Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio: The South Asian diaspora in Britain and BBC Radio 3031356195, 9783031356193

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Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio The South Asian diaspora in Britain and BBC Radio Liam McCarthy

Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio

Liam McCarthy

Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio The South Asian diaspora in Britain and BBC Radio

Liam McCarthy University of Leicester Leicester, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-35619-3    ISBN 978-3-031-35620-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35620-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to a number of people who have made this book possible. First, I must thank the interviewees who gave up their time to share their experiences in the BBC. All of them wanted to speak on the record even when the subject matter was personally difficult for them—I hope I have done justice to their testimonies. Some still had recordings of their radio programmes from the 1970s to the 1990s, and these have been digitised and catalogued at the University of Leicester for use by future researchers (see Appendix B). Special thanks must go to Owen Bentley who gave me access to his personal archive which included many important BBC files about Asian broadcasting—these have now finally been accepted by the BBC’s Written Archive Centre in Caversham. I set out on this journey as part of my AHRC funded Midland Four Cities PhD studies at the University of Leicester. The inspiration for this book came from my academic supervisors, Associate Professor Sally Horrocks at the University of Leicester, Professor Gavin Schaffer at the University of Birmingham and Professor Helen Wood at Aston University. Finally, I must pay tribute to my wonderful family who in between my work on this book and the travails of my support for Leicester City must have sometimes been frustrated and bewildered in equal measure with my various ramblings about Lata Mangeshkar or Jamie Vardy. Thanks guys, especially my wife Helen for putting up with it all. The front cover photograph is of a BBC Mark 3 local radio broadcast desk from the 1980s, taken by Emily McCarthy.

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Abstract

This book is the first to chart the BBC’s Asian radio programming on network and local radio from the 1960s to the 2020s. Liam McCarthy offers an important insight into the agency of the individuals who inspired this programming. Through interviews with the programme makers and the managers who championed them, the book highlights the close connections built up between some BBC local radio stations and local South Asian communities. It shows how the BBC Asian Network began life in 1976 as a daily Asian radio programme on BBC Radio Leicester, designed to improve the toxic community relations in the city. The Six O’clock Show became an iconic programme and was the first to ‘find’ a new ‘British Asian sound’. Despite this success, this book also reveals that the BBC through its procedures and practices continues to discriminate against Asian licence fee payers and its own staff, meeting the Macpherson threshold of institutional racism. Keywords  BBC • Radio • Local radio • Public service broadcasting • Impartiality • Institutional racism • Diversity • Social cohesion • British Asian sound

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 BBC Radio and the South Asian Diaspora 17 3 Failing  the Diversity Test: The BBC and the Legacy of a Policy Vacuum 53 4 Finding a New ‘British Asian Sound’ 87 5 Making  a British Asian Sound: The Pioneers of Asian Radio on the BBC121 6 Networking  the British Asian Sound: The BBC Asian Network and BBC Local Radio155  Appendix A: Hours of Weekly Asian Programming on BBC Local Radio, 1969–1994187  Appendix B: Asian Programme Recordings from BBC Local Radio, 1977–1994189 Index191

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Abbreviations

ABS AIMS AM APAC APU BBC WAC BITC CER CRC CRE DAB DCMS DG FM IBA ILR IPU IRR LDRS LRAC MW NCA NF NUJ Ofcom ONS

Association of Broadcast Staff Anti-Immigration Society Medium Wave (MW) transmitter Asian Programmes Advisory Committee Asian Programmes Unit, formerly known as the IPU (see below) BBC Written Archives Centre Business in the Community Controller of English Regions Community Relations Commission Commission for Racial Equality Digital Audio Broadcasting Department for Culture, Media and Sport Director General of the BBC Very High Frequency (VHF) transmitter Independent Broadcasting Authority (the radio section was replaced by the Radio Authority and then Ofcom) Independent local radio Immigrants’ Programmes Unit (set up by the BBC in 1965) Institute of Race Relations Local Democracy Reporting Service Local Radio Advisory Council AM Transmitter News and Current Affairs National Front National Union of Journalists the regulator for Radio and TV in the UK Office for National Statistics xi

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ABBREVIATIONS

RA RAJAR

Radio Authority (replaced by Ofcom) Radio Joint Audience Research (a research body owned by the BBC and Commercial Radio that measures radio audiences) ROT Recording ‘off transmission’ TX Transmission

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

BBC local radio: hours of Asian programmes per week 1969–1994. (Source: BBC WAC Files) The proportion of the south Asian population with Indian, Pakistani & Bangladeshi heritage in selected English cities, 1981. (Source: CRE, 1985) BBC Asian network average weekly listening figures 2003–2022: ‘000s. (Source: RAJAR) Proportion of South Asian population v proportion of listening to BBC Asian network by selected English regions, Q3 2021. (Source: RAJAR Q3, 2021 (BBC English regions) & ONS Population Estimates, 2021)

35 37 168

170

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In the local elections for Leicester City Council in May 1976 the National Front, a far right, anti-immigrant party achieved one fifth of the votes (ATV Today, 1976), and laid the foundations for a revolution in Asian broadcasting in Britain. Within months the 44,753 votes gained by the National Front in Leicester led to a daily Asian programme on BBC Radio Leicester, the emergence of a new British Asian sound and in 1989 the launch of the BBC Asian Network in the city. Race relations in Leicester had steadily deteriorated during the 1960s as East African Asians from newly independent states such as Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda made the city their home. A series of anti-immigrant campaign groups including the Anti-Immigration Society (AIMS) and the Enoch Powell Support Group were formed to protest against the rapid rise in the ‘immigrant population’ (Leicester Mercury, 6 May 1968, p. 8). The arrival in Leicester of Asians expelled from Uganda in 1972 further increased the proportion of Asian people to one in eight of the population, and the National Front with its anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy of ‘repatriation of all coloured immigrants’ exploited the situation. The BBC’s Panorama programme came to Leicester in November 1972 and described the city as a ‘magnet for Asians’. The programme featured an interview with the Labour city council leader, Edward Marston:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. McCarthy, Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35620-9_1

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We can’t absorb any more. We are full. The City is full as far as our services are concerned, as far as our land is concerned for the building of premises and such like. We are literally full. (Panorama, 1972)

The Labour-run city council had placed advertisements in the Ugandan press urging Asians being expelled from Uganda not to come to Leicester, something that became part of a national media narrative exposing Leicester as ‘the most racist city in Britain’ (Marett, 1989, p. 54). In the 1976 election the ‘Front’, as it was known locally, came just 26 votes short of gaining a seat on the council in a result that sent shockwaves through local politics and the media in the city. Determined to try and address the toxic race relations in Leicester through his radio station, Owen Bentley, the new station manager of BBC Radio Leicester made two critical decisions. First, he resolved to put the National Front on air and second, he decided to launch the first daily Asian radio programme in Britain. Recognising the electoral strength of the National Front, Bentley reluctantly allowed the party to take part in a discussion programme, a decision that left him and BBC Radio Leicester open to charges of racism. Listening to the introduction of the programme fifty years later, it is possible to hear the nervousness of the presenter. In his introduction he read out a press statement from one of the many local anti-National Front organisations: The Inter Racial Solidarity Group is appalled that Radio Leicester in the interests of ‘so-called free speech’ should allow the National Front airtime to express views which they are well aware are totally repugnant to the immigrant community … and most other Leicester people… However, Radio Leicester does believe in free speech and reflecting issues that are important in this city. (BBC Radio Leicester, 1976)

The poisonous nature of race relations in the city was articulated by Brian Piper, a Labour city councillor who took part in the programme opposite the local National Front organiser Anthony Reed Herbert. In a later oral history interview Piper perhaps revealed more than he meant to when he recalled sharing the small lift from the studios down to street level after the recording: So, Reed Herbert and myself are going down in the lift, and I had my pocket-knife in my pocket and I think to myself I would do the world a favour and be out in seven years if I sorted him now, I could do this. Then I thought ‘you bloody idiot Piper that’s exactly what they want; turn him

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into a martyr’. That was the level of emotion meeting NF people could generate in you. (Piper, EMOHA)

This fraught on-air discussion programme featuring the National Front appeared on BBC Radio Leicester at the end of a week in which a new community programming targeted at the Asian communities in Leicester was broadcast. This new daily programme called Six-Fifteen took to the air in a counter intuitive move that might have caused a backlash in such a problematic environment for race relations. At a Local Radio Advisory Council (LRAC) meeting at the radio station Mrs Rachel Root, the LRAC Chair, argued that BBC Radio Leicester ‘might perhaps make itself unpopular with the general “working class” community in the city by broadcasting such a programme’ (BBC WAC, 1976). Bentley recalled: I was expecting a backlash, but it was nowhere near as big as I was expecting. I suppose part of that was where we scheduled it, by six o’clock the white audience was fairly small, whereas it turned out to be a great time for the Asian community to be listening. I got letters and maybe the odd abusive phone call, but in the end, there wasn’t a campaign against it. What I was fearing was that a group might get together and really hammer it. (Bentley, 2018)

The BBC Radio Leicester programme listings in the Radio Times in the week of the launch had a photograph of the two new presenters. Mira Trivedi was dressed in a traditional sari and was sitting at a broadcast desk while a younger suited Don Kotak was standing behind her, with both inviting listeners to try their new programme: ‘Six-Fifteen—a good time to get to know your neighbours’, ran the caption underneath their photograph. For the first time this was an Asian programme without the label ‘for our Asian listeners’ or using a mother tongue programme title; instead the tagline read ‘Radio Leicester’s new community programme’ (Radio Times, 1976, p. 70). There was little sign here that this was the launch of a revolution by a BBC local radio station about to kick-start British Asian radio. Broadcast in English on four nights a week and retaining the existing Milan programme presented in Hindustani on Tuesdays, Six-Fifteen was launched by Bentley with the specific purpose of improving community relations. The programme producer Greg Ainger shared Bentley’s view on the potential of local radio to make a difference in the city:

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The radio station itself, other than paying lip service through the Milan programme which was actually in Hindi [Hindustani] … wasn’t reflective of the community I saw and felt when I was at Leicester … and also, I could see the potential that radio had to be an integrative force in the whole of the community. (Ainger, 2017)

Six-Fifteen was certainly a hit with its target audience: research by the Commission for Racial Equality the following spring showed that two thirds of them were tuning in (Anwar, 1978). A direct line can be drawn between the National Front vote in Leicester in May 1976, the launch of the Six-Fifteen programme in October of that year and the BBC’s digital station the BBC Asian Network. A series of changes came together in Leicester that created the environment for a revolution in Asian broadcasting: immigration of South Asians from East Africa, toxic race relations, the rise of the National Front, a new local radio station manager determined to address community cohesion, and local Asian people willing to devote significant time and effort to broadcasting new targeted programming (see McCarthy, 2018). Without these factors it is unlikely that the main theme of this book—a new British Asian Sound on BBC radio—would have been so prominent in the story of Asian broadcasting in Britain. The events in Leicester during 1976 are a key pivot around which the story turns. The BBC had first begun broadcasting to the South Asian diaspora in Britain a decade earlier in 1965 through an Immigrants’ Programme Unit (IPU) based in Birmingham (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 6). The settingup of the IPU followed a government-initiated meeting led by Hugh Carleton Greene, the Director General, with representatives of Indian and Pakistani communities in Britain. Locating the IPU in Birmingham away from the decision-makers and budget holders in London was matched by the marginal place in the radio schedule of its programmes in early morning slots on Sundays, designed to have less impact on other listeners (Schaffer, 2014, p. 37). The first Sunday morning transmission of Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye (Make Yourself at Home) was broadcast in Hindustani on the BBC Home Service in October 1965. Almost from the start of this first broadcast there has been a constant threat of cuts and closure to BBC radio programmes and stations targeting the South Asian diaspora. At no point have the presenters, producers or listeners to this output been able to feel that they or their programmes have a long-term future or secure funding; at best they have felt left out on the margins of

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the BBC.  Despite this difficult context, some BBC local radio stations embraced their local South Asian communities and produced output of significance and editorial clout. This commitment resulted in the emergence of a new British Asian sound and the launch of the BBC Asian Network in Leicester and the West Midlands. Nevertheless, interviews with present and former Asian staff at the BBC and new research for this book reveal a BBC uneasy with its responsibilities to South Asian licence fee payers and staff. This book will argue that the procedures and practices of the BBC, even if not intentionally, do discriminate against Asian and black staff and licence fee payers, leaving it open to the charge of institutional racism. However, the emergence of a new British Asian sound on BBC local radio in the 1980s, which was driven by young, committed and media savvy second-generation British Asians is a mitigating factor. This book is called ‘Finding’ and not ‘Producing’ a British Asian sound on purpose, as it was not something actively sought by station managers; it emerged organically in the BBC’s local stations based in Leicester, Birmingham, Derby, Luton and Leeds. This role of BBC local radio in Asian radio broadcasting in the BBC has not been fully reflected in the existing literature, which has a tendency to concentrate on London and the tokenism of minority programmes. The existing literature suggests, and this book confirms, that the BBC displays an ambivalent view of ethnic minority audiences, a sentiment reflected in the views of ethnic minority licence fee payers who felt the corporation was not for them and offered them little value for money (BBC, 1994; Born, 2005, p. 10). As this book will show, where BBC local radio stations made deep connections with local South Asian communities, especially in the Midlands, a strong legacy of listening to the BBC has been retained. It will address some of the gaps that exist in the literature confirmed by Hesmondhalgh and Saha who argue that the combined study of race, ethnicity and media is ‘relatively miniscule’ in what is still a comparatively marginal field (Hesmondhalgh & Saha, 2013, p.  192). There are few studies of the history of BBC local radio even though it has been on air since 1967 and each year is collectively responsible for the majority of the BBC’s radio output. This reflects its position out on the ‘edge of the corporation’; a ‘Cinderella’ service that is often made to feel superfluous and little understood by senior BBC management. BBC local radio only exists because of the dogged perseverance of Frank Gillard, the BBC’s Managing Director of Radio in the 1960s. Gillard persuaded the Pilkington Committee to approve his plans for local radio after submitting

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tapes of sample closed-circuit ‘broadcasts’ (Linfoot, 2019). Launched in 1967 as a two-year experiment, it may then have not survived had an academic report by the University of Leicester which accused the trial stations of ‘lacking clarity of purpose’ been published before the BBC had been given the go-ahead to launch the service permanently in 1970 (Wells & West, 1972). In a remarkable symmetry with the South Asian diaspora, local radio staff have never been able to assume that their place in the BBC’s services is permanent. As Crisell and Briggs have pointed out, BBC local radio has always been subject to financial instability, especially in a corporation struggling with high inflation and expensive technological developments such as colour television in the 1970s and online services in the 1990s and 2000s (Crisell, 2006, pp. 142–144 & Briggs, 1975). The constant attacks on BBC local radio funding from within the BBC have continued with the largely abandoned cuts under the banner of ‘Delivering Quality First’ in 2011 (Plunkett, 2011) and the regionalisation of local output under proposals announced in 2022 (BBC, 2022). The cuts announced in 2022 are likely to hit Asian and black programming disproportionately, just as Lewis and Booth noted in earlier savings imposed on BBC local radio when the 25% budget cuts in 1979 and the 10% cuts of 1988/1989 also hit ethnic programming harder (Lewis & Booth, 1989, p. 96). This book will therefore emphasise the credit due to a small number of BBC local stations which protected their Asian programming from these cuts by cross-subsidising it from their shrinking overall budgets. If there is little written about BBC local radio then there is even less written about its range of programming for South Asian minorities. This output grew from under two hours a week in 1968 to more than two hundred hours in 1994, showing that not all Asian programming on BBC local radio was minimal or tokenistic (see Appendix A). Many of the studies into minority programming are written through the prism of community radio and often concentrate on the London radio market. For example, writing in 1989 Lewis and Booth examined the difficulties faced by BBC Radio London and how the BBC failed to grasp the opportunities offered by community experiments in the capital to broadcast more widely to ethnic audiences (Lewis & Booth, 1989, pp. 97–98). Mitchell contends that the demands for ethnic community media outside the BBC stem from the dissatisfaction of ethnic communities with ‘a lack of representation on mainstream media’ through ‘poorly funded off-peak slots for programmes made by volunteers or seconded producers’ in BBC local radio (Mitchell, 2011, p. 57). Tsagarousianou argues that the British media was ‘slow to

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respond to the changing composition of the British population’ and points to the ‘ghetto’ slots on BBC Radio London as reasons why ethnic communities in London suffered from ‘perceived marginalization’ (Tsagarousianou, 2002, p. 216). The evidence in this book adds a further layer to the history of minority broadcasting and reveals how BBC local radio, often working under the radar of the BBC’s central bureaucracy, built a comprehensive radio service for the South Asian diaspora.

Purpose of This Book The purpose of this book is to examine the rise of a new British Asian sound in BBC local radio in the 1980s. A new sound that was developed by young second-generation British Asians who, unlike their parents, were not content to have radio ‘done for them’ by the BBC. This was a generation that wanted to influence their local BBC stations to improve and expand Asian programming that better reflected their British Asian identity. Through the British Asian music they championed, the taboo topics they covered in their programmes, their ‘British’ radio influences and their ‘Asian’ cultural heritage, they created something completely new. The interviews in this book with the pioneers of this new sound show how they fought for acceptance in a largely unwelcoming BBC that reflected the sometimes openly racist societal values towards ‘minorities’ in 1980s Britain. These were feisty and driven young people—many of these young decision-makers and producers were women—who knew what they wanted to achieve for themselves and their peers. Overcoming racism and marginalisation, most went on to successful careers in the BBC as senior journalists, programme makers and local radio station managers. The fact that many left the BBC well before their normal retirement age, some worn out from the constant battles against the organisation’s procedures and practices, suggests that a principal finding of this book that the BBC is institutionally racist is justified. Chapter 2 examines the BBC’s relationship with the South Asian diaspora in Britain. The legacy of this relationship from the 1960s through to the 1990s has left the corporation struggling to catch up with its obligations as a public service broadcaster in the 2020s. Placing the programming of the Immigrants’ Programme Unit and the interests of its audience at the margins of the schedules early on a Sunday morning is also indicative of the priority the BBC gave to the needs of the Asian diaspora. The marginalisation of Asian programming—and by inference the South Asian

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diaspora—by the BBC is highlighted by Tsagarousianou, who argues that before the 1990s, public service broadcasting institutions: did not deem it necessary to adopt an empathetic standpoint and to address members of ethnic communities as citizens with particular communication needs, interests and rights. (Tsagarousianou, 2002, p. 216)

This chapter outlines the importance of two directors general of the BBC, Hugh Carleton Greene in the 1960s and Greg Dyke in the 2000s, as visionaries who pushed and cajoled the BBC to recognise the needs of the South Asian diaspora. Greene provided the first boost in 1965 with the Immigrants’ Programme Unit and its Asian programming, and Dyke took the BBC Asian Network from local radio and invested significant funding to turn it into one of the BBC’s network radio services. From Greene’s departure in 1969 to the arrival of Dyke in 2000 the responsibility for Asian programming was placed ‘out of sight and out of mind’ in BBC local radio. Left to its own devices and with no central policy on the matter, it was in Leicester rather than London in which the BBC did most to build Asian programming. London was home to the largest South Asian population in Britain, but Leicester had the largest proportion of people with South Asian heritage within its population, and this visibility brought action. Marett highlighted the ‘quality and extent of coverage by local radio’ of the Asian community in the late 1980s and the consciousness among Ugandan Asians of the ‘power of the media’ in the city (Marett, 1993, p. 257). With the exception of Schaffer in his general survey Vision of a Nation, in which he marks out the Asian programmes on BBC Radio Leicester as significant audience-pulling projects (Schaffer, 2014, p. 51), and subsequent work by Khamkar about Leicester (Khamkar, 2015, pp. 157–168), little of substance has been written about the role of BBC Radio Leicester in Asian programming. This chapter will examine Asian radio programming across BBC local radio as part of the connections between the BBC and the South Asian diaspora. The presentation of programmes in mother tongue languages grew during the period and reflected the differing local settlement patterns within the South Asian diaspora. BBC local radio stations were important in allowing the corporation to develop locally targeted programmes rather than the ‘one size fits all’ approach that network programmes from the IPU had to follow. However, a lack of funding and editorial drive from the top of the BBC was an

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important factor that marked the troubled relationship between the BBC and the South Asian diaspora. Chapter 3 analyses BBC policy in programming, diversity, journalism and recruitment from the 1970s to the present day. It will argue that through its policies the BBC has marginalised ethnic audiences and its own ethnic minority staff. It confirms the findings of Sarita Malik who writes of a ‘deep-seated inferential racism’ within the corporation (Malik, 2002, p. 69). Meanwhile, Saha argues there is a continuing lack of a consistent base of BAME staff in the British public service media, including the BBC, and how programming featuring BAME content is still marginalised in the schedules (Saha, 2017). This analysis will go further by testing the first policy papers produced by the BBC in the 1970s and 1980s as part of its response to the changing of Britain to a new diverse society. With titles such as ‘The Broadcasting Problems Associated with Asian and Black Minorities in the United Kingdom’ there was little doubt that the BBC saw this part of its public service remit as a problem (BBC WAC, 1977). Even when the BBC did manage to come up with policies that might have made a difference, such as a strategy for local radio which involved paying black and Asian contributors properly, no funding was ever identified and the plans were dropped (BBC WAC, 1982). The BBC’s policy papers represent an attempt to be seen to be doing something while highlighting the successes in local radio. They are written more as a rebuff to critics of the corporation than an attempt to change policy, and as they were mostly written by the secretariat who had no control of budgets or commissioning, they achieved little. In its policies in journalism the BBC too often displayed an editorial ‘whiteness’, concentrating on immigration and negative stereotypes of black and Asian people, rather than issues of concern to them. Recruitment relied too heavily on BBC local radio and the regional press to deliver black and Asian journalists to fill its vacant roles. As a public service organisation it should have been taking action to address the issue itself. However, the analysis in this chapter shows it instead hid behind arguments that ‘the unions wouldn’t accept it’ or ‘that black and Asian recruits might not be up to the required standard’. In one paper it even questioned if a black presenter could ‘justify to his listeners dealing in a “balanced” way with a speech by Enoch Powell?’ (BBC WAC, 1982, p.  6). There is a legacy within the BBC of it viewing black and Asian communities as different from ‘ordinary’ licence fee payers, funding ethnic programmes poorly, and grouping communities together as in ‘something for

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all Asians and all African-Caribbeans’ without acknowledging the differences between or with them (Husband & Chauhan, 1985). This chapter brings these themes together and tests them against the BBC of the 2020s and finds an organisation that is still failing minorities in Britain. Chapter 4 concentrates on the story behind the emergence of a new ‘British Asian sound’ in BBC local radio. It argues that two of the main actors in the development of this new sound were neither Asian nor members of the BBC’s staff. The first was a long-haired social worker from Ipswich who began presenting Asian programmes on BBC Radio Leicester and became an influencer for young British Asian teenagers. The second was a Conservative prime minister on a mission to introduce market reforms into all areas of British life, including broadcasting. What marked Mike Allbut out as different on the Six O’clock Show on BBC Radio Leicester was his presentation style, which was more Radio 1 than the sound of traditional Asian programmes. More than one of the young British Asians he inspired to get into broadcast told me they didn’t know if he was Asian or not. He connected with them because he brought something new to the Six O’clock Show programmes they listened to with their parents, he spoke their language (English) in the way they did without an accent, he was fun and always seemed to have ‘glamorous young Asian co-presenters’ (Allbut, 2022 [2017]). His programme was heard across the Midlands and was also simulcast with BBC Radio Bedfordshire, further spreading his influence. This chapter has interviews with three former presenters who, without prompting, mentioned Allbut as breaking down any barriers they had that as British Asians they could go on and present radio programmes in a contemporary way. The government of Mrs Thatcher was the second key influence on the rise of a ‘British Asian sound’. Her policy of forcing competition into the broadcast sector unintentionally revolutionised commercial and BBC local radio in the 1980s. A policy of ending the simulcasting of the same programmes on AM and FM transmitters of individual stations might have released AM transmitters to new entrants into the market (Starkey, 2011, p. 109). However, commercial stations reinvented themselves by launching golden oldie or ‘Gold’ formats on their AM transmitters and under the same ‘use it or lose it’ logic, BBC local radio stations increased the hours of Asian programming. Between 1985 and 1989 there was a four-fold increase in the number of hours of Asian programming to ninety-seven hours a week, including the launch of a new BBC Asian Network at BBC Radio Leicester in the East Midlands and BBC Radio WM in the West

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Midlands. These new programmes were mainly presented by young British Asians and this chapter reveals how they effectively took over most of the broadcasting of Asian programmes in this period. Youth became a key factor in the building up of a critical mass of young British Asian talent on local stations in Leicester, Leeds and the West Midlands. Chapter 5 brings a new raft of testimonies to the story of Asian broadcasting in the BBC. The chapter reveals the stories of former and present members of BBC staff and freelances. Their roles ranged from language presenters to programme producers, and from journalists to BBC local radio station managers and a former Head of the BBC Asian Network. All were happy to speak on the record and in only one case was anonymity granted, and that decision was taken by me as author as I felt their experience of racism on a BBC local radio station was too raw. These personal stories bring together for the first time the reality of coming into in an unwelcoming BBC, of personal ambition fulfilled and thwarted, and of gutsy young British Asians forging a career in an organisation where many felt the odds were stacked against them. When comparing these interviews with the BBC’s policies in Chap. 3, it is clear that the stories of these pioneers confirm the ambivalence of the BBC to minority communities shown in Chap. 3. It was energising talking to these interviewees; they displayed a passion for the programmes they presented, produced and managed. The three major themes that jump out from this chapter are the unorthodox ways in which many of them got into the BBC, the overt and subtle racism they faced, and the part played in Asian programming by powerful women. Importantly, the experiences in these stories bleed into the BBC of the 2020s and its continued struggles with diversity. Chapter 6 follows the journey of the BBC Asian Network as it moved into network radio under the direction of Greg Dyke, who had joined the BBC to transform it into an organisation ‘where diversity is seen as an asset not an issue or a problem’ (Newton, 2011, p. 221). Dyke was not around long enough to fulfil that vision, leaving under a cloud after the ‘dodgy dossier’ moment at the start of the Iraq War (see Wring, 2005). What followed was dishearteningly familiar: the closure of the BBC Asian Network was announced in 2009, and, as this chapter shows, it was done without any formal audience analysis or formal public consultation. It took over a year before the decision was reversed, leaving staff in limbo and feeling undervalued by the BBC (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 115). In 2015 white BBC managers of the station took it into a new music-led direction targeting

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British Asians aged under thirty-five, and again this move was made without any audience research or consultation (Green, 2018). This chapter assesses the audience figures for the BBC Asian Network over its first twenty years as one of the BBC’s digital networks. These show a direct link back to the programmes made by local radio stations and in particular the lack of a sustained and substantial Asian programme presence in London. The ‘London factor’ is clearly visible in the low audience figures across two decades; the home of Britain’s largest Asian community is a drag on the audience figures of the BBC Asian Network. A legacy of strong British Asian programming has been squandered in the eternal media search for a younger audience, an audience that is ironically now older than it was twenty years ago. The chapter, and book, conclude by offering suggestions for how the BBC can better connect with the South Asian diaspora in Britain: to widen the audience target of the BBC Asian Network to include thirty-fives to fifty-fives; to continue with the Asian programmes on BBC local radio as they bring in talent and stories for stations; to pull all content on the BBC of interest to British Asians together in one easily navigable online app; and to use the journalistic and production firepower of the BBC to add support to community radio across Britain. The BBC also needs to improve its procedures and practices so that it doesn’t discriminate unthinkingly against black and Asian minority licence fee payers, audiences and its own staff. It argues that until its senior leadership is representative of everyday life in Britain the BBC cannot begin to tackle the final bridge to being a truly diverse organisation.

My Positionality: And South Asian Contributors Having grown up on a council estate in Leicester and then a working-class part of the city permanently changed by immigration, I have both a natural affinity to my hometown and an interest as a historian in how it changed in the post-war era. I began my broadcasting career at BBC Radio Leicester in the late 1970s as a freelance member of the youth programme before joining the station staff. However, from the late 1980s I worked across the BBC in various roles, including Head of BBC Local Radio Training in London, and Managing Editor of BBC Radios Sheffield and Nottingham. I was appointed as Managing Editor of BBC Radio Leicester in 1996 through until 2004 and during this period was a co-author of two strategy

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papers that were distributed to staff in BBC local radio—Local Radio 2000 in 1997 and Connecting England in 2000. I am aware that I might be accused of ‘overplaying’ the role of BBC local radio in the development of Asian programming and underplaying the role of network radio. However, the experiences of the British Asian broadcast pioneers I interviewed for this book together with the demonstrable growth of Asian programming in BBC local radio provide a confirmatory triangulation to the existing literature and the files of the BBC Written Archives. The pivotal role of BBC Radio Leicester in the development of Asian programming contrasts with other stations where there was a lack of interest shown in working with local Asian communities. This is a story about the agency of individuals within the BBC, often working against the grain of BBC policy to build significant strands of Asian programmes. My positionality as a former BBC employee gives me a unique insight into the organisation and has certainly helped in researching the BBC’s official archives in Caversham, small local archives held by BBC local radio stations and private archives held by former staff, notably Owen Bentley, the former station manager at BBC Radio Leicester who was so instrumental in the story of the BBC’s Asian programming. Mine is a similar positionality to Gurvinder Aujla-Sidhu, a former journalist at the BBC Asian Network, now an academic, who has written an influential book about the station and the relationship between the BBC, its staff and its listeners (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021). Interviews with former and present South Asian staff and freelances for the BBC were a core part of the research for this book. I am extremely grateful that all those approached felt able to share their experiences and reflections. They all knew I was a former BBC local radio manager so I was unsure how they would respond to questions about racism and their treatment within the BBC. It was not my place as a white middle class former BBC staffer to challenge their often excoriating views—I believe it was important that they were taken at face value. Indeed, when taken together the interviews had a common thread with each person feeling under-­ valued and facing discrimination. These lived experiences coupled with the rest of my research revealed that the BBC met the Macpherson criteria of institutional racism through its failures, unwittingly or not, ‘which disadvantage minority ethnic people’ (UK Parliament, 2021). The first thing I did was sense check my findings with a number of senior and respected British Asian journalists who like me had a fundamental understanding of

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the practices and policies of the BBC. Their answers were depressing, not only because they agreed with my findings of institutional racism in the BBC, but they noted that because I was white it might have more impact if I said it rather than them. This suggests the BBC has still to fundamentally get a grip on equality and diversity from the top—and that the top echelons of the BBC need to reflect British society as it is today. That means the BBC has to have a wider range of people taking the major strategic decisions, including people from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.

References Ainger, G. (2017). b. 12 March 1951, Former BBC Radio Leicester Education Producer, Face-to-Face Interview, February 7. Allbut, M. (2022 [2017]). b. 14 February 1947, Former Producer BBC Radio Leicester Six O’clock Show, face-to-face Interview, April 11. Anwar, M. (1978). Who Tunes into What. Commission for Racial Equality. ATV Today, Broadcast 26 May 1976, MACE (Media Archive for Central England), https://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-26051976-national-frontleicester, accessed 1 August 2023. Aujla-Sidhu, G. (2021). The BBC Asian Network: The Cultural Production of Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan. BBC Media Centre. (2022). BBC Sets Out Plans to Transform its Local Services to Deliver Greater Value to Communities Across England. October 31. Retrieved November 15, 2022, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2022/local-­services-­update BBC Radio Leicester. (1976). In Perspective ‘NF Debate’, Broadcast 23 October 1976, University of Leicester Special Collections, BBC Radio Leicester, RL 1897. BBC Regional Broadcasting. (1994). Programme Strategy Review; England (Author’s Copy). BBC WAC. (1976). File, R81/11/2, Radio Leicester Minutes, 1973–1980, LRAC Minutes, September 28. BBC WAC. (1977). File, R102 / 38/1, Local Radio HQ; Minorities Programmes, Confidential BBC Policy Paper, ‘The Broadcasting Problems Associated with Asian and Black Minorities in the United Kingdom’. BBC WAC. (1982). File B193/5/2, Ethnic Minorities and the BBC, ‘Multi-­ Ethnic Broadcasting: A Strategy for the Next 5 Years’. Bentley, O. (2018). b. 12 August 1942, Former Station Manager BBC Radio Leicester and Head of Radio (Midlands), Face-to-Face Interview, October 22. Born, G. (2005). Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. Vintage.

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Briggs, A. (1975). Local and Regional in Northern Sound Broadcasting. Northern History, 10(1), 165–187. Crisell, A. (2006). An Introductory History of British Broadcasting. Routledge. Green, L. (2018, July 4). How a Simple Insight Helped the BBC Asian Network Become 100% Relevant. Campaign Live. Retrieved July 6, 2022, from https:// www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/simple-­insight-­helped-­bbc-­asian-­network-­ become-­100-­relevant/1485924 Hesmondhalgh, D., & Saha, A. (2013). Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production. Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, 11(3), 179–195. Husband, C., & Chauhan, J. (1985). Local Radio in the Communication Environment of Ethnic Minorities in Britain. In T. Van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse and Communication: New Approaches to the Analysis of Media Discourse and Communication. Walter de Gruyter. Khamkar, G. (2015). A Post-War History of Radio for the Asian Community in Leicester. In I. Franklin, H. Chignell, & K. Skoog (Eds.), Regional Aesthetics: Mapping UK Media Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan. Leicester Mercury. (1968). Anti-immigration Society, Full-Page Advert, May 6. Lewis, P. M., & Booth, J. (1989). The Invisible Medium: Public, Commercial and Community Radio. Macmillan. Linfoot, M. (2019). BBC Experiments in Local Broadcasting 1961–62. Media History, 25(3), 324–335. Malik, S. (2002). Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television. Sage. Marett, V. (1989). Immigrants Settling in the City. University of Leicester Press. Marett, V. (1993). Resettlement of Ugandan Asians in Leicester. Journal of Refugee Studies, 6(3), 248–259. McCarthy, L. (2018). BBC Radio Leicester in 1976: Kick Starting British Asian Radio. Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 25(2), 269–283. Mitchell, C. (2011). Voicing the Community: Participation and Change. In R.  Brunt & R.  Cere (Eds.), Postcolonial Media Culture in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. Newton, D. (2011). Paving the Empire Road: BBC Television and Black Britons. Manchester University Press. Panorama. (1972). Leicester’s Asians, BBC 1, TX 27 November 1972, BBC Programme Archive No. LCA1213E. Piper, B., Oral History Interview, East Midlands Oral History Archive, Accession number 02315/S, EM/142. Plunkett, J. (2011, November 25). BBC Set for U-turn on Local Radio Cuts after Outcry from Listeners and MPs. The Guardian. Retrieved November 15, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/nov/25/bbc-­u-­ turn-­local-­radio-­cuts

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Radio Times. (1976). Six-Fifteen—A Good Time for Getting to Know Your Neighbours, BBC Radio Leicester Programme Listings, Radio Times, October 16–22. Saha, A. (2017). Scheduling Race. In S. Malik & D. M. Newton (Eds.), Adjusting the Contrast: British Television and Constructs of Race. Manchester University Press. Schaffer, G. (2014). The Vision of a Nation: Making Multiculturalism on British Television, 1960–80. Palgrave Macmillan. Starkey, G. (2011). Local Radio, Going Global. Palgrave Macmillan. Tsagarousianou, R. (2002). Ethnic Community Media, Community Identity and Citizenship in Contemporary Britain. In W.  Jankowski & O.  Prehn (Eds.), Community Media in the Information Age: Perspectives and Prospects. Hampton Press. UK Parliament. (2021). The Macpherson Report: Twenty Years On. Retrieved October 21, 2022, from https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/ cmselect/cmhaff/139/13911.htm Wells, A., & West, J. (1972). Local Radio and the Community: Final Report. University of Leicester, Centre for Mass Communication Research. Wring, D. (2005). Politics and the Media: The Hutton Inquiry, the Public Relations State, and Crisis at the BBC. Parliamentary Affairs, 58(2), 380–393.

CHAPTER 2

BBC Radio and the South Asian Diaspora

The BBC has never quite understood how to exercise its obligation as a public service broadcaster towards ethnic minorities in Britain. This is especially so of the South Asian diaspora with its demands for broadcasts in mother tongue languages. The launch of the Immigrants’ Programme Unit (IPU) in 1965 saw the BBC cautiously embrace Hindustani as the language of presentation, under some protest from senior radio management (BBC WAC, 1970c). Successive controllers of BBC Radio 4 then fought an internal rear-guard campaign to have both Hindustani and Asian programming dropped from the network as soon as they could decently do so. In the 1960s and 1970s by keeping ethnic minorities at arm’s length the BBC—and the rest of the media—was merely representative of the attitudes and prejudices of the British public at the time (Husband, 1975). However, as a licence fee funded, public service broadcaster, the BBC was in a unique position to take a lead by changing its policies and practices as Britain became an increasingly diverse society. That it did not do so is apparent when examining the developing relationship between the BBC’s radio services and the South Asian diaspora over the last sixty years. The first decision for the BBC to make came in the in the 1960s and was to consider if it should provide any special programmes for the steadily growing South Asian communities in Britain, and then where to place

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. McCarthy, Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35620-9_2

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them. In 1965 when approached by the Labour government to help in the integration of immigrant communities, the BBC was already trying to persuade ministers that it should launch a local radio service, and this should be the best place to broadcast special programmes (Schaffer, 2014, p. 23). When local stations began broadcasting in 1967 the responsibility for making targeted radio programmes switched back and forth between the BBC’s national networks and local radio. The new South Asian communities across Britain were seen as ‘immigrants’ by the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s and therefore distinct from ‘ordinary’ licence fee payers. This attitude was revealed in the views in senior radio management when they argued that broadcasting Asian programmes in Hindustani on Radio 4 was a significant inconvenience to ‘white’ listeners. Indeed, even in 1982 the BBC was arguing against ‘excessive’ Asian programming on network radio as it might stir up a ‘white backlash’ (BBC WAC, 1982, p. 7). So, as soon as the BBC’s new experimental local radio service began in 1967, senior management at BBC Radio 4 pushed to make local radio the natural place for connecting with the South Asian diaspora. Given that the diaspora was comprised of many cultural and religious communities with Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and East African heritage, there was some merit in suggesting that local stations might be better at reaching disparate local communities. For a diaspora that was itself on the periphery of British Society this would prove to be a good fit—but only in English cities and counties where BBC local radio managers felt they ought to do something. There was no central planning or policy within BBC radio on the question of Asian programming, and a piecemeal approach left to the patronage of local station managers evolved. This inconsistency meant that South Asian communities in places like Leicester and the West Midlands were super-served, while London’s South Asian population, the largest in Britain, with left with token programming. In the 2000s the BBC Asian Network that was first developed by local radio stations in Leicester and the West Midlands became part of the network radio portfolio only to then face closure threats (Aujla-Sidhu, 2017, p. 109). After the station was reprieved at the cost of a halving of its budget a new strategy was imposed by white managers who turned it into a music station for young British Asians, stripping out most of the speech content and journalism. It is therefore little surprise that British Asians feel disconnected from the BBC when since 1965 the corporation has been going round in circles trying to answer the

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crucial question—should it broadcast special programmes or integrate everything into fully diverse radio schedules? When the BBC began its local radio experiment in 1967, there was an evident incredulity expressed by programme makers on BBC Radio 4 that one of the new stations should broadcast a programme in Urdu. On Sunday evening 18 February 1968 listeners to BBC Radio 4 were asked, ‘How many Urdu speaking VHF radio owners might there be in Sheffield?’ (Dyos Papers, 1968). The posing of this question—and its answer − highlight the national and local differences that were already developing in the BBC between national and local services about how best to connect with growing South Asian communities in 1960s Britain. In making the BBC Radio 4 documentary titled Radio Goes Local journalist Tim Matthews had visited stations in Leicester, Merseyside, Nottingham and Sheffield, and the Urdu broadcast targeted at Sheffield’s growing Asian communities clearly made an impact. Michael Barton, the station manager of BBC Radio Sheffield later recalled Radio Goes Local in a memorandum to BBC local radio HQ, ‘A journalist once observed this was taking minority radio too far, after all he asked, how many have VHF sets anyway?’ The answer to Matthews’ question was something that according to Barton was ‘strangely un-English … up to one hundred people at a time came together in groups to listen to the programme’ (BBC, 1970a). The contradictory approaches to serving the South Asian diaspora that emerged between BBC network and local radio reveal the failure of a remote corporate centre to understand the problems and issues facing ethnic communities in their everyday life. These differences should be seen through the prism of the BBC’s editorial leadership, which too often reflected the attitudes to immigration and minority communities in British society and the media (Hooper, 1965, p. 115). The need for the BBC to recognise the prospect of making programmes for a new and growing South Asian diaspora crept up on the organisation, much as it did to politicians and the public alike. Until the mid-1960s immigration from the Indian subcontinent was disproportionately male and transient (Hooper, 1965, p. 19), allowing the BBC to regard it as a discrete news story rather than a permanent change to British life. However, the granting of independence to East African colonies saw South Asian immigration switch to a more family-based permanent settlement pattern in Britain (Hooper, 1965, pp.  20−22). It was this change coupled with the familial pull of relatives from the subcontinent also coming to settle here that began a media and political crisis in which BBC

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management responded to government pressure to consider broadcasting special programmes. The reaction of the British media and public to immigration rattled successive governments into enacting increasingly hostile legislation designed to cut non-white immigration to Britain (See Spencer, 1997; Patel, 2021). In the light of this public unease there was considerable opposition within the BBC to the potential of broadcasting ‘immigrant’ programmes. It took the support and leadership of Hugh Carleton Greene, the BBC’s Director General, to facilitate the launch of programmes presented in Hindustani on the BBC Home Service (Schaffer, 2014, p. 26). This stemmed from the first formal meeting between the BBC and representatives of Indian and Pakistani communities in Britain that took place at Broadcasting House in London in July 1965 (BBC Minutes,1965). The conference was actively encouraged by Maurice Foley, appointed by Harold Wilson to be his trouble-shooter on matters of race relations (Pimlott, 1992, p. 511). The government supplied the guest list for the BBC’s meeting (Schaffer, 2014, p. 27) which was chaired by Carleton Greene, who in his opening remarks noted that the BBC should ‘study what it could do to help immigrants to meet the problems which faced them’ (BBC Minutes, 1965). At the same time the DG was focussed on getting permission from the government to launch a local radio service and in full lobbying mode he told government representatives at the conference that ‘local delivery’ of immigrant programmes would be best (BBC Minutes, 1965).1 Greene agreed with Indian and Pakistani delegates that special programming in South Asian languages should be provided by the BBC, and he pushed through the setting up of an Immigrants’ Programme Unit in Birmingham. The first weekly programme Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye (Make Yourself at Home) presented in Hindustani was broadcast on the BBC Home Service in October 1965 just a few weeks after the conference at Broadcasting House. However, being remote from a London-centric BBC the IPU became progressively starved of funding and distanced from the BBC’s decision-makers, a process that accelerated after Greene left the corporation (Hendy, 2022, p. 384). 1  Delegates at a second conference with representatives of the ‘West Indian’ communities in Britain concluded that special programmes would be divisive and better representation on air of black people living in Britain would be preferable (Newton, 2011, p. 129). This outcome held back the development of black programming by the BBC for over a decade (Schaffer, 2014, p. 30).

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Greene won permission from the government to launch his local radio experiment in 1967 and his loosening of central editorial control gave local station managers new freedoms to match their own programme schedules to local needs (Linfoot, 2011, p. 271). This local leadership in the BBC became crucial to the development of South Asian programmes on the new local radio service. Without a central policy on ethnic programming this new local editorial independence was both a strength and a weakness. It gave Michael Barton, the station manager of BBC Radio Sheffield the freedom to launch Majlis, the BBC’s first Urdu programme broadcast in Britain, while Rex Bawden at BBC Radio Merseyside could assess there was no need for any such output in his area. Programming for minority communities was in effect in the gift of local radio station managers and could be either at the heart of a local station or more often on the margins of the schedule. This point was noted by Peter Lewis in his study of ‘community control of local radio’ in the South-West of England for the Council of Europe (Lewis, 1976). Lewis argued that the Asian community programme on BBC Radio Bristol was a service provided by the BBC which could be taken away without any community input—this in fact happened in the 1980s. There was a recognition on some local stations that these communities were increasingly British born and educated and new programming on BBC local radio reflected the growing proportion of young British Asians who were more determined that their interests be met by the BBC. On these stations the original ‘programmes for immigrants’ were superseded or supplemented by a developing ‘British Asian sound’ with programmes increasingly devised and produced by young people. At BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio West Midlands (WM) a new networking system of programme and content sharing saw the development of a BBC ‘Midlands’ Asian Network in 1989. The contrast in the development of BBC local programming compared to network radio is stark, with local programming growing with communities while the national radio programmes of the IPU were slowly strangled and eventually cut in the 1980s (Hendy, 2022, p.  384). Almost despite the efforts of the wider BBC, between 1968 and 1994 the number of hours of Asian programming on BBC local radio stations grew from under two hours a week to over 200 hours (BBC, 1994). The first central BBC policy for local radio did not appear until the late 1990s when local stations were given an obligation to serve local ethnic communities (BBC, 1997, p. 10). As the South Asian communities grew from an estimated 265,000  in 1964 (Hooper, 1965, p.  5) to five million by 2021 (ONS,

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2021), there was a reticence by network radio controllers to broadcast targeted programming until they inherited the BBC Asian Network from local radio. In 2002 the BBC Asian Network, built and nurtured by BBC local stations in Leicester and the West Midlands from the late 1980s, was brought under the control of network radio by the new Director General Greg Dyke. With network radio now taking a lead on Asian programming, BBC local radio stations slowly scaled back their own Asian offering to just sixteen hours a week across all stations (BBC Sounds Station Schedules, 2022). This chapter will therefore firstly examine how South Asian immigration to Britain impacted the BBC and show how the leadership in network radio failed South Asian communities, pushing the BBC’s responsibility for minorities on to BBC local radio managers. Secondly, it will examine the BBC’s varied local response from producing ‘programmes for immigrants’ to using targeted ‘British Asian’ programming to build social cohesion. And thirdly it will analyse how a growing generational tension within the South Asian diaspora led to a new ‘British Asian sound’ that evolved into the BBC Asian Network. The chapter concludes by contending that the BBC has yet to work out a coherent policy towards targeted Asian radio programming.

