Communication breakdown
Kate Chisholm
There’s been a lot of huffing and puffing about the BBC’s World Service in the past week as cuts were announced in the Russian service. Isn’t it a bad time to reduce the BBC’s output in the Russian language when relations between London and Moscow are so frosty? Surely it should be broadcasting more of its impartial, informative news and current affairs to the peoples ruled by President Medvedev’s increasingly authoritarian government, not less? But the World Service has had to face up to a bit of real-economick. The service is funded not by the licence fee but by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (a hangover from the days when it was known as the Empire Service), and has been told that the pot of gold is not bottomless. Cuts must be made — and the obvious place to make them in the Russian service is in radio, for reasons that tell us a lot about how fast the world is changing in this new century.
The Russian authorities, with a deviousness once typical of the Cold War, have outmanoeuvred the World Service so that it can no longer broadcast on FM or MW. (The partnerships with FM and MW stations that had been formed have been broken up and the BBC, because of complicated deals made in the less chilly 1990s, no longer has any access to these vital transmitters.) It has to rely on Short Wave, reception of which is notoriously bad. Fewer and fewer listeners are prepared in these hi-tech times to put up with trying to listen to a station that is likely to fade out at a critical moment. In any case, those underground free-thinkers who used to huddle in secret cells around a cheap plastic box fuelled by Ever-Ready batteries are just the kind of people to have access to the internet, which is so much more immediate and interactive. Hey presto, the obvious way forward is for the Russian service to decrease its broadcasting output and use any money saved by this to expand its website activities.
It is an alarming development for anyone committed to radio above all else, and to those nostalgic for the time when radio was a lifeline to so many individuals living under Soviet rule. Those images of grey-faced, hungry people saved from ignorance by the free-spirited truth of the Reithian BBC are so very potent. But the media landscape in Russia has changed, as it has everywhere. The Russian-language listening audience has dropped to just 730,000, while the website had almost three million visitors in August during Russia’s crisis with Georgia.
The head of the Russian service, Sarah Gibson, is undeterred. The number of hours of broadcasting per week has been cut to 57 (down 19 from 76) but the service has been rationalised to create more coherent programmes at peak listening times in the morning and evening. There’ll be more extensive news coverage and a level of output that is second only to the Arabic service; as is the budget of £5 million, which seems paltry when compared with Jonathan Ross’s £6 million. Maybe that’s the key to the biggest change of all — in the priorities of not just the World Service but the whole of the BBC. Instead of the top-down approach, giving people what you think they should have, the service is now responding to what people are looking for. That’s sometimes to the good, but not always. What happens next? The phasing out of the Russianlanguage radio service so that all you have left is a Russian-language website among millions of others? This latest hoo-ha has perhaps been an unnecessary distraction to what the World Service does best, to inform on the widest spectrum possible, but the questions are valid at a time when we’ve all become a bit dazzled, if not dazed, by what’s flickering on our computer screens.
From Fact to Fiction, the Radio Four series in which a writer is asked to create a fictional response to a hot topic in the week’s news, is a jolly difficult thing to pull off, and especially if the fiction is in the form of a short play. On Saturday, Kwame Kwei-Armah wrote such a clever, moving drama on the Obama victory which in less than 15 minutes conveyed what it has meant to so many individuals. This Is Our Moment took a domestic triangle — a feckless, now remorseful black father, his still-angry wife and their grown-up son — on the outer reaches of London. The long-absent father turns up to see his son on the night of the American election, filled with the audacity of hope. Maybe he’ll be allowed to see his son again? ‘I need to see the world through the eyes of someone who only knows “Yes I can!” ’ he tells his son. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve died under the “No you can’t!” ’ ❑
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