England Nine - Transcription
Okay. My name's Beth Allen and I'm from a tiny little isolated village *between Blackburn and *Bolton, *which is north Manchester, and it's called Edgeworth. And em I lived there until I was eighteen, went to primary school there, went to the posh school in Bolton em as a secondary school, and so I'm n..not hugely broad. And then went to Scotland for the last fourteen years, so there's a bit of Scottish in there as well. I did a BA in Music Performance and specialized in singing, for three years. Em so I've a degree in singing. And then after that I worked for Scottish Opera doing Community Education projects and working as a, a teacher that went in in and out of schools. And then I did a post-graduate in Music Therapy which took a year, and for that I came to London. And then, after that, I worked again for Scottish Opera and also in a hospital for profoundly handicapped adults, in Scotland. And I did that for about two years and em struggled with the isolation so ended up doing more and more work for Scottish Opera and eventually they created a post for me. Finally taking the hint. And *I then devised projects and worked em all round Scotland touring em primary and secondary schools, teaching kids about singing and o.. dance and em drama, and how the three worked together. And after that, when that job started to become too much an administrative job, I decided to set up my own company, so I set up a children's theatre company called The Happy Gang. And we *performed all over Scotland in theatres and schools and em we did three television series for the BBC, BBC2 Education. Em and we had a fantastic time, but it was very very hard work, as setting up your own company is. And after about three years, I decided I couldn't cope any more with the people I was working with, with commuting to Manchester to see my boyfriend, with em humphing sets around for two hours before you then did an hour and a half very physical performance and then humphing a set out for an hour, and then driving two hours back to Glasgow. So I em had a very unpleasant split from m..my partners and moved to Manchester and then temped for a year and a half as a receptionist. Quite a bright receptionist, I like to think. Quite a bright receptionist, probably a cut above the average. Em. But I enjoyed having no stress and taking n..nothing home and, and that's about it. And then *it's taken me that year and a half to really work out how I wanted to use my skills and where I wanted to go from there. Em. The best thing is confirming what I already knew, so telling myself that actually I do have skills and they are useful, and allowing those skills to be challenged and em possibly redirected and em let them grow a bit so that I actually have more background to those skills, actually know why I'm doing something instead of just instinctively doing it 'cause it feels right. *The part I like the least is em *living away from Andy, 'cause I miss him, and I've being doing it the last s..seven months, I've been in Scotland again, commuting backwards and forwards. Okay the rainbow passage:....
Transcribed by Kevin Flynn, May 2005