“For the benefit of the tape”: Formulating embodied conduct in designedly uni-modal recorded police–suspect interrogations

This paper examines the formulation of embodied conduct in a designedly uni-modal environment: audio-recordings of British police interrogations of suspects. These recordings are made by the police as part of the legal process, and for non-present ‘distal’ recipients (e.g. juries, judges). The paper focuses on the design, placement and action orientation of the phrase, “for the benefit of the tape” and its truncated variant “for the tape”. The first environment for FBT/FT phrases was the opening sequence of interviews, as accounts for eliciting ‘already-known’ information about the identity of the suspect. Subsequent FBT/FT phrases occurred in verbal formulations of embodied conduct and in questions about such conduct, to make it ‘visible’ for distal recipients. FBT/FT phrases were therefore ‘recipient designed’ in two ways: for co-present participants, to account for the formulation of ‘already known’ information, and for distal participants, to disambiguate otherwise unrecoverable spatial and embodied aspects of the interaction. The paper examines how the combination, or collision, of different interactional and recording modalities, with different categories of recipient, provides speakers with a complex set of contingencies to manage.