‘Doing as Little as Possible’: BBC Radio’s First Response to South Asian Immigration The structure of the BBC mitigated against a comprehensive plan to respond to South Asian immigration—a structure in which the BBC is in constant inner turmoil. When he took over as Director General in 1992, John Birt came up against a BBC that he described as a bureaucratic monolith ‘relentlessly expanding without challenge’ (Hendy, 2022, p. 481). However, Birt was only partially correct in his observation; the BBC is better viewed not as a monolith but a series of ‘silos’ or ‘divisions’ such as News, Television and Radio with each competing for their own internal influence and slice of the licence fee. Each Controller was therefore extremely wary of any centrally imposed calls on ‘their’ budgets and it also explains why there was such internal opposition to Birt’s drive for a strong BBC online presence—especially as existing budgets would have to be cut to pay for it. In the 1960s Hugh Carleton Greene faced the same internal opposition from vested interests to South Asian programming and

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the setting up of the IPU in 1965 and a BBC local radio service in 1967. Funding for these new ‘corporate’ priorities was diverted from existing budgets and in the case of the IPU, airtime was granted on the existing networks. Greene took the view that the BBC had to assist the government in helping to develop its integrationist policies towards new immigrants and existing minority communities—though he used the occasion of the two meetings with community leaders and representatives in 1965 to push his case for the BBC to set up a local radio service (BBC Minutes, 1965). It was clear from the Broadcasting House meetings that the provision of targeted Asian programmes was only one of the demands from delegates. The other was better reporting of the immigration issue by BBC News, and one of the delegates, Mr K Gupta, argued that a gap between reporting and reality was causing friction, ‘efforts should be made to correct the impression that strict measures had been taken to restrict immigration. In fact, 25% more vouchers had been issued to Indians in 1965 than in 1964’ (BBC, 1965, p. 7). There was also discussion about the positive impact that immigration had on Britain, with delegate Mrs Mehta arguing that ‘immigrants made an invaluable contribution to industry, and to the health and social services’ (BBC, 1965, p. 3). These contributions reflected a rising dissatisfaction within the South Asian diaspora in Britain that they had been shunted to the periphery of society, seen as outsiders by a media that saw little commercial or public advantage in offering inclusive or indeed targeted content. The changes in immigration to Britain, particularly in the South Asian diaspora from transience to permanent settlement, should not have been a surprise to the BBC. A specially commissioned radio series titled Colour in Britain had been aired on the BBC Home Service in 1965 and was published as a book by the BBC to stimulate debate (Hooper, 1965). The programme and its accompanying book aimed to place immigration into context, reflect on the current situation, point out the problems facing growing minority communities, and argue the need for legislation to fight against embedded prejudice and injustice. The book also suggested radio and television had a role to play in ‘helping the absorption of immigrants’ into British society (Hooper, 1965, p.  211). The limited programming produced by the IPU from 1965 was tucked away early on Sunday mornings in the television and radio schedules to cause as little offence as possible to white audiences. This had been signposted to the delegates at the 1965 meeting when the Director General announced that any new programmes would have to displace existing ones, ‘it would probably be a

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mistake to do anything that might arouse resentments among the rest of the population’ (BBC, 1965, p.  2). As the next chapter will show, this perception of ‘immigrants’ versus ‘ordinary’ licence fee payers became a theme played out in BBC policy documents up to the 1990s. The BBC launched the first radio programme targeted at South Asian communities in Britain on the BBC Home Service on the morning of Sunday 10 October 1965. Scheduled after the Eight O’clock News, Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye (Make Yourself at Home) was, according to Sarita Malik, a ‘classic public service’ offering (Malik, 2002, p. 57). The involvement of UK-based Indian and Pakistani officials both in the initial conference and the IPU’s advisory committee led to there being a carefully balanced split in production and presentation between Indian and Pakistani interests. David Gretton, the manager of the IPU who had been born in British India, outlined the aims for Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye in a launch feature in the Radio Times, ‘This service will make no attempt to “integrate” its audience; though to the extent they are willing to “assimilate” we shall be on their side’ (Hendy, 2019). Malik argues that this suggestion by Gretton shows that the BBC was not at ease with the assimilationist agenda that this new narrowcasting to Asian communities offered (Malik, 2002). In a BBC Home Service radio interview to publicise the new programme Gretton highlighted the paternalistic nature of the BBC’s response to the Broadcasting House meetings: All our contacts so far have been with educated, English speaking, Indians, and Pakistanis in this country, they all welcome it … they say that never before has there been this real attempt to meet the illiterate, and they often are illiterate, Indian, and Pakistani industrial workers and meet his needs. (BBC News, 1965)

In this answer Gretton confirms how even when connecting with the South Asian diaspora in the 1960s the BBC operated in a ‘middle class bubble’ and he acknowledged the lack of any contact with working class South Asians. The programmes from the IPU were by definition what the BBC and ‘educated, English speaking, Indians and Pakistanis’ thought that ‘illiterate Indian and Pakistani industrial workers’ needed. Critically, no one had asked them and if they had, Hindustani might not have been their first choice of presentation language. As late as 2017 the BBC acknowledged that a quarter (24%) of its senior management team had been to private school compared to 7% of the population. This proportion rose to over half

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of the BBC Executive Board who had been educated at private schools and Oxbridge (Purnell, 2017). All of the BBC’s contacts with the South Asian diaspora might therefore be viewed through this prism. Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye was produced in a basic Hindustani which the Radio Times assured its readers ‘can be understood (even if it is not used in daily speech) by nearly all the immigrants who have come and are coming to this country from India and Pakistan’ (Radio Times, 1968). The choice of Hindustani was not fully welcomed by Asian communities, the BBC’s production teams, nor listeners to the BBC Home Service (Schaffer, 2014, pp. 36–38). The BBC had argued that of the ‘1,652 languages and dialects in the subcontinent’ Hindustani was ‘the nearest approach to a “lingua Indica”’ (BBC WAC, 1974). However, it had colonial links as the language of the British Raj, with civil servants and army staff sitting written Hindustani exams before their appointment to roles in British India. As a unifying language Hindustani failed to take off across India, and apart from a ‘basic street language of around 500 words’ as a common language it was an illusion (Safidi, 2012). The five main languages from the Indian subcontinent spoken in Britain were (in alphabetical order) Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, and the BBC’s choice of Hindustani had little to offer some speakers of these languages. The policy decision on language was the cause of ongoing correspondence from Asian listeners, and one letter to the IPU in 1974 suggested Hindustani ‘should have died with the departure of the British Army for which it was created’ (BBC WAC, 1974). The decision of the BBC to stick with Hindustani for its network radio programmes contrasted with the judgement of its own local stations. Capitalising on their editorial freedom within the BBC, local station managers had by 1974 introduced programmes broadcast in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu and English. When Hugh Carleton Greene left the BBC in 1969, his patronage of the IPU was lost and the first serious attempts by successive controllers of BBC Radio 4 to have Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye removed from the network were made. As early as April 1970, discussions took place in the BBC’s weekly programme review meeting about switching the responsibility for Asian programming to BBC local radio ‘as soon as they were all in operation’ and agreed ‘no time should be lost in approaching the different BBC Local Radio Advisory Councils about the proposal’ (BBC WAC, 1970). In response Patrick Beech, the Controller of English Regions (CER), who was responsible for the IPU, rapidly argued a counter case to the BBC’s Director of Public Affairs. Beech summed up his opposition to

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the move with four key points; Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiyi was a national commitment to immigrant communities promised by the Director General; any centrally produced and mandatory programme would dilute the editorial independence of local radio managers; it would be too costly to fund local programmes of the same quality; and it would be difficult to persuade the BBC’s Immigrant Programmes Advisory Council (BBC WAC, 1970). A second attempt to prepare the ground for dropping Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiyi was made in 1972 by Anthony Whitby, the Controller of BBC Radio 4. Whitby wrote to the Controller of English Regions arguing: The programme was launched as an emergency measure on Radio 4 to fill the gap until the wave of immigrants who got in before the door was shut had learned enough English. Enough time has now elapsed for that to have happened. (BBC WAC, 1972)

However, Whitby’s memorandum showed that whilst he was still keen on a switch of Asian programmes to BBC local radio he recognised that the BBC should fulfil its public service responsibility: I would not propose with any conviction that we drop the programme completely. We could not afford to look like we had lost interest in this important cause. However, there are good practical reasons for a change of outlet. (BBC WAC, 1972)

In another example of the BBC senior management regarding South Asians apart from ‘ordinary’ licence fee payers, Whitby suggested his desire to drop the programme was based on the irritation it caused to ‘white’ listeners of BBC Radio 4, which had been accentuated after transmitter changes, So those listeners in the South and West who have been spared the programme so far because there are so few immigrants there will, for the first time be deprived, on mw [Medium Wave or AM], of their religious programme and given Indian pop records instead. (BBC WAC, 1972)

In conclusion Whitby was careful to ensure that the responsibility of Asian programmes did not rest with him. Rather, he proffered to view that the Controller of English Regions was ‘the keeper of the BBC’s conscience on immigrant programmes’ (BBC WAC, 1972). By inference this removed

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the responsibility from the networks in London and re-emphasised the marginal nature of this output. This debate about where responsibility for Asian programming should rest was a confirmation of the error made by the BBC in 1965 of setting up the IPU out of London and away from the BBC’s network controllers who held the budgets. Not only was the IPU marginalised in the decision-­ making and commissioning processes, it also meant that the unit was starved of investment. To address the funding issue in 1976 the management of the IPU in Birmingham unsuccessfully sought permission from the Director of Public Affairs in London to seek external funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation or the European Commission to support the output of the unit (BBC WAC, 1976). The attempts to drop Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiyi continued and by 1975 it had been moved to an earlier Sunday morning timeslot of 7.15 am in a not-too-subtle attempt to kill it off (Hendy, 2022, p. 384). At the time the BBC noted the new time ‘is admittedly a less convenient, though not impossible hour’ (BBC WAC, 1975). This led to a steady decline in the ratings making the programme less attractive to Asian listeners (Hendy, 2022, p. 348). In 1981 Monica Sims as Controller of BBC Radio 4 tried again to free the network of Asian programming in a memo to the Controller of Radio; her complaint about Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiyi was that ‘it isn’t good enough, serves no useful purpose and doesn’t belong on Radio 4’ (BBC, 1981). A campaign by successive Radio 4 controllers that had run for sixteen years eventually saw the last edition broadcast on Sunday 13 April 1986. Having fulfilled this long-held ambition Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiyi was replaced with a selection of programmes from the Open University (BBC Genome, Radio Times billings 1986). Open University programmes were hardly core new output for BBC Radio 4 listeners, highlighting to Asian listeners the marginal nature of their programming on the station. All Asian programming had now been removed from network radio and full responsibility passed to local stations—with Radio 4 ceding ‘ownership’ of the ‘immigrant problem’ to the regions. This has been a continuing theme and is highlighted in 1985  in a promotion leaflet titled ‘Broadcasting in a Multi-Ethnic Society: The BBC and the Asian and Afro-­ Caribbean Minorities’ (BBC, 1985). Priming Asian audiences for the loss of network radio programming, the leaflet argued that its local stations were now the home of Asian programming. It also noted the closure of the Asian Programmes Advisory Council which had been set up as the Immigrants’ Advisory Council to advise the IPU on programme matters

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in 1965. The BBC was now arguing that ‘where appropriate’ Local Radio Advisory Councils were now the place for the voices of ‘Asian and Afro-­ Caribbean’ people to be heard in the BBC’s advisory system (BBC, 1985, p. 4). The leaflet does not make clear which Local Radio Advisory Council it would be inappropriate for ‘Asian and Afro-Caribbean’ people to join. This startlingly clumsy language only goes to emphasise the separateness with which the BBC viewed minorities. The file in the BBC Written Archives that contains this leaflet is dated 1980 and is titled ‘Immigrants Programmes’ showing that even in the 1980s the BBC was failing to recognise that an increasing proportion of what it continually saw as ‘immigrants’ were born here. Yet by 1981 research showed that 40% of South Asians in Britain were British born, a proportion that steadily increased to almost 60% by 2011 (CRE, 1985; ONS, 2020b). The BBC has been constantly slow to recognise the changing nature of the South Asian diaspora and perhaps instead of cutting Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiyi Radio 4 might have commissioned a programme by young British Asians, presented in English and given a better broadcast slot. The marginalization of programming reflecting black and Asian life in Britain still constrains the work of British black and Asian cultural producers (Saha, 2018, p.  66). An example is the decision in 2016 by the BBC to place its new ‘Centre of Excellence for Diversity’ in Birmingham. Launched with much fanfare the new unit nevertheless attracted criticism from commentators that echoed the same arguments about the location of the IPU in 1965: ‘its staff will be far removed from the centre of power, from their own communities and from 98% of TV production’ (Albury, The Guardian 2016). When June Sarpong, the Director of the centre left the BBC in 2022 it seemed that yet another ‘diversity initiative’ in the BBC had failed in breaking down the culture of the organisation (Choudhury, 2022). On a national level, particularly in radio, the BBC was ill-equipped to represent differing communities and interests across the country in a single programme. Nevertheless, the hostility to programmes such Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiyi by successive controllers of Radio 4 is perhaps a recognition of the lack of importance the BBC centrally placed on South Asian communities. These are not homogenous communities nationally or locally as they reflect different cultural heritage, language and religion among a wide range of factors (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, pp. 52–57). As these communities grew and evolved in the 1970s and 1980s, BBC local radio would become responsible for more of the BBC’s Asian radio programming—though with no central policy there was a varied level of local engagement by station managers.

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BBC Local Radio: From ‘Programmes for Immigrants’ to Social Cohesion In the twenty-one years from the first edition of Majlis in Urdu on BBC Radio Sheffield to the setting up of the BBC Midlands Asian Network in 1989 some BBC local stations built deep local connections with the South Asian communities in their areas. Programmes changed from being ‘something for immigrants’ to becoming a core part of the station, a daily conduit through which material representing British Asian culture and interests filtered through to the rest of the station output. Other stations retained a token weekly programme that changed little over the years, remaining on the margins of the schedule: an obligation fulfilled, and a box ticked. BBC local radio was launched as a two-year experiment in November 1967 when the first station—BBC Radio Leicester—went on air. Seven other stations followed in Brighton, Durham, Leeds, Merseyside, Nottingham, Sheffield and Stoke on Trent. The capital costs for the trial stations were paid for by the BBC and the running costs by local authorities as public reaction to such a service was tested (Linfoot, 2011). Each of the station managers was given full editorial independence to devise their own programme schedules and to decide how to serve any communities of interest in their area. This led to an eclectic range of programmes targeting Cubs and Scouts in Nottingham and Esperanto speakers in Stoke (Linfoot, 2011, p.  282). Individual station managers tackled the issue of providing targeted programming in their own way, but without any central directives or policy to follow, many South Asian licence fee payers were left marginalised and excluded by their local stations (Mitchell, 2011, p.  57). Three of the eight experimental stations in Leeds, Nottingham and Sheffield broadcast programmes aimed at local South Asian communities. The first local radio programme for Asian listeners to go on air was broadcast in Urdu on BBC Radio Sheffield on Saturday 18 May 1968. According to the ‘Programmes as Broadcast’ schedule the twenty-minute programme titled Majlis was presented by Ali Rasul, the Community Relations Officer for Sheffield (BBC WAC, PasB 1968). The station manager Michael Barton had met local community groups with Ali Rasul before BBC Radio Sheffield went on air, who told him that there was a serious language problem in the city: ‘That persuaded me that we should do a programme, not every day, but at the weekend in Urdu and later Bengali’ (Barton, 2018). Majlis was effectively outsourced to the

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Community Relations Officer who was trusted ‘absolutely totally’ by the station manager (Barton, 2018). In Nottingham Gerald Nethercot, the BBC station manager chose to broadcast an Asian programme, called Nawrang, that went on air in the autumn of 1968. Nawrang later had to be ‘rested’ as the presenter went to India to get married, as Nethercot informed BBC local radio HQ ‘he told us he was only going to be away for a month, but nobody has heard of him since’ (BBC WAC, 1970). The station was forced to drop the programme and as in Sheffield, Nethercot then outsourced the problem to the Community Relations Council, as he reported to HQ: ‘We have now found another presenter through the Community Relations Council and the programme will restart in October’ (BBC WAC, 1970e). There was not a full-throated commitment to the programme by Nethercot as he told BBC Local radio HQ: As long as we can continue without much staff effort it is probably worth while doing so, but if it had to become a staff chore of a major kind, then I should have to drop it. (BBC WAC, 1970e)

Funding and staffing were constant issues for station managers on the BBC’s local stations who tried where possible to eke out their programme budgets by relying on volunteers to put together community programmes (Mitchell, 2011, p. 57). The third of the experimental stations to launch an Asian programme was BBC Radio Leeds where outsourcing went a stage further. From early in 1970 a team of volunteers from the Indian Workers Association presented a new programme called Jhalak; it was presented in Hindustani and aimed at young people to remind them of ‘their cultural roots in Asia’ (BBC Radio Leeds, 1978, p. 16). That members of the Indian Workers Association or any other group or individuals could walk into BBC Radio Leeds and get airtime was not unusual. The station manager in Leeds saw it as a ‘walk-in radio’ station, an idea that received attention in Parliament. Edward Lyons, the MP for Bradford East told the house: No fewer than 100 people walk in daily to comment, to suggest or to take part, and 50 of them daily go on to the air. There is a staff of 22, and about 500 Leeds citizens broadcast weekly with no fee from the B.B.C. The amateurs greatly outnumber the professionals. (Hansard, 1968)

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The station manager of BBC Radio Leeds, Phil Sidey, was prepared to take what on what he saw as the BBC ‘establishment’ when it came to minority programming. In his memoirs he recalled: We might well have been the first British radio station to take a political stance … After Mr. Enoch Powell’s first and most notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech we felt a counter blast was needed from multi-racial Leeds. (Sidey, 1994, p. 139)

In response to Powell the station broadcast a six-part series called The Black Rose with the aim of showing the positive contribution of the immigration of black and Asian people to local life, and receiving praise in parliament (BBC WAC, 1969). The series was presented by Merlyn Rees, then the MP for Leeds South and a home Office minister with responsibility for Race Relations. The rationale behind the programme was questioned on BBC Radio 4 as Sidey recalled: Mike [the producer Mike McGowan] was interviewed on national radio and was asked: ‘Do you think it is right to use BBC airtime to take a political issue of this sort?’ He gave a carefully thought-out and comprehensive answer: ‘Yes’. (Sidey, 1994, p. 139)

Following the civil war that established the new state of Bangladesh in 1971, BBC Radio Leeds was contacted by Bengali student Ali Hassan who was stranded in England. Hasan argued that there was a large Bengali-­ speaking community in West Yorkshire: We had a long talk and the manager agreed to join a committee from the community and in March 1973 we produced a pilot programme in Bengali which was sent to BBC World Service to check so they could hear how we wanted to produce the programme. (Hasan, 2018)

The station agreed the programme could be broadcast in Bengali, ‘it was important it was in Bengali because in those days the people who came here from Bangladesh were mainly working-class people who spoke little English’ (Hasan, 2018). Unlike Gerald Nethercot, his counterpart in Nottingham, Phil Sidey was prepared to offer a guarantee to the makers of his Asian programme, ‘we intend this service to run virtually for ever’ he told local radio HQ (BBC WAC, 1970). In early 2022 a weekly Asian programme was still broadcast on BBC Radio Leeds, while

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Sanjiv Buttoo, one of the Asian programmes’ journalist/producers from the 1980s, had become Managing Editor of the station. In Leicester, where throughout the 1960s the small Asian population had been boosted by the arrival of Kenyan Asian families, the station manager at BBC Radio Leicester decided not to broadcast a targeted programme. It took a change of manager in Leicester to recognise the increase in the Asian population before Milan, presented in Hindustani by the local Community Relations Officer, was launched (BBC, 1970b). According to the Community Relations Commission (CRC) this had grown from under 4,000  in the early 1960s (Hooper, 1965, p.  18) to more than 17,000 by 1971 (CRC, 1974, p. 13). Bob Kennedy, the station manager informed Local Radio HQ of the change of heart, ‘Now it has been decided that the size of the community, already large and growing, demanded a separate programme solely for them’ (BBC WAC, 1970b). The Asian community in Leicester continued to grow, reaching 63,000 by 1983 including a strong core of east African Asians (Leicester City Council, 1984, p. 16). They brought with them a ‘radio habit’ to Britain of all-day listening to Asian programming on the Voice of Kenya (VoK), which was producing a schedule of over seventy hours a week of Asian programming in the 1960s, presented in a range of South Asian languages under the ‘Asian National’ banner (McCarthy, 2020, p.  84). When BBC Radio Leicester began a nightly Asian programme in 1976, it tapped into this thirst for radio, and research by the CRE revealed the new programme reached two thirds of its target audience every day, with fewer than one in ten (8%) never tuning in (Anwar, 1978, p. 21). This CRE research was the first to record the listening to BBC programmes targeted at Asian communities—twelve years after the first programme went on air in 1965. The BBC was given approval to roll out its local stations in 1970, and a plan to increase the number to twenty stations began. One of these new stations, BBC Radio London, accentuated the independence of station managers. Despite the BBC’s own figures estimating the South Asian population in London to be Britain’s biggest and in the order of 120,000 (Hooper, 1965, p. 17), there were no Asian programmes. Peter Redhouse, the station manager argued, ‘We have no plans for broadcasting in immigrant languages at present and will not consider doing so until we have established an audience’ (BBC WAC, 1970). Although Redhouse did admit to internal pressure on the issue:

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A member of my Advisory Council has put forward a strong case for programmes in Punjabi, Hindi, Bengali or Urdu … he accepts the time is not yet ripe for such an attempt on Radio London. (BBC WAC, 1970g)

This meant the South Asian diaspora in London was overlooked a second time by the BBC. Having based the IPU in Birmingham, their pleas for targeted local programming were also ignored. In 1972 Redhouse relented and launched two language programmes on BBC Radio London: Jharoka, presented in Hindustani and Darpan in Bengali. These programmes would cause the station much editorial concern and were dropped in favour of a single English Language programme London Sounds Eastern in 1976 (BBC, 1976). The station manager of BBC Radio Merseyside, Rex Bawden, took an eccentric view of Asian programming and in a telegram to BBC local radio HQ wrote: ‘Peculiar position of Merseyside where large scale “immigration” took place in nineteenth century and relatively little since means that this section of the community is virtually integrated’ (BBC WAC, 1970h). This response to the HQ unit on ethnic programming in local radio shows a damaging disregard for local Asian communities on Merseyside. The 1981 census recorded that more than 5,000 had been born in South Asian countries (CRE, 1985, p. 7), a figure discounting those born in Merseyside that were not ‘visible’ to the census. The independence of the local station managers meant that BBC Radio Merseyside did not launch an Asian programme until after Bawden retired in 1981. It then took a further three years before Open House, presented in English by Umi Prasad, became the first Asian programme on the station in 1984. The programme was dropped in 2012 with the Asian population in Liverpool standing at over 21,000 (Liverpool City Council, 2021). The integration of South Asian communities into British society was at the heart of the agenda of some station managers. Harold Rogers at Radio Medway in Kent was adamant that if there were to be an Asian programme it would not be presented in a mother tongue as he explained to local radio HQ: I do not consider it to be a good idea to do these programmes in the immigrants’ own language; our job should be to integrate them into our society, and not keep them as a separate community. (BBC WAC, 1970f)

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Rogers, though, was aware of his local Asian community, ‘I understand that in Gravesend the immigrant population (mainly Pakistani) totals between 7.5% and 10% of the population’ (BBC WAC, 1970f). By 1974 Rogers conceded and introduced Sangam, presented in Hindustani by Bikram Bhamra, who had many years of broadcast experience on the Voice of Kenya. Sangam survived without any significant development or investment through till 1989 when it was dropped to be replaced by a regional Asian programme. The independence of the station managers was therefore a critical factor in whether Asian communities would get their own local programme. Examining the range of programming indicates that the size of the local Asian communities was a secondary factor, if it were not then BBC Radio London and BBC Radio Leicester would have produced Asian programming at launch. This editorial independence allowed the management at BBC Radio Blackburn to simply give up on Asian programming for two years in the 1970s. The minutes of the February 1973 meeting of the BBC Radio Blackburn Local Radio Advisory Committee (LRAC) revealed a developing issue with the Mehfil programme presented in Gujarati and Hindi: Dissident immigrant factions began to bombard the office with demands that as ‘they spoke for the whole immigrant community’ they should decide the future of our programmes and provide the presenters. (BBC WAC, 1973)

The language in these minutes show a decidedly ‘them and us’ split between the management of BBC Radio Blackburn and the local Asian communities: Letters, phone calls and visitors swarmed into the building, until during the last three weeks, Mr Musgrave, his Programme Organiser, and the producer of the programmes were all spending more of their time on immigrant matters than the rest of the station output. (BBC WAC, 1974–1979)

The programme was ‘temporarily suspended’ by BBC Radio Blackburn in August 1974, but the language of ‘dissidents’ and ‘swarming’ most likely displays the attitudes in Blackburn at the time. Local race relations in the town were toxic and racial violence was common—the National Party, a splinter from the National Front, won two council seats in Blackburn (see: World in Action, 1976)—but the decision to drop Mehfil

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appears irresponsible. When it returned, Mehfil was still presented in Gujarati and Hindi, leaving BBC Radio Blackburn open to the same criticisms that had forced its suspension in the first place. Academic research on BBC local radio and its ethnic programming has highlighted the marginal nature of some of the output, especially in London (see Lewis & Booth, 1989; Tsagarousianou, 2002; and Mitchell, 2011). However, focussing out of London the range of South Asian programming on BBC local radio and its re-imagination as ‘British Asian’ in the late 1980s does not fit this narrative. In terms of quantity, there is no doubt that these programmes made an important contribution to the BBC’s connection with South Asian communities as they expanded to over 200 hours a week by 1994 (Fig. 2.1). What the overall figures hide is the significant contribution of a small number of stations, particularly BBC Radio Leicester, BBC Radio WM and BBC Radio Leeds. The first daily Asian programme was launched in Leicester in 1976. Initially titled Six-Fifteen, it was later better known by its new time slot as the Six O’clock Show. It was broadcast in English on four nights a week, with Milan in Hindustani keeping its slot on Tuesdays (Radio Times, 1976, p. 70). This was followed by daily Asian programmes at BBC Radio Leeds in 1985 and BBC Radio WM in 1988. The programmes at Leicester and WM were boosted by BBC World Service output in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali and a new late-night youth strand to

250 200 150 100 50 0

1969

1975

1979

1985

1989

1994

Fig. 2.1  BBC local radio: hours of Asian programmes per week 1969–1994. (Source: BBC WAC Files)

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Table 2.1  BBC local radio hours of Asian programming compared to local south Asian population: 1994 Station BBC GLR (London) BBC WM (West Midlands) BBC Radio Leeds BBC GMR (Manchester) BBC Radio Leicester

South Asian population

Hours of Asian programming

520,727 341,965 121,347 90,453 77,634

1 61 9 3 70

Source: ONS & BBC (1994b)

form the BBC Midlands Asian Network in 1989 (McCarthy, 2020, p. 195). In 1989 and 1994 almost two thirds of all BBC local radio programmes were produced in Leicester and the West Midlands. The number of hours of output grew again by 1999 when the BBC Asian Network was simulcast on several local radio medium wave transmitters around the country with local programming slotting into the network. One notable exception is London where over half a million people of South Asian heritage lived in 1994, and the BBC’s local station BBC GLR failed to build up its Asian programming. As Table 2.1 shows, there was an evident failure when comparing the weekly one-hour programme in London to the seventy hours of programming in Leicester to a population that was six times smaller. This highlights the legacy of decisions on programming in the 1970s which, as the final chapter will show, is still an issue in the performance of the BBC Asian Network in London in the 2020s. The different characteristics of South Asian communities in local areas offered BBC local radio station managers an opportunity to develop targeted programming that differed from Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye on BBC Radio 4. Therefore ‘mother tongue’ languages were used on BBC local radio stations to meet local needs, with Bengali and Urdu first appearing at BBC Radio Sheffield and BBC Radio Leeds from 1968. Much of the judgement by local station managers was based on gut feeling as reliable population statistics were not readily available until after the 1981 census when clear differences between the make-up of South Asian communities between English cities emerged (Fig. 2.2). In 1981 London was home to one third of people with South Asian heritage in England, with almost three quarters of Indian background. In contrast, in West Yorkshire the majority had a Pakistani heritage. In

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100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

India

London

Pakistan

37

Bangladeshi

West Midlands West Yorkshire

Greater Manchester

Leicester

Fig. 2.2  The proportion of the south Asian population with Indian, Pakistani & Bangladeshi heritage in selected English cities, 1981. (Source: CRE, 1985)

Leicester the fifth largest South Asian community in England was ten times smaller than that in London but clearly shows the effect of the clustering of people from similar backgrounds. The city was almost exclusively of an Indian heritage and research by Leicester City Council in 1983 showed a strong core of Kenyan and Ugandan Asians, with nine out of ten people having Gujarati as a first language and six out of ten being Hindus (Leicester City Council, 1984). When breaking down the large conurbations into smaller boroughs and districts, similar concentrations to Leicester were evident in 1981; in Tower Hamlets eight of ten South Asians were of Bangladeshi heritage, in Lambeth nine out of ten were of Indian heritage and in Bradford seven out of ten were of Pakistani heritage (CRE, 1985, pp. 7–8). The 2011 census demonstrated these demographic characteristics still exist with new immigrants from the subcontinent choosing to settle in areas with familial, cultural and religious pull factors (Migration Observatory, Regional Briefings, 2013–2014b). In the 2020s Leicester appears again as an outlier, evidenced by the growth of its Muslim population which has become the largest non-Christian faith in the city. From under 5% in 1983 it grew to reach almost a quarter (23.5%) of the city population in 2021 (Open Leicester Data: Religion, Leicester, Liverpool City Council, 2021). Crucial to the success of local Asian programming on BBC local radio was the leadership of individual station managers. From Michael Barton in

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Sheffield and Phil Sidey in Leeds introducing Urdu and Bengali programmes to Owen Bentley in Leicester. It was Bentley who decided to launch a new five nights a week programme in 1976 to serve local Asian communities and to try and build social cohesion in the city. From its unwanted tag as ‘the most racist city in Britain’ Leicester became lauded as a ‘beacon’ city for social and community cohesion (Vidal-Hall, 2003, p. 454 & Clayton, 2009, p. 481). Studies such as the influential Cantle Report for the Home Office on community cohesion emphasise the work of Leicester City Council and faith and community groups as the main reason for this turnaround (Cantle, 2001, p. 15). One of the Cantle proposals was ‘the promotion of cross-cultural contact between different communities at all levels, to foster understanding and respect, and break down barriers’ (Cantle, 2001, p. 14). There is a growing body of academic work that points to the value of radio in building social cohesion as Cantle had argued by giving diverse communities a voice and ensuring their inclusion in local society (Everett, 2003; Lewis, 2008). In 2018 an EU study again highlighted the role of community media in improving the social inclusion and political participation of marginal communities. (Bellardi et al., 2018, p. 13). Improving social cohesion through community radio is now a recognised part of Government policy and the Community Media Association champions the work of over 250 community radio stations across the UK in their ‘astoundingly important and brave work to heal divided communities’. With this new evidence it is right to reappraise the daily Six O’clock Show launched at BBC Radio Leicester in 1976, a programme that broke out of the restrictive straightjacket of existing local radio thinking, and helped to build social cohesion in the city and became the basis of the BBC Asian Network. Toxic race relations in Leicester in May 1976 saw the National Front record 44,000 votes and an 18.5% share in the City Council elections of May 1976, coming just short of gaining an elected Councillor (Walker, 1977, p.  195). This came as a shock in Leicester where the arrival of Ugandan Asians meant the Asian population had risen to an estimated 40,000 or 14% of the city (ATV Today, 1976). The nightly community programme, the Six O’clock Show, was launched on BBC Radio Leicester just four months after the National Front breakthrough in the City Council elections. It was funded by a small grant from the local Community Relations Council and in the Radio Times it was sold to listeners as ‘a good time for getting to know your neighbours’ (Radio Times, 1976, p. 70). As Owen Bentley recalled:

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Part of the rise of the National Front was sheer ignorance of what these communities were, it was the fear of the unknown, fear of the other. And it was a way of getting over this fear of the other if you could get them more on the air, not giving them their own programme as such but having it in English and therefore accessible and that some of that white audience would hear a different sort of Asian to the one they had in their perception. (Bentley, 2016)

The move to a daily programme proved to be popular, and according to Schaffer, turned Asian programming from ‘a sleepy backwater’ to a ‘significant audience pulling product’ (Schaffer, 2014, p.  51). CRE research in Leicester showed just how significant the audiences for the new programmes were; two thirds of the Asian target audience in Leicester were tuning in each day and a further quarter listened occasionally (Anwar, 1978, p.  21). These listening figures are truly exceptional and contrast with those for the BBC Radio 4 programme Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye to which just 8% of the Leicester sample listened (Anwar, 1978, p. 21). The revolution of a daily programme meant that with the increased airtime there was more space for a wider range of topics to be aired, broadcast as part of a mix of entertainment and local community information. Bentley aimed for a two-way approach of crossover listenership to Asian and mainstream programmes: A big thing for me was they’re not listening to us. Because why should they, there was absolutely nothing for them in the rest of the output? A big idea I had was you get some programmes for them to start listening to the station and they will then translate their affections to the remainder of the output. So, they will end up listening to the breakfast show which has a bulletin that reflects not only just pure white news but news of importance to Asians too. (Bentley, 2016 [1942])

This hypothesis was tested by the CRE research in 1977 and a matching BBC Audience survey in 1986. The CRE data suggested that in 1977 10% of the Asian audience were listening to the breakfast show Good Morning Leicester, a figure that rose to 18% in the BBC survey of 1986 (Anwar, 1978, p. 21; BBC WAC, 1986, p. 8). These important audience research projects in Leicester reveal that the Asian listeners were being attracted to mainstream programmes about local life and society on BBC Radio Leicester—they became less marginalised. Surinder Sharma, a former CRE officer in Leicester who went on to work in the field of equality

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for the Ford Motor Company, the BBC and the NHS, and still lives in Leicester, has no doubt about the importance of the Six O’clock Show in building social cohesion: I think it was quite revolutionary to have programming every day, but also then later having programmes from six o’clock to midnight. You know Owen and his team at the time deserve a lot of praise for what they did at the time. I think people don’t recognise the individuals who made a difference in this city, but I think there were many individuals who did make a huge difference in making people feel they were part of local society, they had arrived and were part and parcel of being the Leicester community. (Sharma, 2017)

One of the key elements of the Six O’clock Show was to connect with a young second generation of Asians in the city that were caught between two cultures. Rupal Rajani, a presenter at BBC Radio Leicester, was born in Uganda and arrived in Leicester via a Devon resettlement camp as a toddler in 1972. Like most of her friends in Leicester she had to come to terms with twin identities, being more English at school and more Indian at home. However, as a teenager in the 1980s, listening to the Six O’clock Show on BBC Radio Leicester became crucial to her finding her own identity: It felt like home, it felt comfortable, it felt like you belonged. There were these people at the end of the radio who would identify with you and your culture and what you were about. That was really important for me growing up, and it gave me an identity and it made me feel ok to be who I am—to a huge degree in fact. (Rajani, 2018)

It is this second generation that we turn to next as they were critical in the formation of a new British Asian identity.

The BBC and a New British Asian Identity The 2021 Census revealed that ‘British Asian’ is becoming a dominant identity within the South Asian diaspora. There were four and a half million people with South Asian heritage living in England and Wales (ONS, 2022), but of these only 627,000 (13.6%) described their nationality as Bangladeshi, Indian or Pakistani (ONS, 2022). When further releases are available, they will confirm that the youth of the South Asian communities

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will mark them out from the rest of the population. In the 2011 census six out of ten (62%) people with South Asian heritage were recorded being under the age of thirty-five, compared to four out of ten (42%) in the population (ONS, 2020). This is not a new phenomenon; the results of the 1981 census displayed similar patterns of age distribution among South Asian communities with 62.5% recorded as being under the age of thirty (CRE, 1985). This is a recognition that it was mainly younger people who chose to come to the UK and therefore consequently had higher fertility rates than the rest of the population. The ‘scare’ of higher birth rates in ‘immigrant’ communities has been a recurring theme of local and national press coverage since the 1970s and is one of the elements that has influenced ‘anti-immigrant’ prejudice. As early as 1970 the Leicester Mercury reported ‘One in Four Babies Born to Immigrant Mothers’, a theme it returned to in 1973 as the main front-page story in capitalised bold type asserted ‘CITY IMMIGRANT BIRTHS DOUBLE IN FIVE YEARS’ (McCarthy, 2021). The release of these and similar statistics were seized upon by the national press. The birth rate figures released in March 1970 were reported by seven of the eight national daily papers. In contrast, statistics showing a decline in immigration released in May 1970 were only reported by four out of the eight dailies (Hartmann & Husband, 1974, p. 167). In the run-up to the Brexit vote in 2016 ‘immigrant births’ were once again highlighted in the press; ‘A quarter of all children born in the UK are the children of immigrants’ noted the Daily Mail in 2012, reporting that ‘mothers from Poland, India and Pakistan have been giving birth in record numbers’ (Daily Mail, 2012). Notwithstanding this negative press coverage, a ‘youthful’ population was established with one quarter of South Asians recorded in the 1981 census aged between sixteen and thirty, an important age group ready to make media choices (CRE, 1985). A decade later research by Business in the Community (BITC) pointed out that not only half of the South Asian population was under the age of twenty-five but more importantly that eight out of ten of these young people were born in the UK (BITC, 1994). There was a growing pressure by these young people on BBC local radio stations to adapt their targeted output to meet their needs as ‘British Asians’. Youth, along with a need for the white producers to understand what was being broadcast, was one of the drivers of a switch to English presentation of Asian programmes on many BBC local radio stations from the late 1970s (Schaffer, 2014, p.  51), though as the next chapter will show, this was neither universal nor part of a planned strategy. The

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importance of targeting young Asians had been anticipated by BBC Radio Leicester as early as 1976 and a Friday night programme aimed at younger listeners became one of the strands in the Six O’clock Show. A CRE study of listening to the new daily programming in Leicester showed that around two thirds of the local Asian population were listening regularly (Anwar, 1978). It also revealed that younger listeners in Leicester were choosing to listen to the four daily programmes in English rather than one daily show in Hindustani, which most did not understand. They also included BBC Radio 1 as a substantial part of their listening repertoire (Anwar, 1978). The growing evidence of the size of the younger second generation in South Asian communities in the 1980s saw the recruitment of a second generation of young British Asian presenters by BBC local radio and a raft of new ‘youth’ programmes. Examples include Weekend Bazaar at BBC Radio Leicester, a fast-paced programme of Bollywood music, competitions and chat. At BBC Radio Derby a new young programme team was recruited and the subsequent Aaj Kal programme built a national reputation for championing new British Bhangra music. An on-air ‘meeting place’ for young people developed at BBC Radio Bedfordshire where two young women, Saadia Usmani and Smita Barcha, known on air as ‘Smit’ Petite and the Karachi Kid’, offered a safe place where young people could chat and offer their opinions on current social issues (McCarthy, 2020, p. 160). These programmes became a new front door into the BBC for young British Asians wanting to gain experience of broadcasting. They also became key in the beginnings of a new ‘British Asian sound’, as it was through these programmes that new Asian presenters and production teams brought new ideas, new British Asian music and a new mix of British and Asian cultures to air. A growing tension between first generation ‘immigrants’ and a second British-born or educated generation came to the fore in media coverage in the 1970s. In Leicester older Asians had expressed a reluctance to support more access for their young people to targeted radio programmes. A CRE survey in Leicester found this hesitance was based on a ‘fear that this over exposure to Western values is already resulting in conflict with their parents’ (Anwar, 1983, p. 47). This growing ‘identity gap’ between young people and their parents was exposed in an ITV network television programme titled Here Today, Here Tomorrow, a story of British Asians in 1979. The presenter Zia Mohyeddin set out the fears of parents about their children wanting to identify as British:

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The elders are shocked and horrified that their children would want to consider this, if the young ones expressed a wish to identify with this country, then their own traditional influence would be weakened. (ITV, 1979)

Young people interviewed in the programme expressed both their ‘Britishness’ and a lack of acceptance: If there is any place we could fit in it’s here, but the colour of our skin will stop us, always. There will always be a point … when someone will say ‘hey you, black bastard’. (ITV, 1979)

Young South Asians may have thought of themselves as British, but they did not feel accepted by British society. Practically ignored by mainstream media, they turned to emerging technology to make their own media choices, from the VHS player to cheap technology that made pirate radio possible. Home VHS players helped to revolutionise TV viewing in Asian households. A BBC survey in Leicester in 1986 found that seven out of ten Asian households had a VHS player compared to just four in ten of the general population (BBC Audience Report, 1986). Watching movies became the main family-centred leisure activity in Asian homes and Gillespie argues that with around 900 Bollywood movie releases a year, their impact in Britain began to create a ‘pan-Asian’ identity (Gillespie, 1995, p. 77). The ‘stack and binge’ TV viewing phenomenon that arrived in Britain with streaming services such as the BBC iPlayer and Netflix in the 2010s first emerged in Asian households in the 1980s as they left the traditional broadcasters behind. The VHS had a devastating impact on the many Asian cinemas that had opened in the 1960s and 1970s, who could not compete with cheap video rental and a rise in video piracy. The Natraj cinema in Leicester was one of the first purpose-built Asian cinemas in Britain. It was built in 1974 at a cost of more than one million pounds but faced financial ruin just six years later. The owner explained to an ITV reporter, ‘Video has become so cheap and common. You can hire two films for £1.40, whereas we charge £1.30 per seat. Video piracy is to blame, and we can’t see any improvement’ (ITV, 1980). There was little change, and by 1982 Central News were reporting that there were up to 130 shops offering Asian movies on VHS to hire in Leicester with some charging as little as twenty pence per film (Central News, 1982). The Natraj closed in 1987 and has since been sub-divided into retail units. In

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1989 the Astra satellite, used by Sky, became host to a new satellite television service which, for the first time, offered Asian viewers a twenty-four-­ hour dedicated channel, TV Asia, adding to a home-viewing repertoire that opted out of mainstream media. In radio, relatively inexpensive equipment coupled with only minimal offerings of Asian programming by the existing stations in London and the West Midlands in the mid-1980s provided an opportunity for young enterprising South Asians to develop illegal pirate radio. Stations such as Radio XL, Radio Sangam, Apna Radio, Asian Sound and Fever FM proved hugely popular among South Asians in London and the West Midlands. Research by the BBC in the West Midlands as late as 1994 found that pirate stations Radio Sangam and Apna Radio were both reaching half of the Asian population each week (BBC, 1994). Sunrise Radio, a former cable station, in West London became the first targeted Asian radio station in Britain in November 1989. A move away from much of the mainstream British media has become easier over time with access to satellite television and more targeted Asian commercial and community radio stations. According to Ofcom research in 2021, first generation migrants from the subcontinent found that television from ‘home’ including news, movies, soaps together with the music played on targeted Asian stations were key drivers of media consumption. For subsequent generations of ‘British Asians’ there was a demonstrable lessening of these media ties, but a strong cultural pull was exhibited in which the mainstream British media formed just part of their viewing and listening repertoire, (Ofcom, 2021, pp. 8–14). As a collective, the BBC may have been failing but there was an acceptance by some senior editorial staff, especially in  local stations, that the new diverse Britain emerging in the 1960s and 1970s was here to stay, reflecting the best of the public service ethos of the BBC (Saha, 2018, p. 160). The new BBC Midlands Asian Network in Leicester and the West Midlands that launched in 1989 is a clear example of this. However, there remains a gap between the rhetoric of the corporation and its actions (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 1).

