The mission statement of the World Service says that its main aims are "to deliver objective information and reflect the values of a free and democratic society; to help meet the need for education and English-language teaching; and to give access to the best of British culture and entertainment."

Origins

  The origins of the World Service were modest enough. The development of radio in Britain came later than in the United States and took a different form. BBC Director General John Reith was interested in broadcasting as a way of linking the British Empire. Technical developments in shortwave transmission over long distances made this possible in the mid- 192os, but the BBC did not immediately take advantage of them. This was partly due to the conservatism of its engineers but mainly attributable to disputes over funding. The government was in favor of the idea but not of paying for it. Reith argued at first that the British license payers should not be asked to cover the expense. However, in the financial crisis of 1931, when sacrifices were called for all around, he changed his mind, citing the national interest. A shortwave transmitter was built, and the Empire Service, as it was called, opened on 19 December 1932. A few days later it carried a historic broadcast by King George V, speaking to his empire for the first time:

Through one of the marvels of modern science I am enabled this Christmas Day to speak to all my peoples throughout the empire.... I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all, to men and women so cut off by the snows and the deserts of the seas that only voices out of the air can reach them.

 

In the beginning, the Empire Service had five separate trans­ missions, each lasting two hours, that were directed to areas of the world where it was evening, peak listening time. In the following years transmissions increased, until by the outbreak of war in 1939 the Empire Service was broadcasting for 18 hours a day.

Much of the output was taken from the domestic BBC service, but there were some specially produced programs, and in 1934 the Empire Service established its own news section. The programs were not universally popular: "flabby and uninspiring" was one description. The BBC had a monopoly at home, but not abroad, and fascist Italy and Germany saw radio as an ideal medium for propaganda, using it in an effective and innovative way. The Nazis concentrated their efforts at first on German immigrants in America, both North and South, hoping to convert them to the cause.

The Italians broadcast mainly in Arabic to the Middle East, where Britain had considerable political and economic interests, including a League of Nations mandate over Palestine. The Italian radio mixed entertainment with tales of alleged British atrocities and such choice items of invective as "The empire of the British is decadent" and "Eden [the Foreign Secretary] is a clown in the hands of the Freemasons."

The Nazis later turned their attention to the Middle East in similar terms; faced with such a barrage of hostility, the British government considered how best to counter it and determined not to reply in kind but rather to put forth the British view. After toying with the idea of a government radio station based in Cyprus, the government turned in the end to the BBC. Senior executives in the Empire Service were not enthusiastic about broadcasting in foreign languages; they saw it as a form of propaganda, alien to the traditionally objective tone of the BBC.

Reith overcame management objections and extracted conditions from the government. Services in foreign languages would have to be paid for with government funds, and, crucially, the BBC would have to have the same editorial freedom as it did with services for home listeners. Prestige, Reith said, depended on broadcasting that was both truthful and comprehensive, in other words, not leaving out items that might be embarrassing or critical of government policy. On these terms, the BBC began broadcasting in foreign languages, first in Arabic in January 1938, then a few months later in Spanish and Portuguese for Latin America.

Later the same year, the Munich crisis served to increase the number of languages used. At one point, the government decided in a last-minute policy decision to broadcast a speech by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in German, Italian, and French translations. The BBC undertook the broadcasts. It is unlikely that the broadcasts were heard by the intended recipients, but from then on, those three languages were added to the list.

Wartime Expansion

  By the time Britain and France went to war in September 1939, the BBC had added Afrikaans language broadcasting to try to influence the people of South Africa, and the BBC was ​​broadcasting in Spanish and Portuguese to Europe as well as Latin America. When the war ended six years later, it was broadcasting in more than 40 languages, ranging from Albanian to Welsh (for Welsh-speaking inhabitants of Patagonia in Argentina).

The broadcasts had been a source of hope and inspiration to millions of people in Nazi-occupied Europe and had actively helped the resistance movement. The Empire Service had acquired a reputation for truth and was acknowledged as the foremost international broadcaster in the world. This reputation did not come easily. From the beginning, the external service followed a policy of not trying to conceal military defeats, on the argument that it would thus be more readily believed when there were victories to report. The course of the war proved the case, but the first three years produced virtually nothing but defeats, and the BBC was accused of lowering morale-"an enemy within the gates," as Winston Churchill described it once. Europe was occupied from the north of Norway to the south of France, and Hitler's propaganda machine was able to make use of all the radio stations in this large area. The BBC responded with a huge expansion of broadcasting abroad, decreed by the government. New transmitters were ordered-some from the United States-and new staff were recruited; personnel numbers went up by more than 500 per­ cent in the first 18 months of the war. To accommodate the extra staff, the BBC rented offices in Bush House, a building in central London erected in the 1920s by Irving T. Bush of New York and dedicated to the friendship of the English-speaking peoples, as an inscription on the top of the building still pro­claims. Bush House continued to be used after the war as the headquarters of all BBC services directed abroad.

