Not much fuss has been made about it. We might not have realised it was happening if news of the leaving bash with its tales of uninvited guests (former staff members) had not been gossiped about in the press. But from March the BBC World Service will no longer be broadcasting from Bush House, that once very grand but now rather shabby crescent-shaped building at the heart of the Aldwych in central London. Instead, all 27 of the specialist radio teams broadcasting in Arabic, Persian, Swahili, Russian, Urdu, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, Tamil and Nepalese…will be moving in to swanky new studios in Portland Place, just north of Oxford Circus, as part of the transformation of Broadcasting House.
It’s hard to imagine the BBC, let alone the World Service, without Bush House. The vast colonnaded portico, the words gilded across the impressive porch, ‘To the friendship of the English-speaking peoples’, the smooth encircling arc of the building are so much part of BBC history as well as London life, dominating the view southwards down Kingsway towards the river and Waterloo.
The simple fact of its existence partly explains how and why the BBC has become an international broadcasting service. Within the corridors of Bush House, for more than 70 years, correspondents from across the globe, with inside, in-depth knowledge of the countries they are reporting on, have come together to swap information, experience, ideas. Just to get a cup of coffee, or visit the loo, you might bump into an Iraqi or an Iranian, a Hutu-speaking Rwandan or a Tutsi from Uganda. In a single building, two sides could be found to every story.
How much, then, will be lost, dissipated, devolved when those 27 language departments are swallowed up in a bigger enterprise — BBC Global News — operating from those smart new headquarters? How different will this new ‘international’ operation be?
Peter Horrocks, director of the World Service since 2009, assures me that the World Service’s ‘ethos’, its ‘editorial values’, will always come first. But much more than that. The move, he says, will be ‘hugely beneficial’, because it will bring those very special values into the BBC’s domestic operation. It should, he promises, enable the skills and understanding of the World Service team to be heard not just in their own countries but also on the BBC’s UK networks, giving Radios 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 a sense of the much bigger story beyond the concerns of London W1.
Until now, explains Horrocks, it has been difficult for a correspondent from Burma who is broadcasting in Burmese from Bush House to her home audience in Rangoon to give the same report to listeners in Stoke-on-Trent, simply because Bush House is separate and some distance away from Broadcasting House. She might also not be as fluent in English as is needed for the UK audience. All these specialist reporters, though, are now being encouraged to improve their English. In a few months, when the move from Bush House has been completed, our Burmese correspondent will be able as soon as she comes off air to Burma to just nip along the corridor to the Today studio and give exactly the same report to Radio 4 listeners in the UK. This should mean more ‘immediacy’ and ‘a greater understanding’ of what’s going on, says Horrocks.
A last chance to experience the Bush House effect can be heard on Wednesday when throughout the day listeners to the World Service will be taken behind-the-scenes to hear how the programmes (listened to each week by more than 180 million) are put together. At nine o’clock, for instance, we’ll be able to eavesdrop on the morning editorial meeting, when the production team decides which stories will lead the news bulletins, which part of the world will be highlighted that day. Later the global phone-in, World Have Your Say, will invite listeners from around the world to comment on what they look for in the World Service, what it means to them.
Next day the great move will begin, starting with Horrocks, who says he will be the first person to leave Bush House and move over to Portland Place. What will he miss most? The doorway that he crosses over every morning, with those uplifting columns, the brass nameplate, the sense of history, the projection of what all those years of broadcasting to the world have been about. What will he be glad to get away from? The rampaging mice, the seedy grandeur, the run-down feel of the place.
His job will be to ensure that the spirit of Bush House is brought to the ‘modern, built-for-purpose’, revamped Broadcasting House. We shall see how the World Service, no longer funded by the Foreign Office but dependent on the licence fee, will weather the move out of its ancestral home. Will its character be diminished, or, as Horrocks foresees, will it at last become the centrepiece of all that the BBC does?
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