Abstract
The diaspora which the BBC was interested in, when it launched its overseas service in 1932, was the white population of the British Empire and colonies. It was the Second World War which changed the make-up of both the target audience and the broadcasters, with exiles staffing the language services aimed at their homelands. This marked a profound shift both in the way that the BBC’s external services were run and in the ‘diplomatic’ aims that they served – whether in war or later in uneasy peace, where international broadcasting was seen as diplomacy by other means.
The original Empire Service had not been intended as a projection of British power, but as an extension of the BBC’s service to white people living under the British flag in the dominions and colonies. We may think of broadcasting in the early days of wireless as a one-way communication from the few to the many, but in the early 1930s and even during the Second World War, the audience had their say. In 1933 the Empire Service received 11,794 letters, and their writers’ views had an influence on programmes. One exiled listener wrote in 1934 that he was ‘twelve miles from the nearest white man’ (p.31). Another was in the Naga Hills of Assam, ‘sitting in a jungle stockade right in the middle of headhunters’, listening to ‘the only words of English I hear for months on end’ (p.31). The title of Emma Robertson’s opening chapter sums it up: ‘It is a real joy to get listening of any kind from the homeland.’ She shows how, before 1939, the BBC ‘paid little attention to a potential (or indeed actual) “native” audience’ (p.23).
The audience had their say from the start but as the final chapter shows, the BBC’s target audience has changed radically over the intervening decades, through hot and cold wars and the changing balance of global power. Here, Jingrong Tong and Hugh Mackay analyse the Have Your Say online forums run by the BBC Chinese Service, providing ‘a space … where dissidents and supporters of the Chinese government come together to discuss topics that are banned and censored by the Chinese government’ (p.230). Interestingly, it is the Chinese diaspora which participates in these online discussions, due to the restrictions on access for people living under the Chinese government’s control.
Interactivity and audience engagement are the essence of these forums, of which an overview is provided in a chapter by David Herbert and Tracey Black, entitled ‘What kind of “global conversation”?’ However, anyone who imagines that interactivity arrived only with the internet would be mistaken. Amazingly, the French exiles who broadcast from London into their German-occupied homeland received letters from listeners.
In a fascinating chapter on the French service during the war (‘Les Français parlent aux Français’), Renée Poznanski is one of several contributors who paint a picture of the complex and convoluted influences on the BBC’s external services. Her focus is on the reporting (or non-reporting) of the oppression of French Jews. Many of the letters from France that reached the BBC in London reflected an anti-semitism which suggested widespread support for the German persecution of Jewish people. German propaganda depicted the British Empire as run by ‘international Jewry’; Vichy propaganda labelled Radio London as a Jewish operation. The response of the Free French and the British government was to downplay the persecution of the Jewish people: the BBC (under the direction of the government) repeatedly carried the message that ‘We are not Jews’.
The BBC’s transition from a broadcaster of wartime propaganda to an independent arm of British cultural diplomacy was enshrined in a 1946 broadcasting policy White Paper which stated that the Corporation should ‘remain independent in the preparation of programmes for overseas audiences’ although it also should obtain such information from relevant government departments ‘as will permit it to plan its programmes in the national interest’. In a chapter which explores this transition in the case of Iran, Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh reveal that for the BBC Persian Service, the relationship with the British and Iranian governments was far from clear-cut. During the war, the BBC’s broadcasts were credited with the successful overthrow of the shah, but by the early 1950s, and despite the White Paper, the Persian Service was caught up again in Britain’s intervention in Iran: this time, over Prime Minister Mossadeq’s plans to nationalise the oil industry. The anti-Mossadeq propaganda became so overt that the BBC’s Persian broadcasters went on strike. ‘This period of broadcasting left many Iranians with the impression that the BBC was an arm of the British government’ (p.131). However, by the late 1970s the shah’s protests to Foreign Secretary David Owen about the BBC’s coverage of the Iranian opposition were met with a laugh and the remark that there was nothing he could do about it.
Perhaps just as interesting in the Persian experience was the fact that in the run-up to the revolution of 1979, Iranian members of the BBC staff had their own direct contacts with the opposition, and access to news which was fresher and fuller than that coming through Bush House’s centralised news room. It was a fundamental principle of the BBC’s journalism that the language services should simply translate and broadcast centrally-supplied news. In the case of Iran, that principle began to be eroded under pressure from diasporic journalists determined to provide the fullest service possible.
It was in Poland, in the days of Solidarity and martial law in the 1980s, that this internal revolution came to a head. In his chapter on the BBC Polish Section, Alban Webb shows how a new generation of Polish journalists ‘challenged editorial practices within Bush House, particularly the supremacy of the central News Department’ (p.95). It was not that they ignored the rule which forbade them from direct contact with BBC correspondents in Poland or neighbouring territories; they simply went round them and directly to the sources of news on the ground.
Throughout its history, the BBC World Service has been pulled in different directions: by its own founding principles, by the British Government’s diplomatic or military agenda, by the diasporic staff who colonised this British institution; and by the actual or perceived demands of the different audiences to whom it broadcast. This book provides detailed, nuanced and fascinating views of the complex and convoluted processes that this involved. In one sense it is a wide-ranging history of the BBC World Service in action, but at its heart is the exploration of ‘cosmopolitan contact zones’. The editors see these not as places of rootlessness and transience but, in the case of the World Service, as a site of ‘cultural encounter, creativity, representation and translation’ (p.9). With the BBC’s departure from Bush House and an increasing focus on news and current affairs, this is a timely reminder of the ‘cultural diplomacy dividend’ that the World Service represented for 80 years.