London at that time was host to a large number of governments in exile, and several of them used BBC facilities to broadcast to their own people. General Charles de Gaulle arrived in June 1940, an obscure junior minister in the French government. After France surrendered, he broadcast to the country's armed forces, calling on them to continue the fight. At first his words had little effect, but as the war continued his voice became well-known in France; his reputation was founded by radio. Winston Churchill himself spoke in French over the BBC. "Fran ais, prenez garde, c'est moi, Churchill, qui vous parle !" [French, be on guard, it is I, Churchill, who speaks to you!) he growled in his distinctive voice, which elderly French people still remembered with emotion decades later.

Much of the wartime work of the BBC went unreported at the time, but one initiative that was widely publicized was the "V for Victory" campaign, which began in 1941. It was the brainchild of the man producing programs for Belgium, who noted that V was the initial letter of Victoire in French and Vrijheid (freedom) in Flemish, thus encompassing both languages of his country. He encouraged people to chalk the letter on walls, doors, and other suitable surfaces, and its use spread to other countries. The Morse code for V, three dots and dash, corresponds to the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and this rhythm also became part of the act: people were encouraged to simulate it in ordinary life-a teacher clapping her hands to summon schoolchildren, for example, or customers calling a waiter.

     Winston Churchill encouraged the campaign by adopting the V sign with two upraised fingers. But the campaign lasted little more than a year: it was criticized then and later for having risked lives for no obvious end-there was no strategic fol­low-up. The Nazis adopted it for their own ends by claiming that V stood for victory against Bolshevism and the German word Viktoria and by pointing out that Beethoven was German anyway.

     More practical methods of encouraging resistance included broadcasting news at dictation speed or by Morse code for the clandestine newspapers that sprang up all over occupied Europe and passing coded messages to resistance groups. These messages gave notice of impending operations, including D day, or the arrival of agents or documents, and they were always repeated. For example, "Le diable jongle avec les âmes, nous disons que le diable jongle avec les âmes" [The devil juggles with souls, we say the devil juggles with souls] had a precise meaning for somebody crouched in a cellar with headphones clamped to his ears.

     During the war, the BBC also expanded its transmissions outside Europe. The Empire Service vanished to become the General Overseas Service in English. It developed regional offshoots for the Pacific, the Caribbean, and North America. The North American Service began in 1940 when the United States was still neutral, and it was intended to be an important medium for putting forward the British case. Presentation and contents were adapted to meet the requirements of a North American audience. Canadian presenters were hired, and leading British literary and artistic figures were used as speakers.

     A new type of program, Radio Newsreel, was devised, which consisted of eyewitness accounts by reporters and ordinary men and women, bringing the sounds of war home to the American people. Radio Newsreel was later taken up by other parts of the BBC, and it continued in the World Service until the 1990s, when the cinema newsreels from which it took its name were long forgotten. 

     The Persian Service also began in 1940, and in the following year British troops moved into the country to forestall German expansion. The Shah abdicated, and an excitable journalist claimed that this was the first time a ruler had been toppled by radio. Broadcasting also began to India in both English and Hindi. The programs in English were intended to show that, whatever the evils of British rule, it was preferable to that of the Nazis. T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and George Orwell (under his real name of Eric Blair) were among the speakers hoping to appeal to the Indian intelligentsia. After much government prodding, transmissions in Japanese were started in 1943. Since the Japanese people were forbidden to own shortwave sets, however, nobody heard them.

Postwar Activities

     With the end of the war, the new Labour government decided to continue with broadcasting abroad and put the various language services, which had grown up haphazardly, on a regular footing. The government stipulated that the Foreign Office should determine the languages and the amount of time devoted to each one (and pay for them) but that the BBC should be entirely responsible for the contents. A new director general, Sir William Haley, set out guidelines that have been followed ever since. The External Services, as they were called then, should provide "an accurate, dispassionate and impartial" flow of news, seen through British eyes but international in scope. In matters of international controversy, the official British view would be given due prominence, but opposing foreign views were to be carefully explained, and conflicting opinions with serious backing in Britain itself were to be given due weight.

     One of the fruits of peace was the opening of a service in Russian. The BBC had wanted to start such a service in 1941, when Hitler's invasion turned the Soviet Union into an ally, but the Soviet response was that it would be pointless because all private radio sets that could receive the service had been confiscated. After the war, the restriction was removed, and the service began in March 1946. It was intended to express the friendship of the British people for the Russian people after the great victory of 1945, but before long the Cold War changed the nature of the dialogue. Critics in Britain accused the service of "moral compromise and appeasement" in its transmissions-not being tough enough on the Soviets. But Moscow attacked the service in violent terms-as "mad agitators and disruptionists," for example, and "a crying radio crocodile"­ and jammed it from 1949 to 1987, with occasional breaks in periods of detente.

