How Britain Sold Itself to the World as Paradise

It’s over 40 years ago now since I started work at the BBC External Services, a part of the corporation almost entirely forgotten about among the wider British public today. However, many people have heard of its flagship network, the BBC World Service. Back in those days, the External Services were based at Bush House in the Aldwych adjacent to the Strand, past which traffic surged all day. It wasn’t until 2012 that the last broadcast was made from there, the World Service having moved to Broadcasting House.

The Strand’s traffic noise belied the creepy corridors and crepuscular aged studios filled with equipment that was obsolete even then. The whole place was ramshackle, with tatty offices filled with epic quantities of box files, mountains of paper and the air thick with tobacco smoke. Everything was written on typewriters then, with photocopies and carbon copies generating the duplicate scripts. Programmes were transmitted live or recorded on huge spools of ¼” tape and edited with razor blades and sticky tape.

This was where Britain communicated to the world in a system funded at the time by the Foreign Office or, in other words, the British taxpayer. It still is actually, at least in part, the remainder coming from the licence fee and grants, though the funding is always at the mercy of cuts and reviews.

It was and remains a massive PR stunt, designed to promote British interests internationally even if the World Service’s primary remit was and is to produce an objective and accurate source of news for people denied anything equivalent in their own countries. Perpetually in need of funds, it was a shoestring operation but positively drowning in money compared to the foreign language services that occupied the smaller offices.

The newsroom created the bulletins and recorded the filed despatches from the BBC’s correspondents around the world. An army of bilingual foreigners translated both and revoiced them to transmit in their own networks which were timed to match the daily cycle of the countries targeted, such as the Hindi Dawn bulletin. Shortwave was the predominant bandwidth used because of its ability to bounce off cloud cover. The number of foreign language services has fluctuated wildly over the years, depending on the places considered to be most worth vulnerable to a shortage of unreliable information.

Bush House was run with sense of earnest pride and honourable intent, even if the building was so tatty and rundown that it felt more like a beaten-up country home run by a bankrupt aristocrat telling you how great the good old days had been. The External Services had really grown out of the Second World War and the Cold War, and were fully established at Bush House by 1958. There were plenty of people there in the 80s who had fled Russia or Hungary in the 1950s and Czechoslovakia (as it was) after 1968. They had bought in entirely to the British dream and were only too happy to extoll the virtues of British life and values.

The effect, and subliminal intention, was to tell the world what a wonderful place Britain was, an epicentre of freethinking liberal thought and enlightenment, and the exclusive source of reliable news. Sometimes this was explicit and direct. In other ways it was subtle, communicated through arts and music programmes which wafted out over everywhere from Argentina to Tibet.

For anyone in any one of the countries targeted by the language services who had the misfortune not to speak English, there was English By Radio, a sort of primeval Duolingo that enabled anyone from Burma to Chile to master a smattering of English. These programmes were endlessly recorded and repeated, transmitted at all hours throughout the British day and night to the furthest corners of the globe.

When I watch or listen to the news now and hear the handwringing over the cavalcade of flimsy dinghies laden with migrants, I know that those migrants are almost without exception too young to have any knowledge of the BBC External Services’ golden days. Some at least may have listened to present-day output. But what I do know is that the places they grew up in have a long tradition of their parents and grandparents listening feverishly to the BBC news on shortwave radios and trying to learn English and believing Britain was a place above all others.

Back in the 70s and 80s nobody seriously envisaged the prospect of unmanageable waves of illegal migrants crossing out of the Middle East and Africa to make their way across Europe to the Promised Land across the Channel in dinghies operated by international gangs. Mind you, I don’t know why not. A 1968 episode of Roger Moore’s series The Saint was called ‘The People Importers’ in which a gang of wealthy crooked British businessmen are trafficking illegal Pakistani immigrants in small boats over the Channel. The story would have had no credibility if such dealings were not already going on, and within three years it had been turned into a novel of the same name.

The reasons people try to come to the UK are multifarious and the story far too complex to simplify into foolish soundbites or facile explanations. But what I know is that the British government and the BBC have cooperated for decades in an epic advertising campaign to sell Britain to the world as the best possible place to be and to promote English as the lingua franca of opportunity. The law of course is that of unintended consequences.

You reap what you sow.