BBC World Service: Overseas Broadcasting, 1932-2018

"This book brings us to the BBC’s international role, which I mentioned at the beginning. Johnson and Robertson provide a panoptic view of BBC international broadcasting that goes right back to the foundation of the BBC’s services for overseas listeners. The first regular BBC international service was the Empire Service, which was established in 1932. It was designed to serve listeners around the British Empire . The exact words used in the BBC’s proposal to establish the service were that it would target the English-speaking ‘white population’ of territories ‘under the British flag’. There were several reasons for this focus, but essentially the BBC saw its overseas role as uniting white colonial settlers, ex-pats and ‘Old Commonwealth’ countries including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. This was how the BBC interpreted its imperial role. It tells us a lot about contemporary attitudes to race and empire, within and beyond the BBC. In 1937, the BBC entered into discussions with the British government about providing broadcasts in Arabic for the Middle East and in Spanish and Portuguese to Latin America. This was a direct response to Italian and German fascist propaganda. The BBC very much wanted to ensure that it preserved its monopoly of broadcasting, and the Director General (Reith) was willing to work closely with the government in running international broadcasting in order to achieve this. From 1938, the BBC simultaneously operated as Britain’s broadcaster for audiences in the UK and as the voice of Britain overseas. Johnson and Robertson’s book is good at reminding us of this very bizarre fact. The organisation that viewers and listeners in Britain see as their broadcaster, as primarily providing programmes for them, is also an enormous transnational media operator, projecting British soft power and propaganda. There was inevitably leakage between these two roles, as was demonstrated very clearly during the Cold War. The people running the World Service, as it later became known, were separated by paper walls from other parts of the BBC. A fascinating example was Hugh Carleton Greene , the brother of the novelist Graham Greene . He worked at the BBC German Service during World War II, coordinating radio propaganda against Nazi Germany. He then went on to set up broadcasting in the British sector of occupied West Germany after the war, and was seconded to the Colonial Office to run the ‘hearts and minds’ radio propaganda campaign during the Malayan Emergency, targeting Chinese Communist insurgents. He ended up as BBC Director-General, running the whole show: a former propaganda warrior became famous as the man who introduced progressive programming to the BBC in the swinging sixties, including the satirical That Was The Week That Was and social realist dramas like Cathy Come Home . Yes. Quite a few other BBC people were seconded to government departments during World War II and then, during the Cold War, to work in propaganda roles and to help set up broadcasting in Britain’s colonies in the 1940s and 50s, for example. People moved backwards and forwards between government and broadcaster. Since 1989, the World Service has worked hard to find new roles for itself, with some success. It has engaged with new audiences through television and internet platforms, and with NGO activity through the World Service Trust/Media Action. It has had to do this to justify its continued existence and continued government funding. This is another thing that we don’t often acknowledge: that the BBC up until 2014 received a very large chunk of Foreign Office money to do all of this international work. The World Service also faced a significant threat from the more commercial way of doing things that was introduced by John Birt as Director-General in the 1990s. Birt was determined to impose internal markets on the BBC, and the World Service was very resistant to that. Nevertheless, despite this hostility, and despite the withdrawal of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office grant in 2014, the World Service has survived. Within about a year of losing the FCO grant, the BBC had received a huge chunk of overseas development assistance money to keep doing a lot of the things that were otherwise going to be cut back, and to set up a raft of new services to priority areas, particularly in the Middle East, but also China and Russia, to advance British foreign policy goals. When the charter was last reviewed the BBC announced its aim of reaching a global audience of half a billion people, and it has now pretty much achieved that. Its next goal is a global audience of a billion people. The BBC still has an impressive international reach and major global ambitions."