Identity crisis | 27 October 2016

You may not listen to them every year. Or even to every lecture in the current series. But the survival of the annual Reith Lectures on Radio 4 from the old days of the Home Service and Radio 3 (they were established in 1948 to honour what Reith had done for the corporation) is crucial to the existence of the BBC. Strictly Come Dancing and The Fall might pay the bills in overseas sales (not that a lecture series, no matter how costly to stage, edit, produce and broadcast, is a great burden on the licence fee) but without the Reith Lectures, perceptively chaired by Sue Lawley, it would be much harder to sell programmes abroad because of the way such radio stalwarts have created the BBC brand, given it its leading edge as a broadcaster, affirmed its credentials as an intellectual powerhouse, and ensured the corporation has retained its aura worldwide. And this year’s series (produced by Jim Frank) is no exception, because the philosopher and writer Kwame Anthony Appiah has chosen as his topic one of the most crucial questions facing not just those in the UK but also audiences in Europe and around the world: ‘Mistaken Identities’. What do we mean by identity? How do we decide on an identity? And especially so if, like Appiah himself, your family crosses borders of race, belief, nationality and culture.

His parents created a social storm in the 1950s when they got married because his mother was the daughter of the politician Stafford Cripps while his father was a Ghanaian law student whose family is descended from the chiefs of the Ashanti. As Appiah explained in the course of his lectures, ‘It’s a long answer when people ask where I’m from,’ going on to reveal that he now has close family members living in Nigeria, Namibia, Ghana, Hong Kong, Britain and the USA.