BBC World Service

Overseas Broadcasting, 1932–2018

Gordon Johnston, Emma Robertson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781137318558
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book is the first full-length history of the BBC World Service: from its interwar launch as short-wave radio broadcasts for the British Empire, to its twenty-first-century incarnation as the multi-media global platform of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The book provides insights into the BBC's working relationship with the Foreign Office, the early years of the Empire Service, and the role of the BBC during the Second World War. In following the voice of the BBC through the Cold War and the contraction of the British empire, the book argues that debates about the work and purposes of the World Service have always involved deliberations about the future of the UK and its place in the world. In current times, these debates have been shaped by the British government's commitment to leave the European Union and the centrifugal currents in British politics which in the longer term threaten the integrity of the United Kingdom. Through a detailed exploration of its past, the bookposes questions about the World Service's possible future and argues that, for the BBC, the question is not only what it means to be a global broadcaster as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, but what it means to be a national broadcaster in a divided kingdom.

© The Author(s) 2019

G. Johnston, E. RobertsonBBC World Servicehttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31855-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. From Empire to World Service: An Introduction^*

Gordon Johnston¹ and Emma Robertson²

(1)

School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

(2)

History Program, Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University, Bendigo, VIC, Australia

Gordon Johnston (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Emma Robertson

Email: [email protected]

^*Until 1988, the BBC Overseas Broadcasting Services were known as the ‘BBC External Services’. This included the BBC Overseas English-Language Service which from 1965 was called the ‘BBC World Service’. Prior to this, it was known as the General Overseas Service. In 1988, the title ‘BBC World Service’ was adopted for all of the BBC’s non-commercial Overseas Broadcasting Services, irrespective of language. We have employed the BBC’s terminology and made use of various generic titles, ‘external services’, ‘external broadcasting services’ and ‘overseas services’ where appropriate.

End Abstract

In 1999, Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan described the BBC World Service as ‘perhaps Britain’s greatest gift to the world this century’.¹ In 2018, the BBC World Service was broadcast in 42 languages to a weekly audience of 279 million, its largest ever. Indeed, 12 new language services, including Nigerian Pidgin and Korean, were added in 2017–2018. Of its foreign-language services, the largest audiences were commanded by Arabic, Hausa (spoken in West and Central Africa) and Persian: with weekly audiences of 44.3 million, 24.6 million and 22.5 million, respectively. The BBC’s largest audience was for World Service English. Most of the BBC Language Services are distributed by radio, but many are also available online and on social media. The BBC Arabic, Persian, Russian and Punjabi services also offer television channels. With a weekly audience target of 500 million by 2022, the BBC World Service enjoys a global reach unprecedented in its history.

Contrast this with the BBC’s first foray into overseas broadcasting in December 1932, when the BBC Empire Service broadcast in English to Australasia, Africa, India, Burma and the Federated Malay States, Canada, Trinidad, British Guiana and the West Indies. In his message which accompanied the first broadcast, which consisted largely of musical items, John Reith, Director General of the BBC, explained that Empire Service broadcasting was a significant occasion in the history of the British Empire but ‘how significant it would be unwise at the moment to forecast’. Reith warned his listeners that in the early days they should not expect too much from the programmes, since they ‘will neither be very interesting nor very good’.² In his subsequent account of the genesis of the Empire Service, Reith riled in customary fashion against the parsimony and apathy of politicians, ‘there had been little encouragement; colossal indifference; some opposition. The BBC had recognised and assumed responsibility which should have been urged upon us by those who were the custodians of imperial relationships’.³ The importance of broadcasting and its influence was considered in an early evaluation of the Empire Service by the Colonial Office which concluded that ‘the repeated projection on the minds of listeners overseas of British culture and ideas, and all that this implies must exert a great influence’. The extent of this influence, the report continued:

will vary in different territories with the race and education of the listeners and according to the extent to which they are subjected to other influences, whether these be foreign wireless propaganda, films or the Press, and the extent also to which it can displace these influences.⁴

In 1935, Hilda Matheson, a former Director of Talks at the BBC, was in no doubt that broadcasting constituted an ‘important Imperial asset’.⁵ In a few years, the BBC had created its first overseas audience, of predominantly white British settlers.

The journey from the BBC Empire Service to the BBC World Service of today and the challenges that the World Service is likely to face in the future is the subject matter of our book. In this introductory chapter, we outline the periodisation that we use to make sense of the development of international broadcasting in general and the origins and development of the BBC Overseas Services in particular. We argue that the BBC’s maturation as a global broadcaster and deliberations as to its purpose have to be viewed in the context of Britain’s diminished influence in the world over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We then turn to the specifics of the BBC and argue that in order to understand why overseas broadcasting has developed in the way that it has, we need to consider five themes over time. These are: the relationship between overseas broadcasting and foreign policy, the constitutional position of the BBC and its status as a public service broadcaster, the character and composition of the BBC’s audiences, and the impact of technological change. Finally, the BBC has agency in its own history with resources on which it can draw and influence which it can exert.

