Archives for October 2009

The media loves an anniversary - and as anniversaries go, they don't come more gift-wrapped than 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The BBC World Service has joined in the celebrations, with a number of documentaries and features commemorating the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

Perhaps the most authoritative account will come from Sir John Tusa's documentary "How the Wall Fell" which is aired this week on the network and hears first-hand accounts from politicians and diplomats involved in easing the transition.

It's easy to forget how different the world was in 1989 and the geo-political significance of the divide between East and West in Berlin. Indeed, Over To You's producer, Cathy Packe, remembers being there before the Wall came down and having to negotiate the heavily-fortressed security station, "Checkpoint Charlie" just to pass from one side of the city to the other. It's hard to imagine, if you haven't experienced it, what it must have been like.

I was in the city myself a few weeks ago, and I not only witnessed the preparations for the anniversary but also experienced a buzzing, multi-media metropolis rich in creativity and design.

Cable, satellite, internet, a plethora of radio and TV broadcasters, social media, Twitter....you name it, it's there, reflecting the cultural energy of Berlin.

That is in sharp contrast with the restrictive media environment imposed by the East German government before '89, as recalled on this week's Over To You by listener Morand Fachot.

In a fascinating interview he tells me how East Germans managed to get access to TV stations from the West and how that led to a mass exodus from the country. "People started taking their cars and travelling to Poland, to Czechoslovakia, and trying to get into West German compounds, which eventually forced the East German authorities to ban all travel", he say.

Governments restricting free and open media is not something that just belongs in the history books. Take India, often described as "the world's largest democracy", which doesn't allow news and current affairs to be transmitted to its citizens on FM unless it's provided by state broadcasters.

This clearly affects the BBC's Hindi Service but on this week's programme its boss, Amit Baruah tells me about a new programme - BBC India Bol - which is based on the World Have Your Say format. He believes that far from "dumbing down" the service - a criticism often made of phone-ins - it will encourage intelligent debate of social and political issues from well-informed listeners.

As he says in the interview, "Indians need to be well-informed about the world, and they usually are. But I think with the kind of pressures we're seeing commercially on many news organisations in India, I think that will make more people turn to the BBC"

The new BBC Hindi programme is half an hour in length, just once a week - and judging by its initial success, I suspect India Bol will be pushing for more airtime in the near future.

So, if you are a critic of this kind of radio programme, do you accept that in the present media climate in India, the BBC can make it a positive and constructive force? I'd be interested to hear your views.

And there's one more development this week that we at Over To You think is very positive: the programme is now finally available as a podcast - which means you can listen to it whenever and wherever you like. To find it, click here (note: first podcast will not be available until after this week's show has aired.)

Rajan Datar is the Presenter, Over To You

Over To You is your chance to have your say about the BBC World Service and its programmes. It airs at 10:40 and 23:40 every Saturday, and at 02:40 on Sunday (GMT).

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BBC iD is the new sign in system for BBC Online. It's currently being rolled out across all services that require a user to register or sign in.

On Monday November 2nd we'll be switching all of the BBC's blogs to BBC iD from the previous BBC membership system. And in the New Year our message boards and other communities will be heading down the same route.

Read more about BBC iD on the BBC Internet Blog.

If you have any problems commenting on the blogs under the new system, please take a look at the FAQs.

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Joe Sellers blogs from Uganda:

I love the BBC. I think I've blogged before about how the lifeline to a more familiar world is a real comfort when the 'Brit abroad' is feeling isolated and lonely. At any given time you can tune in and suddenly hear the tones of your favourite correspondent or the occasional football commentary from 5 Live.

So far, so good, but Joe isn't keen on one of our jingles:

However, wonderful as I feel this institution undoubtedly is, I have a gripe. There's been a jingle recently that comes on from time to time which is just the most patronising bit of tosh I think I've ever heard on the airwaves. Word for word, it runs like this...

"The world is big. Your radio is small. Only the BBC can put the world.... in your radio".

Come on Beeb. Surely you can do better?!

Interesting point! Here's the jingle - judge for yourselves.

I spoke to the team responsible for this and other jingles - they call them preludes - on the World Service. They said they were very interested in audience feedback - especially as the jingles are due a revamp very soon. What would you change? What does a good jingle sound like to you?

Over To You is your chance to have your say about the BBC World Service and its programmes. It airs at 10:40 and 23:40 every Saturday, and at 02:40 on Sunday (GMT).

• Listen to previous episodes of Over To You
• Send the team your feedback by email ([email protected]), telephone (44 144 960 9000), SMS (447786 202006) or by leaving comments on this blog.

