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  • A Service to the World?
  • Andrew Whitehead (bio)
Alban Webb, London Calling: Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War, Bloomsbury, London and New York, 2014; pp. x + 253; 978-1-4725-1501-8; 978-1-4725-1503-2 (ePDF); 978-1-4725-1502-5 (ePUB).
Diasporas and Diplomacy: Cosmopolitan Contact Zones at the BBC World Service (1932–2012), ed. Marie Gillespie and Alban Webb, Routledge, London and New York, 2013; pp. xviii + 253; 978-0-415-50880-3; 978-0-203-12515-1 (ebk).
Simon J. Potter, Broadcasting Empire: the BBC and the British World, 1922–1970, Oxford University Press, 2012; pp. x + 261; 978-0-19-956896-3

The BBC World Service has been something of a chameleon. It was established in 1932 as the Empire Service, with the goal of reaching the ‘white’ dominions and Britons scattered across the globe; within a few years, war gave it a new purpose, a much wider audience and made it multi-lingual; it was repurposed and retooled to engage with the Cold War; and in the last quarter of a century, it has been hailed as an authoritative and respected voice in global news, above all because of its perceived impartiality. For much of its history, the World Service has been funded by a government grant-in-aid, which prompts the question why the British taxpayer finances a news-based service which broadly is not available in the UK (the World Service in English currently has two-million listeners in Britain, ahead of Radio 3, but let that be). Is public diplomacy and soft power its primary purpose, or simply a welcome by-product of a service which clearly continues to meet a need? How is editorial independence, the bedrock of the World Service’s ethos, reputation and reach, negotiated and safeguarded when the government retains the right of prescription, so having the final word about the range of services offered to a global audience?

At the same time, the World Service (that name was adopted by the English-language radio service in 1965 and extended to other language services as recently as 1998) has performed another high-wire act, and one which has eluded the wider BBC. It not only enjoys the goodwill of opinion formers, it also has robust cross-party political support. To borrow the words of a BBC marketing and communications expert surveying Parliamentary opinion, the World Service is in a sweet spot while the BBC as a whole is simply in a spot.1

The World Service has reinvented itself more completely, and arguably more successfully, than many other major public institutions in Britain, [End Page 301] while being seen as a repository of unchanging values and indeed sometimes as dated and hidebound in a broadcast landscape which is in constant churn. The institutional histories of the service, rigorous and well-researched as they are, don’t quite succeed in capturing the range of political, editorial, organizational and reputational challenges the service has navigated, or side-stepped. Written by World Service figures towards the close of their careers (this reviewer is also a former journalist, editor and manager at the World Service), they bear such celebratory titles as Let Truth be Told and A Skyful of Freedom and were published to mark key anniversaries.2 The burst of academic interest in the BBC’s global ambitions which the titles under review reflect allows a fuller, and more rewarding, account to take shape of the manner in which a declining world power sought to make use of an enduring global asset, and also of the reproducing and then unwinding of a quasi-colonial division of authority within the BBC’s language services.

‘The Second World War’ – says Alban Webb, the foremost historian of the global BBC, in London Calling – ‘was the making of the multilingual “world service” we recognize today. Expanding from one English-language service at the beginning of 1938 to well over forty by the middle of the war, it not only recast the scale and organization of BBC overseas broadcasting, but gave the Corporation a new strategic significance in the conduct of British military and foreign policy.’ The bulk of the language...

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