[Swprograms] Fwd: [uk-radio-listeners] BBC World Service changes

[Richard Cuff <rdcuff@xxxxxxxxx>]

>From London's Sunday Times newspaper.

The changes cited below are not effective with the B-05 schedule changes...they must be anticipated for a future date.

Outlook, Everywoman, Pick of the World, White Label, Top of the Pops
and Music Review are all listed in the B-05 schedules I've seen.

Richard Cuff / Allentown, PA  USA

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul Donovan <pauldon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
Date: Oct 16, 2005 8:37 AM
Subject: [uk-radio-listeners] BBC World Service changes
To: uk-radio-listeners@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




This Radio Waves from the Sunday Times today might interest other listeners who like or know of these programmes... 
 

Outlook, which helped to keep Terry Waite sane during his captivity in
Beirut, is 40 years old next year, and the BBC is celebrating this by
getting rid of it. The World Service is also dropping its one and only
show aimed at a female audience, Everywoman, plus Pick of the World,
White Label, In Concert, Top of the Pops and Music Review.  Its
one and only serial, Westway, ends next week, though fans will be happy
to know that it will continue to be repeated on BBC7. And it is just
about to announce a cut in the number of its foreign language services
from the present 43.

 

That is a lot of activity, but until now, the programme changes have
been kept quiet. Some producers fear that the man responsible for them,
Phil Harding, boss of all the English output, wants to turn the World
Service into a rolling news channel. This is denied, but the thrust is
clear. "Our research indicates that eight out of 10 of the listeners to
our English schedule are exclusively or primarily interested in news
and information", says a Bush House spokeswoman, "so we are aiming to
give the World Service a clearer role as a news and information
provider. This will not be a rolling news service, a sort of CNN on
radio. It involves a broad range of news, documentary and analysis,
with weekdays concentrating on information and the weekend a more
diverse mix, including drama. It's a change of direction with new
priorities."

 

Outlook, a 45-minute magazine show every weekday, is being replaced -
with no explanation - by a show with a title and presenters yet to be
chosen. Terry Waite, chained to a radiator in Beirut for the best part
of five years, from 1986 to 1991, one day heard his cousin John Waite
presenting an edition of the programme: when this fact was revealed (by
John McCarthy, on his release), it was the first evidence that Terry
had access to a radio. Outlook responded to that by putting out a
special edition with Terry's favourite music, Bach's Toccata and Fugue
in D minor. Terry heard that edition, too, and remembered it: he
thanked the World Service from the bottom of his heart for keeping him
alive spiritually and mentally, and made mention again of Bach's beauty
and precision only last month at the Gramophone Awards. The decision to
scrap it is incomprehensible.

 The position with the line-up of 43 language services is
different. Here there were omens. The Green Paper urged the World
Service to review it, and the BBC's chairman, Michael Grade, in the
annual report, dutifully agreed that the portfolio would face
"significant change". Those likely to go are Polish, Czech, Slovak,
Hungarian and Slovene (because all those countries are now members of
the European Union) and Romanian and Bulgarian (likely to join the EU
in 2007). The World Service has dropped, and started, foreign language
services before. It continually has to adapt to global politics. But,
again, it is curious that there is no debate. 

 The BBC says it hopes to make an autumn announcement about all
this. No date has been fixed, so maybe it is not too late. As for
Outlook, the spokeswoman said: "We don't have a name for the
replacement yet. It is still in development, a weekday, one-hour,
programme with a new brief. It will include human interest stories,
personal testimony and listener generated content". Sounds a bit like
OK magazine.

 

 ends 

 

 

 



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