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This week, changes are being made to the World Service schedule, so we decided to devote the whole of this week's Over To You to an interview with the woman responsible, Gwyneth Williams.

She's the Director of the World Service in English and she has the challenging job of putting together a mix of programmes that she hopes will appeal to as many of us as possible - regardless of where we come from, what we do, and what our interests are.

She was remarkably frank about the difficulties she faces, the main one being the budget, or lack of it. "All forms of original programming are expensive in terms of the budget of the World Service," she tells us in the programme. "This is very challenging!"

Hardtalk: coming soon to the World Service.

Nevertheless, she's introducing a new strand of programmes that will include a radio version of Hardtalk, the interview programme that Stephen Sackur presents on television; and Americana, presented by Matt Frei, which is designed to give us a view of American life that we don't get from the news programmes.

And then there's Witness, which sounds like a fascinating way of presenting modern history, explaining events through archive, eye witnesses and historians.

I'm sure Over To You listeners will let us know what they think of these new programmes. I'm particularly curious to know what the reaction will be to Americana. It's a programme we've been listening to here in the UK for a few months now. But now that a version of it is going out on the World Service it will also reach our American audience - so I hope those of you listening in the United States will let us know whether you think it presents a picture of life as you know it.

But although Gwyneth's comments are interesting and at times thought-provoking, I think it's fair to say that this week's Over to You is dominated by our listeners - which is, of course, the way we like it - and when we'd finished the programme, Gwyneth told us how delighted she was to have had the opportunity to speak to so many of you, and to hear the comments of others.

Emails about the World Service schedules are still coming in, and we shall be passing them on to her, so if you haven't been in touch yet - well it's never too late to drop us a line.

Cathy Packe is the Producer, Over To You

Over To You is your chance to have your say about the BBC World Service and its programmes. It airs at 10:40 and 23:40 every Saturday, and at 02:40 on Sunday (GMT).

• Listen to previous episodes of Over To You
• Send the team your feedback by email ([email protected]), telephone (44 144 960 9000), SMS (447786 202006) or by leaving comments on this blog.

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Why should a listener in Andhra Pradesh care a fig about the ongoing expenses row in the British Houses of Parliament?

That's essentially the question we put this week to Norman Smith, BBC political correspondent and presenter of the World Service's Politics UK programme.

Former British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had to apologise to the House of Commons over her expense claims. But do listeners outside of the UK really care?

Norman points out the programme takes great pains to ensure that neither the content nor the guests are too parochial and that discussion of domestic UK issues will inevitably spread to a wider analysis of the state of modern democracy which may be of interest to listeners from any part of the world - and especially those in fledgling democracies.

Referring to the expenses row, he feels that, for the international audience: "What they are probably more interested in is the issue of trust and how the whole expenses saga might impact on the way people view politics and view Parliament... the issue of trust and relationships between the electorate and the elected."

What do you think? Is it a little presumptuous of the World Service to imagine that 26 minutes of conversation from British politicians and political commentators is still of interest to a global audience in 2009?

For my money I'm always amazed how knowledgeable and interested international audiences are by the minutiae of British public life - be it Scottish devolution or the latest puerile pranks of two domestic radio presenters. So maybe it's wise to presume nothing

Now ask listeners in Andhra Pradesh whether they would like a dedicated language service in their mother tongue, Telugu, on the World Service and if you are Murali Krishna Mandala from Hyderabad, you will probably reply yes.

Murali contacted us to point out Telugu is the third most spoken language in India after Hindi and Bengali. And this prompted us to ask what determines whether a language is granted its own service? Geopolitical significance? A UK Foreign Office edict?

Well yes - a little bit of both of these things and a lot of other factors too, according to the Head of Corporate Communications, Mike Gardner.

You can find out what they are if you listen to the programme this week but just to say, intriguingly it seems the door is always open for new language services. In fact according to Mike, the powers that be will be discussing this very issue early next year.

Rajan Datar is the Presenter, Over To You

Over To You is your chance to have your say about the BBC World Service and its programmes. It airs at 10:40 and 23:40 every Saturday, and at 02:40 on Sunday (GMT).

• Listen to previous episodes of Over To You
• Send the team your feedback by email ([email protected]), telephone (44 144 960 9000), SMS (447786 202006) or by leaving comments on this blog.

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The team from The Forum have flown Down Under to record three special shows. This Sunday, you can hear a show recorded at the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. The show's presenter, Bridget Kendall, is keeping a diary of the trip for World Agenda, which you can read here. In her final note from the trip, executive producer Emily Kasriel wrote us this post:

There was a stunning descent into Wellington airport. I could see rocky edges of land making forays into a dark luminous sea. After disembarking, we queued up to have our passports checked. I noticed a sign from the New Zealand Customs department: "We willingly accept the responsibility of helping to keep New Zealand safe, secure and prosperous."

