2 - The Fight Game

The Fight Game was first broadcast in 1963, one of eight radio ballads that Peggy Seeger made with Ewan MacColl and the BBC producer Charles Parker, in which the recorded voices of working people were intertwined with folk songs and actuality. Ewan wrote the songs. Peggy, then in her late twenties, was music director and orchestrator, and when Kate Molleson asks what she drew on for the nervy brass of the fight sequence, her answer is 'Nothing.'

What she did have was a mother who took the full score to concerts and whispered to her when each instrument was about to come in. She also had a band of seasoned session musicians, all men and twice her age, who clubbed together to buy her a book on orchestration, as they put it, 'to put themselves out of their misery'.

She listens back to the fight sequence, which terrified her when she wrote it, and to the closing song she sang with Ewan, and she decides this was the first of the radio ballads with nothing in it to make her wince.

Presenter: Kate Molleson
Producer: Victoria Ferran

With thanks to Sara Jane Hall

A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 3