‘The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there,’ suggests the BBC’s DG, Mark Thompson, at the beginning of the report which is recommending, among other things, that Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network be shut down.
‘The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there,’ suggests the BBC’s DG, Mark Thompson, at the beginning of the report which is recommending, among other things, that Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network be shut down. The report is all about this virtual concept, ‘the public space’, and claims that it’s an ‘open and enriching experience’, and that ‘in public space, everyone’s as important and valuable as everyone else’. At the end of the report, in a section headed ‘BBC behaviours’, it promises, ‘We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best’, as if what we need from the BBC is a lesson in good neighbourliness expressed with the straightforward vocabulary of a primary school’s motto encouraging good behaviour among its pupils.
The report (which can be found on the BBC website under ‘BBC Trust’ and then ‘Strategic Review’) is worth taking a look at, not because of what it says but for the language it uses to say it, which veers from this weirdly simplistic verbiage to the most high-falutin jargon. I really can’t decide whether we should be bothered or not about the suggested demise of either Radio 6 Music or the Asian Network, although the latter, which I’ve been dipping into over the weekend, can hardly be said to be fulfilling its stated objectives to provide ‘high-quality news and discussion’ or to help ‘British Asians connect with their cultural and linguistic roots’. How could it, when the Asian community is itself so richly diverse? But we should be worried about a report (which probably cost an arm and a leg to produce) that startles not because of its ideas but because of sentences such as ‘Media is at an inflection point…Full broadband penetration and technological convergence are now realistic policy aims’.
It’s also a bit alarming to find Radio 3 and Radio 1 coupled together in the same sentence and praised because they ‘not only give enormous pleasure to audiences, but make cultural contributions to music and music-making’. With that kind of mealy-mouthed endorsement, I can’t help wondering whether they’re next for the chop.
As an antidote to all this, you could tune into next week’s The Essay on Radio 3, which ticks all the right boxes for cultural diversity and gender difference while also magically providing that one true voice, that connection with something real which can sometimes be found on radio, and only on radio. In Karachi Postcards Kamila Shamsie, who has now settled in London, takes us back to her home town, in a series of five meditations on what it feels like not just to be inside that chaotic, dusty, polluted, gun-ridden Pakistani city, but also to return once you have left knowing that you have left it for good. Shamsie reflects on the feeling of strangeness that overwhelms her as she drives from the airport back to the house where she grew up, ‘the strangeness of returning to a place that has always been home and is no longer where I live’, of returning to a city whose rhythms are governed by the warm breezes off the Arabian Sea rather than the cool winds from the Thames.
Karachi has endured ‘an orgy of construction’ in the last half-century, growing from a population of 400,000 in 1941 to ‘somewhere between’ 15 and 20 million now. It’s so unstable that international cricket teams rarely visit. There’s nothing beautiful to see. No green spaces to relieve the monotony of scorched concrete. Women have to think twice about appearing in a public space without a male chaperone, let alone bare-headed or bare-armed. ‘We’ve all felt ourselves caught under the boot of male patriarchy,’ says Shamsie. Yet she brings the place so vividly, vicariously to life that I almost feel I’ve been there too, eaten on Burns Road, driven through the hair-raising traffic and tasted the dust of empire.
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