We will explore our themes and historical periodisation in more detail below. Before doing so, we need to step back and consider how radio was conceptualised and understood in the early decades of the twentieth century, before the rapid expansion of international broadcasting in the 1930s. This period, marked by advances in short-wave technology, was the moment when the modern state, irrespective of its political character, developed the capacity to address not only its own citizens but those of other countries. Nation states also had to determine the scope, management, control and financing of broadcasting. In the UK, the Crawford Committee in 1925 declared that ‘the United States system of free and uncontrolled transmission and reception, is unsuited to this country’ and recommended instead that the BBC should be established as a public corporation fulfilling a public service supported by a licence fee.⁶ Our final reason for revisiting radio’s early years is because as Dieter Daniels has convincingly argued there are ‘far reaching parallels that can be drawn between the Internet’s metamorphosis into a mass medium in the 1990s and the transition that radio underwent in the 1920s’.⁷ For the modern state and the modern citizen, both technologies offered authoritarian and democratic accounts of their own futures.

The Scope and Purpose of Radio

Radio pioneers quickly recognised the global potential of the medium. In 1924, eight years before the launch of the BBC Empire Broadcasting Service, John Reith wrote that sooner or later ‘the public affairs of the Empire will be debated in the hearing of the Empire’, adding that ‘whatever is practicable within the Empire is practicable also between all the countries of the world’.⁸ In the same year, Reith failed to persuade the India Office to start broadcasts to India, commenting that ‘a great opportunity has been lost’.⁹ In a diary entry two years later, Reith complained that there was ‘neither vision nor recognition of the immense potentialities of broadcasting in this affair; no ethical or moral appreciation; just commercialism’.¹⁰ Reith was not alone in seeing the potential that radio had to reach large, scattered audiences. Lenin who described radio as a ‘newspaper without paper and without distances’ anticipated that ‘all Russia will be able to hear a newspaper read in Moscow’.¹¹ The upper cylinder of Tatlin’s unrealised Monument to the Third International was designed to house a radio station for broadcasts to the international proletariat. Marconi argued in 1922 ‘that for the first time in the history of the world man is now able to appeal by means of direct speech to millions of his fellows, and there is nothing to prevent an appeal being made to fifty millions of men and women at the same time’.¹² For Marconi, radio brought ‘unforeseen opportunities for healthy recreation and instruction into the lives of millions of human beings’.¹³ In 1921, the Russian poet, Velimir Khlebnikov, argued that The Radio of the Future ‘will inaugurate new ways to cope with our endless undertakings and will unite all of mankind’.¹⁴ In 1926, the Swiss architect and future Director of the Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer, wrote that ‘the radio, Marconigram, and telephoto release us from national differentiation into the community of the world’.¹⁵ In the same year, Trotsky linked the development of radio with the modernisation of the Soviet Union: ‘the conquest of the village by radio is a task for the next few years, very closely connected with the task of eliminating illiteracy and electrifying the country, and to some extent a pre-condition for the fulfillment of these tasks’.¹⁶

Reith and Lenin were writing in the early 1920s when radio emerged as a mass broadcast media, no longer the preserve of amateur wireless enthusiasts, shipping companies and military communications. In addition to a shared sense of radio’s potential to reach large dispersed audiences, they were like-minded in their view that broadcasting was a one-way, hierarchical medium: an authoritative broadcasting voice or source, addressing an audience, which was viewed in largely passive terms: ‘speech without response’ as Baudrillard was later to name the mass media.¹⁷ For Walter Benjamin, this way of thinking about radio encouraged a ‘consumer mentality’ and created a ‘public that has neither yardsticks for its judgments, nor a language for its feelings’.¹⁸ But for Reith and Lenin, radio was a medium for informing and constituting the British subject (at home and abroad) and the revolutionary subject respectively.

Bertolt Brecht, who first broadcast on German radio in May 1925, offered an important corrective to this way of thinking about broadcasters and their audiences. He complained that ‘radio is one-sided when it should be two-sided. It is only a distribution apparatus, it merely dispenses’. The radio, Brecht continued, would be ‘the finest possible communication apparatus in public life … if it understood how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a network instead of isolating him’.¹⁹ Brecht called for ‘a kind of rebellion by the listener, for his mobilization and redeployment as producer’.²⁰ Brecht was aware that such developments were unlikely, ‘unrealizable in this social order’ as he put it, writing in Berlin in the summer of 1932. In March 1933, Goebbels in his address to the officials and directors of the German Radio Corporation stated that ‘broadcasting is the most modern and the most important instrument for influencing the masses which exists today’. In view of what was referred to as the ‘intrinsic importance of the address’, the BBC’s World Radio magazine published a transcript of Goebbels’ address in German and English in the months that followed.²¹ The BBC’s 1934 Yearbook in its overview of foreign broadcasting made reference to the ‘honeyed words’ that poured out of Moscow – Soviet broadcasts had been subject to censure in the House of Commons by the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Henderson in 1930. Following a discussion of the reorganisation of German broadcasting, the Yearbook concluded that developments in Germany would be widely followed because ‘the question of the role of broadcasting organisations in relation to society relations has become increasingly important in the last few years’.²²

It was developments in Germany that forced Brecht’s exile and his poem ‘To a Portab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. From Empire to World Service: An Introduction*
• 2. The Empire Service and English-Language Broadcasting
• 3. The BBC and Foreign-Language Broadcasting
• 4. Overseas Broadcasting and the Second World War
• 5. The BBC and the Cold War
• 6. One Voice, Many Accents? The BBC and Empire After the Second World War
• 7. Security, Trust and the Future of the BBC World Service
• Back Matter