Why I still have a deep attachment to the BBC

After I failed my O-levels and decided to leave school, my father suggested I go to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I’m not sure why he thought this would cure me of my self-righteous adolescent narcissism, but it worked. I returned to England determined to go back to school and make something of myself.

I very nearly didn’t come back. The first kibbutz I went to was on the Israeli-Lebanese border and about a week after I arrived it was targeted by a group of Palestinian rebels. Katyusha rockets rained down from all sides and the other guest workers and I were ushered into a special air-raid shelter reserved for ‘volunteers’. It was a particularly dank and mouldy affair, with no mod cons save for an ancient, battery-operated radio. As we sat there for hours, waiting for the all-clear, our only comfort was listening to the BBC World Service.

This was in the run-up to the 1982 Lebanon war and over the next few weeks these attacks became a regular occurrence. Take it from me, if you’re squeezed into a hole in the ground, worried about taking a direct hit from a Katyusha missile, there’s something deeply reassuring about hearing ‘Lilli-burlero’, followed by the words ‘This is London.’ It wasn’t just that it was a source of news we could depend on — literally the only source at that time. It was the sense that, in spite of the chaos and savagery all about us, there was still an island of sanity somewhere out there. The World Service was an umbilical cord connecting us with civilisation. In those hours I caught a glimpse of what it must have been like for the citizens of occupied Europe to tune into the BBC Overseas Service.