Richard Sambrook, former head of the World Service, has written about its move from Bush House for the March edition of the British Journalism Review.


Not the end of the World (Service)
by Richard Sambrook

What Kofi Annan called Britain’s greatest gift to the world is leaving Bush House. It’s out but not down, says a former director


Anyone walking through the portico and main doors of Bush House can be in no doubt that it is a building intended for a great enterprise. The lofty scale, Portland stone, marble and overhead statues with the inscription “Dedicated to the friendship of English-speaking peoples” speaks of a grand vision. It was built by American Irving T Bush in 1923, and was intended as a transatlantic trading centre. The first steel-framed building in the UK, it would have been taller if the ground on which it was built, close to the river, had been able to take the weight. When it opened in 1925 it was declared the most expensive building in the world. Although the economic depression prevented it from fulfilling that original purpose, it has nevertheless been the site of a great global endeavour as the home of the BBC World Service for more than 70 years.

Bush House has never been owned by the BBC, Yet its name has become synonymous with what many still regard as the world’s greatest broadcaster — the idiosyncrasies of the building coming to reflect the character of the programmes. For many, it’s all in the brickwork. But now Bush House is about to be returned to its Japanese landlord and the World Service integrated into the rest of the BBC’s news operations in the sleek refurbished and extended Broadcasting House in Portland Place.

Many supporters are apprehensive about whether the ethos of the service can survive the move to the modern open-plan environment, alongside UK programmes, and how, with reduced funding, it can compete with the aggressive expansion of Al- Jazeera or China Television. Yet through its history the World Service has shown itself adept at accommodating change —  in world events, in audiences, and in technology as well as in the politics of the BBC. It was born at a time of financial crisis, with uncertainty about future funding, and with the intention of exploiting a new technology that was enabling previously unthinkable means of global communication. Plus ça change.

The service has changed over the years from the Empire Service to the Overseas Service, to the External Services to simply the World Service, reflecting the BBC’s attempts to accommodate Britain’s changing place in the world. It has been extended from shortwave to FM, into TV and on to web and mobile. Now it is part of a Global News Division, encompassing radio, TV and the internet. Through all this, its values and standards have proved remarkably resilient.

When Lord Reith launched the English service in 1932 from Broadcasting House, he described radio as “an instrument of almost incalculable importance in the social and political life of the community. Its influence will more and more be felt in the daily life of the individual, in almost every sphere of human activity, in affairs national and international.., the service as a whole is dedicated to the best interests of mankind”. Almost 70 years later, in 1999, Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, described it as “Britain’s greatest gift to the world this century” — an indication of how well those early ambitions had been realised.

Truth in the face of propaganda

In some ways its good fortune was being launched in the preliminaries of a world war, when the British government recognised the value of providing accurate, truthful news in the face of a barrage of propaganda from other countries. It also saw the need to extend the service into other languages — starting with Arabic, Spanish, German, French —  until there were more than 40 in all. The wartime French broadcasts for example, with General De Gaulle speaking to his countrymen as the voice of Free France, helped establish the reputation of the service.

Reith was determined from the outset that it should reflect the same principles of independence as the Home Service. The responsibilities of broadcasting around the world during a global conflict did much to solidify the values and tone that have endured since. After the war, then director general Sir William Haley set out the editorial principles which still govern all the international broadcasts. In a paper for the governors in 1946, Haley said it had three purposes: “It acts as a prime source of fact and information for any who care to take it, either professionally as journalists, publicists, politicians or as private citizens. It makes the truth available in places where it might not otherwise be known. By its presence it forces newspapers and broadcasting in authoritarian countries themselves to approximate closer and closer to the truth. Within the Commonwealth, where it is often rebroadcast, it provides a wider coverage of subject than local broadcasting services would otherwise enjoy and also a link between the parts of the Commonwealth.”