     The immediate postwar years were not happy ones for the External Services. Economic problems led to cuts in government spending, particularly during the Korean War of 1950-53. Services in English and other languages were slashed, and some were abolished altogether. Important capital expenditure projects were postponed. At the same time, other countries were increasing their efforts in international broadcasting: the United States, the Soviet Union, and China all overtook the BBC in hours of broadcasting, and Egypt and West Germany were not far behind.

Relations with the government were soured temporarily over the Suez crisis of 1956. President Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. Some months later, Britain and France invaded his country, ostensibly to separate Egyptian and Israeli forces that had attacked across the Sinai desert-a so-called police action. There was an international outcry and vocal opposition in Britain itself, all of which the BBC reported. Prime Minister Anthony Eden felt that since Britain was effectively at war, a radio station financed by the government should not publicize anti government sentiments. He talked of taking the BBC over, and there was strong criticism of the corporation in Parliament. However, the crisis was quickly resolved. British and French troops called a cease-fire, and Eden resigned. The BBC argued that if it had failed to report the criticism of the government's action, which was publicized everywhere else, it would have lost all credibility abroad. It has also argued since then that the episode shows its independence of the government.

     However, there have been occasions when the World Service has acceded to requests-not orders-from the government. When Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) declared illegal independence in 1965, the government asked the BBC to mount a special program for white Rhodesians to bring home to them their isolation and the consequences of their government's action. A transmitter was set up near the border, but transmissions were jammed, and the few Rhodesians who did hear the program dismissed it as propaganda.

     On the eve of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967, the Soviet Union threatened to break off talks with the British Foreign Secretary if the Russian Service went ahead with plans to broadcast excerpts from a book by Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, who had fled to the West. Since the talks had been set up to try to avert the war, the BBC agreed at the highest level to postpone the broadcast. However, the talks proved unsuccessful, the Foreign Secretary returned home, and the broadcast went out 48 hours later.

     In 1975, when Idi Amin was in power in Uganda, the World Service postponed a review of a book about him by a British expatriate living in Uganda. This was at the request of the Foreign Office, which said that it would infuriate Amin and so endanger the lives of Britons living there.

New Horizons

     After the Suez episode, the BBC expanded its Arabic Service and began broadcasting in African languages-Hausa for West Africa, Swahili and Somali for East Africa. Transmissions in Afrikaans were dropped. This was the prelude to a change in attitudes and priorities in a world that was itself changing. Britain shed most of its remaining colonial possessions in the 1960s. Many of these new nations-in Africa and the Caribbean-set up their own radio networks with the help of people seconded from the BBC.

     The radio audience was increasing enormously thanks to the invention of the transistor. This tiny device revolutionized radio by making possible small, lightweight portable sets. Before the transistor appeared on the scene in the 1950s, most radios were in Europe and North America. In the 20 or so years after 1956, the number of radios in sub-Saharan Africa grew from under half a million to over 22 million, in China from I million to about 50 million, and in India from 1 million to 18 million.

     New listeners meant new types of programs. The General Overseas Service was no longer seen as aimed at the expatriate Briton but at anyone who could hear it. It became the World Service in 1965, and the short news program Home News from Britain was renamed News about Britain. The title of World Service was given to all the External Services in 1988.

     The BBC was one of a number of Western services broadcasting to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War-collectively known in Russia as "The Voices" and widely listened to. Their efforts clearly helped in bringing about the fall of communism there by showing that a more attractive alternative existed in the West and by reporting events ignored by Soviet official media. The biggest and most popular stations were American: Radio Liberty (for the Soviet Union), Radio Free Europe (for the satellite countries), and Voice of America. The U.S. approach was harder than that of the BBC; the latter adopted a "Give them the facts and let them make up their own minds" attitude, which some Russian exiles, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, criticized as "wishy washy." However, when Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union, the first interview he gave was to a member of the BBC Russian Service whose voice he recognized.

     The World Service was singled out for praise by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at a press conference on his return to Moscow after an attempted coup against him in 1991. He was told that nobody from the BBC was present. "Never mind," said Gorbachev with a smile, "The BBC knows everything already." The breakup of the Soviet Union. with its monolithic structure, created problems in broadcasting terms. For example, with the creation of a separate Ukrainian state, it became necessary to add that language, because the people there could not be expected to listen to programs in Russian any longer. Other languages added since then have included Azeri, Kazakh, and Uzbek for Central Asia.

