"We might go into double act mode”: ‘professional recollectors’, rehearsed memory and its uses

This article examines the issues that arise when interviewing subjects experienced in recounting their own histories. Brian Harrison has called such interviewees ‘professional recollectors’, and the article focuses on a single interview conducted with Glaswegian twin brothers John and Peter Douglas, both of whom had careers as cinema projectionists. The interview demonstrates some of the ways in which memory is structured into a ‘performance’, and the implications that this has for oral historians. Although the anecdotal aspects of the interview (and others like it) offer a highly constructed and rehearsed set of narratives, the article concludes that they are nevertheless useful historical sources because the anecdotal ‘set-ups’ frequently involve detailed accounts of the working life of the projectionists