024 gives me a chance to study the way the programme was constructed, and to compare the city it captured then with today’s much busier and bigger version. But one question really pushed me into writing what you are now reading: whatever happened to Barbara McDonald?
In the mid-1980s, we worked in the same office at Granada Television. I checked my old address books, full of names, locations and numbers I accumulated long before smartphones. Nothing. Then I found an envelope containing a DVD that Barbara sent me, a decade ago, with a return address. I’d never returned it. How remiss of me. I thought, I’ll go and knock on the door. Maybe she’s still there. Maybe not. I started asking around on Facebook, and that’s when I found out about the Manchester Drag Symposium, which took place at the Central Library in 2017 and featured a broadcast of The Night People. Then a friend emailed me to say Barbara was alive and well, and included a phone number. I called it, and for the first time in years, we spoke. She agreed to be interviewed. The following week, I travelled up to Delph, near Oldham, to meet her. She is now ninety-three years old, and looks and sounds very much the same as she always did – incredibly lively and still very smartly dressed. About The Night People she told me some surprising details.