Seventy-five years ago this coming Thursday the ‘Empire Service’ was born, just in time for George V to announce its arrival in his very first Christmas broadcast to the nation. He sounds remarkably un-pukka on the archive recording. (You can hear a snippet from it on the BBC World Service website: just log on and look for the Free to Speak 75th anniversary logo. There are 75 one-minute selections, one for each year; a great party game for the family once Dr Who is over.) The King promises salvation by shortwave to the men and women ‘so cut orff by the snows, the deserts, or the seas that only voices out of the air can reach them’; with not a trace of RP except for that giveaway ‘orff’.
Those first broadcasts were an extraordinary technological advance, the new service enabling colonial servants in the Punjab or on the wilder shores of Lake Victoria to hear English voices broadcasting ‘live’ from ‘home’.
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