I was interested in the words they used: safe, secure and prosperous. I'm not sure that many other countries would see themselves and consciously describe themselves in quite that light. This description echoes the thoughts of one of the guests in our New Zealand recording: Bernard Beckett. He's written a very thoughtful science fiction novel, Genesis. It describes the world's last habitable homeland, sealed off from the rest of the world which has been damaged by a terrifying plague and plummeting biodiversity.

While we were welcomed rather than prevented from entering New Zealand, the country does go to some lengths to preserve its unique habitat and flora. Two jars of Australian honey which we'd bought as gifts were confiscated at the airport (they will be couriered to London at our expense). A bugle dog was encouraged to sniff out the apple which I had mistakenly left in my bag.

On Friday we had a coffee, (in my case a fresh honey, lemon and ginger brew to counter a New Zealand cold) in a cafe opposite Radio New Zealand with their executive Producer Phil Smith. He then gave us a tour. I had an interesting conversation with head of Radio New Zealand International, she told me about the very strong links that New Zealand retains with many Pacific islands including Cook Islands, Samoa and Tonga.

Read the rest of this entry

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After the appearance of Anne Koch, Deputy Director of the World Service in English on last week's programme and Rajan's appeal to tell us more about your listening habits - we were inundated with responses.

As there were far too many to include in this week's edition, I thought I'd use this post to summarise what you said.

Cheers! Martin Pegrum enjoys the World Service. See his collection of valve sets below.

We heard from lots of internet listeners - but perhaps that's because they were the people who were already seated at their computers and so could fire off an e-mail.

They included Jayne Solesbury in Rome, Claire Buckley in Hong Kong (who also listens on shortwave) and John Parsons and Hope Smith in the United States. Lots of internet listeners seemed to listen for very long periods of time. Joyce Brennan says she has World Service streaming all day and all night!

When it comes to repetition in the World Service schedules, Paul Davis in Canada said that he dealt with this by downloading podcasts so that when a programme came on the radio he'd already heard, he took the opportunity to listen to something he'd missed.

But the Internet listeners weren't the only ones who contacted us. Several people in the United States, including Damien Lloyd Payn on the East Coast and Lulu Braunstein on the West told us they regularly listened via satellite radio in their cars.

Then there are the true globe-trotters such as the person who only identified him or herself as "rogue hippo". He or she must surely hold the record for the most varied means of catching BBC programmes. In Europe: Cable, FM radio and mediumwave plus the internet for downloading mp3s. In Asia: shortwave.

Listening on mobile phones seems to be growing. Jackie used hers to text Over to You and say she listens for three hours every morning this way. But she tunes to other stations in the afternoon when she finds the same programmes coming back on the BBC.

At the other end of the spectrum, Martin Pegrum in the Phillipines has three valve sets, the oldest of which dates from 1946. With a two hundred foot antenna, he can listen to one of these next to his bed. But he's also adapted to the new-fangled technology and feeds the BBC Internet stream through some of his classic sets. As he says: "The soft lights of the dials, the glow of the valves gives a very pleasing, warm dimension to the array of BBC World Service Broadcasts".

Martin sent us these great pictures:

Can anyone top that?!

Penny Vine is this week's producer of Over To You. Cathy Packe is away.

Over To You is your chance to have your say about the BBC World Service and its programmes. It airs at 10:40 and 23:40 every Saturday, and at 02:40 on Sunday (GMT).

• Listen to previous episodes of Over To You
• Send the team your feedback by email ([email protected]), telephone (44 144 960 9000), SMS (447786 202006) or by leaving comments on this blog.

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The team from The Forum have flown Down Under to record three special shows. This Sunday, you can hear the first show, recorded in the Sydney Opera House. Read executive producer Emily Kasriel's post about the Sydney show here. The show's presenter, Bridget Kendall, is keeping a diary of the trip for World Agenda, which you can read here. Next stop on their trip was Melbourne to record a show that will be broadcast in January. Emily wrote us this post:

We kicked off our first day in Melbourne by going to check out the venue of Wednesday's recording at the Melbourne arts centre, the Fairfax theatre is a great space, with circular plush seats surrounding a stage.

The technical team were putting up a living room style set - Persian style carpet, book cases and relaxed armchairs - ready to create a convivial atmosphere for a number of discussions, including The Forum. There is capacity there for 370 curious, and I am hoping enthusiastic and opinionated, Australians.