Conclusion Within a year of being appointed Director General, Greg Dyke described the BBC as ‘hideously white’ (Newton, 2011, p.  231). To kick-start change in network radio and as part of his moves to tackle diversity in the

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BBC, Dyke switched the BBC Asian Network from local to network radio. That this was evident to Dyke a BBC outsider, some forty-five years after the IPU had been set up in Birmingham is a tangible sign that the BBC had struggled to engage with ethnic minorities, and the South Asian diaspora in particular. This uneasy relationship between the BBC and its Asian licence fee payers reflects the political and social context in Britain. Continual tightening of immigration legislation by successive governments has left people of colour socially isolated, a position made worse by the Brexit debate and subsequent issues around border control and trade deals (Sobolewska & Ford, 2020, p. 189). Immigration to Britain from the Indian subcontinent is an ongoing process with a critical mass of South Asian communities in Britain exerting a familial and cultural pull on the subcontinent. This has been the case since the early 1960s and as the South Asian diaspora grew, the BBC has been continually hesitant about how to engage with them, especially on the national radio networks. Government pressure and regulatory opportunities steered the BBC into setting up the IPU in Birmingham in 1965, though it was later more correctly named the Asian Programme Unit as it only produced programmes for Asian listeners and viewers. The unit was placed out of London away from the major decision-makers and channel controllers and as soon as BBC local stations launched in 1967, successive controllers of BBC Radio 4 campaigned to drop Asian programming from their network. One of the driving principles of BBC local radio was a jealously guarded local editorial independence, giving local station managers the responsibility to decide if they wanted their stations to produce Asian programming. A lack of central policy and clarity on this issue meant that programmes developed in a haphazard and disjointed manner across England. The different settlement patterns across the country highlight both the non-homogeneity of South Asian communities and the need for a varying production expertise in each of the BBC local radio areas. The choice of presentation language, duration and style of programming therefore varied between stations, as did the seriousness with which local station managers engaged with the programmes and the local South Asian diaspora. The demographic importance of youth in the South Asian diaspora meant that there was a new generation of young ‘British Asians’ straddling two cultures who were not prepared to accept their marginalisation by the BBC. Through VHS players, pirate radio, new legal stations like Sunrise

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Radio in West London and satellite TV these young British Asians were able to forge a new media market which bypassed much of the mainstream British media. The importance of new youth programming on some BBC local radio stations in the 1980s was reflected in both the on-air content and the opportunities they offered young people as a local front door into the BBC as an employer. The 2016 BBC Charter lists diversity as a key public service goal, but as this chapter has revealed on too many occasions, the BBC has lacked a collective will to make this happen. According to a slew of industry and academic reports, the BBC is still failing in the recruitment and retention of ethnic minority staff and their on-air portrayal (for example, see Robinson, 2021, p. 3). Despite an abortive attempt to close the BBC Asian Network in 2010, the station survived and is tasked by the BBC with targeting young British Asians aged under thirty-five (BBC Trust, 2016). However, Asians aged over thirty-five who have different editorial and language needs to younger listeners are left to be provided for by the BBC’s Nations and Regions. In practice this means BBC local radio in England as there are no targeted programmes for Asians on BBC Radios Scotland, Wales and Ulster. In England only three of the thirty-eight mainland stations broadcast a local Asian show while six other stations share a regional programme. A gap in BBC provision has developed between network and local radio, leaving Asian licence fee payers underserved. As the next chapter will show, this lack of a clear policy on broadcasting to the South Asian diaspora has been a constant problem for the BBC. The corporation has never had a clear, funded and comprehensive offering, relying instead on creative editorial leaders in BBC local radio to devise local answers from their existing limited budgets. It opens the BBC up to charges of institutional racism in its procedures and practices that will become clearer as the following chapters will reveal.

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Aujla-Sidhu, G. (2017). How to Serve British Asian Communities? The Dilemma Facing the BBC. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio, 15(1) (15, May). Aujla-Sidhu, G. (2021). The BBC Asian Network: The Cultural Production of Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan. ATV Today. (1976). News Report, ‘The National Front in Leicester’, TX 26 May 1976, MACE Archive, (Accessed 25 August 2023) https://www.macearchive. org/films/atv-today-26051976-national-front-leicester Barton, M. (2018). b. 20 July 1931, former Manager BBC Radio Sheffield & Controller, BBC Local Radio, face to face interview 25 June 2018. BBC. (1965). Minutes of Meeting, Programmes for Immigrants. Retrieved January 17, 2022, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/100-­voices/ people-­nation-­empire/windrush/ BBC. (1994). Audience Research Report, BBC Radio WM: The Asian Network, BBC Research Department Report, January 1994, p. 10, Personal Archive of Owen Bentley. BBC. (1997). Local Radio 2000: A Review for a New Era. BBC. BBC Radio Leeds Magazine. (1978). BBC Radio Leeds Station Archive, Summer Edition, 1978. BBC Sounds. (2022). BBC Local Radio Station Schedules, January. Retrieved January 25, 2022, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/stations BBC Trust. (2016). BBC Asian Network Service Licence 2016. Retrieved January 09, 2016, from http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/regulatory_framework/service_licences/radio/2016/asian_network_apr16.pdf BBC WAC. (1968). BBC Radio Sheffield, PasB (Programmes as Broadcast), Microfiche, 15 November 1967, December 31. BBC WAC. (1969). File R81/10/1, LRAC Minutes, BBC Radio Leeds, 1968-1973, 7 January 1969. BBC WAC. (1970a). File R102/38/1, Local Radio HQ Minorities Programmes Memo from Manager, Radio Sheffield to Local Radio HQ; ‘Immigrant Programmes’, December 14. BBC WAC. (1970b), File R102/38/1, LRHQ Minorities Programmes, Memo from Manager BBC Radio Leicester to Head of Local Radio Development, October 30. BBC WAC. (1970c). File R102/38/1 Local Radio HQ, Minorities Programmes, Memo from Patrick Beech, CER to HLRD; ‘Immigrant Programmes on Local Radio’, May 5. BBC WAC. (1970d). File R102/38/1, Local Radio HQ Minorities Programmes, Memo from Manager, Radio Leeds to Local Radio HQ, ‘Immigrant Programmes’, September 16. BBC WAC. (1970e). File R102/38/1, Local Radio HQ Minorities Programmes, Memo from Manager, Radio Nottingham to Local Radio HQ, ‘Immigrant Programmes’, September 28.

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BBC WAC File. (1970f). R102/38/1 LRHQ, Minorities Programmes, Memo H. Rogers to Assistant Head of Local Radio Development, September 28. BBC WAC. (1970g). File R102/38/1, LRHQ, Minorities Programmes, Peter Redhouse, Memo to Assistant Head of Local Radio Development, October. BBC WAC. (1970h). File R102/38/1 LRHQ, Minorities, Programmes, Telegram from Manager BBC Radio Merseyside. BBC WAC. (1972). File R102/38/1, Local Radio HQ Minorities Programmes, Memo from CR4 to CER, ‘Programmes For Immigrants’, May 11. BBC WAC. (1973). File R81/3/1 LRAC Minutes , BBC Radio Blackburn, 12 February 1973. BBC WAC. (1974). File R81/3/1 LRAC Minutes, BBC Radio Blackburn 1974-1979, 5 August 1974. BBC WAC. (1975). File R4/93/1, Annan Committee, BBC Memorandum: Broadcasting and Racial Minorities, November. BBC WAC. (1976). File R34/1303/2, Policy: Immigrants, Letter from J. Grist, C.E.R., to K. Lamb, DPA, August 27. BBC WAC. (1981). File R102/13/1, Programmes for Immigrants, Part 2, 1980–1982, Memo from CR4 to MDR, October 2. BBC WAC. (1982). File B193/5/2, Ethnic Minorities and the BBC, Multi-­Ethnic Broadcasting: A Strategy for the Next 5 Years’. BBC WAC. (1985). File R99/154/4, Immigrants Programmes, Leaflet, Broadcasting in a Multi-Ethnic Society: The BBC and the Asian and Afro-­ Caribbean Minorities. BBC WAC. (1986). File R9/327/1, BBC Audience Research Report, Radio Leicester: Listening Amongst Asians, October 1986. BBC WAC. (1995). File R9/1, 831, Programme Strategy Review: Special Report on Ethnic Minorities. BBC WAC File. (1973). BBC Radio Blackburn Minutes 1974–79, R81/3/2BBC Radio Blackburn LRAC Minutes 1970–1973, LRAC Minutes, February 12. BBC WAC File. (1974). R102/38/1, Local Radio HQ, Minorities Programmes, Letter from the Mancunian Indian news sheet to Controller, BBC local Radio, July 31. Bellardi, N., Busch, B., Hassemer, J., Peissl, H., & Scifo, S. (2018). Spaces of Inclusion: An Explorative Study on the Needs of Refugees and Migrants in the Domain of Media Communication and on Responses by Community Media. Council of Europe Report. Retrieved June 24, 2022, from https://edoc.coe. int/en/refugees/8040-­spaces-­of-­inclusion-­an-­explorative-­study-­on-­needs-­of-­ refugees-­a nd-­m igrants-­i n-­t he-­d omain-­o f-­m edia-­c ommunication-­a nd-­o n-­ responses-­by-­community-­media.html Bentley, O. (2016 [1942, August 12]). b. Former Station Manager BBC Radio Leicester, face to face interview 22 November 1916. Business in the Community. (1994). Race for Opportunity, Fact Sheet.

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Cantle, T. (2001). Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team, Home Office. Retrieved June 25, 2022, from https://tedcantle.co.uk/ pdf/communitycohesion%20cantlereport.pdf Central News. (1982). The Popularity of Asian Films in Leicester, TX, October 20. Retrieved March 07, 2022, from https://www.macearchive.org/films/ central-­news-­20101982-­videos-­report-­leicester Choudhury, B. (2022). Why is the BBC Failing When it Comes to Diversity? Eastern Eye. Retrieved November 03, 2022, from https://www.easterneye. biz/why-­is-­the-­bbc-­failing-­when-­it-­comes-­to-­diversity/ Clayton, J. (2009). Thinking spatially: Towards an everyday understanding of inter-ethnic relations. Social & Cultural Geography, 4(10), 481–498. Community Relations Commission. (1974). Ethnic Minorities in Britain: Statistical Data. CRC. CRE. (1985). Ethnic Minorities in Britain: Statistical Information on the Pattern of Settlement. CRE. Daily Mail. (2012). Immigrant Mothers. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar ticle-­2 223009/A-­q uar ter-­ babies-­born-­UK-­children-­immigrants-­mothers-­Poland-­India-­Pakistan-­birth-­ record-­numbers.html Dyos Papers. (1968). University of Leicester Special Collections, ULA/04/2/5, Correspondence on Local Broadcasting. Everett, A. (2003). New Voices: An Evaluation of Fifteen Access Radio Pilots, Radio Authority. Gillespie, M. (1995). Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. Routledge. Hansard. (1968). Broadcasting Local Stations, Sir Edward Lyons, Column 168, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1968-11-11/debates/ a4f40094-2a33-4f8b-a733-ecfb76dd9431/Broadcasting(LocalStations), Accessed 1 August 2023. Hartmann, P., & Husband, C. (1974). Racism and the Mass Media. Davis Poynter. Hasan, A. (2018). b. 3 February 1948, former presenter BBC Radio Leeds, face to face interview, 3 February 2018. Hendy, D. (2019). One of Us? Make Yourself at Home, History of the BBC, https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/people-nation-empire/ makeyourself-at-home/ (accessed 1 August 2023). Hendy, D. (2022). The BBC: A People’s History. Profile. Hooper, R. (1965). Colour in Britain. BBC. Husband, C. (Ed.). (1975). White Media & Black Britain: A Critical Look at the Role of the Media in Race Relations. Arrow. ITV. (1976). World in Action ‘The National Party’ https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JMLgR-2KjvI, (accessed 1 August 2023). ITV. (1979). Here Today, Here Tomorrow: A Story of British Asians’, broadcast 1979. Retrieved January 19, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XPvpVHO_Jf0

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ITV. (1980). Here and Now, ‘Indian Cinema’, TX 4 December 1980, MACE Archive. Retrieved January 18, 2022, from https://www.macearchive.org/ films/here-­and-­now-­04121980-­indian-­cinema Leicester City Council. (1984). The Survey of Leicester, 1983. Leicester. Lewis, P. (1976). Community Control of Local Radio. Council of Europe. Lewis, P. M. (2008). “Promoting Social Cohesion: the Role of Community Media”. Report for the Council of Europe’s Group of Specialists on Media Diversity, https://rm.coe.int/1680483b32 (accessed 2 August 2023). Lewis, P. M., & Booth, J. (1989). The Invisible Medium: Public, Commercial and Community Radio. Macmillan. Linfoot, M. (2011). A History Of BBC local radio in England: c1960–1980. University of Westminster PhD Thesis. Retrieved January 14, 2022, from https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/8zz18/a-­h istory-­ of-­bbc-­local-­radio-­in-­england-­c1960-­1980 Liverpool City Council. (2021). Open Leicester Data, Census 2021: Religion. Retrieved March 21, 2022, from https://data.leicester.gov.uk/pages/home/ Malik, S. (2002). Representing Black Britain: Black and Asian Images on Television. Sage. McCarthy, L. (2020). Connecting with New Asian Communities: BBC local radio 1967–1990, University of Leicester Thesis. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://leicester.figshare.com/ar ticles/thesis/Connecting_with_ New_Asian_Communities_BBC_local_radio_1967-­1990/11798622 McCarthy, L. (2021). The Leicester Mercury: Race on the Front Page, University of Leicester Research Drive. Retrieved July 20, 2022, from https://leicester. figshare.com/articles/preprint/The_Leicester_Mercury_Race_on_the_Front_ Page_/14685843/1 Mitchell, C. (2011). Voicing the Community: Participation and Change. In R. Brunt & R. Cere (Eds.), Postcolonial Media in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. Newton, D. (2011). Paving the Empire Road: BBC Television and Black Britons. Manchester University Press. OfCom. (2021, November 3). Broadcast Expectations of Minority Ethnic Audiences. Retrieved March 08, 2021, from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__ data/assets/pdf_file/0030/227568/Minority-­Ethnic-­Audience-­Research.pdf ONS. (2020a). Ethnicity Facts and Figures Factsheet. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://www.ethnicity-­facts-­figures.service.gov.uk/uk-­population-­ by-­ethnicity/national-­and-­regional-­populations/population-­of-­england-­and-­ wales/latest#by-­ethnicity ONS. (2020b). Population by Country of Birth and Nationality. Retrieved November 25, 2022, from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/datasets/ populationoftheunitedkingdombycountryofbirthandnationality ONS. (2021). Ethnic Group, England and WAles 2021, https://www.ons.gov. uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/bulletins/

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ethnicgroupenglandandwales/census2021#:~:text=The%20largest%20 increases%20were%20seen,%25%2C%20564%. Accessed 1 August 2023. ONS. (2022). National Identity, England and Wales, Census 2021. Retrieved November 29, 2022, from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/bulletins/nationalidentityenglandandwales/census2021 Patel, I. S. (2021). We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire. Verso. Pimlott, B. (1992). Harold Wilson. Harper Collins. Purnell, J. (2017). Does TV Have a Problem with Class? Royal Television Society Debate. Retrieved November 10, 2022, from https://rts.org.uk/video/ video-­does-­tv-­have-­problem-­class Radio Times. (1968, February 18). BBC Radio 4 listings. Retrieved August 24, 2022, from https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/service_bbc_radio_ fourfm/1968-02-18 Radio Times. (1976). BBC Radio Leicester Listings, 16–22 October, 1976, p. 70. Rajani, R. (2018). b. 8 January 1970, Oral History Interview, BBC Radio Leicester Presenter, Face-to-face Interview, June 20. Robinson, N. (2021). Diversity of Senior Leaders in BBC News, Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, Birmingham City University. Retrieved January 10, 2022, from https://bcuassets.blob.core.windows.net/docs/csu2021324-­lhc-­ report-­robinsonv5-­91221-­1-­132835986558468429.pdf Safidi, A. (2012). The Colonial Construction of Hindustani: 1800–1947, (PhD Thesis), p.  200. Retrieved May 11, 2022, from https://research.gold.ac. uk/8026/1/History_thesis_Safadi.pdf Saha, A. (2018). Race and the Cultural Industries. Polity. Schaffer, G. (2014). The Vision of a Nation: Making Multiculturalism on British Television, 1960–80. Palgrave Macmillan. Sharma, S. (2017). b. 5 July 1953, Former Head of Diversity for BBC Television, Face-to-face Interview, September 7. Sidey, P. (1994). Hello Mrs Butterfield: The hilarious story of ‘Radio Irreverent’, the first two years of BBC Radio Leeds. Warwickshire, Kestrel Press. Sobolewska, M., & Ford, R. (2020). Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics. Cambridge University Press. Spencer, I.  R. G. (1997). British Immigration Policy Since 1939: The Making of Multi-Racial Britain. Routledge. Tsagarousianou, R. (2002). Ethnic Community Media: Community Identity and Citizenship in Contemporary Britain. In W.  Jankowski & O.  Prehn (Eds.), Community Media in the Information Age: Perspectives and prospects. Hampton Press. Vidal-Hall, J. (2003). ‘Leicester City of Migration’, Index on Censorship, 32(2), 132–141. Walker, M. (1977). The National Front. Fontana.

CHAPTER 3

Failing the Diversity Test: The BBC and the Legacy of a Policy Vacuum

Three pieces of research three decades apart expose the continued failure of the BBC to fully embrace the increasingly diverse nature of Britain. The first in 1987 was a film by the BBC’s Panorama programme that examined an attempt by BBC local radio to improve its record on the employment of black and Asian journalists through a new training scheme. In the film, which was titled Fair Play for Britain’s Blacks the trainees are bluntly asked ‘Are you sure you’re not here because you’re black?’ (Panorama, BBC 1, 1987). The second, an internal BBC report in 2018 assessed how its own workforce reflected the diversity of the UK audiences it served; it found ethnic staff felt ‘undermined’ and excluded from career progression (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021). Adding to this depressing picture is a third piece of academic research from Birmingham City University in 2021 which exposed the lack of BAME staff in senior roles in BBC News and the impact this was having on the tone and coverage of the BBC’s news output (Robinson, 2021, p. 4). The later studies conclude that in the 2020s the BBC is still failing to deal effectively with diversity, both within its workforce and on air. While it is right to point out, as Robinson does that are more black and Asian voices on radio and television, it takes a diverse editorial management to drive a more inclusive on-air agenda (Robinson, 2021, p. 4). The most diverse roster of presenters on any of the BBC’s ‘heritage’ network stations is to be found on BBC Radio 4, where in 2022 Mohit Bakaya was the Controller. This chapter will analyse the

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development of BBC policy on diversity from the 1970s. It will reveal that despite the best efforts of some senior leaders the corporation is still inadequately representing its diverse audiences. In an organisation that is still trying to come to terms with life as is lived on the streets of Britain in the 2020s, it is hardly surprising that programmes for South Asian licence fee payers were not prioritised in the 1970s and 1980s, save for a small number of BBC local stations. BBC local radio stations with their front doors on local high streets across England devised programmes for local South Asian communities and employed black and Asian journalists in the midst of a policy vacuum in which the BBC talked up these local successes to deflect from its own national failure—a failure that it did not seem to recognise. To make any successful policy in the BBC requires active editorial and financial support from senior management and it is why the key policy objectives and tone set by the director general are crucial. Even then it is still demonstrably possible for policy directions to be resisted and slowed down by content divisions within the corporation until proposals and objectives run out of steam. Two directors general stand out as forcing editorial managers in the BBC to embrace broadcasting to Asian communities in Britain. Hugh Carleton Greene, better known for connecting the BBC to the social changes of the 1960s with a raft of ground breaking programmes, and Greg Dyke, who with his swashbuckling style grasped new opportunities for the corporation in the 2000s. It was Greene who set up the Immigrants’ Programme Unit (IPU) in 1965 as a response to government unease at race relations in Britain, although almost as soon he left office there was a campaign by senior editorial leaders in television and radio management to drop Asian programmes—especially in network radio. Forty years later Greg Dyke was responsible for ‘discovering’ the BBC Asian Network run out of the BBC’s local station in Leicester and turning it nto a full digital station in 2002. Again, after Dyke had left and serious financial turbulence hit the BBC, there was an abortive attempt based on ‘value for money’ grounds to close the BBC Asian Network in 2009 (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021). Therefore, the active patronage by senior leaders who can drive policy, change funding patterns and priorities within the organisation is critical. Just seven years after launching the IPU in Birmingham, the hostility of national television and radio management to broadcasting ‘Immigrant Programmes’ on their networks can be seen in an exchange of internal memoranda. On Tuesday 22 May 1972 the senior manager in charge of

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the IPU in Birmingham wrote to the controllers of BBC television and radio about their private discussions about dropping programmes for immigrants. John Grist, Controller of English Regions, told his colleagues in London: ‘I have been talking to some of my chums in the race relations business and they suggest we might create an almighty stink if we bailed out of the immigrants programme at present.’ His memorandum also accepted that the Hindustani language programmes were causing the controllers an ongoing irritation, ‘I have great sympathy with those that have to cope with the tedious problems created by the multiplicity of languages and the irascibility of that particular kind of humanity.’ Grist closed by suggesting that the status quo should be retained although cutting the radio programme might be a first step (BBC WAC, 1972). In three short paragraphs the lack of connection between the BBC’s decision-makers in London, the output of the IPU and growing Asian communities in Britain were laid bare. They portray a colonial attitude to Asian licence fee payers and expose a policy vacuum towards Asian programmes at the heart of the BBC. During the 1970s and 1980s BBC policy on ethnic minorities lacked strong central leadership and direction. The BBC and the British media at this time regarded immigrants as ‘the problem’, and in an increasingly multicultural society ethnic minorities were practically invisible in the press and on air (Husband, 1975). A raft of working and policy papers on programming, action plans for more diverse recruitment and guidelines for news were produced by the BBC in these two decades but little changed on the ground—or on the air. Today these papers look to be less about producing active policy changes and more part of a rebuttal process against critics of the corporation. This period set the tone and precedent for the BBC in the current century in which it constantly refreshes its policies on diversity but is still criticised for its minimal success in the retention and progression of its ethnic minority staff, and their lack of visibility in senior management roles (OfCom, 2021, p. 44). There was an increasing disconnection of broadcasts from policy and senior decision-makers, resulting in the creation of ‘broadcast ghettoes’ that are still evident in the BBC (Malik, 2013). The policy and working papers from the 1970s and 1980s analysed in this chapter make it clear that the BBC viewed Asian and black communities in the United Kingdom as separate to its ‘ordinary’ or ‘white’ licence fee payers. The grudging provision of Asian language programming in 1965 was therefore set against the risk of upsetting ‘regular’ viewers and listeners, and sixty years later minority communities

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remain ‘under-served as audiences and excluded as practitioners’ (Malik & Newton, 2018, p. 2). However, in BBC local radio there was a precedent of editorial independence that allowed station managers a free hand in programming and scheduling matters (Linfoot, 2011). Station managers decided locally whether to broadcast Asian programmes and in what language they would be presented. Practices in BBC local and national radio therefore visibly— and audibly—diverged almost as soon as local radio was launched in 1967, remaining on different trajectories during the 1970s and 1980s. The eclectic mix of targeted BBC local radio programming for ethnic minorities did have one benefit for the BBC as lists of local Asian and black programmes were appended to policy papers to refute criticism of the corporation’s lack of ambition in minority programming. It was in local radio without a central policy to direct station managers that Asian programming by the BBC was to be ‘put on a firmer footing’ (Hendy, 2022, p. 384). This chapter will therefore examine three crucial factors in establishing how the BBC responded to the increasingly diverse nature of Britain. It will firstly assess the BBC’s policy papers produced in the 1970s and 1980s showing how flawed thinking and a lack of basic research left a legacy of an organisation out of touch with the daily lives of Asian and black licence fee payers. It will secondly reflect how in its journalism the BBC retained and even promoted an ‘editorial whiteness’ at the expense of alienating recruits from new diverse communities. Thirdly, it will consider BBC local radio where, on the margins of the BBC, the lack of a central policy enabled the development of innovative and popular programmes, including the embryonic BBC ‘Midlands’ Asian Network in 1989. These factors and a failure to address them properly in the 1970s and 1980s has left the BBC facing similar issues around diversity and inclusion in the 2020s.

An ‘Out of Touch’ BBC: A Legacy of Failed and Ignored Diversity Policies As a public service broadcaster funded by a licence fee, the BBC has a duty ‘to acknowledge and represent the lives of people who consume television and radio in the UK’ (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 1). However, contemporary studies portray the BBC as being out of touch with an increasingly diverse Britain, and failing in the recruitment, retention and promotion of BAME

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staff (Robinson, 2021), displaying ‘a woeful lack of diversity within senior positions and key decision makers’ (Ofcom, 2021). The roots of the BBC’s problem with diversity stretch back to the 1970s and 1980s and the lack of impact made by policy papers and strategies which were largely disregarded by a white and almost exclusively male management (BBC Annual Report, 1967, p. 171, 1987, p. 188). Nevertheless, at the margins of the BBC in England some local radio station managers made their own policy that in the late 1980s would ultimately develop a fully functioning BBC Asian Network with its own new ‘British Asian sound’. In 2002 Greg Dyke, the BBC’s Director General, was able to turn the BBC Asian Network into one of the BBC’s new digital radio networks as part of his strategy to improve diversity in an organisation he described as being ‘hideously white’ (Vorster, 2008, p. 3). Echoes of the BBC’s seemingly ineffective policy papers and strategies from the 1970s and 1980s are still being felt. In July 2019 a single complaint by a viewer to BBC Breakfast was all it took to set in chain a process that led to the BBC censuring Naga Munchetty, one of its high-profile presenters of South Asian heritage, for suggesting that President Trump was racist (Hendy, 2022, p. 543). The story was portrayed in the right-­ wing media as a battle in the so-called ‘culture wars’, raising questions about identity and Britishness. The ‘Munchetty’ story was on the surface about impartiality, but it went to the heart of the BBC’s difficulties with diversity that stretch back decades. During the 1970s and 1980s the BBC produced several policy papers on how it might react to the rapidly changing diverse nature of Britain, and in each case it failed to understand everyday life in Britain—especially for ethnic minority communities. There is an uncanny pattern to each of the papers: first they emphasise the difficulties involved in making changes to representation of ethnic minorities (or ‘immigrants’) on air or in their employment in the BBC; secondly the lack of any available research is proffered as an excuse that would hinder any rapid changes; and thirdly they all attach a list of Asian and black programmes on local radio as evidence that the BBC is already fulfilling their public service commitments. As a universally funded public service broadcaster, these excuses show a lack of commitment and ownership by senior leaders in the organisation, and it continually placed the BBC on the back foot. Being reactive was a problem for the BBC and during the hearings for the Annan Committee on the Future of Broadcasting, the BBC was invited in 1975 to submit a paper that it ‘might comment on certain criticisms … in the evidence submitted by some other bodies’ (BBC WAC,

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1975). The ‘other bodies’ included the Runnymede Trust, the Indian Workers Association, the Asian Broadcast Listeners’ and Viewers’ Association and the Race Relations Board. These were serious critics of the BBC representing a range of opinions across ethnic minorities and public bodies in Britain (Annan Report, 1977, pp. 499–507). A confident BBC that was facing up to the changes brought about by a new multicultural Britain ought to have been automatically submitting its own policies—not being coerced into doing so. This emphasises the lack of importance shown to the growing black and South Asian communities in Britain by the BBC. When it did respond to Annan, its submission was titled the ‘BBC Memorandum on Broadcasting and Racial Minorities’. The paper highlighted the conferences held with representatives of Indian, Pakistani and West Indian communities a decade earlier in 1965 as a key plank of its achievements thus far (BBC WAC, 1975). The Annan submission featured no audience research or assessment of how BBC programmes were impacting local communities because none had been undertaken. However, it did highlight the role of BBC local radio through an appendix listing local programmes for ‘Asians and West Indians’—fourteen Asian programmes on twelve local stations, and four programmes on four stations for black communities (BBC WAC, 1975, Appendix A). It proffered the view, championed by Anthony Whitby, Controller of Radio 4 in 1972 that local radio should now be the proper place for Asian programming, arguing that Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiyi, produced by the Asian Programmes Unit for BBC Radio 4, served no purpose as a national programme (BBC WAC, 1972). The BBC Memorandum on Broadcasting and Racial Minorities was the first paper to formally set out BBC policy in this area. However, it offered no specific proposals nor had any funding to make any changes happen. Instead, it sought sympathy from Annan, reflecting at length on the problems the BBC faced as a broadcaster, particularly in the field of research: To date there has been no formal survey by BBC Audience Research … the audience is small and scattered for sampling purposes and the linguistic and cultural difficulties of communicating with its members are considerable. (BBC WAC, 1975, p. 4)

Why the BBC had not commissioned its own research in the decade since the setting-up of the IPU, now renamed the Asian Programmes Unit (APU), is not addressed. No effort was made to assess the effectiveness of

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the APU’s programmes through specially commissioned research, instead it relied on suggestions that the unit received a ‘considerable amount of correspondence’ and therefore the BBC had no ‘reason to think’ the programmes were not successful (BBC WAC, 1975). The BBC did acknowledge that it should do some research, ‘in an area as amorphous as racial connotations, it is important to check how fully the messages which the audience receives corresponds with the messages the broadcasters believe themselves to be transmitting’ (BBC WAC, 1975, p. 12). That national organisations such as the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and the Runnymede Trust were able to carry out quantitative and qualitative audience research amongst Britain’s ethnic minority communities while the BBC did not, is another marker of the BBC’s priorities. Audience research by the CRE in 1978 in Leicester and 1983 across England would provide crucial new evidence about Asian programmes and their high audience penetration, but the BBC itself did not carry out its own research on Asian radio programming until 1985—also in Leicester—and then promptly ignored it. Without a senior management champion with the money to act on policy, there was a low priority on funding new research which rather reinforced the title of the next internal BBC working paper in 1977 titled The Broadcasting Problems Associated with Asian and Black Minorities in the United Kingdom. The title of this paper captures the essence of the BBC’s collective understanding of Asian and black minorities in Britain—that they represented a problem for the corporation. This paper represents an example of an almost universally white and male central bureaucracy in the BBC floundering when it came to connecting with black and Asian licence fee payers—for that is what they were. ‘Broadcasting Problems’ again ‘celebrated’ the provision of special programmes for minorities on BBC local radio and identified the potential audience for Asian programmes as ‘rather more than one million’ (BBC WAC, 1977, pp. 6–7). No new audience research had been carried out but a new argument emerged about why the BBC might find it difficult to provide too much targeted programming for minority communities: Until a satisfactory level of revenue can be derived from licence fees, programmes for minorities can only be developed at the expense of the majority. (BBC WAC, 1977, p. 21)

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In no other programme area had the BBC linked licence fee income from specific groups to programmes, including Welsh and Gaelic language programming in Wales and Scotland. There has never been any hypothecation of the licence fee to particular services, all licence fee income goes into a central pot from which television and radio budgets are devised. What this new argument is really saying is that the editorial leaders in radio and television refused to see why they should cut their budgets to pay for new ethnic programming. There was also an argument that any new ‘special language broadcasts for minorities tend to provoke resentment amongst the majority and obstruct rather than assist integration’ (BBC WAC, 1977, p. 21). There was no qualitative or quantitative evidence for the assertion that new programmes might cause resentment, and in any case with a growing proportion of ethnic minorities being British born and/or educated, new programmes could and possibly should have been broadcast in English. Indeed, this paper acknowledges that the BBC’s arguments about potential resentment ‘among the majority’ towards ‘special language programmes’ cannot be proved or disproved as there is ‘no research available’ (BBC WAC, 1977, p.  21). This avoids the obvious point that the same could be said of any minority programming from gardening to motoring, or football to ballet. The BBC viewed Asian language programmes as a potentially alienating force for licence fee payers, disregarding the fact that South Asians were licence fee payers themselves. This separation of Asian listeners and viewers from licence fee payers as ‘others’ is important as it reveals the tensions about race and immigration within society and therefore in the BBC at this time. Beginning in the St Pauls area of Bristol in April 1980, a series of urban riots took place through 1981 in Brixton, the West Midlands and English cities including Leeds, Leicester and Nottingham. The most serious riots were in Toxteth in Liverpool and lasted for three days from 3–6 July 1981 (Hayes, 2015). Many public organisations entered a period of introspection after these riots and the BBC was no exception, holding a series of public meetings across the country. One result of these meetings, together with an internal analysis of its own editorial response to the riots and to the continued criticism from black and South Asian lobby groups was the production of another strategy paper. Titled Ethnic Minorities and the BBC, it noted that the riots had focussed criticism of the corporation on two fronts, that its employment practices and programming did not ‘adequately reflect the multi-racial character of British society today’ (BBC WAC, 1981, p. 1). A BBC producer present at these meetings suggested:

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The apparently patronising and unsympathetic image of the BBC came up as a constant criticism at every meeting with ethnic community groups throughout the UK in the next six months. (BBC WAC, 1981, p. 5)

The minutes from the public meeting held at the Natraj cinema in Leicester show this criticism of the BBC from ethnic minority licence fee payers as a raw emotion, amplifying their feelings of disconnection from the BBC: ‘If the answer to our questions is “a lack of resources”, what is the point of us being here tonight?’ ‘I think the BBC is a waste of time. The ethnic minority should get together and start an independent station and get rid of the BBC.’ ‘Asian programmes are always directed by non-Asians. The producer, the director, the cameraman—all are non-Asian. Are there no qualified Asians?’ ‘Let’s have some positive action and positive comments about employing blacks and Asians in the BBC.’ (BBC WAC, 1982a)

By any measure ethnic minority licence fee payers felt the BBC was failing them, and they wanted action. In Ethnic Minorities and the BBC, the corporation had correctly identified the two major policy issues on employment and programming that it needed to address, but then promptly argued against doing anything too quickly. Having recognised its public service duty was to ‘represent the whole of society’, Ethnic Minorities and the BBC sets out why it would be extremely difficult to do so: firstly, the paper argued the trade unions might not agree to ethnic monitoring; secondly, the portrayal of black and Asian people in programming should not be rushed, and thirdly, recruitment policy at the BBC could not undermine ‘merit’ as the key factor in employment (BBC WAC, 1981, pp. 8–11). In his response to the 1981 riots in Brixton, Lord Scarman argued against ‘Britain being an institutionally racist society’ but did acknowledge that where the practices of public bodies might unwittingly discriminate against black people then this was a charge that deserved ‘serious consideration’ (Mason, 1982). Here the BBC in its response through Ethnic Minorities and the BBC was laying the ground for its own policies and practices to go on and meet the later definition of institutional racism set out by Macpherson (UK Parliament, 2021). Criticism of the BBC’s recruitment remains an important factor in the 2020s (Robinson, 2021), but the 1981 paper perhaps shows why the BBC has always been on the back foot in understanding the diversity—or lack of it—among its own

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staff. Ethnic Minorities and the BBC acknowledges that no systematic effort had been made to record or track the ethnicity of its staff, and the paper argues that there should be no records kept as it ‘would raise expectations (or fears, depending on your view) of a quota system, and of course it would involve problems of definition’ (BBC WAC, 1981, p. 2). The best it could offer was to note that the BBC did employ some black secretaries in the Personnel Department and the News Division, while in the Finance Division ‘6–7 percent of employees are Asian or Afro-­Caribbean’, most working in the lowest bands, but that most black employees were to be ‘found in catering’ (BBC WAC, 1981, p. 3). Having usefully identified a problem with its recruitment practices, this paper failed to come up with any credible policies to address them. In terms of programming, Ethnic Minorities and the BBC makes several observations but again offers little in the way of answers. On the work of the APU in Birmingham, it argues that using Hindustani as the language of presentation on Radio 4 was problematic for many South Asians, including ‘most people of Bangladeshi origin’. It asks if English should be used as the main language for Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiyi and if news from the sub-continent should form part of the programme (BBC WAC, 1981, p. 7). The paper noted that ‘the main source’ of programming for ethnic minorities was in local radio and therefore produced a set of draft guidelines for local radio stations. These addressed the use of volunteer presenters by recognising that pay for minority presenters should be to a national rate, that a range of languages should be used for presentation, and that the programmes should generate a flow of material to the networks (BBC WAC, 1981, Appendix). There was no funding allocated to this process, which goes to the heart of the problem of BBC policy making—as there was no budget or senior management drive to deliver these guidelines, they were never acted on and remained as a draft. In research for this book, I spoke to a number of station managers in post at the time and none could ever recall seeing these guidelines. In all there were five conclusions in Ethnic Minorities and the BBC, of all of which were about employment but none about how network radio and television could improve portrayal and the visibility of ethnic minorities in the output. Then in 1983 a policy paper titled Multi-Ethnic Broadcasting: A Strategy for the next 5 years was drawn up by the Controller of Public Affairs. None of these papers was authored by senior editorial controllers in radio or television and were left to the BBC central bureaucracy to author; this lack of editorial ownership was a fatal flaw. In this paper the

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guidelines drawn up for BBC local radio on pay and editorial matters for ethnic minority programmes had disappeared—no one was willing to pay for their implementation. At last, the BBC finally acknowledged that ethnic minorities were also licence fee payers and should expect their needs to be served by a public service broadcasting organisation (BBC WAC, 1983, p. 3). But in making this assertion the BBC then qualified its newfound belief that it should be serving ethnic minorities better by arguing it could not act too quickly. This time the fear of a ‘white backlash’ against an excessive amount of ethnic minority programme was raised to make the case for keeping these programmes to ‘a small scale’ (BBC WAC, 1983, p. 7). Even though this paper highlights the poor funding of the APU in Birmingham, where programmes such as Asian Magazine on BBC 1, were funded at just two thirds the cost of equivalent programmes (BBC WAC, 1983, p. 8), no new funding was proposed. Having ditched the BBC local radio policy that would have seen ethnic minority presenters ‘paid to a national rate’ it also noted that resources in BBC local radio were ‘scanty’, but as with the APU in Birmingham no new funding was allocated to address the problem. The poor funding for Asian programmes contrasts sharply with audience research carried out by the CRE which showed their popularity on BBC local radio where they achieved significant audiences and were highly valued (Anwar, 1983). A new strategy for Asian broadcasting was proposed but ran to just six paragraphs and included policies that had been set out before and not actioned—or ignored by BBC local radio station managers. Language presentation was to be phased out to be replaced by English presentation but as the 1980s progressed there was actually more not less language programming. A proposed weekly news round-up was centrally produced for local stations, but not all broadcast it and others edited the stories out of it that they wanted to carry. This paper argued that the network radio programmes could be offered to local stations, but again few stations chose to take them, preferring to produce their own programmes. The one policy that was actioned was the removal of Asian programming from BBC Radio 4 with the responsibility—though not the budget—passed to local radio. This was a cautious and non-committal BBC avoiding making any promises on ethnic minority programming, while at the same time trying to appear conciliatory. As the need increased for the broadcast landscape to reflect the needs of ethnic minority audiences who were also licence fee payers, doing nothing looked like the simplest way for the BBC. Especially

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as it could pause any new ethnic minority programming while waiting for new technology to come to its aid: The future of ethnic minority programming, along with the rest of broadcasting, had to be reconsidered in terms of Cable, DBS [Direct Broadcasting by Satellite] and the increasing use of home video. (BBC WAC, 1983, p. 1)

Even so, Multi-Ethnic Broadcasting: A Strategy for the next 5 years did recognise that criticism of the corporation was getting worse and a new generation was expressing ‘a sense of alienation and anger’ against it. Seemingly trying to ensure that ethnic minorities would continue to be alienated, the BBC patronisingly argued that it broadcast ethnic minority programming as: An earnest goodwill on the part of the majority and thus an important step towards removing the barrier of suspicion and mistrust that exists between many of them and the majority. (BBC WAC, 1983, p. 6)

An earnest goodwill? In terms of the provision of mother tongue language programmes surely ethnic minorities should be treated the same as other minorities. Welsh and Gaelic language programming had become part of the core provision of the BBC, it was not a ‘goodwill gesture’. The BBC had argued to the Education, Science and Arts Committee in the House of Commons that there were more Gujarati speakers in Leicester than Welsh speakers in Wales, even though there was no Gujarati programming on BBC Radio Leicester (BBC WAC, 1982b). Multi-Ethnic Broadcasting: A Strategy for the next 5 years rather sums up the policies of the BBC towards ethnic minorities in the 1970s and 1980s: lots of warm words contrasted with the reasons why it was a difficult problem and that there was no money to solve it. The major point that the BBC tried to get across in this paper was that any changes should be brought in slowly ‘over the next 3–5 years’ and should be backed up with further research (BBC WAC, 1983, p. 21). The repeated appendices to these policy papers showing lists of the programme provision for minorities on BBC local radio can be viewed as the corporation grasping at solid examples of its work while it was not sure of how to answer the criticism it faced or what to do about it. This paper proposed that the responsibility for all targeted programming for ‘Asians and Afro-Caribbean’s’ on radio be passed to BBC local radio—again without any additional funding; it

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suggests that television programmes produced by the APU should follow the pattern of Channel Four’s Eastern Eye and that BBC Two’s Ebony be made a weekly programme. Finally, it suggested that research should be carried out into the needs of ethnic minority audiences, ignoring the fact that it had done little research already and no funds were identified for research projects. That all of this should be ‘carried through slowly and sensitively over the next 3–5 years’ was something the BBC had few problems with as it continued to act sluggishly (BBC WAC, 1983, p. 21). Some of these policies were carried forward in 1984 in a paper titled Broadcasting in a Multi-Ethic Society: BBC Policy Related to the Asian and Afro-­ Caribbean Minorities (BBC, 1984). Here the BBC confirmed that television programmes for both ‘Asian and Afro-Caribbean’ audiences were to be produced in Birmingham, language programming on television and radio networks would be phased out, and local radio would be the home of radio programming for Asian and ‘Afro-Caribbean’ communities (BBC WAC, 1985). Again, no was funding identified and this paper closed with a statement that relied more on hope than realism: Provided the policies are followed, there will be a steady progress towards a proper reflection in programmes and career opportunities, of the multi-­ cultural, multi-lingual, and multi-racial society in which we live. (BBC WAC, 1984, p. 4)

Waiting to see if unfunded policies would work could be described as a ‘hoping for something to turn up’ exercise—it was not a policy. No editorial leader at the corporate centre took responsibility for these policies and therefore nothing turned up. By the early 1990s, to frame the debate for the next BBC Charter around the coming digital age for broadcasting, the BBC produced a lobbying booklet called Extending Choice. Here its responsibilities to Britain’s ethnic minorities were reduced to one bullet point, ‘To portray a multiracial, multicultural society and to respond to the diversity of cultures throughout the UK’ (BBC, 1992, p. 22). In one form or another this sentiment and commitment has continued through to the 2020s, even though the BBC is still failing to meet even this broad policy. In the list of proposals in Extending Choice the responsibility of serving Asian and black minorities was once again placed on BBC local radio which should be, ‘A voice for the country’s multiracial and multilingual groups’ (BBC, 1992, p. 85). With no funding there was little change. Building on Extending Choice, a series of Programme Strategy Reviews

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(PSR) were carried out across the BBC in the mid-1990s. The PSR in Regional Broadcasting noted that in Leicester and the West Midlands the BBC Midlands Asian Network was proving to be both popular and to be feeding significant programme material to daytime sequence programming on the local stations (BBC WAC, 1994, p. 240). But recognising this success did not lead to a sharing of best practice across BBC local radio stations—especially the local BBC station for London. These policy failures in the 1970s and 1980s have left a continuing legacy that has resulted in the BBC struggling to reflect everyday life in Britain, especially for ethnic minority licence fee payers. In 2008 the lack of black and minority ethnic staff in leadership roles at the BBC was criticised by Samir Shah, former Head of Current Affairs at the BBC, who used a speech to the Royal Television Society to argue: The equal opportunities we have followed over the last 30 years simply have not worked. Despite 30 years of trying, the upper reaches of our industry, the positions of real creative power in British broadcasting, are still controlled by a metropolitan, largely liberal, largely white, middle class, cultural elite—and, until recently, largely male and largely Oxbridge. (Holmwood, The Guardian, 2008)

Shah was echoing the views of Sir Lenny Henry on the lack of Diversity in British broadcasting, a personal campaign that resulted in Henry’s sponsorship of an academic research unit in his name at Birmingham City University. As a slew of reports from Ofcom, academics and industry bodies continue to show, the BBC has work to do. This is especially so in its journalism, which forms the spine of so much BBC radio programming, as Robinson pointed out in a report issued by the Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity in 2021: Under representation of BAME senior leaders is also having a clear impact on journalistic output … This results in Radio News coverage constructing and reinforcing negative representations of BAME communities and contributing to a loss in trust. (Robinson, 2021, p. 51)

The criticisms of the Robinson report into the Diversity of Senior Leaders in the BBC can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s and a lack of action by the BBC in recruiting, retaining and promoting black and Asian journalists.

