Stupidity takes hold of another students’ union

I had never heard the acronym Soas before I started work at the BBC, almost 30 years ago. But as a very young producer at the corporation I was asked to fix up a story about something appalling happening in Africa — I can’t remember exactly what. Famine or cannibalism maybe. Or perhaps one mitigated by the other. The senior producer told me to get someone from Soas to explain it all. What’s Soas, I asked?

‘The School of Oriental and African Studies,’ I was informed. ‘It’s in London. It’s basically a place where we try to work out what on earth the natives are up to now.’

It was a different BBC back then. I was based in the old Broadcasting House, at the top of Regent Street. An eight-floor building — the first seven floors pretty much exclusively white. But then loads of black people working on the top floor — that was the canteen.