Gwyneth Williams on delivering the World Service
Monday: the nine o’clock meeting. I have measured out my days with BBC meetings, and none rivals this. It is the queen of meetings, a jewel; a crisp attempt to order the world coupled with a dark humour acknowledging the absurdity of the task. This is, after all, the World Service newsroom at work: driven by a deeply felt mission to unpick and explore, decode and analyse, above all tell our 40 million weekly English listeners and the 143 million in other languages what is going on. It is parody and irony, occasional brilliance, wit and wisdom, daily and all in 40 minutes.
I come in late and prop myself on the table at the back of the windowless room. All the nations of the world are here, arranged in dense format in a large square.
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