Some interesting shapes in Melbourne's Royal Botanic Garden

The debate over the Anzac soldiers and the legend created around them will be a discussion which will kick off our recording at the Melbourne Arts Festival. I've found out that it is a subject which inspires much passion amongst Australians, so I thought it would be wise to go and see for myself the towering Anzac monument just south of the arts festival, just next to the botanic gardens. The Anzac are the white Australian, and New Zealand soldiers who fought for empire in the First World War. 22 hectares of grounds include many trees dedicated to individual battalions as well as an eternal flame.

The scale of the monument is quite extraordinary. As we were nearing it, a loudspeaker announcement came on, giving us 5 minutes to climb the steps and take part in a memorial ceremony.

"Let all men know that this is hallowed ground" began a veteran who was leading it, before a recorded bugle call was sounded. These ceremonies take place on the hour, and I was told that most days 1000-1500 people take part.

Many schools make official trips here, and I took the opportunity to talk to some 13 and 14-year-old neatly uniformed boys from Xavier the elite Melbourne Jesuit School. I was taken aback by the strength of feeling that the boys shared with me. "Those soldiers gave their lives so we can live in peace, we can be freedom."

"We are all grateful."

It was not really the way that they honoured the soldiers that surprised me, even if their depth of passion did. It was more the fact that they wholeheartedly bought into Australia drawing upon the Anzac and its military connotations as the key national heroes of their country that made me think.

They told me that on Anzac day they often visit the shrine, bake Anzac biscuits, or do community service. Their teachers explained how much emphasis the school played on cultivating these ideas in their boys, and none that I spoke with expressed any scepticism or challenged the myth. I think that our feminist historian, who is going to do just that in our programme, might get quite a reception...

The Forum is first aired at 8:05am GMT (9:05 BST) on Sunday mornings, and repeated at various times after that. You can listen again here.

Over To You is your chance to have your say about the BBC World Service and its programmes. It airs at 10:40 and 23:40 every Saturday, and at 02:40 on Sunday (GMT).

• Listen to previous episodes of Over To You
• Send the team your feedback by email ([email protected]), telephone (44 144 960 9000), SMS (447786 202006) or by leaving comments on this blog.

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The Forum team have flown out to Australia for the first of two special shows. This week, they'll be broadcasting from the Sydney Opera House. Next week they'll be at the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. The show's producer, Emily Kasriel, wrote us this post:

I am feeling excited about the journey across the world to make three special Forum programmes.

The trip from London to Sydney Australia echoes a semi fictional trip made two centuries ago by William Thornhill. He too spent his working life along the Thames, not in Bush House but as a waterman ferrying the gentry up and down the river; until he was convicted of smuggling and narrowly escaped a death sentence.

He chose instead to spend the term of his natural life in the penal colony of New South Wales. William is the hero of the celebrated novel, The Secret River written by Kate Grenville, one of the special guests featured in our recordings down under.

William spent nine long months in the convict ship Alexandra, and he travelled across the globe via Cape Town. Ours is courtesy of the rather more modern airbus A380 with a span of a day and a half, and a stopover in Dubai. William spent the crossing in shackles; we are merely going economy class. When William arrived, Sydney was a frontier settlement peopled by some of Britain's more interesting characters escaping poverty, prison, or death.

Many of the early settlers felt themselves at risk from the native Australians who resented the encroachment on their land. Today I don't feel in too much danger: I've heard that the huge red dust cloud which had engulfed the city last week has disappeared though I'm not quite sure how I can best prepare myself for our first recording, it is part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

Now all I can see outside is a pitch black sky some 41,000 feet above Mosul in Iraq and we are about two hours away from Dubai. In a day's time, I am looking forward to staring out the oval window and see if I can spot the iconic wings of the Sydney Opera House - where we are recording the first show. Not in the cavernous main auditorium, but in the slightly more modest Utzon room, the only interior in the Opera House designed by the architect Jørn Utzon, who was the original architect for the Opera House.

On the back of the room, according to an image on the website, hangs an enormous floor-to-ceiling brightly coloured woolen tapestry which he created; great swashes of purple, yellow, black green and orange. I am trusting that it will inspire a vibrant discussion between our Aboriginal novelist and lawyer, Asian Australian cultural studies professor and singer, writer and arts advocate.

I am travelling to this part of the world with historically-tinted lenses. So many of the pre-conversations I have had with guests in the lead up to this trip have revolved around negotiating, reconsidering and questioning Australia's history and their place in it. Kate Grenville's books immerse you in the settler's early history.

