Initially created to counteract broadcasts from Nazi Germany, the BBC’s Eastern Service became a cauldron of global modernism and an unlikely nexus of artistic exchange. Directed at an educated Indian audience, its programming provided remarkable moments: Listeners in India heard James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake on the eve of independence, as well as the literary criticism of E. M. Forster and the works of Indian writers living in London. In Radio Empire, Daniel Ryan Morse demonstrates the significance of the Eastern Service for global Anglophone literature and literary broadcasting. He traces how modernist writers used radio to experiment with form and introduce postcolonial literature to global audiences. While innovative authors consciously sought to incorporate radio’s formal features into the novel, literature also exerted a reciprocal and profound influence on twentieth-century broadcasting. Reading Joyce and Forster alongside Attia Hosain, Mulk Raj Anand, and Venu Chitale, Morse demonstrates how the need to appeal to listeners at the edges of the empire pushed the boundaries of literary work in London, inspired high-cultural broadcasting in England, and formed an invisible but influential global network. Adding a transnational perspective to scholarship on radio modernism, Radio Empire demonstrates how the history of broadcasting outside of Western Europe offers a new understanding of the relationship between colonial center and periphery.

This book is the first full-length history of the BBC World Service: from its interwar launch as short-wave radio broadcasts for the British Empire, to its twenty-first-century incarnation as the multi-media global platform of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The book provides insights into the BBC’s working relationship with the Foreign Office, the early years of the Empire Service, and the role of the BBC during the Second World War. In following the voice of the BBC through the Cold War and the contraction of the British empire, the book argues that debates about the work and purposes of the World Service have always involved deliberations about the future of the UK and its place in the world. In current times, these debates have been shaped by the British government’s commitment to leave the European Union and the centrifugal currents in British politics which in the longer term threaten the integrity of the United Kingdom. Through a detailed exploration of its past, the book poses questions about the World Service’s possible future and argues that, for the BBC, the question is not only what it means to be a global broadcaster as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, but what it means to be a national broadcaster in a divided kingdom.

In the 1930s, British colonial officials introduced drama performances, broadcasting services, and publication bureaus into Africa under the rubric of colonial development. They used theater, radio, and mass-produced books to spread British values and the English language across the continent. This project proved remarkably resilient: well after the end of Britain’s imperial rule, many of its cultural institutions remained in place. Through the 1960s and 1970s, African audiences continued to attend Shakespeare performances and listen to the BBC, while African governments adopted English-language textbooks produced by metropolitan publishing houses. Imperial Encore traces British drama, broadcasting, and publishing in Africa between the 1930s and the 1980s—the half century spanning the end of British colonial rule and the outset of African national rule. Caroline Ritter shows how three major cultural institutions—the British Council, the BBC, and Oxford University Press—integrated their work with British imperial aims, and continued this project well after the end of formal British rule. Tracing these institutions and the media they produced through the tumultuous period of decolonization and its aftermath, Ritter offers the first account of the global footprint of British cultural imperialism.

Examines how, for much of the twentieth century, the BBC supported the British empire, and how it sought to link listeners in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Considers the impact of the end of empire on British broadcasting.

Beginning in the 1930s and moving into the post millennium, Newton provides a historical analysis of policies invoked, and practices undertaken as the Service attempted to assist white Britons in understanding the impact of African-Caribbeans, and their assimilation into constructs of Britishness. Management soon approved talks and scientific studies as a means of examining racial tensions, as ITV challenged the discourses of British broadcasting. Soon, BBC2 began broadcasting; and more issues of race appeared on the screens, each reflecting sometimes comedic, somewhat dystopic, often problematic circumstances of integration. In the years that followed however, social tensions such as the Nottingham and Notting Hill riots led to transmissions that included a series of news specials on Britain’s Colour Bar, and docudramas such as A Man From the Sun that attempted to frame the immigrant experience for British television audiences, but from the African-Caribbean point of view. Subsequent chapters include an extensive analysis of television programming, along with personal interviews. Topics include current representations of race, the future of British television, and its impact upon multiethnic audiences. Also detailed are the efforts of black Britons working within the British media as employees of the BBC, writers, producers and actors.

Behind the Wireless tells the story of women at the BBC in the 1920s and 30s. Broadcasting was brand new in Britain and the BBC developed without many of the overt discriminatory practices commonplace at the time. Women were employed at all levels, except the very top, for instance as secretaries, documentary makers, advertising representatives, and librarians. Three women held Director level posts, Hilda Matheson (Director of Talks), Mary Somerville (Director of School Broadcasting), and Isa Benzie (Foreign Director). Women also produced the programmes aimed at female listeners and brought women broadcasters to the microphone. There was an ethos of equality and the chance to rise through the ranks from accounts clerk to accompanist. But lurking behind the façade of modernity were hidden inequalities in recruitment, pay, and promotion and in 1932 a marriage bar was introduced. Kate Murphy examines how and why the interwar BBC created new opportunities for women.