     Similarly, the fragmentation of Yugoslavia meant that Serbo-Croatian was no longer an acceptable language, as it had been since the war; the BBC had to broadcast separately in Serbian and Croatian, and it also added Macedonian. The regimes that succeeded communism in Europe are of variable quality, and not all are wedded to the idea of free expression in the media; it has remained necessary to continue broadcasts to them. There are still Third World countries, too, with state­ controlled media, whose people rely on outside broadcasters such as the BBC to inform them about what is going on inside their own boundaries as well as the rest of the world.

     This has often led to complaints from the regimes affected. For example, in the late 1970s, the Shah of Iran, remembering the fate of his father, convinced himself and others that the Persian Service was encouraging revolution by reporting the increasing opposition to his regime. A campaign was launched against the service, with British businessmen, politicians, and others being provided with fake transcripts and encouraged to put pressure on the BBC. There was even a proposal to sabotage the transmitters (in Cyprus and Oman), which was fortunately vetoed by the Shah. Independent investigation showed there was no evidence of bias against the Shah. Reports of opposition were balanced by statements of support for him. The British ambassador at the time, who had been critical of the BBC, agreed years later that its only fault had been telling the people what their own media were concealing.

     The government of Burma went so far as to produce a book in 1988 called A Skyful of Lies, outlining what it said was the misinformation disseminated by the BBC and the Voice of America. "That the BBC is particularly trying to subvert Burma is especially clear," the book says. The country was run by a military regime that cracked down on any dissent, and the Burmese Service was very popular. In the following year, it received 98,000 letters, the highest number received by any language service; one of the letter writers wrote, "Tuning into the BBC is like sharing a bit of its freedom as our own."

Television and Restructuring

     The World Service began television services in 1991. It had been planning the move for several years, but the government refused its request for a subsidy to start the service, and in the end the BBC went ahead on its own. BBC World, as it is now called, is sent by satellite and is received either directly or through cable companies; it is financed by local advertising.

     The BBC underwent a restructuring in 1996 that involved the merging of all news and program output in English, whether for domestic or overseas broadcasting. A number of prominent people expressed fears about the continued distinctiveness of the World Service and the link between the foreign language departments and the news operation under these conditions. A campaign, "Save the World Service," was launched with three former managing directors of the service taking part. In the end, a compromise was reached and a number of safeguards put in place. The World Service now commissions programs in English from other departments of the BBC but retains its own newsroom in Bush House, preparing bulletins in English and foreign languages.

Reception Difficulties

     Since the earliest days, radio reception has been a constant concern. Direct shortwave broadcasting has limitations: it is overcrowded, it is affected by such uncontrollable phenomena as sunspots, it weakens over long distances, and it is subject to jamming. The Soviet Union, China, Libya, Iraq, and Argentina are among the countries that have jammed BBC transmissions at various times. The original Empire Service sought a solution to reception difficulties by transcribing programs onto discs and mailing them for local rebroadcasting.

     However, this method is not suitable for topical material, particularly news. Even before World War II, it was recognized that the signal needed to be boosted by relay stations in various parts of the world. The war held up progress, but the first relay was set up in Tebrau, Malaya, in 1949; it later moved to Singapore. Delays in the provision of funds for capital expenditure, already noted, held up the work, but other relays opened in the 1950s and 1960s in Cyprus, Ascension Island in the Atlantic, and the Omani island of Masirah.

     However, the BBC still lagged behind the expansion plans of other international broadcasters. In 1981 a program costing £100 million was undertaken to improve audibility worldwide, although the government insisted that some language services should be closed to help pay for it. Transmitters were modernized, including some in Britain itself that dated from the war, and new relays were opened in, for example, Hong Kong and the Seychelles, and transmissions to them were conveyed by satellite.

     Satellites have also made it possible for World Service programs to be broadcast on FM stations throughout the world. The 1990s saw a huge increase in this development, starting with a handful and ending with over 1,000 rebroadcasters. Some are on the air for 24 hours a day, others for only an hour or two. The broadcasts are in English or the local language. In some cases, they involve joint programming with the local broadcaster. The rapid growth of this form of broadcasting now in 130 capital cities all over the world has helped to boost the audience for the World Service.

     The World Service first went on-line in 1995, in Polish, followed by English. This has been increased to all 43 languages, with nine of them having an update every 24 hours.

     Since the war, the World Service has taught English by radio and then by television as well as audio- and videocassettes. The service began training broadcasters in other parts of the world in 1989 and has since set up a Training Trust, which undertakes training in more than 30 countries, including three schools of broadcast journalism in Eastern Europe.

     The World Service has cooperated with the International Red Cross to help reunite refugee families in Rwanda, Burundi, and Kosovo. These programs are in the local languages, Kinyarwanda and Albanian, and are transmitted by both FM and shortwave. Training and humanitarian activities are funded separately from broadcasting, which continues to be paid for by a government grant. For 2003-04, this amounted to £201 million, to increase to £239 in 2005-06.