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BBC Journalism: An Editorial ‘whiteness’ The gap between policy and practice on issues such as immigration and race relations is evident in the BBC’s journalism from the 1960s to the 1980s. The BBC’s clear policy objective on ‘racial matters’ was expressed in the handbook given to every BBC local radio manager from 1967: ‘Race’ is one of the few subjects where the BBC has expressed an opinion— discrimination, like murder, is considered to be an evil in society. Opportunities are never given in programmes to people or organisations to incite prejudice based on colour, race, or religion. (BBC Local Radio Handbook, 1970)

An Institute of Race Relations (IRR) study titled ‘Colour and Citizenship’ in 1969 suggested the practice differed from policy and observed flaws in the BBC’s coverage of ‘race’, arguing it was wrong for the BBC to give equal prominence to opposing points of view: This often leads them to select as protagonists those who hold extreme views on either side … By giving prominence to the views of extremists they may appear to sanction them and to confer a respectability and importance on their holders which they could not otherwise achieve. (Rose et  al., 1969, p. 744).

This study argued that there was a ratcheting up effect of cross-­fertilisation between television, radio and the press, adding further layers of legitimacy to extreme views in which it contended ‘the demagogue becomes a public figure’ (Rose, 1969, p. 744). Conservative MP Enoch Powell was certainly a controversial figure with his views on immigration and repatriation of ‘coloured immigrants’. Writing in 1969, Paul Foot accused Powell of ‘playing the demagogue brilliantly’ (Foot, 1969, p. 138). Powell was one of the most featured politicians on BBC Radio 4 in 1972, proving the IRR’s point by rarely failing to come up with provocative copy (Hendy, 2007, p. 96). For example, when speaking about the decision by the Heath government to allow Ugandan Asians to come to Britain, Powell highlighted the toxic race relations in Leicester to Radio 4 listeners: They must be out of their mind. They are under no obligation to do so. They know the horrific consequences that could follow from this—and if they don’t, they should go to Leicester and ask them there. (BBC, 2002)

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Was the BBC stirring up racial tension or reflecting current political debate? Both are credible journalistic positions to take and are still debated in the 2020s. In 2022 Emily Maitlis, a former BBC Newsnight presenter, continued the dialogue on impartiality in her MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival when she accused the BBC of ‘both-sidism’ and ‘superficial balance’ (Maitlis, 2022). This question of impartiality is a thread that weaves through BBC policy papers and strategies in the 1970s and 1980s. Each of the BBC’s strategy papers discussed in the previous section of this chapter touch on the problems the corporation faced when covering ethnic minorities, especially on race relations. Before the BBC began broadcasting Asian programmes in 1965, Dipak Nandy, a future chair of the BBC’s Asian Programmes Advisory Committee, wrote to the BBC as Chair of the Leicester Campaign for Race Equality. Nandy argued that the corporation had suffered a ‘failure of nerve’ by not tackling race relations issues in anything other than a neutral manner and allowing ‘myths and untruths’ to go unquestioned (BBC WAC, 1965). A decade later in its submission to the Annan committee in 1975 the BBC, still focussed on race relations, argued that it could not employ specialist correspondents to cover the issue as ‘it would involve keeping one or two reporters idle for substantial periods of time or else giving race relations rather more News coverage than events actually warranted’ (BBC WAC, 1974, p. 25). This says more about the aloofness and narrow focus of BBC journalism than it does about the everyday experiences of ethnic minorities in Britain. As licence fee payers they were just as interested in issues such as housing, education and employment as race relations but also had the added complication of dealing with racism and inequality. These issues needed to be teased out and reported on by journalists—or specialist correspondents. As with the contemporary study by Nina Robinson in 2021, the critics in the 1970s were arguing that the BBC’s journalism was out of touch with the developing multi-ethnic Britain. After spending time embedded in the BBC television newsroom, in 1978 Philip Schlesinger argued there was a ‘common prejudice’ at play: All immigrants are black and that all blacks are immigrants, if not actually, then in the sense they are necessarily apart from the mainstream. (Schlesinger, 1978, pp. 171–173)

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Having examined the BBC’s policy papers above, it seems that Schlesinger was correct in his observations of the BBC’s London newsroom. The 1982 paper Ethnic Minorities and the BBC argued that ‘broadcasting in the public interest, rather than as a mouthpiece of authority’ was ‘ill understood by people who had grown up in Third World countries’ (BBC WAC, 1981, p. 6). Having patronised immigrants, this BBC paper then went further by attacking the potential for a lack of impartiality by black and Asian journalists: Can a black presenter justify to his listeners dealing in a ‘balanced’ way with a speech by Enoch Powell? (BBC WAC, 1981, p. 6)

This argument overlays an editorial ‘whiteness’ to questions of balance and impartiality while ignoring the fact that similar arguments could be made about the background, gender or ethnicity of any journalist covering almost any story. In 2019 this question of impartiality came to the fore in the treatment of BBC Breakfast presenter and journalist Naga Munchetty, where the parallels to the example cited in Ethnic Minorities and the BBC are uncanny. After a complaint from one viewer, Munchetty was found to have breached the BBC’s journalistic guidelines on impartiality by speaking about her experience of racism in relation to a story about Donald Trump and his ‘Go Back’ outburst against four female political opponents (Ibrahim & Howarth, 2021). An open letter in support of Munchetty to the BBC titled ‘You can’t be impartial about racism’ by several academics, journalists and campaigners challenged the BBC about her treatment. Homing in on the central issue for the BBC and the effect the case could have on its recruitment policies, the letter suggested ‘To require journalists of all ethnicities and races to endorse racism as a legitimate “opinion” is an abrogation of responsibility of the most serious nature’ (Hirsch et al., 2019). The complaints against Munchetty were upheld by the BBC’s internal procedures, but a groundswell of opinion—including the open letter—forced the director general to overturn the decision. That critics of the BBC in the 1980s and the 2020s have similar arguments around this crucial issue highlights it as a continuing fault line in BBC journalism. Schaffer argues that programmes in the 1970s and 1980s presented issues of race in a neutral manner and ‘ran the risk of conferring legitimacy on anti-immigrant voices’ (Schaffer, 2014, p. 87). This reinforced the perception among ethnic minorities that they were ‘indulged’ with black and Asian programmes whereas on the rest of the schedule, and notably in

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news and current affairs, they appeared in stories that were ‘characterised by an emphasis on negativity’ (Troyna, 1981, p.  80). The BBC often invited outside ‘experts’ to attend its regular News and Current Affairs (NCA) meetings as a way of stimulating debate on broad editorial policy issues. In July 1978 David Lane, the Chair of the CRE, attended the NCA meeting to discuss race and the news. Lane pointed out to the assembled editors that two fifths of the ethnic minorities in Britain had been born here, stressing they were not immigrants, and that BBC journalism should take this into account (BBC WAC, 1978b). The minutes show how Lane made the case for a more balanced news agenda: Mr. Lane said the public debate on this subject was still unbalanced, concentrating too much on immigration (which was declining), and not enough on race relations generally and on particular problems such as the alienation of young black people. (BBC WAC, 1978b)

In the late 1970s immigration and race relations were salient issues with the public, stoked in part by the speeches of Enoch Powell and the rise of the National Front. It was argued at the time that media reporting of the National Front was overstating its support and that there was a disconnect ‘between the facts of the NF’s electoral performance and its reporting’ which was affecting wider political policy (Steed, 1978, p. 293). This may have influenced comments on television by the leader of the Conservative opposition, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, that Britain ‘was in danger of being swamped’; this call by Thatcher for ‘an end to immigration’ certainly fuelled dissent with government policy (Murray, 1986). The BBC’s concentration on immigration was highlighted at the NCA meeting of March 1978 when a BBC Radio Leicester programme featuring the National Front was subject to trade union opposition, ‘problems had arisen at Radio Leicester when NUJ members had said they did not wish to work on a phone-in programme involving members of the National Front’, though the programme went ahead without them (BBC WAC, 1978b). A month later the issue resurfaced as members of the Association of Broadcast Staff (ABS) at BBC Radio Leicester received support from national union colleagues in their dispute with management about working on ‘morally offensive’ programmes featuring the National Front. An ‘emergency proposition’ indicated that the NEC (National Executive Committee) would support any member of staff ‘who has strong personal objections to racialism and who refuses to work on these programmes’ (BBC WAC,

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1978b). Discussions on union matters and race in general led to the working paper Coverage of Racial Matters circulated to senior BBC news editors in February 1980. It argued that the BBC had to balance its ‘journalistic objectivity’ with its ‘ethical obligations as part of a society in which racism is generally and justifiably deplored’ (BBC WAC, 1980). The BBC, however, was little different to the rest of the national media which was constantly accused of concentrating on violent racial conflict and immigration while doing little to explain the difficulties faced by minorities. In 1981 Troyna carried out a content analysis of 650 newspapers and found that two fifths of the stories on race concentrated on topics such as the National Front, crime, immigration, race relations and ‘white hostility’ (Troyna, 1981, p. 17). Fewer than one in ten of the stories collated by Troyna featured housing, health and employment, issues in which minorities faced considerable difficulties (Troyna, 1981). Given the attitudes displayed by senior management in these policy papers and its own acceptance that it was failing ethnic minorities, it is no surprise that the BBC felt it experienced ‘problems in getting the co-­ operation of black people and of finding people who were prepared to act as spokesmen for groups or interests’ (BBC WAC, 1978a). This highlights the problem of a lazy ‘contact book driven’ journalism in which ‘spokesmen’—and they were usually men—were sought as a quick and easy solution to presenting a story. It emphasises the lack of connection between BBC journalists and minorities. Had this been better they might have realised, for example, that it was too simplistic to suggest that someone could speak for all ‘Asians’, or all ‘Muslims’. This debate continued in the BBC, and in 2000 there was a backlash against the BBC drawing up a database of black and Asian ‘experts’ that was designed to ‘get more black and Asian faces on to BBC News and Current Affairs’ (Newton, 2011, p. 218). Ultimately getting more black and Asian faces and voices on to BBC News and Current Affairs—and BBC local radio—was and remains one of recruitment, retention and career progression. The employment of more black and Asian journalists with their own life experiences and contact books should in turn be reflected in the stories they seek or consider to be of importance, widening the range and content of the BBC. In the 1980s there was plenty of strong outside advice for the BBC, most of which was not acted upon. The CRE suggested that broadcasters should establish ethnic monitoring units and engage in better training for their ethnic staff and potential staff (Anwar & Shang, 1982, p.  67). This was sound advice but in a classic avoidance move in Ethnic Minorities and the

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BBC worried about union reaction to any changes in recruitment practices, noting that the Trade Unions ‘have not been energetic’ in the area of equality of opportunity for jobs in the BBC (BBC WAC, 1981, p. 9). This was an issue on which the BBC should have been leading rather than being led by trade union sentiment trying to maintain the status quo for its members. While the strategy papers in this period point to the number of programmes for ethnic minorities in BBC local radio, there were no suggestions that this growing talent pool could be tapped, or their audiences targeted with information about BBC jobs. Senior leaders in BBC News argued that black and Asian candidates ‘are not at the right standard’ and placed the blame for this firmly at the door of the ‘provincial press which was one of the BBC’s main sources’ of recruitment (BBC WAC, July 1978b). Training for new recruits and a need to look outside of the usual sources for new journalists was going to be key in widening participation in BBC News. So, when in 1987 the BBC Local Radio Trainee Reporter Scheme recruited its first black and Asian trainees, it attracted the attention of a BBC Panorama team making a film called Fair Play for Britain’s Blacks (BBC 1, 1987). Four of the trainees in 1987 were black or Asian, and the leading question put to them by the Panorama reporter was, ‘Are you sure you are not here because you are black’, in the film all four—including Clive Myrie now a BBC household name—look stunned. Barnie Choudhury, who also went on to have a successful career in BBC news, replied: If you are trying to suggest to me there was a special … that they looked at me and thought “this guy is coloured I think we ought to take him” and threw away the quality side of it, then I don’t want this job. (BBC 1, 1987)

Presenter Richard Linley then interviewed John Herbert, the Head of BBC Local Radio Training, revealing that here was a part of the BBC recognising it needed to do more, although Herbert struggled to articulate the reasons why: Herbert:

We are taking the best people, if the best twelve people are blacks great. If the best twelve people are whites, then it’s not great, we’ve gone wrong somewhere. Reporter: Why is it great if twelve of them are black but not great if twelve of them are white? Herbert: Yes … well … we have some catching up to do. (BBC 1, 1987)

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When training schemes with an emphasis on improving black and Asian employment are now run by the BBC, they attract fierce criticism in the national press as being ‘anti-white’ (Daily Mail, 2019). Conversely, critics of the BBC argue that an institutional whiteness is a barrier to employment and advancement of journalists from non-white backgrounds. In the 1990s black and Asian journalists were found to be under-represented in what was still termed a ‘white media’ with racial discrimination seen as a major factor in employment and advancement (Ainley, 1994). This amounted to what former BBC programme maker Sarita Malik has called a ‘deep-seated and inferential racism’ and a ‘racially coded news bias’ within the corporation (Malik, 2002, p. 77). Later in the decade Born was still able to argue that the BBC consistently marginalised ‘the interests and social concerns of minorities’ and had demonstrably failed in terms of equal opportunities (Born, 2005, p. 10). Robinson’s study for Birmingham City University in 2021 found that in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland there were no BAME senior leaders in radio news, with only BBC Wales having any representation at journalist level. In the English Regions one local station in a city with a 40% BAME population had an all-white leadership and news team (Robinson, 2021). This raises serious questions about how the concerns and issues affecting black and Asian licence fee payers are being reported and investigated on air. The burden of representation is placed on minority staff to find and report on stories of interest— but if they are not there in leadership or journalistic roles, a whole swathe of society loses out on public service journalism (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021). In its media statement announcing the appointment of June Sarpong as Director of Creative Diversity in 2019, the BBC noted it needed to go further in terms of on-air portrayal in programmes and employment of black, Asian and minority staff. Stating that ‘creative diversity’ was the BBC’s ‘number one priority’ it then based Sarpong and her unit in Birmingham, repeating earlier mistakes with the IPU in 1965, placing it way from the BBC’s decision-makers (BBC Media Centre, 2019). When Sarpong left the BBC in 2022 it seemed another ‘diversity initiative’ from the BBC had failed to gain traction in the organisation, and Barnie Choudhury, a former BBC senior journalist and now an academic argued: I guess Sarpong has realised what her predecessors found out too late. The answer to what ails the BBC when it comes to true representation is a bit more complicated than three days a week and a string of superficial back-­ slapping events and headline-grabbing initiatives which turn out to be useless, losing the trust of diverse staff. (Choudhury, 2022)

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The BBC’s policy papers from the 1970s and 1980s made little headway in the corporation and even less so out at the margins in BBC local radio, where station managers operated in what can only be described as their own BBC policy-free zone.

BBC Local Radio: A Creative but Policy-free Zone As a poorly funded ‘Cinderella’ operation, there is no doubt BBC local radio was on the fringes of the BBC from its beginning in 1967, and to a large extent has remained there. It was only a semi-permanent presence in the BBC’s portfolio until the Annan report in the 1970s, after which it gradually gained a national footprint across the English counties. From its launch through to the 1990s the independence granted to local station managers was jealously guarded as it gave an editorial freedom few other managers in the BBC enjoyed. As a result, BBC local radio was not subject to any central policy directives on ethnic minority provision and yet it broadcast an increasing range of creative and risk-taking programming. In May 1968 BBC Radio Sheffield broadcast the first local Asian programme and by the mid-1970s thirteen BBC local stations were providing a weekly programme. Station managers may have had a great deal of independence, and some built strong connections with local South Asian communities, but there was a lack of black and Asian voices at a senior level until the 1980s. The early invisibility of Asian and black broadcasters in the decision-making process was evident at a local radio conference held at the BBC’s new Pebble Mill building in Birmingham in June 1976. Sixteen white men and one white woman from fourteen local stations and BBC local radio HQ attended the conference to discuss policy on ‘programmes for immigrants’. During the day they were joined by three members of staff from the BBC’s Asian Programmes Unit (APU) which was based at Pebble Mill but only one of them, Ali Rampul, was not white (BBC WAC, 1976a). With no voices in the room from the Asian or black programmes broadcast each week on BBC local radio, this conference gravitated to bureaucratic issues, such as a scarcity of funding and the difficulties of producing Asian programmes in languages they and their staff did not understand. Two key questions therefore arise from the attendance list and subject matter of the conference, firstly, why were there no black or Asian practitioners from local minority programmes present and secondly, why had it taken almost a decade to organise such a conference where best practice and

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co-ordination could be discussed? This meeting is a practical demonstration of a dominant ‘white’ paternalistic editorial perspective which Husband and Chauhan argued largely excluded local non-white communities from the decision-making process (Husband & Chauhan, 1985, p. 287). The call for a ‘switch to English’ in BBC local radio was made after the Pebble Mill conference by Peter Redhouse, the Deputy General Manager of Local Radio (DGMLR). Redhouse had argued ‘A lack of knowledge of the languages concerned make it impossible to exercise editorial control’ because of what he termed the ‘comparative absence in immigrant communities of potential broadcasters with journalistic training and/or knowledge of BBC principles and practice’ (BBC WAC, 1976a, p. 1). This was highlighted by Bryan Harris, the station manager of BBC Radio Birmingham, who told his Advisory Council of language problems reported from other stations at the conference, ‘This had resulted in some presenters using the programme to disseminate comments about various factions within the Asian community’ (BBC WAC, 1976c). The presentation language of programmes for South Asian communities has been problematic for the BBC since the first transmission in 1965 of Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye (Make Yourself at Home) in Hindustani. A switch to English presentation for Asian programmes was first suggested by the Director General Charles Curran in 1975 (Schaffer, 2014, p. 50), but as with many BBC policy pronouncements things moved at a glacial pace. Phil Sidey, the Head of Network Production in Birmingham, was responsible for the APU and aware of the delicate issues around language—having authorised Bengali and Urdu for Asian programmes as station manager at BBC Radio Leeds. At a BBC Board of Management Meeting in 1979, while validating the views of Charles Curran about a switch to English, he argued the time was not right for such a change: English can be the only lingua franca, but I would not care to be the person who has to convince the sub-continent, or even the Asian Programmes Advisory Committee, that this is so. (BBC WAC, 1979)

Programmes from the APU and some on BBC local radio stations remained in Hindustani even though there was a growing recognition within the wider BBC that its use was flawed. The policy paper Ethnic Minorities and the BBC produced in 1983 pointed out the weaknesses of using Hindustani:

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It does not, however, cater for most people of Bangladeshi origin, and there is a demand among Gujarati’s and Punjabi’s, who form two of the main Asian communities in Britain, for programmes in their own language. (BBC WAC, 1981, p. 7)

Research by the CRE in 1983 found that the use of language by the BBC and Independent Local Radio (ILR) played a part in radio listening among Asian communities in Britain. The lack of broadcasting in the Bengali language, for example, was reflected in the fact that only 63% of respondents of Bangladeshi heritage had radios in the household, compared to 96% of Indians and 86% of Pakistanis (Anwar, 1983, p. 14). If the BBC wanted to encourage more listening by communities such as Bengalis, it would need to provide more appropriate language programmes. It had already centrally decided against this, but local radio managers went ahead and developed new language programmes as the 1980s progressed. There was a political inference behind the choice of language as witnessed by the introduction of Bengali language programmes in Leeds and Sheffield in 1971 after the new state of Bangladesh was established following the civil war. Vociferous ‘mother tongue’ language lobbies were constantly pushing local stations to broadcast more languages. The inability of white staff to monitor and produce programmes in mother tongue languages therefore took priority at the 1976 Conference. This marked the beginning of a significant but not universal switch to English presentation in Asian programmes at BBC Radio London, BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio Derby (BBC WAC, 1976a). The change from Hindustani and Bengali presentation to English at BBC Radio London proved to be problematical. The plan to drop the two existing language programmes, Jharoka in Hindustani and Darpan in Bengali, and replace them with a single English language programme London Sounds Eastern was completed in September 1976 (BBC Genome, 1976). A vigorous campaign against the changes was nevertheless conducted in the press and reached the desk of the director general. A briefing note prepared by Local Radio HQ staff for the director general suggested, ‘some immigrant groups have seen the programmes as nationalistic in nature and have tried to exploit this as far as possible’ (BBC WAC, 1976b). The briefing confirmed that staff from the BBC’s Eastern Service who had presented news updates in Jharoka and Darpan, had been put under public pressure and personal campaigns that questioned their impartiality, which the paper noted:

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Have been much greater since the creation of Bangladesh and the Bangladeshi community in particular have been pressing for more than one programme of their own. (BBC WAC, 1976b)

In the end management at Bush House had withdrawn their Bengali presenter ‘because they rightly felt his position as a broadcaster to Bangladesh was being influenced by press comments there, stemming from the Bangladeshi community in England’ (BBC WAC, 1976b). The 1971 civil war that had ended with the creation of a new Bangladeshi state underlined how the use of language in Britain could be an expression of a new nationalism or could reference perceived historic injustices in border regions of the sub-continent such as Kashmir. There was a successful lobby for Mirpuri language programmes on BBC Radio WM by a locally based Mirpuri community in the early 1990s. Analysis of the Radio Times local radio billings pages shows that the ‘switch to English’ remained something of an illusion, as ‘mother tongue’ language programmes were in the majority into the mid-1980s (McCarthy, 2020, p. 223). The introduction of the new BBC Midlands Asian Network in 1989 heralded new language programmes in Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali and Mirpuri as a new Asian production and management team brought a new confidence into language programme presentation and production. For the BBC the choice of language was mainly a production issue but for South Asian communities it encompassed a range of issues including identity, religion and politics (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 149). It also represented differences in class and education, the closeness of ongoing links to the sub-continent and a desire for cultural re-enforcement (Ali et  al., 2006; Scannell, 2001). The discrete South Asian media sources that developed in Britain in the early 1980s through pirate radio and, most importantly, the viewing of Bollywood movies on home VHS players helped shape and affirm cultural traditions (Gillespie, 1995, p. 79). The choice of Hindustani for the presentation of Asian programmes—a hybrid language developed in the days of the British Raj—fulfilled few of these needs. Visiting BBC Radio WM in 1983 Stuart Young, the Chairman of the BBC, told the management team ‘he wouldn’t broadcast in Hindi, or Urdu etc., but said Gaelic etc., was important because it was a mother tongue of this country’ (BBC, 1983). BBC Radio Birmingham had always broadcast its Asian programmes in English yet within five years of Young’s visit the now relaunched BBC Radio WM was broadcasting in five South Asian languages. There was a constant tension between the BBC and

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South Asian communities over language and in BBC local radio stations the range of language programmes became broader. Local Punjabi and Mirpuri language programmes were added, becoming an integral part of the federalised structure of the early BBC Asian Network. When the station was ‘adopted’ by network radio in 2002 as part of a new digital radio offering, the language programming was retained. It was to be a further decade until 2012 when the BBC left ‘pure’ South Asian language presentation to commercial and community radio stations, embarking on new ‘blended language’ programmes designed to better reflect how young Asians speak (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 153). The deliberations of the Annan committee had presented a clear and present danger to BBC local radio with its recommendation of a new regulator for all local radio and the possible removal of local stations from BBC and Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) control (Starkey, 2015, p.  57). In a widely distributed public lobby booklet against this change called Serving Neighbourhood and Nation in 1977 the BBC celebrated the benefits of a BBC-run local radio service (BBC, 1977). The lack of prominence in the booklet about programming for minorities can be viewed as a touchstone of how important connecting with these communities was regarded—or not regarded—by individual stations. Each of the twenty local stations was given a page to outline its programme policies, but only three of the stations mentioned their Asian programming. The entries for BBC Radio Blackburn, BBC Radio Nottingham and BBC Radio Leicester highlight the independence of the relevant station managers through their commitment—or lack of it—to their Asian programmes. They also capture slowly changing attitudes within the BBC as local station managers got to grips with the changing demographics in their areas. From seeing the ‘immigrant communities’ as a problem in Blackburn, through a celebration of difference in Nottingham to a recognition of the importance of embracing and reflecting change within the city and local communities in Leicester. BBC Radio Blackburn captured the fractured state of its broadcast area by highlighting ‘immigrants’ as one of the issues that united the ‘white’ population of the disparate Lancashire towns: As one community heard about activities in another, more and more common factors emerged—public transport, vandalism, local government matters, entertainment, the arts, the immigrants. (BBC, 1977, p. 39)

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Here ‘the immigrants’ are decisively ‘othered’ as being separate from the ‘white’ audience to the station. BBC Radio Nottingham made a major play of the multicultural element of the city but also outlined the separateness of its minority programming: As befits a multi-racial community, when Nottingham speaks, it isn’t always in English. There’s a good chance that you’ll even mispronounce Nawrang— that is, of course, unless you are one of the several thousand citizens of Asian origin who tune in every week for this programme specially for their interests. (BBC, 1977, p. 52)

However, BBC Radio Leicester, which had launched daily programming targeting its Asian communities in October 1976, used the booklet to promote this new programme within the context of a changing and increasingly multi-racial city: One in five living within the city boundaries is of Asian or West Indian origin and to mirror the new multi-cultural community Radio Leicester has added a whole new block of programmes to its output. The station now broadcasts Six-Fifteen a 45-minute programme capturing the new audience. (BBC, 1977, p. 45)

The entry for Leicester then goes further in recognising the changing nature of Asian communities and a developing generational split within them. The Station Manager, Owen Bentley, clearly saw this programme as a way of promoting social cohesion: One group which Six-Fifteen is out to capture is the generation that is caught between two cultures; its integration into the community as a whole is vital for race-relations in the city, and therefore, vital for Radio Leicester. (BBC, 1977, p. 46)

The language in this booklet shows that the understanding of the importance of Asian programming was slowly changing, but the experience in Blackburn—where Asian programming had been suspended for over two years from 1974—was perhaps more typical across BBC local radio in the 1970s. The new Six-Fifteen programme in Leicester was conceived as an attempt to build social cohesion in a city that had toxic race relations and in 1972 had gained the reputation as ‘the most racist city in Britain’ (Marett, 1989, p.  54; Singh, 2003, p.  42). The BBC had

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acknowledged a lack of research into the needs of South Asian communities, and the new programme was therefore built on the experience and gut feeling of Owen Bentley, the Station Manager: You walked the streets in Leicester, and you saw a pretty large Asian minority population and you listened to Radio Leicester, and everything was geared to the white indigenous population. (Owen Bentley, 2016)

Bentley had to convince his staff that a new nightly programme targeted at the growing Asian communities in the city would not be divisive at a time of high racial tension, ‘I felt that if Leicester was going to be a successful radio station, then it was going to have to embrace this community’ (Bentley, 2016). Here was an opportunity to test the reaction of Asian listeners to these nightly programmes, but it was the CRE and not the BBC that carried out the research and would ultimately prove if the call taken by Bentley had been the right one. The CRE undertook a survey of Asian residents in Leicester between May and July 1977, just six months after the new programme Six-Fifteen went on air. By any measure the results were impressive, more than four fifths of respondents (83%) claimed BBC Radio Leicester as their ‘favourite station’, two thirds were listening regularly and a further quarter were listening occasionally (Anwar, 1978, p. 21). These impressive listening figures were proof that Bentley had been right to take the plunge with his daily programming, but it would be almost a decade before another BBC local station followed suit. He launched the programme with a grant from the local Community Relations Council—not the BBC. The CRE report on listening and attitudes in Leicester contained data that could have influenced network radio and its ability to connect with a growing young British Asian demographic. It was evident that young Asians in Leicester were consuming BBC Radio One in large numbers, between fifty and sixty percent of youngsters tuned in every day (Anwar, 1978, p. 19). An early understanding of this by BBC Radio One—if indeed any of the station management ever saw these results—could have initiated a range of programme ideas. BBC Radio One could have targeted some of its news coverage to ensure it featured the voices of young British Asians, recruited young Asian reporters to its news team as role models, worked with BBC local radio to develop young Asian talent and even had an early chance to engage with an emerging new British Asian music scene such as bhangra and the ‘daytimer’ phenomenon. This lack of coordination between network radio, local stations and policy makers bedevilled BBC policy as each jostled for budgets to fund their own initiatives.

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Conclusion In the 1970s and 1980s there was a wide disconnect between the potential policies discussed in editorial papers and programmes as broadcast. Without the patronage of senior management sponsors with the ability to direct funding into Asian programming, policy was detached from programme makers. When patronage and funding was forthcoming, as with the setting-up of the IPU in 1965, a series of errors were made. Placing it in Birmingham away from the decision-makers and budget holders stymied its progress and left it marginalised. The BBC never really recovered from this first error of not placing the unit in London close to the largest Asian communities in the country. Both the IPU and the communities it served therefore remained on the fringes of the BBC. Similarly, Greg Dyke left the management team of the new networked BBC Asian Network in Leicester rather than moving it to London and network radio management. It has seemingly been on the move ever since as it struggled for influence at the corporate centre. In 2009 the BBC Asian Network moved into a new broadcast centre in Leicester, co-located with BBC Radio Leicester. It was later moved to be in London and Birmingham, and in 2021, as part of the ‘BBC Across the UK’ plan, the BBC Asian Network moved to Birmingham (BBC, 2021, p. 6). The continual change of bases and programming policies of the BBC Asian Network mark it out as a network that the BBC has no idea what to do with. The BBC has certainly not embraced it as a long-term part of its planning; like BBC local radio, it is on the fringes of the BBC. Policy papers from the 1970s and 1980s are apologetic in tone and look to be more about assuaging critics than devising new policies. They set out the reasons why it would be difficult for the BBC to do more, or to do it to quickly without getting an adverse reaction from white licence fee payers. There is a constant theme of viewing ethnic minorities as immigrants and not as part of the licence fee paying public. All the papers have lists of local radio programming for Asian and black minorities attached as one of the few positive actions that the BBC was taking. There are few, if any, funded proposals that emanate from these papers as they remained beset by a lack of senior management ownership, meaning that even strong ideas such as the proposed guidelines for ethnic minority programmes on BBC local radio were never actioned. The effects of an ‘editorial whiteness’ in the BBC’s journalism are clear to see. It is from this period that many of the ongoing problems within the

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BBC over recruitment and journalistic policy making become visible. The early thinking that journalists from ethnic minority backgrounds could not approach stories with impartiality are particularly grating as they assume only ‘BBC’ journalists—a code for white?—can do so. The suggestion from 1981 that ‘broadcasting in the public interest rather than as a mouthpiece of authority, is often ill-understood by people who have grown up in Third World countries’ was particularly offensive. In terms of recruiting journalists there was a raft of reasons why the BBC thought it was difficult: from the small number of ethnic minority graduates to the fact that local papers did not recruit minority reporters that the BBC could poach. One bright spot was the BBC Local Radio Trainee Reporter Scheme of the late 1980s which brought new black and Asian reporters into the BBC. BBC local radio was marginalised by the BBC, rather like the ethnic communities it tried to serve. Working within a framework of editorial independence, stations were able to decide locally if and how to serve minority communities. There was no central planning for Asian programmes, and they developed in a piecemeal fashion, dependant on the patronage of local editors. BBC local radio stations can be seen as ‘policy-­ free zones’ at the fringes of the corporation where creative freedom allowed new and innovative thinking to occur—as in the policy at Radio Leicester to launch a daily programme aimed at improving community cohesion within the city. Crucially, the differences within and between Asian communities across England meant that local radio became the logical service on which to build Asian programming, although there was no will by the BBC to fund it properly. Having examined how the BBC has failed in its workforce recruitment and programming policies over the last six decades, the case for describing the BBC as institutionally racist has been met. Yet there are still balancing factors in favour of the corporation, as out on the margins of the BBC in its local radio stations a new ‘British Asian sound’ began to develop in the 1980s. This was a sound that the BBC did not set out to create; it emerged under the radar of station management and presented the corporation with a new opportunity to connect with an increasingly large and young British Asian audience. Almost despite itself the BBC did get some things right in its Asian programming even if senior management later tried to destroy this progress by arguing for the closure of the BBC Asian Network.

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BBC WAC. (1970). File R102/38/1, Local Radio HQ, Minorities Programmes, Memo from Patrick Beech, CER to HLRD; ‘Immigrant Programmes on Local Radio’, May 5. BBC WAC. (1972). File R102/38/1, Local Radio HQ Minorities Programmes, Memo from CR4 to CER, ‘Programmes for Immigrants’, May 11. BBC WAC. (1974). File R102/38/1, Local Radio HQ, Minorities Programmes, Letter from the Mancunian Indian News Sheet to Controller, BBC Local Radio, July 31. BBC WAC. (1975). File R4/93/1, Annan Committee on the Future of Broadcasting, BBC Memorandum: Broadcasting and Racial Minorities, November. BBC WAC. (1976a). File R102/38/1, Local Radio Conference on Immigrant Programmes, Minutes, June. BBC WAC. (1976b). File R34/1303/2, Policy: Immigrants, Letter from J. Grist, C.E.R., to K. Lamb, DPA, August 27. BBC WAC File, (1976c), R81/2/1, Radio WM Minutes, 1970–1977, BBC Radio Birmingham, LRAC Minutes. BBC WAC. (1977). Local Radio HQ; Minorities Programmes, R102/38/1, Confidential BBC Policy Paper, ‘The Broadcasting Problems Associated with Asian and Black Minorities in the United Kingdom’. BBC WAC. (1978a). File R/78/2 688/1, BBC News and Current Affairs Bi-Weekly Meetings. BBC WAC. (1978b). File R78/2, 688/1, BBC News and Current Affairs Meetings, July. BBC WAC. (1979). File, R2/28/3, BBC Board of Management Meeting, September 15. BBC WAC. (1980). File R/78/2 688/1, BBC News and Current Affairs Bi-Weekly Meetings. BBC WAC. (1981). File B193/5/2, Ethnic Minorities and the BBC, ‘Ethnic Minorities and the BBC’, December. BBC WAC File. (1982a). File R99/339/1, Programmes for Immigrants— General, Minutes of Public Meeting in Leicester, July 21. BBC WAC. (1982b). File R102/13/1, Programmes for Immigrants: Part Two, 1980–1983, Unattributed Press Cutting from 29 March 1982, re: Education, Science and Arts Committee, BBC/ITA Evidence, House of Commons Paper 49. BBC WAC. (1983). File B193/5/2, ‘Ethnic Minorities and the BBC, Multi-­ Ethnic Broadcasting: A Strategy for the Next 5 Years’. BBC WAC. (1984). File R78/2/669/1, Asian Programmes Advisory Committee, Paper by DPA, ‘Broadcasting in a Multi-Ethic Society: BBC Policy Related to the Asian and Afro-Caribbean Minorities’, November. BBC WAC. (1985). File R99/154/4, Immigrants Programmes, Leaflet, Broadcasting in a Multi-Ethnic Society: The BBC and the Asian and Afro-­ Caribbean Minorities.

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BBC WAC. (1994). File WA48/578, for PSR England, August 1994. Bentley, O. (2016). Face-to-face Interview, November 22. Born, G. (2005). Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. Vintage. Choudhury, B. (2022, April 13). Why is the BBC Failing When it Comes to Diversity? Biz Asia. Retrieved November 7, 2022, from https://www.easterneye.biz/why-­is-­the-­bbc-­failing-­when-­it-­comes-­to-­diversity/ Daily Mail. (2019, March 10). Posh White People Need Not Apply. Retrieved February 2, 2022, from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-­6792471/ BBCs-­2 0k-­y ear-­t rainee-­j our nalist-­B AME-­l ower-­s ocial-­e conomic-­ background.html Foot, P. (1969). The Rise of Enoch Powell. Penguin. Gillespie, M. (1995). Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. Routledge. Hayes, P. (2015). Riots in Thatcher’s Britain. In M. T. Davis (Ed.), Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan. Hendy, D. (2007). Life on Air: A History of Radio Four. Oxford University Press. Hendy, D. (2022). The BBC: A People’s History. Profile. Hirsch, A., Henry, L., Lester, A., Guru-Murthy, K.& Others. (2019). You Can’t be Impartial About Racism’, an Open Letter to the BBC. The Guardian, Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/27/racism-­no-­such-­thing-­as-­impartiality-­open-­letter-­bbc Holmwood, L. (2008, June 26). Are there Really Too Many Black and Asian Faces on TV? The Guardian. Retrieved December 1, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/media/organgrinder/2008/jun/26/aretherereallytoomanyblac Husband, C. (1975). Racism in Society and the Mass Media. In C.  Husband (Ed.), White Media and Black Britain: A Critical Look at the Role of the Media in Race Relations Today. Arrow. Husband, C., & Chauhan, J.  M. (1985). Local Radio in the Communication Environment of Ethnic Minorities in Britain. In D.  Tain (Ed.), Test Theory, New Approaches to the Analysis of Mass Media Discourse and Communication. De Gruyter. Ibrahim, Y., & Howarth, A. (2021). ‘The Munchetty Controversy: Empire. Race and the BBC, Gender, Work and Organisation, 28(1), 231–247. Linfoot, M. (2011), A History of BBC Local RYadio in England; 1960–1980, PhD Thesis, University of Westminster, p.  34. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/8zz18/a-­h istory-­ of-­bbc-­local-­radio-­in-­england-­c1960-­1980 Maitlis, E. (2022). The James Mac Taggart Lecture 2022, Edinburgh TV Festival. Retrieved September 6, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= e0dRBtSAvLM Malik, S. (2002). Representing Black Britain: A History of Black and Asian Images on British Television. Sage.

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Malik, S. (2013). Creative Diversity: UK Public Service Broadcasting After Multiculturalism. Popular Communication, 11(3), 227–241. Malik, S., & Newton, D.  M. (Eds.). (2018). Adjusting the Contrast: British Television and Constructs of Race. University of Manchester Press. Marett, V. (1989). Immigrants Settling in the City. University of Leicester Press. Mason, D. (1982). After Scarman: A note on the concept of “institutional racism”. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 10(1), 38–45. McCarthy, L. (2020). Connecting with New Asian Communities: BBC Local Radio 1967–1990, University of Leicester Thesis. Retrieved January 11, 2022, from https://leicester.figshare.com/articles/thesis/Connecting_with_New_ Asian_Communities_BBC_local_radio_1967-­1990/11798622 Murray, N. (1986). Antiracists and Other Demons: The Press and Ideology in Thatcher’s Britain. Race & Class, 27(3), 1–19. Newton, D. (2011). Paving the Empire Road: BBC Television and Black Britons. Manchester University Press. Ofcom. (2021). Digital Radio and Audio Review: Ensuring a Robust and Sustainable Future for UK Radio and Audio. Retrieved January 27, 2022, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/1027206/Digital_Radio_and_Audio_Review_ FINAL_REPORT_single_view.pdf Robinson, N. (2021). Diversity of Senior Leaders in BBC Radio News, Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, Birmingham City University. Retrieved September 6, 2022, from https://bcuassets.blob.core.windows.net/docs/ csu2021324-­lhc-­report-­robinsonv5-­91221-­1-­132835986558468429.pdf Rose, E.  J. B, & Associates. (1969). Colour & Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations. Oxford University Press. Scannell, P. (2001). Authenticity and Experience. Discourse Studies, 3(4), 405–411. Schaffer, G. (2014). The Vision of a Nation: Making Multiculturalism on British Television, 1960–1980. Palgrave Macmillan. Schlesinger, P. (1978). Putting ‘Reality’ Together: BBC News. Constable. Singh, G. (2003). Multiculturalism in Contemporary Britain: Reflections on the “Leicester Model”. Journal of Multicultural Societies, 5(1), 40–54. Starkey, G. (2015). Local Radio, Going Global. Palgrave Macmillan. Steed, M. (1978). The National Front Vote. Parliamentary Affairs, 31(3), 282–293. Troyna, B. (1981). Public Awareness and the Media: A Study of Reporting on Race. CRE. UK Parliament. (2021). The Macpherson Report: Twenty Years On. Retrieved October 21, 2022, from https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/ cmselect/cmhaff/139/13911.htm Vorster, G. (2008, March 4). BBC People Chief Looks to Future After Diversity Failings. Personnel Today.

CHAPTER 4

Finding a New ‘British Asian Sound’

Two of the people who played a crucial part in the emergence of a ‘British Asian sound’ on BBC local radio stations in the 1980s were neither of South Asian heritage nor members of BBC management. The first was a self-described ‘flamboyant white guy’ who had developed a passion for Hindi film music while working as a teacher and social worker in Leicester’s inner-city (Allbut, 2022). The second was the daughter of a family grocer in Grantham who went on to lead a Conservative government determined to open up broadcasting to market forces. Mike Allbut, with his love of Bollywood playback singers, brought a new light touch ‘Radio One style’ presentation sound to BBC Radio Leicester’s Six O’clock Show. His was a new style that resonated with a young second generation of British Asians torn between two cultures and trying to make sense of their identity. Margaret Thatcher and the political drive for deregulation of her Conservative government took advantage of new digital technologies and satellite broadcasting to change the British media. A side effect of new government media policies was to liberate a huge number of broadcast hours of BBC and Independent Local Radio (ILR) local radio stations through the ending of simulcasting on their AM and FM transmitters. In BBC local radio this produced a fourfold increase in the number of hours of Asian programming and launched a raft of ‘golden oldie’ stations in commercial radio.

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Having responded speculatively to an on-air advert looking for presenters for the Six O’clock Show on BBC Radio Leicester in 1977, Mike Allbut was surprised to get the job. He soon became a household name to Asian listeners of BBC Radio Leicester who were tuning into the Six O’clock Show in huge numbers (Anwar, 1978). Recently discovered cassette tapes of Allbut on air with a host of young British Asian teenagers reveal a completely new sound to the existing Asian programmes. This was most definitely not a ‘programme for immigrants’ with Allbut’s new ‘zoo’ sound of multiple presenters bringing the studio to life embraced by second generation British Asian teenagers used to listening to their favourite BBC Radio One DJs (BBC Radio Leicester, 1977). His unwitting role as an influencer played a critical part in the emergence of a new ‘British Asian sound’. College students Satvinder Rana in Derby, Saadia Usmani (née Nasiri) in Luton, and young engineer Kamlesh Purohit in Leicester all claim Allbut was influential in their own style and sound as presenters of their own Asian programmes on BBC local radio. They all independently said that Allbut gave them the confidence to make different programmes to the existing Asian output and engage directly with their ‘British Asian’ peers (Usmani, 2022). In their own programmes they combined their ‘British’ radio presentation influences of John Peel, Steve Wright and Tony Blackburn on BBC Radio One with Mike Allbut on the Six O’clock Show with their own ‘Asian’ cultural background (Rana, 2022). Through the way they spoke on air, the issues they decided to feature and the music they chose to play they began to find their voice and a new ‘British Asian sound’ (Purohit, 2022). This chapter is deliberately titled ‘finding’ a new ‘British Asian sound’. Despite BBC stations in Derby, Leicester, Luton, Leeds and the West Midlands making a conscious effort to connect with young Asians there was no intention on the part of local management to create or produce a new sound. These were programmes not imposed by management but grew organically through increasingly British Asian-led production teams. At BBC Radio Derby the programme team making Aaj Kal were left to do their own thing, and the management at BBC Radio Derby only ‘found out’ about the huge hit they had on their hands by accident (Rana, 2022). This new ‘British Asian sound’ was an unintended consequence of these new young presenters connecting with their peers within local South Asian communities who had similar cultural British and Asian influences. It was part of a move by second-generation British Asians who were eager to give voice to their unique heritage and the problems they encountered in being

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both British and Asian. These programmes challenged the status quo by the choice of taboo topics and stories they covered, questioning the older generation in what Huq describes as a societal shift within the South Asian diaspora (Huq, 2003, p. 29). Rana, Usmani and Purohit were just three of the many young people who benefitted from the ‘Thatcher dividend’ of an expansion of Asian programming on the AM transmitters of their local BBC radio stations. Deregulation and consumer choice drove the broadcasting policy of Thatcher’s government in the mid-1980s. The Peacock Committee on Broadcasting in 1985 was charged with finding deregulated and competitive solutions for new digital technologies to increase consumer choice. Chignell argues that the real driving force came not from the government but from broadcast entrepreneurs who were ‘anxious to get into the market or to increase their stake’ (Holland et al., 2013, p. 201). The BBC licence fee survived the scrutiny of the Peacock Committee intact and endured into the current century (O’Malley & Jones, 2009), but in local radio there was something of a revolution as the cosy duopoly enjoyed by BBC and commercial local radio stations was shattered. Both were ‘simulcasting’ their programmes on FM (VHF) and AM (Medium Wave) transmitters which the government pointed out was not only wasteful but was restricting consumer choice. In an analogue radio age of frequency scarcity, the government argued that ‘splitting’ FM and AM transmitters would open up wavelengths for new entrants to the market (Starkey, 2015, pp. 109–113). This policy would go some way to satisfy a constant demand for new radio stations at national, regional, local and community levels (Stoller, 2010, pp.  155–161). It unleashed a ‘gold rush’ in commercial radio as oldie stations were devised to use AM transmitters while at the BBC there was a push to use or lose their own local AM transmitters to new commercial competitors. Part of the ‘dividend’ of splitting AM and FM transmitters was an increase in Asian programming on the ‘liberated’ wavelengths of BBC stations. By increasing the hours of Asian programming on AM transmitters, BBC local station managers were daring the government to take them away, threatening their Asian listeners—and potential voters—with a loss of valued programmes. An ultimately successful campaign to ‘save’ the BBC Asian Network in 1992 used this technique, arguing that by taking the AM frequencies from the BBC stations in Leicester and the West Midlands the government would be restricting and not extending choice (BBC, 1992). The demonstrable increase in the hours of Asian programming—and the launch of a new BBC Midlands

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Asian Network—on BBC local radio in the late 1980s was an unintended consequence of broadcasting policy steering developments on BBC local radio. The total weekly hours of Asian programming on BBC local radio stations rose from sixteen hours in 1983 to over ninety hours in 1989 and 200 hours by 1994 (see Appendix A). The young British Asian radio pioneers of the 1980s, the pragmatism of local radio management to let them find their voice, and the broadcast policy of the Thatcher government led to the BBC Asian Network. This chapter argues that the new ‘youth’ orientated programmes at BBC Radio Leicester, BBC Radio WM in the West Midlands, BBC Radio Derby and BBC Radio Bedfordshire were key in developing a new ‘British Asian sound’ in the 1980s. It will examine three key themes: Firstly, how a second generation of young British Asians brought their British and Asian cultural influences to BBC local stations and began the emergence of a ‘British Asian sound’; secondly, how changing broadcast regulation led to an expansion of airtime through new split frequency operations; and thirdly, how BBC local stations with a critical mass of young British-born or educated producers and presenters of South Asian heritage combined to launch a BBC Asian Network in the Midlands at the end of the decade.

