BBC - Around the World - Ariel's 'Foreign Bureau' - Chris Travers, radio and music marketing manager on attachment in Thailand, January 10 2006

by Chris Travers, radio and music marketing manager on attachment in Thailand, January 10 2006

I cannot quite believe that little more than a year ago I was doing a stint with the ‘A team’ in tv marketing, working on the Children in Need campaign from our icy White City fortress.

Today the temperature is in the 30s and I find myself more than half way through an attachment in Thailand, from where I am running the Burma project of the BBC World Service Trust, the BBC’s international development charity.

Burma has been described by Condoleezza Rice as ‘an outpost of tyranny’.

In the country’s closed military world – with its elected leader locked away and a looming HIV crisis – our weekly programmes on health promotion and humanitarian themes reach one in five Burmese adults with messages that really make a difference. And yes, we’ve done research to prove it!

Imagine a cross between The Archers and a Burmese Brookside and you’ve pretty much got the recipe for our main weekly drama Eugenia Tree Village.

The latest plot to come across my desk includes a drugs ring, a rigged football match (or is it?), a leading politician conquering a drink problem, an outbreak of malaria, a quadrille of love affairs, the tension of our leading likely lad taking an HIV test … oh, and advice on how to get the best yield from your rice paddy.

It certainly pulls the punters. And they remember the health advice (mosquito nets, of course, in the case of the malaria story).

Producing these exciting and informative shows is certainly a very different job in most respects from marketing the BBC’s UK services.

But, importantly to me, the BBC values remain the same.

In Burma, of course, just offering an independent voice and daring to debate issues like citizenship, or the stigma of someone with HIV, is critical in supporting a poor, mainly rural population that is starved of balanced information.

It is also, in the context of a state media environment, controversial, to say the least.

And that is why our production base is in Thailand, where our talented, largely Burmese, 50-strong team of writers, directors, researchers, actors, technicians and producers ‘make it happen’ in our own special style.

The project is funded by the UK’s department for international development and the programmes are broadcast on the BBC Burmese Service, which has a devoted following derived from its 60 year history.

Here the BBC has an audience of 23 percent, equivalent to three-fifths of weekly radio listeners.

It has been fun out here as well as challenging. But there are lots of things I’ve missed about the Beeb in the UK over the months, despite the upheavals that have overtaken it: the Proms, the Africa season, Dr Who and many colleagues.

On the personal side, a big cause of homesickness is Dunns, the esteemed Crouch End baker. Well, almost.

Meanwhile, in Chiang Mai, as well as keeping the shows on air and the team cheerful and on message, my job is to lead the strategy, run the business, ensure we are aligned with our stakeholders, and drive the fundraising.

It is not so different from what I was doing a year ago in snowy London….except that taking a tuk tuk to the pool after work beats the Friday night charge to the central line any day.