Revolting listeners

A rare but threatened species, in dire need of a campaign to save it from extinction, could be heard on Saturday night. Stages of Independence, showcasing the work of ten African playwrights, is likely to be one of the last-ever original World Service productions when the threatened cut to its budget goes through. Twenty-six BBC reporters and cameramen were rushed off to the Chilean desert to film what was undeniably a fantastically dramatic story. But were that many really needed? Meanwhile, a staple output of the BBC, and part of its Reithian mission — free access (at the touch of a button, and no longer at the cost of a licence) into the mind’s interior, to the interplay of voices, words and the imagination — is under threat. Once drama’s gone, we’ll never get it back.

When Marion Nancarrow took over as head of World Service drama in 2001 she was mistress of two-and-a-half hours of drama production each week. Now she has just 12 hours a year, and even that is in imminent danger of being abolished. In her office at Bush House hangs a picture that was sent to her by a group of builders in an African village. It shows them sitting around a wind-up radio, listening to the latest edition of Westway, the World Service soap which ran for eight years, was heard by millions in places as far afield as Timbuktu and Qaqortoq, but was cut off in its prime in October 2005 in an earlier budgetary crisis. Twice a week the builders listened together in their lunch break. What did they love so much about a series set in a doctors’ practice in west London? The telling of stories, listening in to other people’s lives. It’s something that all cultures share, no matter how sophisticated they become, as Neil MacGregor has revealed so compellingly in The History of the World in 100 Objects.