Youthquake? An Emerging Second Generation of British Asian Broadcasters There was little evidence of the emergence of a new ‘British Asian sound’ as the 1970s ran into the 1980s with BBC local radio stations seemingly content with their Asian broadcasting. In 1979 fourteen stations were broadcasting under an hour a week of Asian programming that was cheap to make and often staffed by volunteers. This gave the stations a veneer of community involvement as part of their public service remit (Mitchell, 2011, p. 57). With its nightly Six O’clock Show, BBC Radio Leicester was the only station to broadcast daily Asian programmes and the bright new sound of Mike Allbut was a still a ‘one-off’—though it was a popular one. BBC Radio Leicester accounted for three in every ten hours of BBC local radio Asian output and would go on to become a ‘centre of excellence’ of Asian programming within the BBC (see Appendix A). Apart from the young co-presenters that appeared with Mike Allbut on the Six O’clock Show British Asian youth culture was noticeably absent from much of BBC local radio. However, developments at three BBC local stations would establish new youth-led programmes setting the scene for a new ‘British

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Asian sound’ to emerge. At BBC Radio Derby a new local student team of presenters aimed to connect with their peers and feature new British Asian music on Aaj Kal. At the new BBC Radio Bedfordshire, the live simulcast of Mike Allbut presenting the Six O’clock Show from BBC Radio Leicester inspired a new show titled Smit’ Petite and the Karachi Kid, aimed at British Asian teenagers in Luton. However, the changes made at BBC Radio Leicester in 1976 with the introduction of daily Asian programming presented in English as the Six O’clock Show had the largest influence. Bringing in Mike Allbut as one of the presentation team changed the dynamics of the Six O’clock Show, as he was noticeably different to the other presenters as Kamlesh Purohit, who became a presenter himself in the late 1980s, remembered: Up to then I thought the standard of presenting wasn’t particularly high, but for the very first time Mike Allbut comes along, and you’ve got fun competitions and you’ve got banter and conversations that were like the conversations we were having in school. So, you were relating to the presenter way more than you had done before. (Purohit, 2022)

Building up relationships with local Asian youngsters was key to Allbut’s success, as he consistently pushed the boundaries, taking his shows out of the routine ‘information and help’ mode into pure entertainment. Launching a weekend entertainment programme in the mid-1980s was the point at which he realised that his connections with Leicester’s British Asian teenagers was growing: When I started the Weekend Bazaar—which was a most outrageous programme—it was a bizarre mishmash of jokes, horoscopes, dedications, the latest music and always with very glamourous young [Asian] female co-­ presenters in their first foray into broadcasting. So, it was a very attractive mix for a younger audience. (Allbut, 2022)

Kamlesh Purohit recalled the difference Allbut made to him as a teenager listening to BBC Radio Leicester: For me in those days Mike Allbut was a revolution in Asian broadcasting. Mike Allbut came along, and we always wondered whether he was white or Asian or is he Anglo Indian or what. But for young people like me it was the first sound that I heard on Radio Leicester on the Asian programmes that I felt this is great, this is really good, this is something that I would want to aspire to. (Purohit, 2022)

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An emphasis on connecting with young Asians ‘trapped between two cultures’ had been a key objective from the launch of the Six O’clock Show at BBC Radio Leicester. Asian teenagers born or educated in Leicester experienced looser direct connection with cultures that their parents brought from the subcontinent or East Africa and felt excluded by the white community; they were developing a new British Asian culture of their own. Producer Greg Ainger, who had been expelled from Uganda in 1972 and witnessed the distress of the Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin first hand, recognised that airing some of the issues affecting young people might cause disquiet in the local communities who were trying to rebuild social and community structures in Leicester: My view was that we had to reflect the realities and there were difficulties which the younger generation, the teenagers, were actually experiencing because they were growing up between two cultures. (Ainger, 2017)

The raw experience of some young people in how they viewed the restrictive nature of what they were able to do compared with their white classmates at school was highlighted in an edition of the Six O’clock Show broadcast in 1979. It can be heard on a recording featuring presenter Don Kotak and studio guests taking calls about relationships between young people and their parents: Teenage girl in studio: ‘If parents have come over here and they are gonna stay here permanently they’ve got to do a few changes, because my parents have not changed, they think that girls are not allowed to dance, while I like dancing you see. If I tell them I’m going to a disco they’d probably say you’re not going’. Don Kotak: ‘But they probably think you aren’t old enough to go out’. Teenage girl in studio: Yeah, if I’m not too old enough then by the time I’m gonna be 18 they are going to try and get me married off. You see, in our sort of thing girls are getting married so quickly. For example, a friend of mine she’s only seventeen but she’s married now, and I think that’s really too much’. (BBC Radio Leicester, TX 1979)

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These cultural and generational differences represented on BBC Radio Leicester in the late 1970s are an important barometer of how young people found their dual lives, as Kamlesh Purohit explains: You had a very Asian life at home, you know our parents expected children to speak Gujarati and be very embracing of our faith and food and everything, so we had a very Indian lifestyle at home. At school you know you were just another Leicester lad, you were just as British as your counterparts, so we were very English in our mental outlook. (Purohit, 2022)

Audience research by the CRE in Leicester in 1977 showed that trying to connect with young people was working for BBC Radio Leicester. More than half of British Asian teenagers were regularly listening to the Six O’clock Show, a number that increased to seven out of ten twenty to twenty-nine-year-olds (Anwar, 1978, p.  19). In addition to BBC Radio Leicester there were high listening figures for BBC Radio One, which was listened to regularly by half of Asians in Leicester, suggesting that young people were both consuming and being influenced by western pop music and presentation styles (Anwar, 1978, p. 20). Asian programming on BBC local radio stations in the early 1980s, except at BBC Radio Leicester with its established daily Six O’clock Show, was at a turning point. Station managers could either let the existing programmes continue at the margins of their schedules as a public service or invest their limited resources to reach out to new younger British Asian audiences. At BBC Radio Derby in 1981 the management decided to switch the presentation language of its Asian programme Sangam from Hindustani to English. This decision caused the resignation of the programme team and much resistance in the community to the change. The local reaction forced the station manager Bryan Harris to hold a series of public meetings to explain his decision for the change of language. Harris had come to Derby from BBC Radio Birmingham where Asian programmes had always been presented in English and he wanted to ensure that in Derby his producers were able to understand everything they were broadcasting. As none of his staff could understand Hindustani Harris felt the programme had to be switched to English presentation. Satvinder Rana, one of the young team recruited to replace the departed Sangam presenters, recalled the frostiness in these community meetings towards the change:

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There was opposition to it. Some people felt this was an Asian programme, it needs to be in Asian languages, and it needs to be what we want to it to be. And I could understand that. (Rana, 2022)

Nevertheless, Harris recruited Rana and a team of five other young students to develop a new programme. Rana and his team were determined their new programme would be different to Sangam, with changes to the speech content and, crucially, the music. I started to listen to Mike Allbut on Radio Leicester. They played really good music, and they very much focussed on Hindi films. I was passionate about Hindi films, so I used to listen to them, and it kind of grew. You never thought that one day I’m going to be a radio presenter, but you think, you know, I’d like to do that. (Rana, 2022)

The new programme was called Aaj Kal (These Days) and though it was fronted by Satvinder Rana, it was presented in an early iteration of the ‘zoo’ format with the whole team talking about British Asian cultural phenomena. In a study of young British Asians in Southall over a decade later, Marie Gillespie found that teenagers were becoming bi-cultural and without their parents they viewed mainstream television, with many just as likely to have seen the latest Bollywood and Hollywood blockbusters (Gillespie, 1995, p.  77). This bi-cultural effect can be heard in a 1984 recording of Aaj Kal in which a rundown of the top Asian music and films is liberally sprinkled with British and American references: I’m going to start off this week with a look at this month’s video and LP charts. The video chart shows that Hero [a Hindi romance] is still the number one film and is doing very well at the box office as well. The star of Hero is of course Jackie Shroff, yes that is his real name. I once said that Jackie Shroff made Burt Reynolds look as macho as Boy George … we at Aaj Kal aren’t in the slightest bit jealous of Jackie because we are quite macho as well. Er, well at least as macho as Victoria Principal. (Aaj Kal, BBC Radio Derby 13 April 1984)

Here cultural references to Victoria Principal in the hit TV show Dallas, Boy George on Top of the Pops and Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit coupled with Hero—the latest Bollywood hit—perfectly encapsulates what Gillespie described as ‘bi-cultural’. Crucially young British Asians would have thought this to be just a normal part of life. Music was key to Aaj Kal

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and the programme is highlighted by historian Rajinder Dudrah as being essential listening for young Asians as far afield as Birmingham and Northampton on Friday nights: ‘It quickly established itself as the first point of call for all producers, bands and music listeners across large parts of England’ (Dudrah, 2007, p.  64). For Rana the adoption of British Bhangra music was the critical factor that built up the reputation of the show: The Bhangra revolution happened in the mid-to-late 80s with bands like Alaap and so on. We started interviewing those bands and inviting them onto the programme, and they used to release their songs on our show. (Rana, 2022)

This focus of the Aaj Kal team on playing new British Asian music was therefore key in establishing the credibility of the programme among their peers in large parts of the Midlands: I suppose that was the appeal to us because it was something that was here, it was something we could identify with. It was also something we could play proudly without anyone saying, ‘hang on, what’s that foreign sound?’. The lyrics were Punjabi, we wanted that, but the music was equivalent to anything else, and we were the only ones who started to play that music. (Rana, 2022)

This view about championing new British music was echoed much later by musician and composer Talvin Singh in 2011: As second or third generation Asians it’s time to realize that we have a culture that doesn’t exist back in India but here in Britain which we need to feel proud about. (Saha, 2011)

As Aaj Kal became noted for the music it played and the access it had to new bands, its popularity grew and according to Rana: We had more listeners in the West Midlands than Radio WM did. We had groups of young people forming clubs to be part of our programme. (Rana, 2022)

Sahota describes the interaction between these ‘fan groups’ and Aaj Kal as the ‘Twitter and Facebook of its time’ and asserts that by 1988 it

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was ‘the biggest Asian radio show in the country winning many major awards and accolades’ (Sahota, 2014, p. 85). Aaj Kal is a classic case of local BBC management being unaware of the forces it had unleashed on its airwaves. It operated under the radar at BBC Radio Derby until, as Rana recalled, it suddenly took centre stage: I remember once we had a new Assistant Editor at BBC Radio Derby, and he hadn’t paid much attention to the programme and then one Friday he decided to come and sit in on the programme. And after he went back to the rest of the staff and said if you want to engage with the audience listen to the Aaj Kal show. (Rana, 2022)

One of the Aaj Kal innovations was a national chart of British Asian music compiled using sales returns from Asian record shops across the country. This was a labour of love by members of the Aaj Kal team and the effort was way above any minimal payments they would have received from the BBC. The Aaj Kal chart was hugely influential in building up interest in British Asian music and an early example is reproduced in Bhangra: Birmingham and Beyond (Dudrah, 2007, pp. 68–69). According to Sahota some of the new British Asian bands that emerged in the 1980s and were featured on Aaj Kal still refer to the programme as the ‘midwife’ of British Bhangra music (Sahota, 2014, p. 85). In the mid-1980s Aaj Kal on BBC Radio Derby with its student presentation team and Weekend Bazaar with Mike Allbut on BBC Radio Leicester at the centre of a zoo format surrounded by young Asian talent, were two of the first programmes to reach out purposefully to engage and entertain young British Asians. Their influence was to spread wider thanks to the efforts of Owen Bentley who by now had been promoted from Station Manager at BBC Radio Leicester to Senior Manager for BBC Local Radio in the Midlands. Having taken the decision to launch the Six O’clock Show on BBC Radio Leicester in 1976, Bentley was clear that where the size of South Asian communities merited it, other stations under his leadership should follow suit. The Luton-based BBC Radio Bedfordshire was one of his stations and when it went on air in 1985 there was clearly a need for Asian programmes. With little money available at the new station, Bentley was able to supplement the station’s own Asian Voice programme with a shared and extended edition of the Friday Six O’clock Show presented by Mike Allbut from BBC Radio Leicester. The pre-­ recorded Asian Voice programme was presented by Saadia Usmani (née

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Nasiri) and Smita Barcha. However, Usmani was aware of the heavy South Asian cultural influences on teenagers within the conservative Muslim Community in Luton, and as a student at Luton Six Form College had witnessed the struggles with identity shown by her fellow students: These girls used to be dropped off by their parents wearing shalwar kameezes and in the toilets they would take off their shalwar kameezes and put on jeans and T-shirts. I kind of coped with the parallel lives but I think a few people did struggle with that … I think there was a lot of confusion at that time. Everyone was coming from a similar background, our parents were coming to this country and working really hard, you know grafting away. It was surprising though a lot of people had been born in the UK but there was a real heavy link to your culture. (Usmani, 2019)

Having approached the station management at the new station during a pre-launch community consultation evening, Usmani was brought into the station by the community producer and offered a presentation role. The producer told me, ‘We are thinking of doing a programme called Asian Voice and it’s a magazine programme and would you like to present it?’ And I was thinking there will be good money in this and then she said to me, ‘we can’t pay you anything, it will be on a voluntary basis’. (Usmani, 2019)

That memory from Saadia Usmani places the dilemma facing BBC local stations and contributors from black and minority ethnic backgrounds in the 1980s into sharp focus. The BBC wanted to broadcast Asian programmes but was not willing to make the investment to make them work everywhere, so these programmes relied on the patronage of station managers and the forbearance of the presenters. Nevertheless, as many had done before and since, Usmani accepted the ‘unpaid’ offer as a way of getting into broadcasting—something she succeeded in at BBC Radio Bedfordshire, first as a freelance and then as a staff member. Describing Asian Voice as a programme to ‘help Asians in the community’, Usmani and her co-presenter Smita Barcha were underwhelmed by their new role, ‘It was a pre-recorded programme and we read the scripts between the items … I used to do it and I used to like it, but it was so boring’ (Usmani, 2019). Usmani wanted more and recalls being interviewed in Urdu on Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan on BBC television to argue her case and saying on air:

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All I hear from Asian programmes is you’re teaching people to fill out forms and living in this country and immigration. I’ve been brought up here and there is nothing for me. I can listen to English programmes, and I can hear them doing phone-ins and talking about funny and interesting things, but where are the programmes for people like us. (Usmani, 2019)

It is here the influence of Mike Allbut and BBC Radio Leicester becomes apparent again. His Friday Six O’clock Show was an early example of simulcasting between local stations and though it was popular in Luton, it wasn’t local and came from a city with a completely different mix of South Asian communities and religion. Usmani and Barcha were regular listeners and wanted to do a local programme more in keeping with his fresh entertaining style: I used to listen, and it was great, it was a fun, fast programme and I used to think we need something like that here. I would love to do something like that. I was also a big fan of Steve Wright and I wanted to do something fun and zany that was like it but aimed at the Asian community. (Usmani, 2019)

Usmani successfully pleaded with Mike Gibbons, the Station Manager at BBC Radio Bedfordshire, to be able to do a similar programme. Surviving handbills for the new show called Smite Petite and the Karachi Kid give a clear indication of the young target audience as the show promises ‘competitions, chat, jokes, music, prizes, phone-in’s, and requests’ (BBC Radio Bedfordshire, 1986). Recordings of the programme still sound vibrant—both very Asian and very British—and it soon established itself as a way of young Asians keeping in touch with each other  (See Appendix 2): Initially when it started lots of kids thought ‘hey this is really cool, we can get in touch and send messages to people, we can set up meetings with the girl I fancy at school or whatever. (Usmani, 2019)

Usmani said they had to keep an eye on the messages that came through and not have the programme used as an unofficial dating site. The boundaries on difficult issues were tested as the listeners were asked to come up with topics for future discussion; one edition features a phone-in section tackling love versus arranged marriages. It is with a surprising candour the callers bring to life the dilemmas facing the young generation, with male callers accepting the cultural norm of arranged marriages, while Usmani

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asks, ‘what are the chances of meeting Mr Right at your house after a cup of tea’. Looking back Usmani was proud of what the programme achieved: I listened to that programme recently and I was amazed that so many of the young people were saying, ‘look we have to do it because it’s our family’s reputation’, ‘we have to do it because our parents know best’. I was surprised how good we were at saying ‘Look guys, we want you to talk about it, to look at the options and don’t feel uncomfortable about coming on air’. (Usmani, 2019)

By 1989 the programme was networked across the BBC’s South-East region on the new BBC GLR in London and BBC Radio Kent. It received very positive reviews in the Times Educational Supplement which under the headline ‘Bubbly Time with Bhangra Pop’ praised the show as being ‘lively and unself-conscious’ and not afraid to tackle both light and difficult subjects (TES, 24 March 1989, p. 18). For Usmani the programme had all the elements of a new ‘British Asian sound’: It was a step forward. It was like a breath of fresh air. It was chilled out and we were being ourselves. We weren’t being backward and in need of help. No, we were here, we were living the life. We knew we were a bit more savvy, we knew exactly where we stood, and we were happy to say whatever we wanted to say without thinking that anyone would judge us … It was a revolution that we accepted who we were in the society that we were living in. (Usmani, 2022)

In Leicester, Derby and Luton the influence of Mike Allbut in the development of new entertainment-based programming for young South Asians is important. He did not create a new ‘British Asian sound’ but he did influence a new young audience, showing them that they too could let their creative instincts loose. Importantly, the local stations made an investment to train this young new talent to get on air and use the technology to connect with their peers. According to Page, training was the key to unlocking the ethnic minority talent that could enrich mainstream programming, seeing local radio Asian programming as one of the key gateways into the BBC (Page, 1983, p. 173). With this training and once on air, these young presenters began to establish a new style of broadcasting that captured the interests and concerns of their peers, from playing new British Asian music to discussing pressing social and cultural issues. Some, like Saadia Usmani and Kamlesh

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Purohit, got staff jobs in the BBC, while others, like Satvinder Rana, never had the mentoring he needed to take broadcasting up as a career. These seemingly random outcomes were just that, random, and like the programmes themselves relied upon the patronage and interest of station management. The story of these and other pioneers will be told in the next chapter. Beginning these new programmes was not without risk for the BBC local stations that went down this road. Having decided to allow young British Asians to broadcast, they engaged with Asian youth culture and challenged the views and cultural norms within South Asian communities—the normal role of youth. These new young British Asian presenters who emerged on BBC local radio during the 1980s were the first to express themselves and represent the concerns and interests of their second-­generation peers. They were part of a growing trend, and by building up their British and Asian backgrounds they played an important part in carving out a new British Asian niche. Rupal Rajani, who was to become a presenter at Sabras Radio, an Asian commercial station in Leicester, in the late 1980s was clear about the influence they had on her: It felt like home, it felt comfortable, it felt like you belonged. There were these people at the end of the radio who would identify with you and your culture and what you were about. That was really important for me growing up, and it gave me an identity and it made me feel OK to be who I am—to a huge degree in fact. (Rajani, 2018)

These new programmes built a foundation from a which a new ‘British Asian sound’ could develop and from the mid-1980s emerging government broadcast policies brought forward the possibility of more airtime for the new sound to take off.

‘Doing the Splits’: Government Policy and Asian Programming. The innocuously named government green paper of 1987, ‘Radio: Choice and Opportunities’ was to have a profound impact on both commercial and BBC local radio (Starkey, 2015, p. 109). Produced after the publication of the Peacock Report, the green paper argued that broadcasting the same programmes on both AM and FM transmitters (simulcasting) was a wasteful use of limited broadcast spectrum (Starkey, 2015, p. 109). Fearful

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of losing one of their transmitters to new local competitors, the existing ILR stations developed new ‘gold’ format classic hits stations, such as Capital Gold, on their AM transmitters. The BBC also feared its local radio transmitters would be stripped away and handed to commercial rivals to set up competing stations. A big fear was the potential for the AM (206m) transmitters of BBC Radio London, BBC Radio WM and BBC Radio Manchester to be strung together to form the spine of a new national commercial station. Conservative broadcast deregulation was to lead to the first commercial Asian stations in Britain and have the unintended effect of increasing Asian programming on BBC local radio stations. The government had first allowed experimental split frequency broadcasting on ILR and BBC local radio as early as 1985. In commercial radio these pilots included a weekend service called Melody Radio at Capital Radio in London, a precursor to Capital Gold, and rugby league commentaries at Viking Radio in Hull (Stoller, 2010, p. 169). In BBC local radio simulcasting pilots included the Six O’clock Show being broadcast on the AM transmitters of BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio Nottingham, while a 1960s music show ran on FM transmitters. Owen Bentley as Regional Manager for BBC local radio in the Midlands pushed things further by simulcasting the Six O’clock Show to BBC Radio Bedfordshire. The future pattern was set: classic hits on commercial radio and more Asian programming on BBC local stations so that by the end of the decade the number of hours of Asian programming broadcast each week on BBC local radio had risen dramatically from under twenty hours (16.5) in 1979 to almost one hundred hours (96.5) in 1989 (see Appendix A). The increase in hours of Asian programming in 1989 was not equally spread across the BBC’s regions: seven out of ten hours (67.1%) were broadcast on local stations in the Midlands under the guidance of Owen Bentley and his station managers. However, even in the Midlands the new evening ‘BBC Asian Network’ in Leicester and Derby accounted for 90% of programmes. This confirms that as the 1980s were drawing to a close the most important factor in the provision of local Asian programming was the patronage of the station managers. Back in 1968 BBC Radio Sheffield was the first station to broadcast an Asian programme but little had changed and the Majlis programme broadcast in Urdu and Bengali had stagnated. When Nigel Kay arrived as the new station manager twenty years later in 1988, he was quickly made aware of the disenchantment of local ethnic communities with his new station. Together with the Editor

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of the Sheffield Star, Kay was called to a meeting of the local Community Relations Council, and both were berated in what he described as one of the most uncomfortable meetings of his career: For me this was a turning point. This one session of two hours changed fundamentally my thoughts on broadcasting to black and ethnic minority audiences. It was a pretty full-on assault on the local paper and the local radio station for their failure to recognise the contribution these communities made to the life of the city, our failure to report their concerns and our failure to report their lives. It was a pretty excoriating experience. (Kay, 2022)

Within months Kay had recast his daytime programming to ensure that the station was broadcasting live from these communities using new mobile broadcast cars and considerably increased his ethnic minority programming. The station appointed Shawkat Hashmi as a new Community Producer who was responsible for setting up a new Ten-35 service of ethnic programmes on Saturday and Sunday evenings between 6 pm and midnight on the station’s 1035 AM transmitter. As part of this new schedule three new Asian programmes were added on Saturdays: a British Asian youth programme, a magazine show presented in English and a recast Majlis in Bengali and Urdu. These new programmes were added to a new policy of sharing the new daily Connections programme from BBC Radio Leeds, increasing the Asian output on the Sheffield AM transmitter to six and three quarter hours a week. These developments at BBC Radio Sheffield were part of a developing narrative for BBC local radio and its Asian programming in the 1980s of increased programming and more production effort, which was often Asian led. The green paper from 1987 proved to be the pivot on which the future of Asian broadcasting on BBC local radio turned. Increases in output on AM transmitters at BBC Radio Sheffield and BBC Radio Leeds were joined by more stations broadcasting Asian programmes. At the new BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, the new transmitter splitting opportunities allowed the station to broadcast South Eastern, a new Asian programme on its AM transmitter for Peterborough. BBC Radio Cleveland, BBC Radio Merseyside and BBC Radio Solent all launched Asian programmes for the first time. In the North there was a doubling of the Asian output at BBC Radio Lancashire and in the South new simulcasting of Asian programming in the South-East with BBC Radio London and Kent sharing programmes from BBC Radio

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Bedfordshire. In the Midlands there was a new British Asian youth programme, Dhamaka, at BBC Radio Nottingham, presented by Kavel Vaseer, one of the Aaj Kal team at BBC Radio Derby. Asian programmes in Leicester on both BBC Radio Leicester and the local ILR station Leicester Sound (formerly Centre Radio) played an important part in proving the worth of split frequency broadcasting to boost programming to South Asian communities. The evidence would lead to a full-time Asian station on the former Leicester Sound AM transmitter and a new BBC Asian Network on the AM transmitter of BBC Radio Leicester. The benefit for Asian communities in Leicester was clear as they were super-served by these new programmes, offering the choice and quality that the government had called for. Indeed, twenty years after the arrival of Ugandan Asians to Leicester historian and community activist Valerie Marett wrote how she was impressed by the ‘quality and extent of coverage by local radio’ for the Asian community in the city (Marett, 1993, p. 257). Commercial radio had begun in Leicester with the launch of Centre Radio in 1981, however two years later the station had the dubious honour of being the first local station to enter administration, then rapidly cease trading and go off air (Stoller, 2010, p. 124). For its launch the managers at Centre Radio had persuaded Don Kotak, one of the original Asian presenters of the Six O’clock Show on BBC Radio Leicester, to join them and present a new Asian programme called Sabras (All Tastes). Kotak had only agreed on the condition that his new three-hour Sabras show on Fridays would not be broadcast until after 7 pm when BBC Radio Leicester’s Six O’clock Show had finished. This astute move both increased the listenership in the early days and helped with the commercial viability of his own programme: We used to generate in the region of a ten-grand surplus every month from our three hours. We used to do our own adverts, cut them, and get them ready, and they [Centre Radio] just had to lock them into the system. (Kotak, 2017)

When the licence for the defunct Centre Radio was awarded to Leicester Sound, the commercially viable Sabras programming was brought back and expanded, introducing a new competitive edge to Asian programming on the two radio stations in Leicester. After BBC Radio Leicester had begun its new youth show in 1987, The Weekend Bazaar presented by Mike Allbut on Saturday evenings, the Sabras programming was extended

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further in 1988 to run three hours a day seven days a week. Within a year in October 1989 BBC Radio Leicester then joined forces with BBC Radio WM to launch the new BBC Midlands Asian Network. A new ‘super-­ serving’ of the Asian diaspora in Leicester began with thirty-two hours of programming on BBC Radio Leicester and twenty-one hours of Sabras. Listeners now had new South Asian programming on both stations, with the BBC adding Eastern Beat, a new late-night youth programme, and BBC World Service bulletins in Hindi and Urdu. The new schedule for BBC for the evening BBC Asian Network in Leicester was built on research carried out in the city by the BBC in 1986 (BBC WAC, 1986). This found that three quarters of Asians in the city aged fifty-five and over (74%) wanted more programming in mother tongue languages, so programmes in Gujarati, Punjabi and Bengali were gradually included. In contrast, the choice of English as the language of presentation was a priority for seven out of ten (69%) British Asians who were born here, and the majority of the schedule was broadcast in English (BBC WAC, 1986). To add to the extensive radio programming in 1989 the Leicester Mercury was able to exploit new printing technology that allowed it to produce up to six targeted editions a day including a daily Asia Edition. This featured news from the subcontinent, mixed with local community news together with features on Bollywood, health and wealth. Both radio stations and the Leicester Mercury had all come to the same conclusion that Owen Bentley had reached in 1976 when he launched Six-Fifteen as the first daily Asian radio programme in Britain; that if the station was going to be a success it had to engage with an increasingly large and influential South Asian diaspora in Leicester. The Asian communities in Leicester therefore had the most targeted multimedia offerings in Britain—and a local Asian television service MATV (Midlands Asian TV) followed in the 1990s. The role of radio is now recognised by policy makers as a positive way of connecting locally disadvantaged communities and playing a part in building social cohesion (Lewis, 2008, p. 28). There is a strong case that can be tracked back to 1976 and the launch of Six-Fifteen on BBC Radio Leicester that the nationally recognised social cohesion in Leicester is an early exemplar of the power of the media to play a part in breaking down barriers and increasing understanding between communities. For many potential broadcasters the role of broadcasting regulation was seen as a drag on freedom and by others as a closed door to new ethnic minority entrants to the market, so some of them took to the air illegally as ‘pirates’. By the mid -1980s the operation of these pirate stations was

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causing serious problems, both of interference on the transmitters of existing radio stations, and for policy makers. The ‘pirates’ were not only illegal but hugely popular, especially to ethnic minority audiences who felt ignored by the  mainstream media. In justifying pirate radio, Hind and Mosco, writing in 1982, suggest that ‘ethnic groups can expect the usual tokenism slotted in between endless hours of sport and gardening’ on traditional radio services (Hind & Mosco, 1982, p. 62). The Asian pirate stations operating in an unregulated and illegal broadcast ecology of their own were nevertheless very successful at attracting audiences. Research by the BBC in the West Midlands as late as 1994 found that the pirate stations Radio Sangam and Apna Radio were reaching half of the Asian population each week (Bristow, 1994, p. 10). As a measure of their success these stations proved to be a good recruiting ground for young British Asian talent into the West Midlands side of the BBC Asian Midlands Network. In Leicester, possibly because of the volume of daily Asian programming provided by BBC Radio Leicester and Sabras, there were no targeted Asian pirate radio stations, although researchers in the city in the 1990s found that some young British Asians were experimenting with forms of Bhangra on urban-music pirate stations (Gilmore, 1996). In 1985 the government flirted with the idea of offering a new strand of community radio licences, with Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary, believing that it might regularise the illegal activities of some of the more successful ethnic pirate radio stations—particularly in London. However, despite attracting nearly 300 applications (286) for the twenty-one licences, the initiative was abandoned in 1986 without a single community radio station being established, confirming the worst fears of ethnic broadcasters (Stoller, 2010, p.  127). Many pirate stations were operated by black and Asian entrepreneurs who felt frozen out of legal radio. The Home Office panel assessing the applications accelerated the cancellation of the pilot when it revealed there was ‘the likelihood of licensing just the sort of “marginal” groups that the GLC [Greater London Council] would have favoured’ (Stoller, 2010, p. 159). Bruised by this experience, in 1988 the Home Office grasped an opportunity provided by the release of ‘liberated’ AM frequencies from some BBC and ILR local stations to launch community radio stations targeted at small-scale geographic areas or ‘communities of interest’ (Stoller, 2010, p. 174). Again, the number of applications for the new licences was huge and according to one press report threatened to ‘deluge’ the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), with many existing pirate stations taking the decision to stop broadcasting

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and apply to ‘go legit’ (Broadcast, 25 November 1988). Sunrise Radio in West London became Britain’s first full-time ILR Asian station in October 1989; a station that had begun life as the cable TV-only Radio Sina in 1984 was now ‘wireless’. There was practically no competition for Sunrise Radio in terms of any significant Asian programming on the existing BBC or ILR stations in London, and in 2023 it was still the most listened to Asian station in the capital. The BBC’s response to the 1987 green paper of increasing local Asian programming varied across England and regional management teams. The launch of the BBC Asian Network in the Midlands contrasted with the view of senior management in the South of England which suggested that Asian programming would become less—not more—important for the BBC as new commercial stations such as Sunrise Radio were launched. Arnold Miller, the BBC’s Head of Region in the South-East, argued: Specialist and targeted music stations will surely be a part of the future. Still less, as community stations develop, will our commitment to ethnic minorities stand out as they still do. (Renton et al., 1989, p. 556)

BBC Radio London is an example of the wide variations in regional policy. When the station was relaunched as BBC GLR in 1988, all of its targeted ethnic programming was dropped—although it was re-­introduced in the early 1990s. This mismatch between Asian programme provision and regional policy between the Midlands and South-East demonstrably grew and was noted in the 1994 BBC Programme Strategy Review (PSR) as being ‘particularly problematic’. The PSR’s figures showed that while one third of the Asian population of Britain lived in London (34.8%), they were offered only one hour of re-introduced Asian programming a week on BBC GLR. This contrasted to the seventy hours a week of Asian programming broadcast by BBC Radio Leicester on its BBC Midlands Asian Network to less than one in ten (7.4%) of the Asian population of Britain that lived in Leicestershire (BBC, 1994). Once again, the lack of any central BBC policy on ethnic broadcasting highlighted how the personal strategic aims of individual regional and local managers was the defining factor in the provision of Asian programming. Government policy did offer local station management who had editorial desire to do more ethnic programming a window of opportunity to use their AM transmitters for the purpose. On some stations an increase in output led to the building up of a critical mass of British Asian talent that would both move into the wider BBC and locally develop their own ‘British Asian sound’.

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BBC Local Radio: Expansion and Building a Critical Mass of South Asian Talent Longstanding single weekly programmes that had been made by volunteers who came and went in the evening hours were not going to provide a strong foundation on which to build a critical mass of South Asian talent on BBC local radio stations. These programmes were still in the majority on stations in 1979 and risked becoming irrelevant to young British Asians who were a growing and influential force in the diaspora. Many increasingly did not speak mother tongue languages and they wanted more than simple record request shows (Page, 1983, p. 169). It would take the 1987 green paper to shake some BBC local station managers out of their ambivalence to their own Asian programming, presenting an opportunity to broadcast more Asian programmes on AM transmitters. Without the editorial support of station managers there could be no substantial changes such as the daily Asian programming established at BBC Radio Leicester in 1976, BBC Radio Leeds in 1985 and BBC Radio WM in 1988. These programmes created a critical mass of often young British Asian talent who brought both a daily presence on stations and a supply of news stories from local communities to the rest of the output. As the 1980s progressed, increases in the hours of Asian programming across BBC local radio was extremely uneven (see Appendix A). With no central policy, English regions took different views on how to connect with their local South Asian communities based on management priorities. The starkest contrast was demonstrated in 1989 between the BBC South-East region which produced four hours of weekly shared programmes across three stations and the BBC Midlands region where a new fifty-two-hours-a-week BBC Midlands Asian Network was launched. Minority communities that had suffered a ‘perceived marginalization’ in ‘ghetto slots at BBC Radio London’ (Tsagarousianou, 2002, p. 216) therefore remained on the margins in the capital while the much smaller South Asian communities in Leicester were super-served. In the North of England BBC Radio Leeds began a nightly Connections programme in 1985 aimed at bringing news of the South Asian communities across West Yorkshire to the wider station. Together with weekend programme expansions, a critical mass of young Asian talent was added to the existing Asian programme teams. Sanjiv Buttoo was typical of the second-­generation British Asians employed in Leeds, beginning work as a researcher on the Asian programmes at BBC Radio Leeds in 1989 at the age of twenty-two:

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Within a few months the producer of the ethnic programmes, both black and Asian programmes, decided to go back to India and recommended that I should take over. After three months or so the bosses told me I was very good and should become a journalist. So, I retrained as a journalist and joined the main newsroom and off I went. (Buttoo, 2018)

He spent time in the 1990s reshaping Connections, by now shared with BBC Radio Sheffield to give it a more challenging journalistic edge. We were covering subjects like radical Islam back in the mid-1990s, we were speaking on air to groups who are now banned. We were tackling topics that were very controversial and I was saying to my presenters this is what we are here for. (Buttoo, 2018)

Buttoo exemplifies the importance of Asian programming in the 1980s as a ‘front door’ to the BBC and where, through his later work on the BBC Asian Network and BBC stations across the north of England, he went on to become Station Manager of BBC Radio Leeds in 2017–2023. In the Midlands at BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio WM an ambitious connection of the respective local Asian programmes saw the launch of a new BBC Midlands Asian Network. An extensive range of output was formed by combining local Asian shows on BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio WM, BBC World Service news in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, and a new daily British Asian youth show into a ‘network’ of fifty-seven hours a week of programming. A new late-night ‘youth orientated’ sequence called Eastern Beat made up over half the output and was shared across the region, producing a mix of ‘music, live studio guests and gossipy chat’ (Radio Times, 1989). Having young British Asian presenters and producers in Leicester and Birmingham created a competitive edge to Eastern Beat that was a critical factor in driving up the range of British Asian music and journalism on offer (Purohit, 2022; Khatkar, 2022). For Kamlesh Purohit, one of the presenters of Eastern Beat, it was important that his British Asian peers began to take the lead on the new BBC Asian Network: I came in as a second-generation Indian kid, I was living that culture at home, so I was in tune with that, but I guess I came in with a more westernised perspective … What I think I was able to bring was like a third dimension to the whole thing, it was a different perspective … with my fellow presenters like me we were truly a ‘British Asian sound’ … we wanted to make programmes for British Asian kids because that’s what we were’. (Purohit, 2022)

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Purohit was part of a growing Asian programmes team at BBC Radio Leicester that had by 1987 grown to be thirteen-strong and was led by Vijay Sharma as the Senior Producer in charge of the Asian output (BBC Radio Leicester, 1987). To boost Asian programming at BBC Radio WM, Anita Bhalla was appointed as the Senior Producer and tasked with setting up the Birmingham end of the Midlands Asian Network. While Bhalla was convinced by the need to increase Asian output, she was in no doubt about the link between saving BBC Radio WM’s AM transmitter and the new Asian programme service: My challenge was, we have the 1458 [AM] frequency and we need to save it. We can’t let it go to the Radio Authority, so we are expanding Asian programmes. It was overnight. I went around literally grabbing people off the streets to train as presenters for the drivetime programme, the language programme, and the youth programme. (Bhalla, 2017)

Individually, neither BBC Radio Leicester nor BBC Radio WM had the funds required to build up an independent Asian programme service that would make a significant impact in Asian communities. However, led by the regional manager Owen Bentley both stations combined their assets and a schedule of fifty-seven hours a week was developed that required minimal additional funding. David Waine, the Head of Broadcasting in the Midlands, persuaded the Controller, Regional Broadcasting to provide temporary funding to launch the new service, though it had a precarious start, as can be seen in Waine’s note to Owen Bentley in March 1989: CRB [Controller, Regional Broadcasting] has confirmed on the telephone, that £20,000 will be available in this financial year to start up the Ethnic Minority Service for WM and Leicester. If there is a need, I will add the extra £5,000. It should be said that there is no guarantee that this money will be there in the next financial year, although, obviously, if the service works it is quite difficult to take it away. (BBC, 1989)

If there was an element of the calculated risk in launching the BBC Midlands Asian Network in October 1989 based on just six months’ funding, it was not the first time Bentley had taken such a chance. In 1976 he had launched what became the Six O’clock Show with a six-month grant from the local Community Relations Council, so he felt it was worth taking a similar gamble as he was confident the new BBC Midlands Asian Network would be a success:

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You take a risk. You think it’s going to be successful. If it’s successful, you can’t take it off the air. Essentially, it’s a form of slow blackmail really. But in those days, you were able to go ahead and do things, if it was the right thing to do, if it was going to work and if you were reasonably responsible about the finances. (Bentley, 2018)

The initial funding was used to bring in new British Asian talent to boost the existing teams and add journalistic depth to the output. After leaving University, Perminder Khatkar joined the team after impressing the station manager of BBC Radio WM with her brutally honest view of how the BBC was failing British Asians. She joined at the same time as Reeta Chakrabarti on a funded journalist training scheme and worked on developing Eastern Beat. One of the Birmingham editions was simulcast nationally on BBC Radio 5 and presented by Danny Choranji—a top British Bhangra musician—and Khatkar, who recalled: Suddenly I was talking about Asian women, I remember one interview with Asian women strippers, the first Muslim girls who were strippers … they’d got these death threats from the Muslim community. They said, ‘we are Asian women, we are strippers, and we love our job, and a number of our clients are Muslim men’ … of course it was taboo and something people didn’t want out in the open. (Khatkar, 2022)

This was an example of the issues that young British Asians wanted to talk about, often at the risk of shocking their elders. It was an opportunity to take control of their own portrayal in the media and Khatkar remains proud of Eastern Beat: We discussed the double standards, the hypocrisy, all these issues and every week we would go and discuss sex, virginity, all the issues you now see on BBC 3. It was a cutting-edge youth programme. (Khatkar, 2022)

When the BBC Midlands Asian Network was expanded to run all day in the 1990s, Khatkar and Anita Bhalla set about recruiting staff for the West Midlands side of the station. There was a huge increase in programming to an eighteen-hour-a-day operation with new presenters and programmes to find: I tried to find the best local programmes we could use, and we got Satvinder Rana from Radio Derby to do a programme for us … and I actually went for

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big names in the Bhangra industry … so we got people like Amajit Sidhu, Sonia Deol and Adil Ray, Bobby Friction and eventually people like Nihal. (Khatkar, 2022)

From the new recruits in the 1990s, Reeta Chakrabarti, Adil Ray and Nihal have become household names through their work on network television and radio—again highlighting how important Asian programming on BBC local radio was in providing a new entry point to the BBC at a time when so many doors into the corporation for black and Asian talent were seemingly blocked. The financial and editorial risk taken by Bentley and Waine to launch the BBC Midlands Asian Network in 1989 paid off as in March 1990 the Regional Directorate of the BBC decided to fund the Midlands Asian Network for a five-year period. This ‘coercive’ tactic was subsequently used by Bentley and Waine to lobby the BBC, government ministers and MPs to retain the AM transmitters of both BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio WM on which the network was hosted. In 1993 Michael Checkland, the Director General, wrote to the Radio Authority refusing to hand over the BBC Radio WM transmitter and the campaign was won. By the late 1990s the BBC Asian Network was a twenty-four-hours-a-day service in the East and West Midlands and had spread its programming to AM transmitters of the BBC local stations in Derby, Lancashire, Leeds, Manchester, Peterborough (Cambridgeshire) and BBC Three Counties. In these stations local Asian programming was retained with BBC Asian Network offering a sustaining service for up to thirty hours a week on each transmitter (BBC Asian Network Flyer, 1999). The glaring exception on this list of stations hosting the BBC Asian Network was BBC GLR in London, and both Anita Bhalla in Birmingham and Vijay Sharma in Leicester expressed their concerns over the London strategy. For Bhalla the way to get stories and issues from South Asian communities into the rest of the station output was to use the Asian programmes and staff as a conduit to provide material and interviewees for daytime programmes rather than relying on newsrooms with few connections to the South Asian communities: London was quite backward in that sense. They felt their communities didn’t need that support. My aim as Editor of the Asian Network in the West Midlands was to get the stories important to our communities onto mainstream, and I think me and my team succeeded. (Bhalla, 2017)

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Sharma, who was to become the first Managing Editor of the BBC Asian Network, echoes the frustration about the lack of a central policy for ethnic programming: It has never been clear to me why similar developments didn’t happen earlier in other parts of the country, especially when you look at London. Some things did happen, but not enough to mirror the size of the community and the growing community. (Sharma, 2017)

BBC local radio in London has had a problematic history in terms of its connections and engagement with South Asian communities. The BBC’s own ‘Community Radio Study’ in 1978 examined if BBC Radio London could become an ‘ethnic station’, but this never got off the ground (BBC, 1978b). This was a missed opportunity described by Lewis and Booth as a loss of nerve by the BBC for an innovative attempt to serve London’s ethnic communities (Lewis & Booth, 1989, p. 98). These issues were well known to the management team that came into Radio London and relaunched it as BBC GLR in 1988, however, they found no great heritage of a strong Asian community programme to work with. There was no critical mass of South Asian talent on the station, unlike that in Leicester and BBC Radio WM. With no Asian programming on the new BBC GLR and then only a limited shared regional programme that was broadcast on the station’s AM transmitter, it was released to the Radio Authority for commercial competitors. Despite launching a new hour-long local weekly programme in the 1990s, BBC Radio London effectively turned its back on substantial discrete minority broadcasts, deciding instead to concentrate on increasing diversity across all of its programmes. Use of the London AM transmitter for the BBC Asian Network would have been transformative in its early years, but in 1989 the first commercial Asian station, Sunrise Radio went on air in West London (Starkey, 2015, p. 116) and London was ceded to the competition. How difficult it made the building of Asian audiences in London was revealed as part of the move by Greg Dyke to turn the BBC Asian Network into one of the new BBC national DAB stations. An internal pre-launch presentation for the station titled ‘Going National’ in 2001 revealed that only 3% of 620,000 South Asians in the capital tuned into the BBC local station in London—then known as BBC London Live—and three fifths never listened to BBC radio at all (BBC, 2001a). There was, though, a willingness amongst South Asians in London to tune into targeted local radio, as highlighted by the