She herself has come under criticism from some Australian historians who see her writing as a flawed way of recreating the past. This is a charge she dismisses, the events and characters in the novel are adapted from the historical record she argues, "these things really did happen, even if at a slightly different time and in a different place." Another guest is the historian Marilyn Lake - who will be challenging the country's infatuation with her national hero, the Anzac: an anonymous white, male soldier from the First World War era revered for his bravery and loyalty.

Bridget Kendall (far right) with guests on the Sydney edition of The Forum (L-R: Robyn Archer, Larissa Behrendt, Ien Ang, Bridget Kendall.)

The guests for the Melbourne show tried to convey to me the strength of feeling which the Anzac icon inspires in their compatriots. To understand them better I searched my mind to find a British equivalent, but I could think of no figure like the ANZAC or indeed a hero like Jefferson or Lincoln honoured by the American psyche.

In Melbourne we are recording a show at the Melbourne Arts festival, and we plan to ask the audience for a show of hands to get an idea of how loyal they feel to the ANZAC legend today. I hardly think that we will get too many of the macho Australians willing to defend their legend in the arts festival crowd; it would be interesting and make a better programme if I am proved wrong. Let's wait and see.

Thinking of icons, Susan Clark, the ABC producer who we have been working very closely with, replied to my offer of an English gift with a request for Marmite, "so much better than the vegemite you get round here" she insisted.

A few jars, still intact I hope, lie in the Airbus hold below me. I hadn't realised quite how subversive her request was until I just read a story in a copy of The Australian newspaper. Kraft has been forced to kill off the launch of a new Vegemite spin off. After a competition they had chosen the name iSnack2.0, but this name was met with a storm of national outrage: Kraft was accused of tampering with an Australian icon.

Emily Kasriel is executive producer of The Forum

The Forum is first aired at 8:05am GMT (9:05 BST) on Sunday mornings, and repeated at various times after that. You can listen again here.

Over To You is your chance to have your say about the BBC World Service and its programmes. It airs at 10:40 and 23:40 every Saturday, and at 02:40 on Sunday (GMT).

• Listen to previous episodes of Over To You
• Send the team your feedback by email ([email protected]), telephone (44 144 960 9000), SMS (447786 202006) or by leaving comments on this blog.

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One of the pleasures I've found in working on Over To You is the contact I have with you, the listeners - reading your emails and listening to your phone messages is always interesting, and already I feel I'm getting to know some of you who are regular correspondents.

Someone who definitely comes into this category is Donnamarie Leemann. She's an artist and works at home with her internet radio tuned, almost permanently, to the World Service.

Almost permanently - but not quite all the time, as she told me in an email this week. She has started turning off some of the Aftershock programmes - not, she was quick to add, because she doesn't like them individually, but because she finds the whole idea of a "season" of programmes as "overkill". Actually she described the experience of listening to the season as like being hit over the head with a hammer - wonderful when it stops! She's felt the same about seasons in the past - as you can hear on this week's Over To You. She jokes that the season about India proved so indigestible it even put her off eating curry!

Is all our financial crisis coverage giving you a headache?

She appears on the programme in discussion with Anne Koch, the deputy director of the World Service in English. Part of Anne's responsibility is for seasons of programmes - which as she pointed out, only happen occasionally - and she explains the thinking behind them. "These subjects that we do seasons on are incredibly important and they often are very complex" she tells us. "We need to develop complexity in our coverage about some of these most important events"

Another interesting thing that Anne mentions is that she's trying to find out more about how you listen to the World Service. Donnamarie has her internet radio on most of the day - which is possibly why she feels she is hearing too much on certain topics - but as Anne Koch says in her interview, this is probably not typical of most listeners.

Or is it? We'd certainly like to hear more about your listening habits - how often do you listen, and how do you hear our programmes? How many of you listen through the internet? Or do have a short-wave radio? Or listen to World Service programmes that are rebroadcast on another network? We are keen to find out more from you.

One thing to mention for the future - the World Service schedules will be changing towards the end of October, and we shall be hearing more about those changes from Gwynneth Williams, the Director of the World Service in English. If you have any points you'd like to put to her, about things you'd like to hear more or less of on the World Service, do get in touch.

Cathy Packe is the Producer, Over To You

Over To You is your chance to have your say about the BBC World Service and its programmes. It airs at 10:40 and 23:40 every Saturday, and at 02:40 on Sunday (GMT).

• Listen to previous episodes of Over To You
• Send the team your feedback by email ([email protected]), telephone (44 144 960 9000), SMS (447786 202006) or by leaving comments on this blog.

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