Fifty years ago on Monday the World Service programme Outlook was launched as an innovative news and current affairs programme presented ‘magazine style’ with live interviews featuring ‘star’ guests. Such ‘soft’ journalism was highly suspect back in 1966, as England won the World Cup, Russia landed the Lunar 9 mission on the moon and China embarked on its Maoist cultural revolution, because it relied not so much on factual truths or reportage but on the emotional truth of what it felt like to be there in that place at that moment in time. Over the years, though, the guests on Outlook have taken over from the news content precisely because they can tell us stories that not so much illuminate the headlines as take us into the heart of what it is to be human, whether in a small village in Afghanistan or the Australian bush.
Back in the 1980s Terry Waite and the other Beirut hostages were encouraged by what they heard on Outlook, which they listened to in their makeshift cells on short wave transistor radios.
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