These are the same justifications used today — even though the world to which it broadcasts has changed utterly. As the service adapted from the loss of empire, to the Cold War, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the geo political shock of 9-11, its great success was to remain relevant to audiences around the world. It built huge followings in East and West Africa, the Middle East and in Southern Asia. As countries developed and local media grew, the World Service has found new formats and approaches to continue to build an audience of more than 166 million people each week. It has navigated the political minefields of Suez and Iraq with its reputation intact. It has won the plaudits of luminaries such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. But its strength comes from reaching ordinary people, often in countries starved of free information. There are many accounts of the daily ritual of families in Eastern Europe, Iran, and China secretly tuning in to the main BBC news bulletin.

Russian, Asian and Arabic taxi drivers in New York, when asked why they listen to it, have told me it reminds them of home. It has been the most effective tool of public diplomacy (or “soft power”, as it’s now called) that Britain has had — something that has sometimes been resented in Whitehall as the government picked up the tab while recognising it has little influence over it. The Foreign Office has been scrupulous in observing the constitutional arrangements. The opening or closure of services has to be agreed by them, and the BBC has to report to them on performance and audiences, but there is no editorial influence. It is a peculiarly British arrangement that other countries find hard to understand or believe — but it has been crucial to seven decades of success. Independence could never be taken fir granted, however. I remember speaking to one senior politician, then in opposition, now in power, who told me he would force the World Service to reflect government policy as other countries did — “After all, we’re paying for it” — before adding ruefully that he knew his colleagues would never allow him to do it. One crucial advantage of taking the World Service into the rest of the BBC, in financial and constitutional terms, is to remove such pressures and the regular Whitehall game playing over budgets.

Walking around Bush House today provides a vivid sense of the issues the World Service faces. The building is of grand proportions, with sweeping staircases, brass fittings, now redundant internal letter boxes marked “London” and “Overseas”, the remnants of the vacuum tubes which at one time shot copy around the building, all speaking to its imperial past. But the worn carpets, chipped paintwork, long corridors with multiple offices bearing the hallmarks of repeated refitting, indicate the lack of investment it has seen in recent years. The few modern open-plan areas, the new media teams and digital technology seem retro-fitted uncomfortably into a building intended for different purposes in a different time.

Take the lift down to the basement where the canteen and bar are located and you may discover the heart of the place. You will hear multiple languages spoken, and see the conviviality of teams bonded by working long shifts with sparse resources on programmes more appreciated abroad than by their neighbours or colleagues in the UK. Speak to some of the journalists there and you will soon hear courageous personal accounts of how and why they came to Bush House from countries at war or from hostile regimes or from poverty. Stories of families split and left behind, and a deep conviction that through the BBC they were doing something of real value for their home country. The canteen became known as a dining room for exiled intellectuals after the Second World War. Placed between the LSE and King’s College, and attracting leading academics and writers from around Europe in particular, Bush House has always been home to fierce debate — off air as much as on. There’s one apocryphal story of an argument over a translation which culminated in a formal challenge to a duel.

Many a BBC researcher has sought the leading international expert Ofl some aspect of world affairs only to discover he or she is on the staff. The building has a rhythm of its own as shifts change, different languages take to the air, and then wind down again — it’s a building which never rests and it was broadcasting 24 hours a day long before rolling-news channels became fashionable.

There are, of course, the bar-room stories shared and re-told. Bush House was not just a place for international broadcasting. Often language service staff wrote and translated books there and wrote poetry. Many relationships were incubated (and some consummated) in the small hours of the night shift; scripts set on fire or newsreaders ties cut in half while on air as pranks. More seriously, people recall the murder of broadcaster Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge by the Bulgarian secret police; the sense of family around the loss of the two journalists in Afghanistan and Somalia within a month or so last year; and the return of correspondent Alan Johnston, after being held hostage in Gaza, with staff hanging out of the windows to welcome one of their own back home.

Pride and the passion of dedicated people

Bush House has been a close and spirited community, isolated and little understood by the rest of the BBC or by most of the British public. Those who have dedicated their lives to it show pride and passion and sometimes an overdeveloped sense of ownership. When John Birt sprang a surprise restructuring in 1996, merging the management of the English programmes and newsgathering with UK news management, wreaths were laid by staff at the door of Bush House lamenting the death of the World Service (a ritual now frequently repeated when any change is announced). But like Mark Twain’s obituary, these expectations of imminent death were exaggerated. At the time I ran the BBC’s global newsgathering operations and absorbed responsibility for world service reporting. One Bush producer said accusingly to me: “It will never be the same again,” to which the only reply was: “No — but different doesn’t have to mean worse.” The tight family bond was broken, but the resources and opportunities that opened up for reporters and producers were greater than could ever have been managed within a World Service silo.