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listening figures to Sunrise Radio which reached a quarter of a million (255,000) in 2001 (BBC, 2001b). In contrast, in its Midlands heartland the BBC Asian Network proved to be extremely popular in South Asian communities and by the end of 1997 it was attracting 181,000 listeners each week, a 47% reach in its target audience of 381,000 people of South Asian heritage (BBC, 2001a). The BBC Asian Network was not forcing out local competition, which was attracting similar audiences, but the BBC offering of news and current affairs and a developing ‘British Asian sound’ was widening the choice for listeners—exactly as the Thatcher government had argued for in the 1980s. One striking factor from the BBC Asian Network listening figures at the turn of the century was that, unlike the commercial stations, the BBC listeners tended to be younger: the average age of the listeners was thirty-six, with a third of the audience aged fifteen to twenty-four (BBC, 2001a). The critical mass of young second-generation British Asians dominating the programme teams at BBC local radio stations in the Midlands were delivering for their peers. As a result of decisions taken to build up the influence of young British Asians in local programming, as the 1980s progressed, a new ‘British Asian sound’ developed that became associated with the BBC Asian Network.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that a new ‘British Asian sound’ began to develop on some BBC local radio stations as a growing and vibrant second generation of Asian communities began to build programmes on their local stations. Influenced by their radio listening, especially to BBC Radio One and commercial stations, their presentation style also owes a lot to the radical new sound of Asian programming in Leicester presented by Mike Allbut. His programmes were heard across the Midlands and on BBC Radio Bedfordshire, spreading his influence over a wide area. The popularity of the music he played, the many young Asian co-presenters he introduced and the topics discussed on his programmes brought a new sound that was British but increasingly Asian. During the 1980s the range of programming targeted at and presented by young British Asians increased. The growing influence in the British Asian music scene of Aaj Kal at BBC Radio Derby, the sharp social comment and discussions of Smit’ Petite and the Karachi Kid at BBC Radio Bedfordshire and the

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radical late-night Eastern Beat programme on the BBC Midlands Asian Network in 1989 are important examples of the shift to a new young ‘British Asian sound’. BBC local radio has been accused by academics, practitioners and the media of offering a tokenistic and minimal programme service to South Asian communities. Whilst the evidence from London might confirm that diagnosis, it was not true everywhere, and especially not in Leicester, Leeds, Luton, Sheffield and the West Midlands. The continued growth of the South Asian diaspora and the influence of young second-generation British Asians challenged the BBC’s general view that targeted Asian programmes would naturally fade away once their remit to help new immigrants to ‘settle’ in Britain was achieved. This was certainly the case at network radio when as early as 1972 Tony Whitby, the Controller of Radio 4 and a former civil servant in the Colonial Office, wrote to the Controller of English Regions about Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye arguing, ‘The programme was launched as an emergency measure on Radio 4 to fill the gap until the wave of immigrants who got in before the door was shut had learned enough English’ (BBC, 1972). This was echoed at BBC Radio Leicester where the Station Manager, Owen Bentley, told the Local Radio Advisory Council in February 1978 that ‘eventually that there would be no need for special programmes for the ethnic minorities and that the content of the programmes would become integrated in all other programmes on the station’ (BBC WAC, 1978a). However, the influence of young second-generation broadcasters began a chain of events that runs through to the present BBC Asian Network and its targeting of ‘UK Asian youth culture’ (BBC, 2020). The expansion of Asian programming on BBC local radio in the 1980s was a somewhat unexpected outcome of the broadcasting policies of the government of Margaret Thatcher. The 1985 green paper on broadcasting presented existing BBC and ILR local radio stations with a ‘use it or lose it’ ultimatum to stop simulcasting the same programming on AM and FM transmitters (Starkey, 2015, p. 109). This was a challenge embraced by both the public and private sectors as ILR stations mainly built new ‘gold’ services of classic hits on their AM transmitters, often ‘networked’ across several local stations, while many BBC local stations grew their ethnic programming. As a result, the range and quantity of Asian programming in both BBC and some ILR stations increased dramatically. Nowhere was this felt more keenly than in Leicester where the significance and

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visibility of the Asian communities in terms of size and influence led to a competitive element in the local media in search of new audiences. BBC Radio Leicester had built a fifty-seven-hour-a-week service with BBC Radio WM to provide a new BBC Midlands Asian Network. The East Midlands ILR stations now under the control of one group had combined their AM transmitters to form a new regional ‘gold’ AM service which in Leicester hosted an expanded Sabras service of twenty-eight hours a week. The licence to provide a full-time ILR Asian radio service was sold to Sunrise Radio from London in the early 1990s only for a vigorous local campaign to return the licence to Sabras, which was successful in 1995. The local evening newspaper the Leicester Mercury also began to produce a new nightly Asia Edition in 1988 which was to run for almost twenty years (Hold the Front Page, 2007). Historian Valerie Marett in her work on the settlement of South Asian communities in Leicester stressed the importance of ‘the power of the local media’ in building social capital, and the local campaign to return Asian commercial radio to local control was a clear example of this (Marett, 1993, p. 257). A critical mass of young Asian talent became established on some BBC local radio stations in the 1980s and they began to have a wider influence on the overall output of these stations. Crucially, the increased opportunities in Asian programming also offered this new talent an opportunity to move further into the BBC. There are many examples of former presenters and producers of Asian programming on BBC local radio finding their way into high-profile roles in BBC network radio and television. But for the dogged persistence of BBC local radio management in the Midlands— and the critical role played by young British Asian broadcasters—the BBC might have effectively opted out of Asian broadcasting in the 1990s and left it to the commercial and community sector. This can be seen in the mixed picture of expansion or retrenchment of Asian programming on BBC local radio as different regions adopted their own local policies. At BBC Radio London, relaunched in 1988 as BBC GLR, all ethnic minority programming was cut from the schedules, including the daily Black Londoners and the weekly London Sounds Eastern. With no heritage of a strong Asian programmes team to build on, station managers at BBC GLR concentrated on improving diversity right across the station output. In the 2020s embracing diversity across the output is exactly the policy that BBC local radio is expected to follow (Ofcom, 2017, p. 4), but in 1988 it was deemed too radical, and a year later ethnic minority

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programming was back in the BBC GLR schedule. This was to prove too little too late for Asian audiences, as the final chapter in the book which deals with the experience of the BBC Asian Network as a part of the BBC’s network portfolio, will show. Most of these developments in the rise of a new ‘British Asian sound’ took place under the radar of BBC station managers, who had not set out to produce a new sound. That this was all left to a few inspirational local and regional managers and dozens of young British Asians suggests the BBC centrally did not see it as a priority. All this happened during a period in which the BBC came under attack for its lack of on-air diversity and its poor record of employment and retention of black and Asian staff. It is difficult to understand why despite introducing a raft of diversity initiatives the BBC could not find the limited funding and desire to pull together a central plan that might have transformed its connections with British Asians. It is also why some broadcasters from South Asian communities who gave their time—often as volunteers—to broadcast programmes to their peers feel the BBC was and still is institutionally racist, as we will discover in the next chapter.

References Ainger, G. (2017). b. 12 March 1951, Former Producer BBC Radio Leicester Six O’clock Show, Face-to-Face Interview, February 7. Allbut, M. (2022). b. 14 February 1947, Former Producer BBC Radio Leicester Six O’clock Show, Face-to-face Interview, February 2017 & April 11, 2022. Anwar, M. (1978). Who Tunes into What? A Report on Ethnic Minority Broadcasting. CRE. BBC. (1989). BBC Asian Network File, Memo from Head of Broadcasting Midlands to Senior Manager Radio (Midlands), Personal Archive of Owen Bentley. BBC. (1992). Flyer: 2 March 1992, ‘Threat to The BBC Midlands Asian Network’, BBC Asian Network File, Personal Collection of Owen Bentley. BBC. (2001a). Asian Network DAB Project 2002–2005 File, ‘Going National Discussion Document’, 16 October 2001, Personal Archive of Owen Bentley. BBC. (2001b). Asian Network DAB Project 2002–2005 File, ‘Radio Listening by Asians in London, RAJAR Q4 2000’, Personal Archive of Owen Bentley. BBC. (2020). BBC Asian Network: Information on Asian Network for Suppliers. Retrieved April 29, 2022, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/ radio/asian-­network/

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BBC Asian Network. (1999). File, BBC Asian Network, Asian Network Flyer, Owen Bentley Private Archive. BBC Radio Bedfordshire. (1986). Publicity Handbill for Smit’ Petite and the Karachi Kid, Saadia Usmani Private Collection. BBC Radio Derby. (1984). Aaj Kal, Broadcast, April 13. BBC Radio Leicester. (1979). The 6-3-0 Show, Broadcast, April. BBC Radio Leicester. (1987). Photograph of Six O’clock Show Team, BBC Radio Leicester Photograph Archive. BBC WAC. (1972). File R102/38/1, Local Radio HQ Minorities Programmes, Memo from CR4 to CER, ‘Programmes for Immigrants’, May 11. BBC WAC. (1978a), File, R81/11/2, LRAC Meeting, 20 July 1978, Radio Leicester Minutes, 1973–1980. BBC WAC. (1978b), File, R78/1, 165/1, Management Files, ‘London Community Radio Study, December. BBC WAC. (1986). File, R9/327/1, BBC Audience Research, ‘Radio Leicester: Radio Listening Amongst Asians’, October. BBC WAC. (1994). File, R9/1, 831,1, Programme Strategy Review, ‘Special Report on Ethnic Minorities’. Bentley, O. (2018). Former Station Manager, BBC Radio Leicester & Senior Manager Radio (Midlands), Face-to-face Interview, October 22. Bhalla, A. (2017). b. 9 May 1955, Former Senior Producer BBC Radio WM, Face-to-face Interview, May 5. Bristow, R. (1994). BBC Radio WM: The Asian Network, BBC Research Department Report, January, Personal Archive of Owen Bentley. Broadcast. (1988). Applications for the IBA’s Twenty Community Radio Stations are Threatening to Deluge the Radio Division Staff. November 25. Buttoo, S. (2018). b. 17 May 1967, Station Manger BBC Radio Leeds, Face-to-­ face Interview, July 12. Dudrah, R. (2007). Bhangra: Birmingham and Beyond. Birmingham City Council Libraries & Archives. EMOHA 39/12 (1977). Bbc Radio Leicester, Weekend Bazaar, 7 Feb. Gillespie, M. (1995). Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. Routledge. Gilmore, A. (1996). ‘Big up to the Braunstone Massive!’: An Examination of Pirate Radio in Leicester as Local Representation and Local Resource. Leicester University Press. Hind, J., & Mosco, S. (1982). Rebel Radio, The Full Story of British Pirate Radio. Pluto Press. Hold the Front Page. (2007). Mercury to Drop Edition, June 25. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2007/news/ mercury-­to-­drop-­edition/ Holland, P., Chignell, H., & Wilson, S. (2013). Broadcasting and the NHS in the Thatcherite 1980s: The Challenge to Public Service. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Huq, R. (2003). From Margins to the Mainstream? Representations of British Asian Youth Musical Cultural Expression from Bhangra to Asian Underground Music. Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research, 11(1), 29–48. Kay, N. (2022). Former Station Manager, BBC Radio Sheffield, Face-to-face Interview, March 31. Khatkar, P. (2022). Former Senior Journalist, BBC Asian Network, Face-to-face Interview, March 30. Kotak, D. (2017). b. 3 August 1954, Former Presenter BBC Radio Leicester & Owner of Sabras Radio, Face-to-face Interview, March 9. Lewis, P. (2008). Promoting Social Cohesion: The Role of Community Media. Council of Europe. Retrieved May 19, 2022, from http://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/2585/1/H-­Inf%282008%29013_en.pdf.pdf Lewis, P. M., & Booth, J. (1989). The Invisible Medium: Public, Commercial and Community Radio. Macmillan. Marett, V. (1993). Resettlement of Ugandan Asians in Leicester. Journal of Refugee Studies, 6(3), 248. Mitchell, C. (2011). Voicing the Community: Participation and Change. In R. Brunt & R. Cere (Eds.), Postcolonial Media in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. O’Malley, T., & Jones, J. (Eds.). (2009). The Peacock Committee and UK Broadcasting Policy. Palgrave Macmillan. Ofcom. (2017). Diversity and Equal Opportunities in Television: Monitoring Report on the UK Broadcasting Industry. Retrieved December 5, 2017, from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/106343/ diversity-­television-­report-­2017.pdf Page, D. (1983). Broadcasting to Britain’s Asian Minorities. India International Centre Quarterly, 10(2), 161–173. Purohit, K. (2022). b. 15 December 1961, Former Presenter BBC Radio Leicester, Face-to-face Interview, April 7. Radio Times. (1989, November 3). Asian Ties, Midlands Edition, October 28. Rajani, R. (2018). b. 8 January 1970, Former Presenter Sabras Sound and BBC Radio Leicester, Face-to-face Interview, June 20. Rana, S. (2022). b. 15 December 1959, Presenter BBC Radio Derby, Face-to-face Interview, March 17. Renton, T., Reynolds, G., Hatch, D., Tresilian, N., Hay, J., Miller, A., Baldwin, P., Byrom, S., & Findlay, R. (1989, August). The Future of UK Radio: For Better or Worse? RSA Journal, 137(5397), 544–564. Saha, A. (2011). Negotiating the Third Space: British Asian Independent Record Labels and the Cultural Politics of Difference. Popular Music and Society, 34(4), 437–454. Sahota, H.  S. (2014). Bhangra: Mystics, Music & Migration. Huddersfield University Press.

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Self, D. (1989, March 24). Bubbly Time with Bhangra Pop. Times Educational Supplement, p.18. Sharma, V. (2017). Former Head of the BBC Asian Network, Face-to-face Interview, September 7, 2017 & October 13, 2022. Starkey, G. (2015). Local Radio, Going Global. Palgrave Macmillan. Stoller, T. (2010). Sounds of Your Life, The History of Independent Radio in the UK. John Libbey. Tsagarousianou, R. (2002). Ethnic Community Media, Community Identity and Citizenship in Contemporary Britain. In W.  Jankowski & O.  Prehn (Eds.), Community Media in the Information Age: Perspectives and Prospects. Hampton Press. Usmani (née Nasiri), S. (2019). b. 22 February 1964, former presenter BBC Radio Bedfordshire, face-to-face Interview, March 1 2019. Usmani (née Nasiri), S. (2022). b. 22 February 1964, former presenter BBC Radio Bedfordshire, face-to-face Interview, September 12 2022.

CHAPTER 5

Making a British Asian Sound: The Pioneers of Asian Radio on the BBC

One lunchtime in November 1976 Vijay Sharma took herself to Epic House, the ten-storey city centre office block that was home to BBC Radio Leicester. Sharma had been listening to the new nightly Asian programme Six-Fifteen that had launched in late October, and she was concerned about its content: I listened to it for maybe three weeks, and all I heard was very good, excellent music, but it was just music … I thought there is more to us than music and we need to do something about it. (Sharma, 2018)

So, without an appointment she presented herself at the ninth-floor reception and waited to be introduced to Paul Cobley, the producer of Six-Fifteen. She recalled her conversation with Cobley in reception as he returned to the station with his lunch tucked under his arm: ‘I’ve come to talk to you about the Asian programmes,’ and he said, ‘What about them?’ I said, ‘There’s more to us than just wall-to-wall music, why don’t we have some interviews, information and health advice …’ and he said, ‘Right, well OK, if you think you are that good why don’t you do it?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I will.’ And that’s how it started. (Sharma, 2018)

It was extremely unlikely that anyone who walked into a local radio reception in the 1970s would have had any radio training because there © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. McCarthy, Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35620-9_5

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were still only nineteen BBC local stations and fifteen commercial local stations in England (Starkey, 2015, pp. 31 & 49). Local radio was still a fresh concept in the BBC’s portfolio of services and under review by the Annan Committee. By comparison in the 2020s there are hundreds of commercial, BBC and community radio stations with a whole raft of training schemes and courses in higher education producing media professionals. Vijay Sharma was a social worker at Leicester City Council and certainly had no radio experience or training and neither did the two presenters of Six-Fifteen that Sharma had come into BBC Radio Leicester to critique. Don Kotak was a twenty-two-year-old trainee accountant and Mira Trivedi was a thirty-something community worker, both had responded to an advert for presenters placed by the BBC in the Leicester Mercury. The sheer chutzpah of Sharma and other South Asians trying to influence their local stations to make programmes for their communities might seem astonishing—and it was. As I have argued in the previous chapters, the introduction of Asian programming and its tenuous position during the early days of BBC local radio was haphazard and even chaotic. But this is indicative of the fact that local station managers were well aware that they were at the cutting edge of something unprecedented. They were therefore willing to take calculated risks by recognising and developing the South Asian talent that, quite fortuitously, turned up on their doorstep and by broadcasting targeted programming for local Asian communities. Sometimes it paid huge dividends—as a result of the random meeting in reception at BBC Radio Leicester with the producer of the new Six-Fifteen programme, Vijay Sharma went on to become one of the most influential figures in the development of Asian programming in the BBC. In the 1990s Sharma was appointed as the first Managing Editor of the Leicester-based BBC Asian Network. This directly linked back to the hot and racially charged summer of 1976 in Leicester and the Six-Fifteen programme that Sharma argued needed to feature more speech content. Sharma was a member of the South Asian diaspora in Leicester that had grown rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s to reach one in five of the population by the early 1980s—some 63,000 people (Leicester City Council, 1984). The public reaction to the arrival of Ugandan Asians in 1972 had seen the city named in the national press as ‘the most racist in Britain’ (Marett, 1989, p.  54) and the rise of the local branch of the National Front (NF) was one of the reactions to this demographic change (McCarthy, 2021). The National Front gained one fifth (18.5%) of the vote in the local elections for the City Council in May 1976. This proved

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to be a pivotal point and prompted concerted efforts by organisations and individuals across the city to try to improve community relations. The response of Owen Bentley, the new Station Manager at BBC Radio Leicester, was perhaps counterintuitive and marked a step change in the output of the station. Bentley’s solution at this time of toxic race relations was not to lower the profile of Milan, his existing Asian programme, but promote it as part of a new high-profile five-nights-a-week Asian strand. Broadcast at 6.15 pm each evening, the new Six Fifteen programme retained Milan, presented in Hindustani, but crucially broadcast the rest of the programmes in English: Part of the rise of the National Front was sheer ignorance of what these communities were, it was fear of the unknown, fear of the other … having it in English and therefore accessible, some of the white audience would hear a different sort of Asian to the one they had in their perception. (Bentley, 2016)

Don Kotak and Mira Trivedi were recruited as presenters and began the new programme in October 1976. With its format of music and requests, Six-Fifteen quickly established impressively high audience figures (Schaffer, 2014, p. 51). The fact that listener Vijay Sharma felt able to approach the radio station to make her feelings known about the lack of speech content in the programme is a critical part of the story of Asian broadcasting. Walking into the accessible reception of her local BBC radio station had a profound impact on both Sharma and the BBC and began the process of kick-starting a new phase of Asian broadcasting (McCarthy, 2018). In contrast, when the BBC had begun its national Asian radio programming with Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye (Make Yourself at Home) on the Home Service in 1965, it was more remote. The Immigrants’ Programme Unit (IPU) was set up with an advisory panel of respected members of the South Asian community in Britain, plus the High Commissioners of India and Pakistan—to act as a conduit for the views of disparate communities across the country and ‘had the ear of the DG’ (Schaffer, 2014, p. 38). The IPU employed a small number of South Asians with previous broadcast experience and was based in Birmingham, away from the largest South Asian communities in London (Hendy, 2022, p. 382). As BBC local radio stations began to be established from 1967, more opportunities for people from the growing South Asian communities to become involved in broadcasting became available. Compared with the remote national BBC of the

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1960s, the new BBC local radio stations were approachable. Their premises were located on local high streets and their receptions were easily accessible. It was ‘walk-in radio’ in a way that the BBC’s network radio stations were not. This left the IPU and its national radio programming increasingly inaccessible to the wider South Asian diaspora, as they found more appropriate programming matching the makeup of local communities on BBC local radio (Schaffer, 2014, p. 49). Indeed, operating at the margins of the BBC, some of the new local stations built deep connections with their South Asian communities. Just as the BBC’s local stations were, in a sense, marginalised within the corporation, so these communities were marginalised within wider British society. One of the striking factors of the early Asian programming is how much of it was presented by women and how many of these women went on to become the driving force behind much of the Asian output of BBC local radio. The number of people who, like Vijay Sharma, approached their local BBC station as individuals making proposals for new or improved Asian programming is a testament to the openness of this new local BBC. The interviews in this chapter are with some of the pioneer presenters and producers of Asian programming from the 1970s, their second-­ generation counterparts who began to establish a new British Asian sound in the 1980s and with those involved with the setting up of the BBC Asian Network. It is, in other words, a collection of memories and reflections of people who played a part in developing Asian programming on BBC Radio. Every one of them turned down the opportunity to be quoted anonymously even though some of their individual testimonies are difficult in parts for both themselves and the BBC. While some of these interviews can be grouped into themes such as how they first got into the BBC or how they were received on local stations, it is important to recognise the individuality of each story. They represent everyday life which can be messy and discordant, they include individual stories of success and failure, of encouragement or lack of support from the BBC and stories of racism. It is these people and many others across BBC local radio in England who gave their time as volunteers or pursued careers in the BBC while serving their local communities. Without them and their battles with the BBC’s bureaucracy the radio landscape would be even less reflective of daily life than it is in today’s broadcast climate. Their stories have been woven into the chapters of this book, but as pioneers of Asian broadcasting in the BBC their stories deserve to be told collectively. These interviews give a fresh dimension to this history of a ‘British Asian sound’, a perspective

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that documents in the BBC’s Written Archives, newspaper clippings or archive recordings of their programmes cannot bring. Some of the recollections were difficult to listen to as interviewees talked for the first time of an everyday racism they experienced in the BBC. These experiences, coupled with the analysis of the BBC’s developing policies towards diversity and inclusion in Chap. 3 suggest the BBC is guilty of passing the Macpherson threshold of ‘institutional racism’ in its procedures and practices (UK Parliament, 2021). However, moments of success were joyous as the interviewees recalled getting their first staff job in the BBC or looked back with justified pride at what they achieved—almost despite the BBC.  Especially warm were their memories of growing up, living a life between cultures as they listened to BBC Radio One like their teenage friends and to Asian radio programmes on BBC local radio with their families around the kitchen table.

Radio as a Core Part of Teenage Listening In the analogue 1970s and 1980s with no internet, no Wi-Fi, no social media, and no multi-channel television, it was the radio around which teenagers bonded. Both portable and personal, it was listening to the radio that inspired some young second-generation British Asians to try and get involved in broadcasting. This personal inspiration came nationally from the high-profile presenters on BBC Radio One and locally via listening with their families to programmes targeted at South Asian communities. Research by the CRE in 1978 in Leicester found that over half of Asian teenagers were listening to BBC Radio One every day, and there is no reason to suspect it was different elsewhere in the country (Anwar, 1978, p. 19). Rupal Rajani, who had arrived in Leicester from Uganda as a baby in 1972, was typical: I used to listen to radio all the time growing up. Radio Leicester, Radio One mainly … I’d listen to the chart show on Sundays with my little recorder waiting to press record in between the DJ. Everybody looked forward to the Top 40 on Radio One, everybody did it. (Rajani, 2022)

In Derby, as well as listening to Sangam, the weekly Asian programme on BBC Radio Derby, Satvinder Rana was also a regular listener to BBC Radio One, which was part of his daily routine:

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It was Radio One, people like John Peel and Tony Blackburn, they were the major influences because at that time in the seventies I was into pop music as well, you know David Cassidy, The Osmond’s and so on … They presented with a lot of personality, it wasn’t just music it was their personality plus music and it was a different kind of radio. And I thought if ever I got the opportunity that is what I’d like to do, present as a personality. (Rana, 2022)

This dual listening, mainly to BBC Radio One supplemented by additional listening to Asian programming on BBC local stations highlighted the cultural heritage of young British Asians—a split cultural identity that was central to Rupal Rajani growing up in Leicester: Radio more than anything else, radio was the most liberating thing. There were real voices of real people who lived in the same city as you did and that you could relate to … I’d be listening to Radio Leicester on a daily basis at home, we’d have it on in the kitchen and it would be the Asian programmes. Without fail there would be cooking, and we’d be listening to the radio at the same time … you could listen to the music that was familiar … you could hear the songs from the films you were watching on your VHS, the video you’d borrowed from the video shop. It was connecting your culture, your religion and it made you feel part of something. (Rajani, 2022)

Perminder Khatkar, who grew up in the West Midlands, has similar memories of family listening to the minimal Asian programming on air in the 1970s: I’m from Birmingham and growing up I was aware of some ethnic and Asian programming. When you’re growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, for me if ever there was any Asian programming on you would all listen to it. I remember my mum used to do the ironing and she used to have the crackly radio on and we actually used to listen to Mike Allbut [on BBC Radio Leicester]. You used to try and find any Asian programming you could get on the radio. (Khatkar, 2022)

As with Rupal Rajani and Perminder Khatkar, Kamlesh Purohit feels that those early years listening to the Six O’clock Show on BBC Radio Leicester provided an important connection to his cultural roots: I went to a school where there was a large number of kids from an Asian background and in those days there wasn’t much about for the Asian

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c­ ommunity on radio or television and if there was an Asian person on television people would ring their friends to say; ‘Watch the television!’ … So, the Six O’clock Show had a big following among the kids in school … the one thing I do remember was the regular competitions on the Six O’clock Show and one of my earliest memories is hearing one of my classmates on the Six O’clock Show and hearing him on the radio and he’s won the competition. That really inspired me because I’d never thought of participating until then. (Purohit, 2022)

As new younger presenters like Mike Allbut and Rabia Raza began to present the Six O’clock Show in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Purohit began to become emotionally linked to the show: Milan was aimed at my parents. But the Six O’clock Show I could totally relate to … When Mike Allbut and Razia Raba came along … they were people I started to idolise. In those days Mike was young, the music he played was young, and the things he talked about were the things happening in my life …. We were second-generation kids who grew up in this country, and kids learns very quickly, so our English was very similar to my white counterparts in school, very different to what I was hearing on the radio. But the radio gave us our culture and lots of Bollywood music, so that was what we related to. It motivated me, because I used to listen to the output and think I could do better. I wanted to be a radio presenter. (Purohit, 2022)

Deepak Patel, who had come to Leicester as a six-year-old in 1970 from Zambia, highlighted his dual ‘Indian’ and ‘British’ identities and his concern that his Gujarati heritage was fading: You went to school and you were talking about chart music and movies. Then when you came home you were listening to what your mum and dad were listening to, which was primarily Bollywood music. At home we spoke Gujarati but over time it became fifty-fifty with English … I can’t read or write Gujarati, but I can speak it. (Patel, 2019)

There was therefore a desire not only for programming in mother tongue languages, something expressed not only by Deepak Patel but in the very different and brutal experiences of Mintu Rahman. Rahman had arrived in England as a traumatised teenager in 1973, having escaped the civil war in Bangladesh.

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The village I lived in was the headquarters of the freedom fighters, so they came and they burned our houses and killed our neighbours … I saw people being killed in front of me. (Rahman, 2022)

Together with his mother and siblings, the family walked for three days to cross the border to India before getting the paperwork completed so they could join his father who was stuck in Birmingham when the war had begun. For Rahman the Bangla language which had been at the root of the Pakistan civil war and led to the founding of Bangladesh was important. Having moved with his family from Birmingham to Leicester in the late 1970s, he recalls listening to the Six O’clock Show on BBC Radio Leicester: Me and my family used to listen to the Six O’clock Show because it was the only Asian thing available … I was working in the community and I thought there’s a lot of people here and there is nothing in their native language … they pay the licence and we are a minority in a minority but we need something for us. (Rahman, 2022)

Like Sharma in 1976, Rahman contacted the station to argue the case for a Bengali programme and was ultimately successful. As the number of young British Asians grew, so did their dissatisfaction with the type of Asian programming they were listening to on their local BBC stations. By the 1980s the original weekly programmes that were still being broadcast in the same style and with similar content were beginning to sound dated to second-generation British Asians that regularly tuned into pop stations. Kamlesh Purohit remembers: People like Mira, Rabia, Mike Allbut and Vijay started to become the veterans … we were young British Asians who were listening to mainstream radio; Radio One, Atlantic 252 and Luxembourg, and we wanted to apply their ideas to Asian programmes. (Purohit, 2022)

With a growing South Asian diaspora in Britain there was also a need for more Asian programming that both met the needs of first-generation ‘immigrants’ and a second generation of young British Asian teenagers. With continued immigration to Britain from the subcontinent, there was still a desire for cultural reinforcement through broadcasting in mother tongue languages (Schaffer, 2014, p. 50). Lobbying of the BBC nationally

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through public consultations such as the Annan Committee (CRE, 1979) and groups such as the Commission for Racial Equality called for more broadcasting to, and more employment of Britain’s ethnic minorities by the BBC (Anwar, 1983). However, as this book has noted, there was no central BBC policy on the provision of minority programming and any new Asian programming depended on the patronage of the local station managers. Local pressure from individuals direct to their BBC local radio stations was the most effective way of either getting into broadcasting or creating new programming. Nevertheless, even if getting into the BBC through BBC local radio had become a real possibility, there was no clear route to do so—it relied on the drive and tenacity of the individual and the approachability of white station managers and producers.

Getting into the BBC In 2019 Ofcom noted that the radio sector—including the BBC—was the least successful medium at reflecting the diversity of ethnic communities in Britain (Ofcom, 2019). As seen in Chap. 3, the same arguments were being made in the 1970s about a mass media ‘dominated by white interests and white values’ that failed to reflect the new multi-racial Britain (Husband, 1975, p. 36). Despite the substantial change that has come to the BBC with Asian voices presenting programmes on the BBC’s speech-­ based radio networks, senior management remains stubbornly white. As Aujla-Sidhu notes, substantial challenges remain around the questions of recruitment, retention and promotion of minority staff in the BBC (Aujla-­ Sidhu, 2021, p. 97). Nevertheless, the interviewees in this chapter began— and some concluded—their careers in the BBC still fighting to change the organisation to better reflect a changing and diverse Britain. When Vijay Sharma had walked into BBC Radio Leicester in November 1976 to offer her input to local programming, she wasn’t the first or last to do so. In the late 1980s as Sharma took over responsibility for the Asian programming on BBC Radio Leicester, she was aware of pressure from young British Asians who saw broadcasting as a career: There was a school of thought that Asians don’t go into broadcasting. Well, that myth was soon dispelled because they did, they were knocking on our doors, but we didn’t have jobs for them. Asian programmes became a conduit for these people to move into the rest of the BBC. (Sharma, 2018)

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What Sharma achieved in Leicester was matched by Anita Bhalla who was responsible for developing the West Midlands side of the BBC Asian Network. Bhalla began her working life as a community worker for the CRE in Leicester in the late 1970s. She was a regular guest on the Six O’clock Show on BBC Radio Leicester, where she was invited to the studio to talk about a hostel she had set up in the city to support Asian women affected by domestic violence: I would go on, not just on the hostel issue but also to talk about young people, around culture and events that were happening, and young people and their relationship with the police which wasn’t good. (Bhalla, 2017)

Having appeared in an edition of the BBC 2 programme Brass Tacks— filmed in Leicester—that explored the relationships between young Asian people and their parents, Bhalla was in the unusual situation of being sought out by broadcasters. She was contacted by two of the local stations in the West Midlands, BRMB and BBC Radio Birmingham (later called BBC Radio WM) in her home city. June Harben, the Education Producer at BBC Radio Birmingham, was keen for her become involved in the Asian programme East in West: June said, ‘We’d love you to become a presenter for us, would you be interested?’, and at that time I said no to everybody … I left it a year and June contacted me again and this time I said yes … she literally gave me a UHER [portable tape recorder] and told me how it works and said go and do a report, so I went to a youth club and did a report and the next thing I knew I was there presenting with Muhammad Ayyub. (Bhalla, 2017)

While freelancing at BBC Radio WM, Bhalla was approached by the Asian Programmes Unit (APU)—also based at BBC Pebble Mill—and asked to do film reports: They took me on as a young thing to do reports in English, and I remember the letters that started coming into the Asian programmes Unit saying, ‘Why have you got this woman’—me—‘presenting in English and not wearing Asian clothes?’. There were other women presenters, but they were wearing saris or salwar kameezes and speaking Urdu. It was an interesting reaction … ‘we don’t want her because she’s not conforming to our norms’. (Bhalla, 2017)

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This tension between the generations and more traditional communities would become more prominent as young British Asians began to take on taboo subjects and will be examined later in this chapter. Bhalla moved back to Birmingham in the early 1980s where she did a lot of freelance work in both radio and television: I didn’t join full time until 1987, which was interesting because I had been presenting since about 1981 on BBC Asian television and radio. I also did documentaries for ITV and BBC Radio 4. I was working as a lecturer, and it got to the point where my freelance stuff for BBC and others just got too much so I thought what do I do? And then John Pickles [Station Manager of BBC Radio WM] came up and said, ‘Would you come on a six-month contract because we want to sort out Asian programmes?’ … so I took a career break. (Bhalla, 2017)

Anita Bhalla, like Vijay Sharma in Leicester became a key player in the development of the BBC Asian Network, recruiting staff, devising programmes and promoting the station within and outside of the BBC. As Bhalla was working to increase the hours and quality of content on Asian programming in the West Midlands, Perminder Khatkar became one of the key members of her team. A graduate from Lancaster University, Khatkar remembers telling her student friends in the student union bar about her low opinion of the BBC: It’s so crap radio and telly, you never get black and Asian people on the radio or telly, we’re never represented and if ever you do see someone, it’s always the community leader with a bad accent … they just take the piss out of us. (Khatkar, 2022)

Dared to do so by her friends, Khatkar wrote to Tony Inchley, the new Station Manager of her local BBC station in Birmingham to express her exasperation at the lack of Asian voices on BBC Radio WM: I thought it would be really interesting to see if I could get more black and Asian programming on the radio and I wrote a letter to Tony Inchley … critiquing and complaining about why for a station like Radio WM for the size of the population, why weren’t they doing enough to represent black and Asian people? (Khatkar, 2022)

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To her surprise she got a reply and met Inchley at Pebble Mill, who advised her to apply for new traineeships the station was about to advertise: I joined BBC Radio WM based at Pebble Mill through an ethnic fund that the station manager had been able to tap. The station was able to recruit black and Asian staff as they were under-represented on station, so I was recruited along with Reeta Chakrabarti. They ran it like the trainee reporter scheme, so my job was to get trained up as a journalist to work in the newsroom and do bits on programmes and the Asian programmes. (Khatkar, 2022)

BBC local radio mangers were adept at finding untapped reserves of money in regional or national funds that could be repurposed and used as ‘ethnic funds’ to subsidise new initiatives. In the 1990s, as ‘diversity’ became a priority across the BBC, local managers were able to build up their staff through ‘ethnic funds’ to get new talent in the door. Much of the funding for the BBC Asian Network was secured this way, beginning with temporary funding, building up a successful Asian operation and then daring the BBC to pull the money—a sort of ‘slow blackmail’, as Owen Bentley, the Midlands Regional Manager behind the station only half- jokingly called it (Bentley, 2018). Khatkar remained on the staff of the BBC until 2019, moving on from the BBC Asian Network earlier in the decade to produce and present documentaries for BBC Radio 4. These are strong examples of the ‘local front door’ to the BBC of local radio stations enabling new and diverse talent to make their way into the corporation, but it relied on people being proactive and making the first move. Not all used the route of direct contact with their local station to join the BBC; government schemes to reduce youth employment in early the 1980s also had an effect. Deepak Patel joined BBC Radio Leicester on a six-month YTS (Youth Training Scheme) placement in the gramophone library in 1983 and never left: That’s how I met Mike [Allbut], he used to come into the library, and I used to help him find music for his programme. I started learning everything I could regarding the ‘technicals’. One of the things I consciously put my mind to was helping the presenters, who would come in from the community in the evenings and present their programmes, to become better technically. (Patel, 2019)

Patel joined the BBC staff of the BBC Asian Network in the 1980s and though now retired still does technical and production shifts at the BBC

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in Leicester. For Bilal (not his real name), a college student in a northern town, Asian programmes were the last thing on his mind when he walked into the reception of his local radio station; he was interested in a technical role: I’d gone to the library to pick up some books about media, and there was a woman who ran the place and she said, ‘Those look good books, why don’t you try and get a job at Radio [withheld]? Just go over at the weekend, they might have a little job for you there.’ So, I went and there was a producer, a brilliant man called [Name withheld] and he said, ‘Are you looking for a job? Can you come and make the tea please?’ And there was me making the tea. (Journalist, Bilal, 2022)

In a matter of weeks Bilal had become a part-time member of the technical team on the station having been trained on the job by station staff. After he left college, he got a contract at the radio station doing a range of technical jobs including ‘driving’ the desk for the daily shows. Having been trained as a journalist by the BBC, Bilal joined the BBC Asian Network in the 1990s. For Sanjiv Buttoo in Halifax, a college qualification in textile technologies and a short period in the army were not an obvious lead into the BBC. After he left the army and was looking for something to do his father took the initiative: My dad had a good friend in hospital radio in Halifax and he told someone, ‘My son has got records. He can come and play some records for you.’ My dad told me just go down to this hospital radio lark, ‘There’s a two-hour programme playing Asian music, just go and do it’, because Asian parents always volunteer their children to do anything. After three weeks I thought I quite like this, but I don’t like playing Asian music as I don’t really understand it, I can’t pronounce it very well and I’d rather do the Saturday afternoon sports programme, which is what I ended up doing. (Buttoo, 2018)

In the summer of 1989 and firmly part of the Halifax hospital radio station, Buttoo was intrigued by an advert he saw in the local paper: I saw an advert in the paper which said, ‘Presenter Required for Asian Programme, PO Box 21, Leeds.’ I still remember it and I applied and wrote off, heard nothing back for three months and then I got a letter from the BBC saying would you like to come to BBC Radio Leeds. So, I went for the job, I did the interview, and I didn’t hear back. Then I got a letter back

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s­ aying thank you, ‘you were rubbish’ but ‘if you want to come and speak to me, I’ll tell you why you were rubbish’. And I thought I’m not going but my dad forcibly drove me to Leeds and said, ‘If this chap is going to give you a debrief, you listen to him.’ And that’s the best thing he could ever have done, because I was told that they didn’t believe what I was telling them, but he said, ‘Because you’ve come back I’m going to give you three months,’ and the rest is history. (Buttoo, 2018)

Buttoo became a researcher/broadcast assistant on the Sunday night Asian programmes at Radio Leeds, and when the producer decided she was returning to India she recommended that he take over the production of all ethnic programmes. Later he was trained by the BBC as a journalist and began a career journey working in BBC local stations in the north of England, the BBC Asian Network and finally as Managing Editor of BBC Radio Leeds. In Luton Saadia Usmani was a college student who took a direct approach to getting into the BBC. She became aware of the team launching the new BBC Radio Bedfordshire and their search for Asian presenters. So, she went to a public meeting the new station had organised: It was an evening do and people had orange juice and stuff and were chatting. Then I recall, I didn’t even know who I was speaking to, and I introduced myself to someone and I said, ‘Hi, I’m Saadia’, and he said, ‘What do you do?’, and I said, ‘I’m going to work for Radio Bedfordshire and I’m going to be doing their Asian programme’. And it was Mike Gibbons, the Station Manager! (Usmani, 2019)

She got the job and became a full-time member of BBC staff, working on reception in the mornings and programmes in the afternoons. Teamed with Smita Barcha, a Luton-based community worker, the two began a ‘traditional’ Asian programme, but felt it lacked oomph: It wasn’t aimed at me, someone who was brought up in Britain and liked the same things as my peers, and who just wanted to understand their own culture and value that. We wanted to listen to good music, have a good chit-­ chat about things that affected me. (Usmani, 2022)

In the kind of risk-taking that editorially independent station managers could take, Usmani and Barcha were given a free hand to present a ‘youth’ programme they titled Smit’ Petite and the Karachi Kid. Usmani left the

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station after getting married and followed her husband to Wales and Scotland, but despite some radio work through an ‘ethnic fund’ in BBC Wales and BBC Scotland, she largely left broadcasting behind until her husband moved to Hong Kong and she took it up again on Radio & Television Hong Kong (RTHK). At BBC Radio Leicester, after the appointment of Farah Durani Marsh as Community Producer in 1983, there was for the first time an Asian staff member in charge of Asian programming. Durani Marsh had been working on East in West at BBC Radio Birmingham and brought fresh ideas to the Leicester output. Leicester listener Kamlesh Purohit was as disappointed as Saadia Usmani in Luton with what was on offer for young British Asians and wrote to Durani Marsh with a critique of the existing output: To be honest I was surprised that Farah even entertained me. I thought she’d say, ‘You’re a trouble-maker, get out of here.’ I went to see her, and I said ‘I’ve written some thoughts about the Asian programmes’, and I remember sitting with her while she was reading through it … but it showed I had ideas, I had passion for what I wanted to do, and I could contribute something. (Purohit, 2018)

Timing was propitious for Purohit as unknown to him BBC Radio Leicester was about to launch a new Saturday evening programme called Weekend Bazaar. Presented by Mike Allbut, this was a programme squarely aimed at young British Asians with the latest music, competitions and chat. It was the perfect opening for Purohit: To my surprise she said, ‘We are looking for someone behind the scenes, answering phones and so on, would you be interested?’ Would I? Heck yes! And I joined … it was amazing timing from my point of view as I got involved from the very first show … the Weekend Bazaar for me was a massive step change in how the standards and level of programming changed for the Asian community. (Purohit, 2018)

For Purohit that first job answering the phones for the Weekend Bazaar programme gradually opened a new career: I loved broadcasting … so I made a big gamble on my part and for a couple of years I didn’t have a staff job but took a freelance contract, so I could’ve

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lost that job any time and become jobless. But such was the passion for what I wanted to do that it was a gamble worth taking for me. (Purohit, 2022)

In the early 1990s, as the BBC Asian Network expanded, Purohit applied and joined the BBC staff as a Broadcast Journalist on the station. This began a career that by 2020 saw him as the Station Manager of BBC Radio Leicester—once again showing the value of the new and unorthodox ways of getting into the BBC its local radio stations offered. One of the drivers of increased Asian programming with the Weekend Bazaar at BBC Radio Leicester was competition from the local commercial station Leicester Sound and its nightly Sabras programming. Rupal Rajani, a future presenter for BBC Radio Leicester, began her radio career at Sabras, one of an increasing number of people who would come to the BBC via commercial radio. As she recalled, it was quite an easy process for her to get on air in commercial radio: I was probably about 17 or 18 … I wanted to do drama or theatre originally and then I heard this advert on Sabras Radio looking for presenters and I thought ooh I could do that … I had an informal chat with them and a voice test and the next thing, I was on the radio. (Rajani, 2022)

Sabras was on air for three hours a night, timed to start when the Six o’clock Show finished and so increase the amount of Asian programming on air in Leicester. It proved to be almost as popular as the BBC show, as Rajani told me: There were always callers, there were people knocking on the door when you were there in the evenings, wanting to meet you, wanting to get an autograph. You could tell from the interaction you got on the air, it was popular, there were lots of people listening and there was a great need and a great thirst for it. (Rajani, 2022)

All radio presenters will tell you how popular their programmes were, but in this case audience research by the BBC from 1986 confirms that Rajani was correct. There was a huge crossover of listening, with seven out of ten of the Asian population in Leicester regularly tuning into BBC Radio Leicester’s Six O’clock Show and a little under half (47%) tuning into Sabras. The same research showed that only 8% never listened to either of the stations (BBC, 1986), a set of amazing audience figures that were used

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in the arguments by Owen Bentley for building an Asian Network at BBC Radio Leicester. For Rajani a chance encounter with one of the BBC Radio Leicester Asian programmes team began her switch of station: I made connections at the BBC with Sujata [Bharot] at BBC Radio Leicester. She was presenting Guzal and Gold on a Friday night and I came in and started again from scratch, making tea and coffee and learning the ropes. It was completely different to the work at Sabras where you were on your own; you answered the calls, you chose the music, you decided what you are gonna talk about … you had two hours to fill with music and conversation. The BBC was a completely different world; you had to have things in the show, a schedule, there was a running order and interviews and features. (Rajani, 2022)

Farah Durani Marsh left BBC Radio Leicester in 1988 to follow a career in television and was succeeded by Vijay Sharma who began the moves towards setting up a new ‘Asian Network’. Like Durani Marsh, she was also open to new programming ideas, one of which came from Mintu Rahman, who with his family had escaped the bitter war in Bangladesh: We wrote to Vijay Sharma about making a programme for the Bengali community … we put a case forward and she met us a few times and then gave us a show; I think it was two hours a week. We had a lot of people tune in and got invited to loads of community events. (Rahman, 2022)

Rahman went on to devise the BBC Asian Network website and in 2022 still worked at the BBC as an online journalist. These pioneers took different routes to get into the BBC, but the one factor they all had in common was tenacity. Many made successful BBC careers, but others were less fortunate and remained on the fringes of their local stations, forever typecast as ‘Asian’ presenters, and overlooked for jobs in the wider BBC. The ongoing legacy is that after fifty years of position papers, diversity strategies, targeted recruitment schemes and traineeships, ethnic minorities are still under-represented in the BBC, especially in senior management (Ofcom, 2020a). The welcome on station some of the interviewees received was a dispiriting and barely concealed racism which for some has permanently affected their view of the corporation.

