Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Free from the constraints of substantially verbatim reporting, Parliamentary Reporter Joe brings to life an unassuming and everyday tool of Hansard's trade.
Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones once described taking up the pedal steel guitar as being like learning to fly a helicopter. To create the inimitable bluesy crunch of that instrument is a full body commitment: hands and feet working in co-ordination, intellect and muscle memory deployed simultaneously. The result is sublimely more than the sum of its parts and arguably just as thrilling as wingless flight. It may be a stretch to apply such terms to any aspect of a Hansard reporter’s skills, yet the description immediately sprung to mind when I was asked to contemplate the humble foot pedal. Of all the tools at our disposal it is perhaps the most romantic (The Chute may give it a run for its money)—a final physical artefact in a new digital age.
Putting your foot down
At first glance, the foot pedal is unassuming—inelegant, even. Nestled under a reporter’s desk, it is a simple black rectangle consisting of three large buttons—robust enough to be operated by a shoed foot, small enough to be slipped into a rucksack and taken home. The pedal is used to manipulate the audio a Hansard reporter needs to construct their turn—the five-minute chunk of debate that they are transcribing and editing. The central button is the largest; this is the accelerator, driving the audio—and thus the turn—forward. It is pressed on to play and released to pause. Half memories of childhood arcade games bubble to the surface the first few times you use it. The left button skips backwards, and the right button skips forward. It is a time machine. With it comes the ability to endlessly replay the past with just the pulse of a heel, poring over each detail to squeeze out every last nuance—a long dark night (or perhaps half hour) of the sole.
The value of the physical
Visitors to Hansard are undeniably most intrigued and surprised by the existence of the foot pedal. It appears an obtusely mechanical outlier in what is sometimes considered an entirely cerebral enterprise. That is its romance. Where once the reporter’s room would have reverberated with the metallic clang of typewriters or the strange chords of stenography, now there is only the soft brush of ergonomic keyboards muffled by noise-cancelling headphones. Into that reverie the rhythmic smack of heel on plastic is reassuringly retro. Foot pedals seem to be from an earlier era and serve as a bridge to Hansard’s more hands-on past. They also give a chunky legitimacy to working from home. You cannot lounge in bed and complete a turn; the domestic office must be set up like a flight simulator.
Of course, there are those tech wizards or digital natives among the staff who opt for a keyboard-only approach to their turns. There is—apparently—some combination of keystrokes that will allow a reporter to control the audio without the need to engage their lower half. But where’s the fun in that? The foot pedal is the last material embodiment of a now entirely digital task. When frustrated, or up against the clock, the rhythm and volume of the foot pedal’s operation betrays the operator’s inner world. The noise from their foot pedal may be the catalyst for checking in on that colleague in the corner. That is its value: it exists in the real world, where the rest of us also reside.
And the world in which the long-serving Hansard reporter resides is always full of philosophical linguistic questions. At the end of a 20-minute presentation on the soon-to-be-adopted bespoke digital audio playback system, questions were invited. There was just one: "Isn't foot pedal tautologous?"