This is the promise of the forthcoming move to Broadcasting House. It won’t be the same — but will it be better, or will it just dilute the essence of a great and unique enterprise? Even some of the most stalwart World Service defenders recognise that a move out of Bush House was inevitable and overdue and that moving closer to the heart of the BBC promises significant opportunities. The former director of English language networks and news for the World Service, Bob Jobbins, is typically shrewd: “The issue is not should it be integrated, it is how it should be integrated and how the advantages [of the new building] will be shared.” The advantages are clear. Moving into a new broadcasting centre with new technology, open collaborative working spaces and access to more resources than it has ever previously enjoyed will be welcomed by most. The opportunity to sit specialists together (arts, science, business, technology), to share not just material but ideas, will be invigorating. The huge multi-media newsroom serving all BBC outlets will be a powerful engine driving original reporting through all the services. The World Service will be the first to occupy the new building—Arabic and Persian TV are already there—allowing it to establish itself before the bigger beasts of the UK news operation arrive. Hopefully, co-location will also allow the expertise of the language services to inform the UK programmes. Global intelligence is at a premium and should be a competitive advantage for the BBC.

But the risks are also clear. The language services, little understood or recognised, could be choked in the annual budget round. The English service could be homogenised as it is blended into the UK newsroom. The specialism and global perspective, sometimes dismissed as overly precious, could be diluted. The same concerns were voiced when BBC Radio news moved west to join TV News in 1997. Would the Today programme become an audio version of Breakfast News? Of course it didn’t — from which sceptics should take heart. The BBC has experience of protecting what matters even as much else changes around it.

The new building will be more efficient, and such savings in time should allow reinvestment in new activities as well as meeting reduced budgets. But as it’s all licence fee now — who decides and how to choose between the Hausa Service or Newsnight? The BBC Trust is no doubt putting in place protections around the World Service remit with a service licence defining inputs and outputs. That is certainly needed, but cannot capture the intangible spirit. What’s needed is a new vision. The World Service tried to transform itself with a move into TV in the 1990s but struggled. World Service TV became BBC World News — a thin, underinvested commercial channel that has only recently moved into profit after more than 15 years. Its first move into Arabic TV was a joint venture with a Saudi-backed partner that fell apart under editorial pressure, opening the door for Al Jazeera to launch with redundant BBC-trained staff

The World Service’s moves into the web have been more successful, with some services effectively now web-only and a core video-hub now distributing pictures across multiple language websites. Digital platforms are providing a new opportunity to reach global audiences. The competition is significant. As the BBC cuts back on its language services, Al Jazeera is launching TV in the Balkans, Turkey, Somalia, and has plans for many more. The Chinese are investing $7billion in international broadcasting. Siloed in Bush House with a declining budget, the World Service could never hope to compete against states prepared to pay whatever it takes to establish a global voice. As part of a bigger BBC global enterprise, it might.

The conditions today aren’t so different from those of its launch in 1932. The BBC is again funding it from the licence fee at a time of widespread economic uncertainty. New technologies are opening up new markets for communication. The world is in a state of flux and assailed with propaganda, ideology and spin, placing a premium on high quality, accurate news and information. What’s needed is a bold vision for the BBC’s global role in the 21st century — one as ambitious as Reith’s in launching on shortwave a service “dedicated to the best interests of mankind”. The BBC has the brand, the resources, the experience and the skill. The need is as great as it has ever been. The challenge for its leaders is to prove as skilled at adapting the World Service to the digital age as their predecessors proved in adapting to the turmoil of the last century.

Richard Sambrook, at the time of writing this article, was global vice chairman of the Edelman public relations agency. For 30 years, until February 2010, he was a BBC journalist, becoming successively director of sport, news and, latterly, the World Service and Global News.  He has recently been appointed director of Cardiff University's Centre for Journalism.