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Welcome Here? Fitting in to the BBC There is a part of this story that makes uncomfortable reading for both the BBC and the interviewees—racism. Being a white male and a former BBC manager at three BBC local radio stations, it was difficult to ask my interviewees if they had been affected by racism during their time at the BBC. Would they answer the question or be polite and bat it away? I was taken aback by their honesty as I learned of the taunts and the indifference they encountered from some of their colleagues. They talked about their experiences of racism outside the BBC and how some of this everyday racism followed them onto radio stations. The recall of their lived experience suggests a low level of racism existed almost everywhere in the BBC and while some were prepared to talk about it, some also told me they did nothing about it in order to protect their careers. This increases the respect these pioneers deserve, battling not only the same career choices as others in the BBC but doing so at a disadvantage because of the colour of their skin. Even in the 2010s BBC Asian Network staff were made to feel unsupported and undervalued with the proposed closure of the BBC Asian Network. The closure of the station and BBC 6 Music were announced on the same day and while both were reprieved, it took only four months to reverse the closure of BBC 6 Music but sixteen months to save the BBC Asian Network. (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 115). Contemporary writers who explored the lack of coverage that ethnic minorities received in a largely hostile British media in the 1970s argued that ‘the immigrants’ were seen as the problem (See Hartmann & Husband, 1974). This was certainly the experience of Sanjiv Buttoo growing up in Halifax in the 1970s: My school was OK because there weren’t many Asian kids, so I was a novelty, and if you’re a novelty you’re treated ok … My language, my culture, my religion was different to virtually every other Asian walking the streets of Halifax. Of course, white people didn’t know that—they thought we were all Pakis’. (Buttoo, 2018)

Kamlesh Purohit recalls running a daily gauntlet of abuse at the end of his school day in one of Leicester’s toughest schools: Mundella [Secondary Modern] was next to the notorious Northfields Estate and there was a lot of skinheads who would descend on the school at a quarter to four. We had a tough time; the teachers didn’t really understand

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r­acism and didn’t understand what we as kids were going through. (Purohit, 2022)

For Vijay Sharma this everyday racism was represented on air with listeners to the Six O’clock Show only too keen to share their experiences in phone-ins into the 1980s: When we were doing the Six O’clock Show and we were talking about issues around immigration and education and racism, what our listeners were telling us was very real and palpable out there. I don’t think that Leicester had turned a corner then, that came much later when the second and third generation started making inroads into careers and showing just how clever and aspirational they were. (Sharma, 2022)

Local radio stations were not immune from the racial conflict in society. It makes uncomfortable reading to know that the interviewees in this chapter were subject to quite appalling abuse. Bilal (real name withheld) shifted uncomfortably in his chair and paused for a moment or two before recalling his experiences at a BBC local radio station in the north of England: To be honest with you it was terrible. Being called ‘Sambo’ was a regular occurrence, any jokes that you can have about ethnicity were made and you know, er, it wasn’t great. But it wasn’t by everybody, you kind of knew who the little bullies were in the newsroom, and you stayed clear of them. You have to remember the North at the time wasn’t the sort of place you could say everyone was quite aware of what was going on in the world. (Bilal, 2022)

For Bilal the most difficult part was having to accept this kind of behaviour: You know how it is, you just get on with it. I think if you’re Asian or whatever ethnicity you come from, er, you don’t let them dominate your life because you just accept them as part of your life. You just accept it and move on because if you started saying ‘Hey, this is wrong, you’re out of order on this’, you’d be fighting everybody forever. (Bilal, 2022)

Perhaps most dispiritingly is the knowledge that it had to be endured, and Bilal believes he had no choice but to accept it:

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All it needed for me to do at that time was to create a fuss about this race thing and my career would’ve been over. So that’s how it was, you either had to put up with it or learn to relate to people really quickly that you were no different to them and being as decent as you can be. (Bilal, 2022)

As the new nightly Six-Fifteen programme in Leicester went on air at BBC Radio Leicester in 1976, the toxic race relations in the city certainly spilled into the radio station. Station Manager Owen Bentley had to convince the station staff to accept the new programme: The staff weren’t all in favour at all. They thought it was what we now call ‘a brave decision’. They told me, ‘You are going to alienate the audience’, and there was quite a view of that on the station. (Bentley, 2018)

Greg Ainger, who replaced Paul Cobley as producer, remembered there was resentment towards both the programme and the new Asian presenters Don Kotak and Mira Trivedi: I wish I could sit here and say it was universally well received. It wasn’t. In a way the radio station was reflecting the same kind of prejudices that were in the community. It was a problem and trying to get the radio station reflecting at least in part the communities I was trying to reach wasn’t particularly easy. (Ainger, 2017)

Don Kotak described how he and Mira Trivedi were received by some of the BBC Radio Leicester staff: Very badly. Some people were OK, but when I look in hindsight, I knew what they were saying behind our backs. At Epic House when you went in there no one welcomed you. There were one or two friendly people there but not many more. Owen was great, Greg was fine, but we were treated like a little ghetto set up. (Kotak, 2017)

Looking back, Vijay Sharma said she had an uncomfortable awareness of the treatment of the Asian programme makers at the station by some staff: It wasn’t overt for a start; it wasn’t in your face. However, when I now think back, I think there were some behaviours which were not particularly welcoming. But, er, I didn’t care, I just kind of brushed it off and got on with

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it. It wasn’t so overt I felt I had to stop and take a stance; it wasn’t that either. Particularly in the newsroom there was a bit of a culture … where people worked hard and played hard … they were always interested in stories that we brought but not in recognising that there was a whole world out there which they’re not aware of. (Sharma, 2022)

Like others, Vijay Sharma in Leicester accepted this behaviour and let her passion for the work see her through the situation: So, I think it would be wrong to say there was no racism but equally it would be wrong to say it was so overbearing that it was impossible to break through it. (Sharma, 2022)

For people coming onto stations in the evenings to present weekly programmes it was easy to avoid the rest of the station staff—and any unpleasantness—as they rarely saw anyone. This was the case for Satvinder Rana in Derby who, with his team, came into BBC Radio Derby each week to present Aaj Kal: I think these programmes, not just here at Radio Derby but in other places as well, was kind of a Cinderella service in local radio. You get these community people coming in to do a community programme and then they leave. So, you were never part of the BBC or the station. (Rana, 2022)

This feeling of being ignored and marginalised by the rest of the staff on station was echoed by Anita Bhalla when she spoke of her early days at BBC Radio WM: It wasn’t very nice. June [Harben] was terrific but she was the education producer and was responsible for looking after us. So, Ayyub and I, and we took on Jay Patel as a young thing, Reeta Chakrabarti and a whole load of people came to us but in the early days we would come in and we would present our programmes, we would literally have four or five sacks of mail every week, those big black sacks, full, and yet no one on the station ever acknowledged that we kind of existed. We were like little mice who came at night to work, and we disappeared once our work was done. (Bhalla, 2017)

For Bhalla this experience was only a precursor to her time in the television newsroom at Pebble Mill in the 1990s, which she described as very male, white and excluding:

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I absolutely felt it when I moved into the television newsroom. I was not wanted there as a woman, as an Asian woman, covering the brief I was covering. It was uncomfortable … that was in your face, it hurts when you are totally ignored, but the real in-your-face stuff used to come out on outside broadcasts. (Bhalla, 2022)

Despite this experience it is notable that women held senior positions developing Asian programming in Leicester and the West Midlands. The ‘British Asian sound’ that emerged in the 1980s only did so because they wanted it to happen. But in what is still seen as male-dominated South Asian communities why did these women succeed in such a culturally important role? According to Vijay Sharma, Anita Bhalla and Perminder Khatkar, they brought something new to the role. Sharma outlines it: We had some insight in what we wanted to do and how we were going to go about doing it. We could make the case for it and sell the idea. If you talk about business and what it would mean for the station, people were more receptive. It wasn’t a case of going in someone’s office and banging the desk. (Sharma, 2022)

This considered management style was certainly of benefit to Sharma as she fought the closure of the BBC Asian Network in 2009, as will be discussed in the next chapter, but Anita Bhalla and Perminder Khatkar made a more basic observation. Khatkar suggests: In the nineties there were just so few Asian men in the industry who were either training to be journalists or were getting into radio as a full-time profession. Without role models it was assumed you couldn’t make a decent career from it. Arts and creative industries were simply seen as a no-go area for Asians, not stable careers, but particularly for males. (Khatkar, 2022)

If this seems a stereotypical argument, it is one that is backed by Anita Bhalla: It was partly from within our own communities. In the1980s when I started presenting Asian programmes in our communities, it wasn’t seen to be a profession for men. My dad had it in the early 1980s when I started broadcasting; his friends used to say to him, ‘Oh, it’s alright for the girls to do it, but it’s not a proper job is it? We were not seen as doing a proper job. It was

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only when we started to get more authority and more visibility that Asian parents thought, ‘Well maybe it’s not a bad profession for the boys as well’. (Bhalla, 2022)

What these women achieved through their ethnicity and gender was not only pioneering within the BBC, but also in wider society and their own communities. They brought a harder journalistic edge to the daily radio shows that they produced and presented. Covering subjects that some in the South Asian diaspora found to be troubling began to raise the profile of Asian programmes and their own profiles within the BBC. As programme teams expanded, a critical mass of talent from a range of local Asian communities became more visible on station, slowly gaining acceptance in newsrooms as journalists. As the South Asian diaspora is not a homogenous group but a mix of religions, culture, heritage and back stories, recruiting from across the diaspora was vital (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p.  52). Vijay Sharma at BBC Radio Leicester suggested that building a critical mass in her Asian team helped to ensure that the programmes reflected the differences between local communities: It was important in terms of sheer diversity within the Asian communities; it wasn’t a homogenous community, we relied on them to bring their expertise and their knowledge. It was just a different model than what you might be familiar with on a generic radio station. So, from the Six O’clock Show we brought in the Weekend Bazaar, we bought in the religious strands at the weekends, and then we brought in the language strands. That was the buzz, that’s what kept us going, we weren’t just standing still. (Sharma, 2022)

The support of station managers was important in driving an integration of all the journalism on station. As Vijay Sharma noted, the visible presence during the day of a growing Asian programme team did make this easier: I think the critical mass helped; it wasn’t just one hour a week, it was every day and at the weekend, that was one thing. There was also some staff support, apart from the producer. The leadership was good, they were aware of things, there was interest … It says something when the station manager rings you up at home at 8 o’clock in the morning and says, ‘This is a big story, what are you planning to do today?’. (Sharma, 2017)

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Even so, Anita Bhalla recalled that it remained a struggle to get the BBC Radio WM newsroom to take the Asian programmes seriously and it still relied on Asian teams taking the first step: Nobody in the newsroom ever left us any relevant stories, or any relevant material we could share from the daytime. That only shifted when I joined full time because I then started to attend morning [news] meetings. I would go to the meetings and say, ‘these are the stories that the Asian Network is looking at’ and we were coming up with some really good journalistic stuff. And suddenly the newsroom sat up, they were interested because they wanted to steal our stories and it took a long time for it to be a two-way process. Even though I presented the drivetime programme five nights a week, I would always make a point of coming back in for the morning meeting, pushing the agenda that we were pushing and grabbing the stories that I thought we could put on the Asian Network. (Bhalla, 2017)

However, once the BBC Radio WM journalists realised the range of material that was available—and management had made it clear that the station needed to engage with all of the ethnic communities in the West Midlands—it became easier for Bhalla and her growing team: My aim was to get the stories we were putting out on the Asian Network on to ‘mainstream’, and I think I and my team achieved that. Often, we were leading the agenda in the mornings … There was a ‘lightbulb moment’ for our colleagues in the newsroom at BBC WM … we were able to get in young people like Reeta Chakrabarti and Sonia Deol and train them to ask the difficult questions … It took a long time for people to realise that we had a great story to tell and that we had a great following. (Bhalla, 2017)

This included tackling difficult issues and that meant Asian programmes were now challenging local communities and were no longer just a vehicle for entertainment or cultural reinforcement. In the mid-1990s Sanjiv Buttoo moved from BBC Radio Leeds to BBC Radio Lancashire as Assistant Editor and brought a more contemporary sound to a range of long-running Asian programmes. As Assistant Editor he first tackled a review of contracts of the Asian team that he felt was long overdue: What some Asian people will do is say ‘they’re picking on me because they’re racist’, so white managers tended to leave Asian staff alone because they’re afraid of being accused of being racist … so we didn’t renew a contract and

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I told him [the station manager] don’t worry, they won’t accuse you of being racist because I’ve done it. (Buttoo, 2018)

The harder journalistic edge Buttoo brought to programmes at BBC Radio Lancashire was not without a personal cost: We were covering subjects like radical Islam—this is going back to the mid-­1990s—we were speaking to groups who are now banned on air, we invited them in for discussions … we were tackling topics then which were very controversial, and I was saying to my presenters ‘this is what we are here for’ … we had to be brave. My car was vandalised, I was thumped outside the station, I was sworn at and called names because of some of the subjects we were doing. (Buttoo, 2018)

As a new presenter in the late 1980s at BBC Radio Leicester, Kamlesh Purohit also wanted to shake things up a little from some of the programmes that he found ‘a little boring’, and he had a clear idea of what he and his colleagues wanted to do: Issues like arranged marriages were starting to be discussed for the very first time and we were starting to discuss issues that were relevant to the second-­ generation British Asians. I remember we were getting phone calls—quite nasty phone calls—from community leaders saying when you start talking about forced marriages and things even like incest, it’s like hanging our dirty linen in public. There was a lot of anger about us tarnishing an image, but these things were going on and we could see that, and we felt there was a hypocrisy there. (Purohit, 2022)

When BBC Radio London had been relaunched as BBC GLR in 1989, it did so with a programme philosophy of covering the issues and concerns of BAME communities across the daytime programmes and dropped all minority programming. The new management team of Matthew Bannister and Trevor Dann inherited a station without a strong heritage of local Asian programming. There was no local programme team as the existing one-hour programme London Sounds Eastern had since 1976 been produced by BBC staffers in other London departments. In the early 1990s BBC GLR reversed its decision and built up new strands of minority programming, and Saadia Usmani and Smita Barcha at Radio Bedfordshire were on the radar:

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We were told Mathew Bannister and Trevor Dann at the time were looking at recordings, I think they got cassettes from across the UK at the time … and we were told they wanted to do Smit’ Petite [and the Karachi Kid] and we were thrilled, you know. It eventually got to two hours that we did. It just took time for people to know it was going on … I think the London audience was a little more advanced, modern or whatever the word would be … and because we were London, we were able to get people the biggest stars and the latest bands to come in, so we started this platform for new people to come on board. (Usmani, 2019)

The programme was ‘networked’ to BBC Radio Kent and BBC Radio Bedfordshire from BBC GLR, but because it was no longer out in ‘the regions’ and broadcast in London it attracted press attention. It received very positive reviews in an article in the Times Educational Supplement titled ‘Bubbly Time with Bhangra Pop’, which said it was ‘lively and unself-conscious’ and not afraid to tackle both light and difficult subjects (Self, TES, 1989). Looking back, Usmani now regrets that despite her staff job at BBC Radio Bedfordshire she did not get involved elsewhere on BBC GLR as she felt the programme was not fully connected to the station. There was, however, a clear connection with the audience and, like other programmes presented by young British Asians, it did not shy away from challenging stories: Taboo subjects that you probably didn’t hear before, that you hadn’t heard Asian people talk about openly in their community … there was a lot of outrage on a lot of topics. It was mainly the older audience that didn’t like that and objected to it quite strongly. We created these ties with people … Because we were also quite sensitive on difficult issues, kids used to come on and say, ‘Well, should I have a love marriage, do you think my parents will object?’, and yet I can’t believe that those subjects … I thought that now thirty years on we may have progressed, and we have to a certain extent, but you know—it’s not. People are still living with those things. (Usmani, 2022)

While some people were able to move into the BBC staff jobs in either Asian programming or elsewhere on stations, others still felt they were left on the outside, marginalised by an unresponsive management. This was certainly the case for Satvinder Rana and his team at BBC Radio Derby: It was a closet programme. You weren’t ever part of the BBC or the station here, so you were the kind of people who came on a voluntary basis, and

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you’d come a couple of hours before the show went on air, do your programme and go and that was it. (Rana, 2022)

Just like others interviewed in this chapter, a career in the BBC was something that Rana aspired to: From when I started to about 1984, I wanted to build it as a career. When I went for my two weeks’ training at the BBC in London, to Langham Place, I thought, this is great; I want to do this. But the opportunities weren’t there, or if they were, we weren’t able to access them … nobody was mentoring you so that guidance wasn’t there. (Rana, 2022)

Looking back, Rana says he would have been more forceful in pushing his case, and recognises that in the 2020s things have improved in terms of opportunities in broadcasting: You dreamt about being a broadcaster, you dreamt about being a radio or television presenter … but because you are not trained, and you don’t know what your capabilities are, nobody is advising you or mentoring you or saying, ‘Hang on, we can help you to get to where you want to be”. Ever since the advancement of Asian broadcasting, not just in the BBC but also Asian community stations and magazines, I think that industry has mushroomed. Now it’s still not there to earn a living necessarily, not for many people, but it’s a good training ground. So, I look at a lot of Asian channels; they can’t pay their presenters in the way that the BBC can, but they do provide training opportunities. (Rana, 2022)

What Rana experienced was not unusual, and recent studies still show inequality in terms of ethnicity and career progression within the BBC (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 75). As Chap. 3 on BBC policies has shown, the BBC has always talked strongly on better representation on air and within its own workforce, but results have been patchy. A submission to a House of Lords Committee on the ‘Future of Journalism’ by former senior BBC journalist Barnie Choudhury noted that a Freedom of Information Request he had made to the BBC revealed that twenty-nine different diversity schemes had been set up by the corporation between 1995 and 2010. Choudhury went on to argue: The fact it [the BBC] still has a problem with racial representation at senior leadership levels suggests something is not working. From experience and

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through academic research, I concluded that while senior managers, from the director general to the 100 top leaders, were invested, the problem was with the job and budget holders. These gatekeepers simply did not understand the need for diversity … who kept their hands firmly on their powerful lever in the shut position. (Choudhury, 2020)

This observation by Choudhury is something that was recognised by Anita Bhalla at Pebble Mill, the BBC’s production centre in Birmingham in the late 1980s. Bhalla told me that working with the Asian programme team at BBC Radio WM she felt unrepresented in the rest of the building: We were based in Pebble Mill and whole of Pebble Mill was predominantly white—apart from the Asian Unit and the Caribbean Unit. I remember sitting upstairs in the canteen on the seventh floor with Colin Prescott one lunch time because Colin and I had started talking about how we push diversity across BBC Midlands. We sat there one day and thought we don’t see people like us—Colin’s got dreadlocks and I’m obviously not white and a woman—and we’d sit there and think ‘where are the rest of the people like us?’ (Bhalla, 2017).

A signal that diversity was beginning to be taken more seriously by the BBC was the appointment of Surinder Sharma as Head of Equality and Diversity for BBC Television in 1990, where he observed the magnitude of his challenge and the lack of a base to build on: One of the huge challenges was that the only black people you saw in television were either the cleaners, or the catering staff, or security. You didn’t see people in programme making or presenting that were from these communities at all. (Surinder Sharma, 2018)

For Bhalla the early impressions of Surinder Sharma exactly echoed her own experience of diversity—or lack of it—in the West Midlands: There was no commitment to it. There was no understanding of it. There was nobody keeping their eye on the ball at a senior level. There was no real commitment to say this is good for the BBC, because there’s a pool of stories out there, there’s a pool of talent out there and if you look at the numbers in our inner cities particularly, they’re the future generations. I don’t think anyone from the BBC was keeping an eye on the future demographics and how they were changing under our noses at the time—not future proofing itself enough to see how it works with those audiences. (Bhalla, 2017)

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After the BBC Asian Network, Bhalla became Head of Political and Community Affairs for BBC English Regions and worked to improve diversity across local radio and regional television. But in the end, she agreed with the suggestion of Director General Greg Dyke that the BBC was ‘hideously white’: If you take the Asian Network away, Greg was right, it was hideously white. What managers cleverly did was put the Asian Network into their figures [staff diversity figures] and everybody wanted a bit of the Asian Network then. But I think Greg saw through that, he did challenge people to say no, and the BBC did then drop the Asian Network from its figures. (Bhalla, 2017)

Conclusion The experience of these pioneers of Asian programming is enlightening and it is possible to argue that they succeeded in their careers, despite the BBC rather than being facilitated by it. The negative aspects they endured including the racism they experienced on station and the lack of support some received in trying to join the BBC full time asks difficult questions of the BBC as an organisation. Their evidence is troubling and should challenge the BBC today over a continued lack of diversity—especially in senior roles. The lack of black and Asian decision makers at the top of the BBC, the drip feed of reports analysing failures of diversity and the myriad of new and ongoing corporate diversity initiatives beg the question, does the BBC reach the Macpherson threshold of ‘institutional racism’ as defined by Parliament: The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people. (UK Parliament, 2021)

Anita Bhalla, who after leaving the BBC has established successful senior non-executive roles in a range of cultural, academic and arts institutions is in no doubt that the tag of institutional racism should apply to the corporation:

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Absolutely. It’s an institution where racism has not been dealt with; some of its procedures and practices make it racist. Like recruitment and who and when and how do people recruit in their own image, and developing talent, who and why and where do they develop talent? In management skills there is not that competency, apart from some very vocal managers that are visible, that competency on race—and gender—doesn’t spread right through the organisation, so it makes those procedures institutionally racist and sexist. (Bhalla, 2022)

I believe that Bhalla is correct in her portrayal of the BBC, and as a former station manager of three BBC local stations, whilst I find it difficult to accept that she is right, the overwhelming evidence in this and other chapters suggests she is. This conclusion is also supported by research from Birmingham City University on the diversity of leaders in BBC news which found: Systemic and cultural barriers to career progression for BAME staff were identified as continuing to restrict the progression of diverse candidates into senior roles in Radio News. These include the existence of a ‘BBC type’ groomed for management, un-conscious bias in the selection of candidates and other recruitment practices causing structural issues with recruitment and career progression process. (Robinson, 2021)

In addition, experiences such as that of Marcus Ryder, whose appointment to the role of Executive Editor of news for BBC Radio One and BBC Asian Network was claimed to have been blocked by the BBC because of his record in campaigning for greater diversity in broadcasting, do not assist the cause of the corporation (Chappell, The Times, 2021). Even though as Barling argues the BBC has made ‘steady institutional progress’ in reflecting the broad changes in British society, too often it relies on ‘intervention by individuals’ to drive change (Barling, 2022). Ofcom has also recognised a ‘new impetus’ on diversity by the BBC and whilst noting this is being led from the top by Director General Tim Davie, it argues that for the BBC in reflecting on diversity there is too much of a concentration on ‘what the activities are rather than the impact they have’ (Ofcom, 2020b, p. 71). It is to the credit of people like Vijay Sharma, Anita Bhalla and Perminder Khatkar that they persevered to get into the BBC and set about trying to change it from the inside. Equally deserving recognition are Sanjiv Buttoo in Leeds and Kamlesh Purohit in Leicester who both rose to

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become the station managers of BBC stations covering the areas in which they grew up—determining the editorial direction of the BBC locally. Collectively, the individual efforts of young British Asians across England resulted in the emergence of a new ‘British Asian sound’. It embraced change and challenged the status quo on social values within the South Asian diaspora through the tackling of previously taboo subjects. The fact that by the 1990s in Leicester and the West Midlands there was a recognition that a ‘network’ of local Asian programmes was needed suggests a realignment of the BBC’s priorities. Without the work of these pioneers there would have been no BBC Asian Network for Greg Dyke to pass on to network radio in 2002 and no ‘British Asian sound’ that so dominates the network today. For Vijay Sharma, the first Managing Editor of the BBC Asian Network, who with Greg Dyke took the station into network radio there is no doubting the pride in, and the importance of, the difference that she and her colleagues made: Putting together something which people are listening to even today, which has evolved over time and brought in so much talent. Broadcasting careers have been made and people got their break and first opportunity through the Asian Network. And then every now and then to actually challenge the establishment, so the proposed closure of the Asian Network—I feel quite proud that I wasn’t afraid, I was brave enough to say ‘actually, you’ve got this wrong’. To stand up when it matters’. (Sharma, 2022)

However, even for Sharma there are some question marks over the direction of the BBC Asian Network as it targets a young audience of under thirty-fives: It is still going, and I think it will keep going. But they do need to reassess who they are targeting and whether that target audience is consuming the editorial in the same way they think they are. (Sharma, 2022)

Rupal Rajani, who was one of the early BBC Asian Network presenters, agrees that the station needs to address its targeting of under thirty-fives: I don’t listen to it … I’m not their target audience, it doesn’t appeal to me, the music doesn’t appeal to me, the presenters don’t appeal to me, and I don’t think the topics appeal to me either. It should be doing a hell of a lot more. I would change some of the evenings and weekends … it’s alienating

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a lot of people and this ethos of, you know, ‘you’ve got to be younger; you’ve got to be younger’ … why? (Rajani, 2022)

These questions faced by BBC radio around Asian programming are explored in the final chapter which argues that they are much the same as the corporation faced in 1965. Should the BBC recognise the cultural and language heritage of the South Asian diaspora and provide separate targeted radio services, or should it ensure the whole of its radio output covers the interests of minority communities sufficiently that targeted programmes become redundant?

References Anwar, M. (1978). Who Tunes Into What? Commission for Racial Equality. Anwar, M. (1983). Ethnic Minority Broadcasting. Commission for Racial Equality. Aujla-Sidhu, G. (2021). The BBC Asian Network: The Cultural Production of Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan. Barling, K. (2022). Putting the Black in Britain Back on the BBC. Critical Studies in Television, 17(2), 154–169. BBC WAC. (1986). File R9/327/1, BBC Audience Research Reports, Radio Leicester Listening Amongst Asians, 85/92, October. Chappell, P. (2021, October 21). Marcus Ryder: Leading Black Figures Join Row over BBC Executive “blocked” from Job. The Times. Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/marcus-­r yder-­leading-­ black-­figures-­join-­row-­over-­bbc-­executive-­blocked-­from-­job-­kzftpt5vn Choudhury, B. (2020). Written Evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Future of Journalism. Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/10092/pdf/ CRE. (1979). Broadcasting in a Multi-Racial Society: The CRE’s response the White Paper on Broadcasting. Commission for Racial Equality. Hartmann, P., & Husband, C. (1974). Racism & the Mass Media: A Study of the Role of the Mass Media in the Formation of White Beliefs and attitudes in Britain. Davis-Poynter. Hendy, D. (2022). The BBC: A People’s History. Profile. Husband, C. (1975). White Media & Black Britain, A Critical Look at the Media in Race Relations Today. Arrow. Leicester City Council. (1984). The Survey of Leicester. Leicester. Marett, V. (1989). Immigrants Settling in the City. Leicester University Press. McCarthy, L. (2018). ‘BBC Radio Leicester in 1976: Kick Starting British Asian Radio. Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 25(2), 269–283.

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McCarthy, L. (2021). The National Front and the BNP in Leicester and Leicestershire. University of Leicester. Retrieved October 21, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.14685870.v2 Ofcom. (2019). Diversity and Equal Opportunities in Radio: Monitoring Report on the UK Radio Industry. Retrieved October 21, 2022, from https://www. ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0022/159421/diversity-­i n-­ radio-­2019-­report.pdf Ofcom. (2020a). Diversity and Equal Opportunities in Television and Radio 2019/20: Report on the UK Based Broadcasting Industry. Retrieved October 21, 2022, from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0022/ 207229/2019-­20-­report-­diversity-­equal-­opportunities-­tv-­and-­radio.pdf Ofcom. (2020b). Ofcom’s Annual Report on the BBC 2019/20. Retrieved October 28, 2022, from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_ file/0021/207228/third-­bbc-­annual-­report.pdf Robinson, N. (2021). Diversity of Senior Leaders in BBC News, Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, Birmingham City University. Retrieved October 31, 2022, from https://bcuassets.blob.core.windows.net/docs/csu2021324-­ lhc-­report-­robinsonv5-­91221-­1-­132835986558468429.pdf Schaffer, G. (2014). The Vision of a Nation: Making Multiculturalism on British Television, 1960–1980. Palgrave Macmillan. Self, D. (1989, March 24). Bubbly Time with Bhangra Pop. Times Educational Supplement, p. 18. Starkey, G. (2015). Local Radio: Going Global. Palgrave Macmillan. UK Parliament. (2021). The Macpherson Report: Twenty Years On. Retrieved October 21, 2022, from https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/ cmselect/cmhaff/139/13911.htm

Interviewees Ainger, G. (2017). Former Community Producer, BBC Radio Leicester, Face-to-­ face Interview, February 7. Bentley, O. (2018). Former Station Manager BBC Radio Leicester & Head of Radio (Midlands), Face-to-face Interview, November 22, 2016 & October 22, 2018. Bhalla, A. (2017). Former Assistant Editor, BBC Asian Network in Birmingham & Head of Political and Community Affairs, BBC English Regions, Face-to-face Interviews, May 5, 2017 & October 31, 2022. Bilal. (2022). (Name Withheld), Former BBC Journalist, Face-to-face Interview, May 5. Buttoo, S. (2018). Managing Editor, BBC Radio Leeds, former Senior Journalist, BBC Radio Leeds & Assistant Editor, BBC Radio Lancashire, Face-to-face Interview, July 12.

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Khatkar, P. (2022). Former Senior Journalist BBC Asian Network, Face-to-face Interview, March 30. Kotak, D. (2017). Former Presenter BBC Radio Leicester and Owner of Sabras Radio, Leicester, Face-to-face Interview, August 3. Patel, D. (2019). Former Sports Journalist, BBC Asian Network, Face-to-face Interview, January 11. Purohit, K. (2022). Former Presenter, BBC Radio Leicester, Journalist, BBC Asian Network & Managing Editor, BBC Radio Leicester, Face-to-face Interviews, December 11, 2018 & April 7, 2022. Rahman, M. (2022). Former Presenter BBC Radio Leicester, & Online Journalist, BBC Asian Network, Face-to-face Interview, May 30. Rajani, R. (2022). Former presenter, Sabras Sound, & Presenter BBC Radio Leicester, Face-to-face Interviews, June 20, 2018 & May 14, 2022. Rana, S. (2022). Presenter, BBC Radio Derby, Face-to-face Interviews, September 8, 2018 & March 16, 2022. Sharma S. (2018). Former Head of Diversity for BBC Television, Face-to-face Interview, June 20. Sharma, V. (2022). Former Head of BBC Asian Network, Face-to-face Interviews, September 17, 2017 & October 13, 2022. Usmani, S. (2022). Former Presenter, BBC Radio Bedfordshire, Face-to-face Interviews, March 1, 2019 & September 12, 2022.

CHAPTER 6

Networking the British Asian Sound: The BBC Asian Network and BBC Local Radio

When Greg Dyke was appointed Director General of the BBC in 2000, he brought a new focus on diversity to an organisation which he believed was failing both its black and Asian staff and its licence fee payers. As DG designate he used his keynote speech at the Race in the Media Awards in 1999 to promise that he would lead a BBC ‘where diversity is seen as an asset not an issue or a problem’ (Newton, 2011, p. 221). An outsider with a background in commercial television, Dyke brought a swashbuckling style to what he described as a stuffy and overly bureaucratic BBC with his ‘cut the crap: make it happen’ campaign and a drive for creativity (Wells, 2002). According to Sir Christopher Bland, the Chairman of the BBC at the time, Dyke could not have been more different to his predecessor John Birt: ‘One’s a roundhead, the other’s a cavalier’ (Higgins, 2015, p. 96), so during the unusual long changeover between directors general Dyke spent as much time as possible out of London and away from Birt. He used his time to visit many of the BBC’s local radio stations in England where in the cramped, ramshackle and decrepit city-centre base of BBC Radio Leicester he encountered the BBC Asian Network. Formed in 1989 by the amalgamation of Asian programmes from BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio West Midlands (WM), a decade later it was a full stand-alone station operating on a shoe-string budget as part of the BBC local radio family. Dyke expressed his surprise to Vijay Sharma, its Managing Editor, that the BBC Asian Network was still part of local radio, suggesting that it © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. McCarthy, Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35620-9_6

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was ‘not a good fit’, and that it should become a network radio station (Sharma, 2022). By moving the line management and control of the station to network radio, Dyke made an early step towards one of his key objectives of broadening the diversity of the BBC’s network radio staff and programming. He also ensured the budget of the BBC Asian Network rose considerably to reach £13m a year as a reflection of the importance he placed on the BBC’s connection with Asian licence fee payers (Plunkett, 2010). Over the next twenty years the decision taken by Dyke to move the BBC Asian Network to the control of network radio in London was to have a profound effect on the BBC’s services to the South Asian diaspora. The settled position that had evolved in the 1970s of the responsibility for Asian programming being left to BBC local radio was reversed as network radio now became the principal provider. As a result, with local stations under constant financial pressure and some of their AM transmitters now home to the BBC Asian Network, the local commitment to provide Asian programming was reduced. The hours of Asian programming broadcast on BBC local radio dropped dramatically from over two hundred hours a week in 1994 to under twenty hours in 2022 (BBC Sounds, 2022b). The move of the BBC Asian Network to network left local Asian programmes vulnerable to cuts, and the wider South Asian diaspora more reliant on network radio. The problem of this over-reliance on network radio became apparent after Dyke’s resignation from the BBC, when in 2009 the closure of the BBC Asian Network was proposed on the grounds that it was too expensive. The station only survived after the internal intervention of the station Editor, Vijay Sharma, and a long public campaign. After a closure process that took almost two years, the station was eventually reprieved by the BBC Trust (Aujla-Sidhu, 2017, p. 109). In the 2020s, stripped of its local roots, the BBC Asian Network focusses on serving young British Asians aged under thirty-five, pulling out of mother tongue language programmes, ending its religious output, reducing its speech content and building a music policy that moved away from ‘Asian only’ music (Green, 2018). The reduction of the speech content on the BBC Asian Network is a cause of concern for British Asians, a concern articulated by former presenter Nihal Arthanayake of BBC Five Live who has argued there must be ‘a live space for the different Asian communities to challenge, share and debate’ (Biz Asia, 2022). In BBC local radio a focus on providing diverse content across the day led by black, Asian and minority ethnic presenters and producers has left programming for minority audiences—including

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South Asians—back in the margins of the schedule. Six decades after the BBC broadcast Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye on the BBC Light Programme in 1965, it seems the corporation still cannot decide if it should provide targeted programming for South Asian communities on radio or leave it to the general output in network and local radio to address their needs. This chapter will therefore examine three key questions that the BBC has struggled to answer since 2002 when the BBC Asian Network became a national network. Firstly, how did a young ‘British Asian sound’ come to dominate the BBC Asian Network? Secondly, how did the audience figures of the BBC Asian Network drive change to the pursuit of a younger British Asian audience at the expense of the wider interests of the South Asian diaspora in Britain? And thirdly, where does BBC local radio with its heritage of British Asian programming now fit in the new ecology of national and local Asian services? It will conclude that the current programming footprint of Asian programme is part of an overall picture that portrays the BBC as ‘institutionally racist’ and therefore still failing the South Asian diaspora. The BBC has effectively pushed some of its responsibilities as a public service broadcaster on to local commercial and community radio stations which do not have the budgets to provide strong independent journalism. However, using a refreshed BBC Asian Network and its online platforms the BBC could still build on its local and network radio legacy to rebuild strong connections with the South Asian licence fee payers who remain underserved.

How Did the ‘British Asian sound’ Come to Dominate the BBC Asian Network? In 2016 targeted audiences to BBC television and in cinemas first saw an advertisement for the BBC Asian Network designed to appeal to British Asians aged sixteen to thirty-four. It was given high profile promotional slots on BBC 1 and BBC 2 around hit shows The Great British Bake Off, Eastenders and Match of the Day in an effort to connect with young British Asians (Green, 2018). It featured British Asian rapper Raxstar walking through both public and private settings showing that young British Asians are inspired by Asian culture but not defined by it: I am more than a beard or the nation’s favourite dish. There’s four million ways of understanding what British Asian is … We are everything the past

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has made us and we are the future. We found a place to call our own, not one city or one town. (YouTube, 2016)

The film ends with Raxstar delivering the tagline ‘you know what British Asian looks like … this is how it sounds’, before fading to black and displaying the phrase ‘THIS IS THE BRITISH ASIAN SOUND’ in large white capital letters and freezing on the BBC Asian Network logo (YouTube, 2016). This promotional film was a public confirmation that the BBC Asian Network was moving in a new direction, away from its BBC local radio roots and the previous broad ‘family’ approach of trying to offer something for all age groups. The ‘British Asian sound’ developed and nurtured by young second-generation British Asians in the 1980s and 1990s was now deemed ‘too old’ and had evolved into a new sound that was the British Asian equivalent of BBC 1Xtra, the BBC’s digital black music station. As a music station it tries to capture the essence of this fresh British Asian sound that has been developed by third and fourth generation British Asians. However, as Vijay Sharma had pointed out in her first encounter with the BBC at Radio Leicester in 1976, ‘there is more to us than just music’ (Sharma, 2017), and this emphasis on targeting the under thirty-fives has effectively decoupled the BBC Asian Network from significant sections of the Asian diaspora. The rise of the ‘British Asian sound’ described in the previous chapters accelerated with the launch of the new BBC Asian Network in the Midlands in Leicester and the West Midlands in 1989. This new ‘station’ was a product of policies by BBC managers in the Midlands to build up an extensive range of output by combining local Asian shows on BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio WM into a ‘network’ of fifty-seven hours a week of programming. Crucially, a new late-night ‘youth orientated’ sequence called Eastern Beat was shared across the region, and having young British Asian presenters and producers in Leicester and Birmingham brought a creative and competitive edge to the range and quality of British Asian music and journalism on offer (Purohit, 2022; Khatkar, 2022). The new ‘station’ also featured the heritage sound of the Six O’clock Show on BBC Radio Leicester and East in West on BBC Radio WM, new language programmes and BBC World Service news bulletins in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. But it was youth and the new Eastern Beat that dominated the schedule, accounting for half of the total output in the early 1990s. The major factor that led to the setting up of the BBC Asian Network in the Midlands rather than in London was the critical mass of young

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British Asian talent working at BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio WM. The number of young British Asians on each station had steadily increased during the late 1980s and through senior Asian staff pushed station managers for more output. In contrast, there was no local Asian programme team at BBC Radio London; the single hour-long programme London Sounds Eastern was presented by a BBC staffer who recorded the programme elsewhere and dropped the tape off at reception for broadcast. New management of BBC Radio London therefore decided to drop all ethnic programming—including London Sounds Eastern—in 1988 when they relaunched the station as BBC GLR, but in the early 1990s they reversed this decision and bought in programmes from BBC Radio Bedfordshire to network across the South East. Later in the 1990s the station built a number of highly regarded ethnic minority programmes although by this time much of the Asian audience were already served by full-time ethnic stations in the capital such as Sunrise Radio. From 1988 and the relaunch as BBC GLR, the local policy of the station management was to aim to place stories and issues affecting ethnic minorities across daytime output, a policy which in the 2020s is the default across BBC local radio stations (Ofcom, 2017, p. 4). The contradictory strategies in London and the rest of the country would continue to play out across BBC local radio in the 1990s as stations in the Midlands and North developed their Asian programming as a gateway for audiences and new talent. This move towards a policy of ‘cultural diversity’ where ‘racial/ ethnic diversity is just one of many diversities incorporated into the mainstream’ is still a live issue, as will be seen later in the chapter when assessing how BBC local radio should connect with local Asian communities in the 2020s (Saha, 2018, p.  58). However, in the late 1980s the decision by local management not to launch significant new Asian programming on BBC GLR has delivered a demonstrable legacy of lower radio listening to the BBC by South Asians in the capital (BBC English Regions, 2022). At the beginning of the twenty-first century the BBC Asian Network, still operating out of Leicester and Birmingham, was a full-time station with evening output shared across AM transmitters of seven local radio stations in the Midlands and the North of England. It was not broadcast by BBC GLR as the BBC had surrendered its AM transmitter to the Radio Authority for new commercial stations in the capital. Londoners therefore had to wait for the BBC Asian Network to broadcast on satellite in 1999 and then DAB in 2002 to hear it. Being based in the Midlands allowed the

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BBC Asian Network to develop under the radar of the BBC in London as Vijay Sharma, the first Managing Editor, recalled: Because we were part of the local radio offering, its partly because of that. Local radio only got a look in when it suited the BBC in London. (Sharma, 2017)

That sentiment was confirmed more forcefully by Perminder Khatkar, one of the senior producers on the BBC Asian Network in Birmingham: It really used to piss me off, to be honest. We were tick boxes, and because we were doing it, they just let us get on with it. There wasn’t any real interest in making sure the rest of the BBC took notice. We were based in the Midlands and back then the BBC was very London-centric, so if it wasn’t happening in London nobody cared. (Khatkar, 2022)

However, there were some early links with network radio, including a mid-1990s Friday night simulcast of Eastern Beat on BBC Radio Five. This was part of a late-night mix of programmes from the BBC’s ‘nations and regions’. The networked Eastern Beat was co-presented by Perminder Khatkar: They [Radio 5] decided the voice of the Midlands should reflect more diversity and they chose the Midlands to present the Asian perspective and chose the Eastern Beat programme. They wanted not just Bhangra but also a speech element … and I was there at the right time, a bit gobby, chatty, and we did a phone-in. Danny Choranji, who was a well-known Bhangra artist did the Bhangra bit and big-star interviews and they had this opinionated side presenter who would come in and do the phone-in element and we did issues that you never heard on the radio before … Because it was late-night radio every week, we would go on and talk about issues like sex and virginity and all the issues you now see on BBC 3. (Khatkar, 2022)

For the most part, the BBC Asian Network like its local radio compatriots continued as a ‘semi-detached’ network out on the margins of the BBC. Nevertheless, operating in its own Midlands base it was successful at reaching its target audience. RAJAR listening research at the end of 1997 showed that the station was adding almost 200,000 listeners from the South Asian diaspora to the reach of BBC radio, with 67,000 listeners in the East Midlands and 114,000 in the West Midlands (BBC, 2001). The

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influence of the Eastern Beat programme and its emphasis on youth was the strength of the connections it was building with young British Asians. In 1998 Perminder Khatkar built on this legacy by producing a new programme called The Edge which featured music with English lyrics, and it was this music that became a battleground on the station: I created a programme in Birmingham called The Edge which was late-night listening and we decided we were going to play songs in English that people were starting to mix at the time, but we had a quota of songs in English we could play. Then as the years went by and people like Adil Ray were on air and it became even more important to be strong about the British Asian identity; it was always a battle over music. (Khatkar, 2022)

In 2001, as the station was preparing for its move to network radio, it was still reaching 38% of its target Asian audience in the Midlands, an audience that thanks to programmes like Eastern Beat and The Edge had an average age of thirty-six. A third of the audience was aged under twenty-four, significantly younger than the audiences to Asian commercial stations in the Midlands (BBC, 2001). It is somewhat ironic that a station that broadcast a range of programmes including BBC World Service bulletins in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali and mother-tongue language shows had an audience that was significantly younger than in 2021 when under one fifth (18.1%) of the audience is aged under twenty-four (BBC English Regions, 2022). Before the move by Greg Dyke to network the station on DAB radio, the station was made available on satellite and available on televisions across the UK. Once the station was available in London via satellite, its programmes began receiving national attention in the press. Sonia Deol, who had been recruited as a teenager as part of the West Midlands side of the BBC Asian Network in the early 1990s, was singled out for praise. A review in The Guardian described her mid-morning phone-in as ‘Populist and passionate radio at its best’, and continued: From the first moments of Sonia Deol’s mid-morning show, the BBC Asian Network felt vital in more ways than one … It was about time the BBC addressed its under-serving of the British Asian community. (Mahoney, 2001)

An important part of the service to local stations from Leicester was the provision of news bulletins and features in Bengali, Hindi and Urdu from the BBC World Service. This provision marked the BBC Asian Network

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out from the commercial competition and provided a counterbalance of BBC journalism to that of newspapers and radio stations from the subcontinent that were becoming available on the internet. As early as 1990 the BAPS service (Bush Asian Programme Service) in Leicester was sending out material from Bush House to fifteen local stations to include in their own Asian programming, and this continued into the early years of the network era. Greg Dyke, simultaneously fascinated and horrified, watched the BAPS team in action on one of his visits to Leicester, marvelling at the efficiency of the operation and the strategically placed buckets to catch rainwater from the leaking tenth floor roof of the radio station (Sharma, 2022). In his first speech to BBC staff, he suggested everyone should go to Leicester to see the appalling conditions that their fellow staff in local radio had to work in. The appointment of Greg Dyke as DG was the key to unlocking the true network potential of the BBC Asian Network. Vijay Sharma recalled his first visit to Leicester: So, Greg Dyke when he came to see us for the first time just dropped in on a Friday afternoon for a start. It was the first time any DG had bothered to come and talk to us. What struck was his informality, his willingness to learn and understand. He didn’t come in as an expert and he had a belief that the Asian Network had grown beyond its remit, ‘It’s a national station.’ He could not see a reason why we were not part of network radio. (Sharma, 2022)

The move by Dyke to bring the BBC Asian Network under the control of BBC Network Radio in 2002 saw the station funded properly for the first time with its budget rising to £13m by 2007/8 (Plunkett, 2010). The immediate effect of launching the station on DAB and the publicity it received was the first of three significant boosts to its audiences that the station has received. In autumn 2003 the number of listeners to the station effectively doubled to 500,000 with 129,000 listeners added in the north of England and a further 125,000 in London (BBC, 2004). Again, the youth of the audience was a striking feature of the listening figures, as was the difference in the age profile of the audience of the BBC Asian Network compared to Sunrise Radio—the most successful commercial Asian station. Over half the audience to the BBC Asian Network was under thirty-five years old (54.6%) compared to under a third (28.2%) for Sunrise (BBC, 2004). With bigger budgets, and bigger audiences, the move to network radio also brought greater scrutiny for Vijay Sharma:

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I think it was a bit of a culture shock if I’m honest, because up to then we were part of this big family who we knew by first names, who were very professional but chilled out and then you move into network radio where they were just different. They were welcoming, but you were among big players, and it was obvious this would require a different mindset. (Sharma, 2022)

There was considerable investment in the launch of the new DAB service, and a MORI opinion poll was commissioned for the launch. Designed to provide ‘news lines’ to the national press and complement the launch, the results showed that their British heritage was becoming more important to young British Asians, ‘A large majority believe that young British Asians belong to Britain than South Asian countries’ (66%) and they also felt ‘It is now more acceptable for young Asians to move away from the extended family to live in another town (59%), (MORI, 2002). The survey results and the youth of the audience to the station flagged the importance of serving young British Asians as part of the overall package of the new network. The second boost to audience figures took place in 2010 when The Times leaked a BBC strategy report that included the potential closure of the BBC Asian Network and BBC 6 Music (Curtis, 2015, p. 203). The closures were confirmed on 2 March 2010 by the BBC’s Director General Mark Thompson and almost immediately campaigns were organised by staff and the public to try and save both. Within a year both stations had experienced big increases to their audiences: the BBC Asian Network saw the number of listeners rise by a third to again reach nearly 500,000, whilst the audience to BBC 6 Music almost doubled to reach 1.1 million. With the closure plans the BBC had unleashed a barrage of newspaper coverage which had the immediate effect of providing weeks and months of free editorial publicity for the two stations. The proposed closure of the BBC Asian Network and its possible replacement with up to five local services in London, the West Midlands, Leicestershire, West Yorkshire and the Northwest seemed like a recipe to take Asian broadcasting back to the 1980s (Curtis, 2015, p. 200). Interviews and comment columns in the national and local press continually challenged the closure and attacked the BBC for its lack of support for Asian broadcasting. Writing in The Guardian, Nihal Arthanayake, the presenter of the BBC Asian Network’s mid-morning phone-in, was scathing of the BBC:

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The argument being made is that money is best spent by breaking up the network and allowing targeted programmes to be done locally. This ignores the reality that Britain’s Asian communities are not simply separated ­geographically or regionally. ‘Local’ is an attractive buzzword. But the connections are national. Until the details of the new plan are seen, I’m yet to be convinced it can better serve the Asian audience than the current national network. (Arthanayake, 2010)

The value for money of the radio station was the main argument that the BBC put forward in its plans for closure and comparing its ‘cost per listener hour’ to other national networks did make it look expensive. However, this may have not been a fair comparison; as Aujla-Sidhu has pointed out, a better comparison might have been made with the cost per listener hour of the language-specific services of Radio Cymru in Wales or BBC Radio nan Gaidheal in Scotland (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 112). In any event, it became clear that the BBC had done no new research or even small-scale focus group research into Asian listening habits, nor enquired what Asian communities wanted from the BBC, as Vijay Sharma, recalled: I was the lone voice that said, ‘I do not agree with this decision’. Having canvassed for opinions and support, I remember distinctly when I went to see Mark Thompson in his office, he was very civil, he listened to what I had to say, and he said, ‘Leave it with me, I’m going to think about this.’ The next thing, I was in this meeting where I was the only non-white person. There was Head of News, Head of Radio 4, Head of Network Radio, any Head you name, they were in that room. I told them the case for closing the Asian Network has not been made, where is the evidence, where is the homework, and Tim Davie [DG in 2022] who was the Head of Audio and Music at the time—to give him credit, he knew I had a dissenting view—and he took me into the meeting. (Sharma, 2022)

The staff at the BBC Asian Network faced an uncertain future even as BBC 6 Music was reprieved by the BBC.  In July 2010 the BBC Trust rejected the closure plans for BBC 6 Music but confirmed the closure plans for the BBC Asian Network (Curtis, 2015, p.  237). For the staff there was an immediate comparison to be made between the two stations, which as Aujla-Sidhu argues, suggested the BBC saw the BBC Asian Network as being of low value and low significance within the BBC hierarchy (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 115). This became evident in the sometimes-­ farcical alternatives that were examined for providing an alternative service

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of Asian broadcasting. A plan for five local Asian services and a hub for Asian journalism was rejected as it would leave large areas of the country underserved as transmitters were not available. The suggestion of building a central ‘Asian hub’ to provide content for the BBC networks would have been too costly and relied on network stations to commission and broadcast the content that was produced. There was even a plan to distribute programmes via television—as these became more fanciful they were each deemed demonstrably unworkable when they came up against the reality of costs, difficulties of distribution and accessibility for the audience (Curtis, 2015, p. 237). The result of a public consultation on the closure made uncomfortable reading for the BBC: feedback was overwhelmingly positive about the BBC Asian Network; respondents liked the journalism, the discussions around difficult topics and crucially they did not like expensive DAB radio sets—they wanted the station to be on FM or AM— ‘they said the BBC Asian Network did not exist in London, it was all Sunrise’ (Curtis, 2015, p. 227). It was not until 2011 that the BBC Trust announced a reprieve for the BBC Asian Network, and a year later in 2012 a Trust review of the station found it to be ‘performing well’ and ‘was highly valued’ by its listeners. It had taken almost three years from the closure proposal to the results of a review by the BBC Trust for the BBC to realise the value of the BBC Asian Network—had the process been reversed the station might never have faced calls for closure. This is another example of a largely white senior BBC management not considering the needs of Asian licence fee payers when making key decisions that might affect them. One of the recommendations by the Trust review was that while the station should continue with its ‘friend of the family’ strategy, it should ‘maintain a focus on its primary target audience of under thirty-­ fives’ (BBC Trust, 2012). This led the BBC Asian Network being forced down the road of aggressively targeting youth by its Controller Bob Shennan (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p.  109). By 2012 younger presenters had been hired, language programming dropped and the speech content reduced to be supplemented by an emphasis on digital content designed to appeal to second and third generation British Asians (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, p. 116). New and emerging British Asian music became the bedrock of the station, and ‘bhangra became the prime symbol’ (Bakrania, 2013, p. 200). The abortive closure caused much anxiety among staff and managed to give the impression that Asian licence fee payers were being targeted for service cuts, causing reputational damage to the BBC within

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the South Asian diaspora. Nevertheless, it had boosted awareness and listening figures for the station. The third boost to BBC Asian Network listening figures came in 2016 with the ‘British Asian sound’ campaign of 2015/2016. As audiences to the station began to dip again in 2015, including the proportion of the young target audience of eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds, the BBC decided to double down on targeting youth. Advertising and brand agency 101 was engaged by the BBC and set an objective to bring ‘a new, young British Asian audience’ to the station, although crucially it was given ‘no budget for research’ by the BBC (Green, 2018). To satisfy the BBC’s brief, the agency team ‘immersed’ themselves in the station, and particularly with the younger members of the network: We assembled a culturally diverse team and went to the station to chat to everyone from DJs to Asian work-experience students. We also listened to how influential British Asians define themselves—filmmakers, comedians, DJs, rappers, musicians, models—and found a confusion and tension surrounding identity. (Green, 2018)

These conversations with younger people produced an outcome that was only going to point one way—effectively to turn the BBC Asian Network into an ‘Asian 1xtra’, a black music station that the BBC viewed as successful. The campaign film was made for ten thousand pounds and was built around a concept that had emerged from the conversations with the young British Asians at the station and the young external people that the agency encountered—that they saw themselves as ‘100% British, 100% Asian’ (Green, 2018). The role of Raxstar in the film was tactically targeted at young Asians, and another huge publicity blitz about the new under thirty-fives sound of the BBC Asian Network was launched. The initial response to the campaign showed that younger people were listening and for longer (Green, 2018). By 2022 this impact had worn off and the station was once again losing listeners. When these changes are placed in the broader context of twenty years of RAJAR data and analysed alongside new contemporary data, it becomes clear that the exclusive targeting of British Asian youth by the BBC’s Asian Network is questionable. Despite this, the station has resolutely stuck with its commitment to target British Asian youth. On targeting and diversity, Perminder Khatkar, whilst clear that things have improved, argues the BBC has more to do in recognising South Asian talent:

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Just before I took redundancy, I’d done twenty-nine years in the BBC and all I have done is seen it go round and round in circles. Somebody said to me recently about diversity and I don’t think we’ve moved very far. We’ve done a little bit better, no we’ve done a lot better than when I first joined in 1990/91, but still in the early 2000s it was ‘let them get on with it’. But when we launched on DAB radio, that was when we started to set up a little satellite station in London and then it was ‘Oh, OK, have you got a bit more of this?. By the late 2000s people like Adil Ray, Anita Rani and Nihal were doing Desi DNA [on BBC TV] … and they suddenly realised Adil Ray could present and do a programme on Five Live, shock-horror, ‘oh he’s quite good’ and they suddenly woke up. (Khatkar, 2022)

As the BBC Asian Network begins its third decade as a network station, it is worth reflecting on its audience performance in the twenty years between 2002 and 2022 as it changed from a broadly targeted station aimed at the wider South Asian diaspora to one that is tightly focussed on reaching British Asians aged under thirty-five.

Driving Change to the BBC Asian Network: The Flawed Pursuit of a Young British Asian Audience In the twenty years after it was launched as a BBC network digital station in October 2002, there have been more than eighty quarterly sets of RAJAR listening figures produced for the BBC Asian Network—more than enough to test its reach in the South Asian diaspora (RAJAR, 2023). An analysis of these figures reveals that while they fluctuate, the station rarely has fewer than 400,000 or more than 600,000 listeners. To measure the audience figures for the BBC Asian Network four times a year, the industry body RAJAR places around 4,000 listening diaries within South Asian households for participants to record their listening. However, when recruiting participants for the RAJAR surveys no distinction is made between households that identify as being of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage. This lack of proportionality between ethnicity within the South Asian community may go some way to explaining the volatility of quarterly listening figures for the BBC Asian Network. Research by the CRE in the 1980s found that radio listening by members of the South Asian diaspora who were less fluent in English was much lower (Anwar, 1983, p.  14). Anwar found that respondents in Bangladeshi households

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were much less likely to listen to the radio: more than a third (36%) told interviewers that they did not have a radio in the home; this compared to Indian households where radio ownership was almost universal at 96%. The Ethnic Minorities Listening Report produced in 2021 for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) as part of its review of the radio market in the UK found that fewer than three quarters of Asians (72%) listened to the radio compared to eight out of ten (81%) in the rest of the population (Digital Radio UK, 2021). There is no new evidence on the disparity of listening between South Asian communities, but it may also go some way to explain the popularity of commercial and community stations that still broadcast in mother tongue languages, especially in London. As part of BBC network radio, the two listening boosts of the proposed closure in spring 2010 and the launch of the British Asian sound campaign in 2016 can be seen in Fig. 6.1. The listening boost to the closure plan shows a steady upward trend before plateauing in 2015 and 2016 at almost 600,000, a rise of a third since the low point of 2009. The impact of the British Asian campaign is real but not as sustained, with the audience for the station rising to nearly 700,000 by 2016. However, once the boost of the publicity around the new look to the station and the film by Raxstar had begun to fade, the

'British Asian Sound' Campaign

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Fig. 6.1  BBC Asian network average weekly listening figures 2003–2022: ‘000s. (Source: RAJAR)

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audience once again began to fall and by 2022 the BBC Asian Network was averaging fewer than 500,000 listeners, down a fifth from the highpoint of 2016. This suggests that publicity and active promotion have as much to do with the listening to the BBC Asian Network as the programmes, with the station still struggling to gain national attention among the BBC network radio family. Analysis of the station’s audience figures in the autumn of 2021 suggests the current targeting of under thirty-fives with an ‘Asian 1xtra’ is falling short. Three key factors bring into question the performance of the BBC Asian Network as a ‘young’ station: first, two thirds of its audience is aged over thirty-five; second, audience figures in London are a drag on the station’s performance; and third, the total audience is beginning to fall back (BBC English Regions, 2022). Research by BBC English Regions shows that eight out of ten of the 499,000 listeners to the BBC Asian Network in England live in the BBC local radio areas where substantial local Asian programming was broadcast in the 1980s, with the East and West Midlands remaining the heartland of the station (BBC English Regions, 2022). The Midlands account for under one fifth of the Asian population in England but achieve around two fifths (38.5%) of all listening to the station. In contrast, London and the South-East are underperforming, as Fig.  6.2 shows. More than one third (34%) of the Asian population in England live in the BBC Radio London area but less than a quarter (22.4%) of listening to the BBC Asian Network happens in the capital (RAJAR Q3, 2021; BBC English Regions, 2022). This not a station built on youth: six out of every ten (62.7%) of the listeners to the BBC Asian Network is older than the target age for the station of the under thirty-fives, and almost half of the audience (46.6%) is aged thirty-five to fifty-four (BBC English Regions, 2022). In the heartland areas where the audiences are largest, the proportion of young people listening to the station is even lower at one in eight (15.4%) in the West Midlands and one in five (19%) in Leicestershire. London may be a drag on the overall station figures but the audience in the capital is somewhat younger with three in ten (31.2%) being under thirty-five. As the BBC Asian Network continues to relentlessly target under thirty-fives, where does this leave older listeners? Are they once again underserved by the BBC? Interviews with broadcasters involved in making Asian programmes on BBC local radio and the BBC Asian Network suggest it does; while their views are personal, they all point to similar problems with targeting.

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40 35

% of Asian Population

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% of listening to BBC AN

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Fig. 6.2  Proportion of South Asian population v proportion of listening to BBC Asian network by selected English regions, Q3 2021. (Source: RAJAR Q3, 2021 (BBC English regions) & ONS Population Estimates, 2021)

For Kamlesh Purohit, who worked on Asian programmes at BBC Radio Leicester from the 1980s, targeting the under thirty-fives by the BBC Asian Network is problematical: It’s almost the equivalent of 1Xtra, and a lot of us at the time felt it was the wrong thing to do. I don’t think my kids have ever listened to an Asian Network programme in its entirety, because they are as British as you can get … their friends are English … when they decided to go really young, they only went for a very small percentage of the audience and alienated a huge percentage of that audience. I then presented an Asian programme on Radio Leicester because local people were telling me that the Asian Network didn’t serve them any more. (Purohit, 2022)

Perminder Khatkar, with her experience from the BBC Asian Network, also feels the young-audience target is a problem: On paper it makes sense: the Asian community is the youngest community, so therefore why are you doing programmes still in languages, why are you playing Lata Mangeshkar and all that stuff—you shouldn’t be, your presenters are too old … however, I argued that there was a loyal audience that had been listening for years; you can’t radically change it overnight. But that’s

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what they did. They alienated the core audience. Friends my age in their 50s do listen to the Asian Network, or if they want ‘proper’ Asian stuff they go back to Sabras or Sunrise or Punjab Radio. (Khatkar, 2022)

Vijay Sharma is more nuanced in her views of the station, but does ultimately believe the targeting of under thirty-fives should be re-examined: For a very long time there has been this argument to start segmenting the population, don’t try and be all things to everyone, target where there is the biggest demographic pool of people. This is a business case, so the station identity is more clearly defined, so that people know what they can expect, and when I’ve run the station—especially when we were part of network radio—I too subscribed to that point of view, up to a point. The reality, though, is that leaves a gap in the provision and that’s where commercial radio comes in and picks it up … and the BBC has allowed that to happen. They do need to think about who they are targeting and whether that target population is consuming the editorial in the same way as they think they are. (Sharma, 2022)

Despite her misgivings on the sole targeting of under thirty-fives, Sharma is in no doubt that the station still has a valuable role to play: I think there is room and scope for the Asian Network alongside Five Live, or Radio Four for that matter, that is reflective of the population it serves, so you hear the voices and you hear the topics. (Sharma, 2022)

Satvinder Rana was one of the team that broadcast Aaj Kal at BBC Radio Derby—one of the most influential radio shows promoting British Bhangra in the 1980s—and feels the time is right for the BBC to reconsider the older Asian audience: When we did it back in the eighties there was nothing else for young people. Now young people have got their phones, YouTube and all sorts of things, so I would question whether they are getting the engagement that they want and yet there are people forty-plus with time on their hands, money in their pocket, and now want to re-engage with their culture, and how do they do that? There isn’t a platform and I think the BBC’s missing a trick there. (Rana, 2022)

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The programme and targeting challenges that remain for the BBC Asian Network are just part of the equation facing the BBC; the other lies in the local radio services that until 2002 were the corporation’s principal connection with Asian communities. When the BBC Asian Network was moved to become part of the BBC’s network radio portfolio, it gave station managers in BBC local radio a dilemma: should they continue to invest in Asian programming as before or should they recognise that the new network station should carry the major load for the BBC’s engagement with the South Asian diaspora?

Where Should BBC Local Radio Fit in to the 2020s Ecology of National and Local Asian Services? In the twenty years since the BBC Asian Network was established as part of the BBC’s national networks, the hours of Asian programmes on BBC local radio have reduced from more than two hundred hours a week to twenty. This was something predicted by Anita Bhalla in 2002 when the BBC Asian Network was removed from the local radio family by Greg Dyke: I think the saddest thing was the Asian Network gave local radio a get-out clause. Because there was the Asian Network, you don’t have to have any programmes that target your local community. That was sad for two reasons: the Asian Network was moving away from local communities … so those local communities suffered, and if those communities didn’t have a local programme, they had no reason to listen to local radio. (Bhalla, 2017)

When it switched to network radio, the BBC Asian Network took with it the critical mass of South Asian staff that had been active in local radio stations, especially in Leicester and the West Midlands. These staff had brought cultural diversity into the everyday production processes of the radio stations, something described by Campion as essential (Campion, 2006, p. 76). In 2022 only nine BBC local radio stations still broadcast Asian programmes: Derby, CWR, Lancashire, Leicester, Manchester, Northampton, Nottingham, Three Counties and WM. All the programmes are presented in English with the BBC leaving mother tongue language presentation to the independent sector, which has grown dramatically in the last two decades. There are also black programmes totalling twentyfive hours each week on eleven BBC local stations—the nine stations above plus BBC Radio Berkshire and Radio Bristol. In late 2023 all these local

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programmers will be made regional—a significant loss to local communities. Perhaps the strangest programmes are those on six BBC local stations that target ‘all ethnic minorities’ together in one sequence; this seems at face value to be a token nod to diversity (BBC Sounds, 2022b). Taken together, these targeted programmes added value to listeners through the BBC journalism they contain, though they are designed to complement rather than compete with local Asian commercial and community stations. These are programmes that Vijay Sharma believes should continue, arguing that her local station BBC Radio Leicester is right to do so: So, we are now talking about a minority-majority city here. There’s a strand of argument which says that most of the output should be reflective of the community it’s serving, and I think that is the case when it comes to the case of conversation, news and discussion. When it comes to music, I think it’s less comfortable in playing something which is not English and therefore I think there is room for Asian programming that they do quite rightly on Thursday. But when I’ve listened to that programme, I think they feed into each other. I would be shocked if I heard a story on the Asian programme that was not on the mainstream Radio Leicester and I have yet to come across that; it always is. I think that’s where they are getting it right. And to me, therefore, having an Asian music show with some chat and news is no different to having discrete musical taste shows, like jazz or gospel music. (Sharma, 2022)

Local Asian programmes at BBC Radio Leicester—including the Gujarati show—had been subsumed into the BBC Asian Network in 2022. But in 2012 after the language programmes were dropped and the station targeted under thirty-fives, Kamlesh Purohit, then still working for the BBC Asian Network, was commissioned by the station manager at BBC Radio Leicester to broadcast a weekly programme—much as he had done in the 1980s: When the Asian Network was fundamentally changed … and they decided to go really young, you only went for a small percentage of the audience and alienated a huge percentage of that audience, and I then presented an Asian programme on Radio Leicester. The station editor told me, ‘Whenever we have engagement meetings with the Asian community they are very critical of the Asian Network, they say the Asian Network doesn’t serve them anymore and the issues they cover are for very young people.’ So Radio Leicester set up an Asian programme and it felt quite ironical that we had come a full circle and the BBC now needed to start from scratch. (Purohit, 2022)

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Purohit believes that for the BBC to effectively leave Asian programming for over-thirty-fives to the market is wrong: And that’s the problem. It’s the commercial radio stations that are doing that now and I think that’s wrong, because as licence fee payers the BBC should be serving that audience. We are splitting our audiences. We are saying, if you are Asian you should listen to the Asian Network or Sabras Radio because that’s the only way you get served, and I think that needs to change. So local radio, where there are large Asian populations in Leicester, London, Birmingham or Leeds, they need to fundamentally change their content and bring those audiences into the BBC. If we don’t do it now, we will lose that audience forever. (Purohit, 2022)

As BBC radio has retreated from its wider remit to serve the South Asian diaspora, so new entrants to the market have picked up audiences. From the launch of Sunrise Radio in London in 1989, the number of Asian commercial and community radio stations in the radio market has grown to a total of thirty-four. Five of the nine commercial Asian stations are based in London—home to the largest South Asian communities— with the others in Leicester, Bradford, Birmingham and Manchester. The BBC Asian Network is broadcast on AM transmitters across England except in London where it is only available on DAB radios. It is therefore not operating on a level playing field with its commercial competitors in the capital and this might partly explain its poor London listening figures. Indeed, research for the DCMS into radio listening by ethnic minorities shows that Asian listeners are much less likely to listen to DAB radio than FM or AM services (Digital Radio UK, 2021). This research confirms the reluctance for DAB listening expressed in the public consultation on the proposed closure of the station by BBC Trust in 2012 (Curtis, 2015, p. 227). In Autumn 2021 more than half a million South Asian listeners tuned into ‘Asian’ stations in London with four fifths (402,000) choosing commercial radio stations: Sunrise (175,000), Lyca (86,000), Panjab Radio (78,000) Lyca Gold (38,000) and Asia FX (26,000), with the BBC Asian Network reaching 111,000 listeners (RAJAR, 2022). With the range of local stations available, it is no surprise that the 2021 DCMS report suggests that Asians are more likely to listen to local radio—including the BBC—rather than national stations, with one fifth actively seeking out programmes not broadcast in English, something the BBC stations no longer provide (Digital Radio UK, 2021).

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The loss of language programming by the BBC has been a key factor in the development of community radio stations targeted at South Asians in England. Around one in ten of the 261 licensed community radio stations in England are aimed at South Asian communities (Ofcom Licensing, May 2022). Twenty-five stations broadcast full time and a further five offer some programming to their local communities. The largest clusters of community stations are in West Yorkshire (six) and the West Midlands (four), but in London, where Asian commercial stations are most active, there are only two community stations (Community Media Association, 2022). These stations all broadcast in English but present programmes in a variety of the following ten South Asian languages and dialects, set out here in alphabetical order: Bangla/Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Mirpuri, Pahari, Pashtu, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Urdu (Community Media Association, 2022). Despite launching its first language programme in 1965 and developing them on BBC local radio in the 1970s and 1980s, the BBC no longer broadcasts in mother tongue languages. Community radio has brought new languages and dialects to listeners that the BBC did not broadcast, such as Marathi, Pahari, Pashtu and Sindhi. Many of the community stations are tightly targeted to single South Asian communities of faith or geographic ethnicity, with Muslim and Punjabi stations dominating—reflecting a lack of access or influence these local communities feel they have in mainstream media. These stations therefore show a high level of narrowcasting to small but important communities with specialist language needs that the BBC as a broadcaster is unable to achieve. Journalism is expensive and commercial and community stations have only limited news resources compared to the publicly funded BBC. They also face difficult editorial choices in serving local Asian communities as they balance their need for advertising and community funding when tackling important and divisive local issues (Husband, 2005, p.  474). Commercial pressure and community influence through local committees can steer programming away from controversial issues and stories, for example that affect women disproportionately, such as ‘abortion and abusive relationships’, concentrating instead on ‘approved’ religious content, events and music requests (Kaur, 2010). One of the roles of Asian programmes on BBC local radio is to act as a counterbalance to these pressures and to use its journalistic resources to tackle a full range of hard-hitting issues affecting South Asians, then bring them to the attention of wider society by sharing them across the rest of the broadcast day. There is no question of BBC local radio going further and reinventing a whole new

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raft of Asian programming in the 2020s, something that would be seen as anti-competitive. BBC local stations have a bigger public service role in ensuring their output and their staffing represents local diversity, a critical element in South Asians engaging with radio stations (Digital Radio UK, 2021). DCMS research suggests that ethnic minority audiences placed great store in radio stations having more representative workforces and recognised that greater strides had been made in radio than in other public spheres (Digital Radio UK, 2021). Further studies had previously highlighted the perception among Asian licence fee payers that the BBC still needed to improve its portrayal and better represent ‘the modern British Asian community’ and avoid ‘negative stereotypes’ (DCMS, 2016, p. 9). To do this, BBC local radio stations need to continually improve both their staffing and on-air representation of black, Asian and minority communities. The work to achieve greater diversity on BBC local radio stations is having mixed results, though research for this book suggests important strides have been made. To assess the ethnicity of on-air presenters in the important daytime sequence programmes on BBC local radio, two surveys of local radio output were conducted for this book in April and October 2022 (BBC Sounds, 2022). Having black and/or Asian presenters is important; not only is it a sign of radio stations reflecting the diversity of their local communities, but they also bring their own personal experience to bear in the questions they ask and the guests they select to interview. The two presenter surveys revealed that one in ten daytime local radio programmes were presented by black or Asian hosts, but the figures are highly skewed to a few stations. In total there were nineteen black and thirteen Asian presenters, with largest number at BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio London. Taking the twenty-one individual programmes across the broadcast day on the thirty-eight mainland stations, only BBC Radio Leicester (twelve), BBC Radio Leeds (seven), BBC Radio Lancashire (five) and BBC Radio London (five) have more than one programme hosted by an Asian presenter. There are similar concentrations of programmes hosted by black presenters, with BBC Radio London (seven), BBC Radio WM (six) BBC CWR (six), and BBC Radios Humberside, Sheffield and York (five). In terms of representing the demographics of the areas they serve, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio Leicester—both with 57% of daytime shows with black and/or Asian presenters and BBC Radio Leeds with 33%—are the strongest performers on presenter diversity. Indeed, BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio London between them account for all but five of the programmes hosted by Asian presenters.

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One of them, Rima Ahmed, the BBC Radio Leeds breakfast presenter, received praise in the national press for her ‘brutal’ interview of former Prime Minister Liz Truss—positively, Ahmed’s journalism and not her ethnicity was the basis of the story (Vinter, 2022). Surprisingly, half of all BBC local radio stations have no presenters from black and Asian backgrounds. BBC Radio WM broadcasts to a city which is home to the second largest Asian population in Britain in the West Midlands yet had no Asian daytime presenters in either of the surveys for this study. The latest statistics on ethnicity in local authority areas show how difficult the task remains for the BBC in places such as Birmingham where over half the population (51%) and Leicester (59%) come from black and minority ethnic backgrounds (ONS, 2022). Anita Bhalla argues that it is critical for the BBC both to recognise its successes but address its failures in on-air diversity: The BBC is not listening or taking action. It hasn’t learned that we have some real gems within our communities in local radio. People are walking away, they are looking for the alternatives, so BBC local radio, unless it gets its act together, is not going to keep this generation. In Birmingham we have already gone over 50% [BAME population] and unless Radio WM can get its act together, these people are going to walk away from future engagement. (Bhalla, 2022)

A Birmingham City University (BCU) study into the ‘Diversity of Senior Leaders in BBC Radio News’ adds to this troubling picture of a lack of representation. The BCU findings show ‘an under representation of BAME professionals in senior roles’ which is not representative of the diverse populations of the areas they serve (Robinson, 2021). The study even highlights cases of all-white newsrooms in some of England’s most diverse cities (Robinson, 2021). Kamlesh Purohit, interviewed whilst he was Station Manager at BBC Radio Leicester, says diversity is even more important for local radio given the changes to the BBC Asian Network: We broadcast now to a city where half of our audience potentially is of black or minority ethnic background, so it’s really vital that we understand their issues. The Asian Network is now a music station predominantly but there are issues happening in the communities now around Covid, business, textiles. These stories are as important to the mainstream audiences as to the Asian audiences and we should be covering these on our mainstream output. (Purohit, 2022)

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However, changes to local radio proposed by the BBC in October 2022 to reduce the number of local programmes and therefore opportunities to develop new talent could have detrimental effects on diversity (BBC Media Centre, 2022). Even worse was the potential threat to cut all the community programmes targeting Asian and black minorities; this would cut BBC local radio off both from potential new talent and important news stories and issues from these communities. The way news of these changes was announced, with no acknowledgement by the BBC managers that black and Asian programmes might be affected, goes to the heart of the lack of value that is shown to minority audiences (Daily Mirror, 2022). Nevertheless, BBC local radio continues to produce innovative radio in its daily schedules; BBC Radio Berkshire commissioned, produced and broadcast a five-part drama from a local theatre company based on the Ugandan Asian expulsion. Titled The Newcomers and centred on the arrival of the Ugandan Asians arriving at the Greenham Common resettlement camp in Berkshire, each of the fifteen-minute episodes was broadcast across five mornings on the breakfast programme (Rabble Theatre, 2022). On Diwali day 2022 the daytime schedule of BBC Radio Leicester included a programme titled Let’s Get This Diwali Party Started, presented by Shruti Chauhan, one of three Asian presenters on the station (BBC Sounds, 2022a). These programmes are unfortunately the exception and coupled with cuts proposed in 2022 confirm the BBC’s disregard for both its black and Asian staff and its licence fee payers.

Conclusion: A Way Forward for Asian Content from BBC Radio? It was only possible for Director General Greg Dyke to make the BBC Asian Network a network service because of the desire by some BBC local radio station managers and senior Asian staff, often working against the grain of BBC policy, to build connections with local Asian communities across England in the 1970s and 1980s. The moves to close the BBC Asian Network after Dyke’s departure mirror the moves to end Asian programming in network radio after Hugh Carleton Green left the BBC in 1969—had things really changed in those thirty years? The answer is a partial yes as senior managers did reverse their decision after a vocal public campaign led inside BBC management by the Head of the BBC Asian Network, Vijay Sharma:

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I stood up for what I believed in because I knew they hadn’t done their homework. They had relied on strategy people to tell them what the strategy for radio should be. Not what an appetite there was, or the changing demographics, or how we would deliver that service. (Sharma, 2022)

Proposing the closure of the BBC Asian Network without testing the proposition with audiences and research to affirm the decision is the sort of casual management action that builds towards the charge of institutional racism against the BBC made in the previous chapter. As does taking more than a year to reverse the closure decision compared to the three months it took to decide against closing BBC 6 Music. This just confirmed to the staff of the BBC Asian Network just how little the BBC regarded their contribution. A similar case can be made against the proposed cuts to BBC local radio in 2022. In the 2020s it is perhaps not surprising that some Asian staff still regard the atmosphere within the BBC as ‘toxic and racist’; through the press they ‘accused the corporation of decades of “systemic, structural and institutional racism”’ (Eastern Eye, 2020). Buried in an interview with The Sunday Times, Richard Sharp, the former  Chairman of the BBC, recognised that the organisation ‘needs more of an accountability culture’, admitting that ‘people have felt disadvantaged here, whether it’s minority groups or women’ (The Sunday Times, 2022). The decision by white managers to turn the BBC Asian Network into an ‘Asian 1Xtra’ music station targeting young British Asians without the support of qualitative audience research is another example of the BBC thinking ‘it knows best’. Forty years after Vijay Sharma walked into the reception of BBC Radio Leicester in 1976 to argue that the new daily Six-Fifteen programme needed some relevant speech content, it is ironic that the same arguments are being made today. Comments from Bilal (name changed for anonymity), a former journalist at the station, have echoes of Sharma in the 1970s: It’s a music station, that’s it. And you know, music is fine, but there’s a whole load of other things with the Asian community that impacts on them, and I don’t think you’re getting that. (Bilal, 2022)

Current audience trends suggest that a further U-turn is needed to broaden the appeal of the station, but will the BBC argue that the freezing of its £3.8 billion licence fee means it cannot afford to do so? This is a

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question of priorities and the lack of impact of the South Asian diaspora and senior Asian BBC staff in the decision-making of the BBC. In BBC local radio the limited Asian programming still on air is paying dividends in introducing new presentation talent and bringing news stories to daytime output. But short-sighted decisions taken to reduce the local output on BBC local radio and change community programming in November 2022 are going to hinder the work of ensuring stations represent the full diversity of the areas to which they are broadcasting (BBC Media Centre, 2022). The lack of Asian and black presenters on daytime programming, in newsrooms and especially in senior management needs to be addressed. Despite some successes in stations like BBC Radio London, BBC Radio Leicester and BBC Radio Leeds, more work needs to be done, as research shows half of BBC local radio stations have no black or Asian presenters on air in daytime hours (BBC Sounds, 2022). BAME presenters bring new perspectives to the stories covered on air, impact the decisions made on which stories are covered, and build connections with underserved audiences. It is imperative that the success of Asian staff who have come through BBC local radio and the BBC Asian Network to have career as reporters, presenters and managers is continued for the BBC, especially as Aujla- Sudhu notes BAME staff are still under-represented in the BBC (Aujla-Sidhu, 2021, pp. 210–211). Writing in Eastern Eye, former BBC Senior Journalist Barnie Choudhury goes further when considering BBC Regional Television and BBC local radio stations: Under 6% of all staff are non-white. There are cases of all-white newsrooms … former colleagues who still work for the BBC have told me this. What is indefensible are those who try to explain how complicated it is to say whether a newsroom is all-white. It is not. (Eastern Eye, 2020)

The output already produced by the BBC for South Asian audiences on local radio and the BBC Asian Network is often hidden and difficult to find. There is an appetite for digitally connecting with this material, as Ahmed Hussain, the Head of the BBC Asian Network, noted in the press after the release of audience figures in 2021: It’s fantastic to see an increase in engagement across the Asian Network, with over half a million radio listeners and a further 2.1 million engaging with our content across social media and YouTube. We also continue to

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increase our numbers on-demand via BBC Sounds as our new schedule settles in. We are proud to provide such an important platform for our diverse audience, championing British Asian culture even through the most challenging times. (Biz Asia, 2021)

Research by Ofcom confirms this desire for digital connections by ethnic minorities. The Ofcom ‘News Consumption’ study in 2021 noted that compared to the rest of the population, ethnic minorities use radio the least to keep up with news—fewer than one in three (28%) turn their radios on for news. However, there is an almost universal readiness (85%) to use the internet to find news (Ofcom, 2021), suggesting that mainstream media is not producing news that they find relevant to them. Buried in the research is some good news for the BBC as six in ten (62%) say they use the BBC website, BBC iPlayer, and BBC Sounds. These figures provide an opportunity for the corporation to make deep personal connections with South Asian audiences by creating simpler navigation on BBC apps to deliver relevant content. In October 2022 a search for the term Asian on the BBC News app steered users to a section titled BAME Communities which featured only one news story—a story about free school meals illustrated with a picture of two white school children eating their school dinner. A similar search on the BBC Sounds app brings up BBC Asian Network programmes, BBC World Service documentaries that are twenty years old, but no BBC local radio programming or features. Surely the BBC can do better than this; there must be navigation tools that can better connect with licence fee payers searching for relevant content to them? The BBC could go further and assist the twenty-five poorly funded community radio stations targeted at South Asians in Britain, most of which are available on the internet (Ofcom, 2021, p. 113). These stations do not have the editorial and production resources of the BBC to call upon, and a ‘top slice’ of the licence fee to fund ‘community producers’ to work in these stations might be a way forward. This is not a new idea: in 2022 there are 165 reporters in the BBC’s Local Democracy Reporting Service based in local newspapers, radio and TV stations in the UK (BBC, LDRS, 2021). Community producers funded by the licence fee based at BBC local radio stations and building partnerships with local community stations could share best practice, and two-way programme sharing with the BBC could be an option.

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The evidence in this chapter suggests that after sixty years the BBC still is unable to decide if it should be providing targeted programming or to provide a completely diverse schedule. The answer is it should do both but with a solid commitment that does not flip flop between feast and famine for black and Asian licence fee payers depending on which manager is making the decisions. As a universally funded public service broadcaster it should not be making cavalier threats to close down the BBC Asian Network or community programmes on BBC local radio for black and Asian licence fee payers, only to change its mind at a later date. This shows a disregard for what are growing minorities in British society. From Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye (Make Yourself at Home) presented in Hindustani on the BBC Home Service in October 1965 and Majlis broadcast in Urdu on BBC Radio Sheffield in 1968 through to the current BBC Asian Network, the BBC has moved a considerable distance. But in the way it treats its own BAME staff, the needs of BAME licence fee payers and in the whole field of diversity it sometimes can appear to have not moved much at all. Too often it has been left to individuals like Hugh Carleton Green and Greg Dyke at the top and far-sighted regional and local managers like David Waine and Owen Bentley to force change on a disinterested organisation. The fact that the South Asian women like Vijay Sharma, Anita Bhalla and Perminder Khatkar, who did so much to build Asian broadcasting, and a ‘British Asian sound’, left the BBC before their normal retirement age speaks volumes of the relationship of the BBC to its Asian staff. Anita Bhalla who set up the West Midlands side of the BBC Asian Network is clear about this: ‘I used to say the BBC was institutionally racist in the 80s and the 90s, it is an institution where racism has not been dealt with effectively’ (Bhalla, 2022). A fundamental change in the culture and practices of the BBC is required. 

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Ofcom. (2022). Community Radio Station Licences, May. Retrieved May 30, 2022, from http://static.ofcom.org.uk/static/radiolicensing/html/radio-­ stations/community/community-­main.htm ONS. (2021). Population Estimates by Ethnic Group, England and Wales. Retrieved April 02, 2022, from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/datasets/populationestimates byethnicgroupenglandandwales ONS. (2022). Census 2021, Ethnic Group by Local Authority Areas, Dataset TS021. Retrieved December 30, 2022, from https://www.ons.gov.uk/datasets/TS021/editions/2021/versions/1 Plunkett, J. (2010, March 4). BBC Has Spent Nearly £100m on 6 Music and Asian Network. The Guardian. Retrieved November 14, 2022, from https:// www.theguardian.com/media/2010/mar/04/6-­music-­asian-­network-­cost Purohit, K. (2022). b. 15 December 1961, Former Presenter BBC Radio Leicester, Face-to-face Interview, April 7. Rabble Theatre. (2022). The Newcomers, BBC Radio Berkshire. Retrieved November 03, 2022, from https://rabbletheatre.com/the-­newcomers/?utm_ source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-­newcomers RAJAR. (2022). Quarterly Listening to UK Radio. Retrieved July 04, 2022, from https://www.rajar.co.uk/listening/quarterly_listening.php RAJAR. (2023). RAJAR Research Methods, https://www.rajar.co.uk/content. php?page=about_process, Accessed 3 August 2023. Rana, S. (2022). Presenter, BBC Radio Derby, Face-to-face Interviews, September 8, 2018 & March 16, 2022. Robinson, N. (2021). Diversity of Senior Leaders in BBC Radio News, Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, Birmingham City University. Retrieved October 31, 2022, from https://bcuassets.blob.core.windows.net/docs/ csu2021324-­lhc-­report-­robinsonv5-­91221-­1-­132835986558468429.pdf Saha, A. (2018). Scheduling Race. In S. Malik & D. M. Newton (Eds.), Adjusting the Contrast: British Television and Constructs of Race. University of Manchester Press. Sharma, V. (2022). Former Presenter/Producer BBC Radio Leicester and First Managing Editor of the BBC Asian Network, Face-to-face Interviews, March 9, 2017 & October 13, 2022. The Sunday Times. (2022). Richard Sharp’s Vision for the BBC: More Guts and No More Liberal Bias. Retrieved December 04, 2022, from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/richard-­sharps-­v ision-­f or-­the-­bbc-­more-­guts-­a nd-­no-­ more-­liberal-­bias-­8ss3x6tp0 Vinter, R. (2022, October 1). “Where’ve You Been?”: Rima Ahmed on Challenging Liz Truss on Local Radio, The Guardian. Retrieved October 31, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-­news/2022/oct/01/radio-­host-­rima-­ ahmed-­says-­its-­easy-­to-­interview-­liz-­truss-­if-­you-­speak-­to-­locals

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Appendix A: Hours of Weekly Asian Programming on BBC Local Radio, 1969–1994

BBC LOCAL STATION Bedfordshire Berkshire Birmingham / WM Blackburn / Lancs. Bristol Cleveland / Tees Cambridgeshire (Peterborough) Derby Gloucester Leeds Leicester London / GLR Manchester / GMR Medway / Kent Merseyside Newcastle Nottingham Northampton Oxford Sheffield Stoke Wiltshire TOTAL HOURS

1969

1975

1979

1985

Not On Air

1.00 No Programme

1.50 1.00 0.50

1989

1994

3.50

4.00

2.00 1.00

25.00 3.00

0.50 1.50

0.50 1.50

3.50 4.00 2.00 2.00 9.00 70.00 1.00 7.00 1.50 1.00 2.75 6.00 1.00 1.50 4.00 2.50 1.00 201.00

0.50

1.00

1.00

1.50

0.5

1.00 0.75 1.00 1.00 0.50

1.50 5.00 1.00 1.00 0.75

4.00 5.50 1.00 2.00 1.00 1.00

5.25 32.00 *3.00 2.00 *4.00 1.00

0.5

0.75

1.00

0.75

0.50 0.75

1.00 1.00 0.50

2.25 0.50 0.50 1.50 0.75

4.00 1.00 1.00 6.75 2.00

1.75

7.75

16.25

21.00

97.50

6.75 3.00 61.00 10.00 1.00

Source: Radio Times & BBC WAC *Shared Programmes from Bedfordshire

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. McCarthy, Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35620-9

187

 Appendix B: Asian Programme Recordings from BBC Local Radio, 1977–1994

During this research a number of archive recordings of Asian programmes first broadcast on BBC local radio stations between 1977 and 1997 have been digitized. They are available for researchers to listen to via the Special Collections at the University of Leicester library. The main programmes are listed below by their catalogue numbers in the East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA). A study of the EMOHA archive will reveal further recordings, for example there are six editions of Smite Petite & the Karachi Kid from BBC Radio Bedfordshire and four editions of Weekend Bazaar from BBC Radio Leicester. EMOHA CAT. NO.

BBC local station

Programme

TX date

Presenter/s

Notable content

EMOHA39/2

Bedfordshire

Smite Petite & the Karachi Kid

2 April 1987— 55 mins.

Phone-in on ‘love versus arranged marriage’

EMOHA39/6

Bedfordshire

Smite Petite & the Karachi Kid

18 June 1987— 55 mins.

EMOHA39/7

Derby

Aaj Kal

13 April 1984— 91 mins.

Smita Barcha and Saadia Usmani Smita Barcha and Saadia Usmani Satvinder Rana, Kaval Vaseer and team.

I/v with Pakistan cricketer Imran Khan. Talks about politics. Interviews from local Gurdwara for Vaisakhi. Local video and music charts.

(continued)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. McCarthy, Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35620-9

189

190 

APPENDIX B: ASIAN PROGRAMME RECORDINGS FROM BBC LOCAL RADIO…

(continued) EMOHA CAT. NO.

BBC local station

Programme

TX date

Presenter/s

Notable content

EMOHA39/8

Leicester

Six O Five Show

Vijay Sharma

Radio Car with Ugandan Asians.

EMOHA39/9

Leicester

Don Kotak, Mira Trivedi, Mike Allbut.

Features Lata Mangeshkar singing to 1,000 strong audience.

EMOHA39/10

Leicester

1983— 15 mins

Local Ensemble

English language teaching as a radio soap opera.

EMOHA39/10

Leicester

1983— 15 mins

Local Ensemble

English language teaching as a radio soap opera.

EMOHA39/12

Leicester

Asian Song Contest— Haymarket Theatre, Leicester Kahani Apni Apni— Episode 14 of 26. Kahani Apni Apni— Episode 20 of 26. Weekend Bazaar

8 May 1977— 60 mins. Late 1980— 24 mins.

7 Feb 1987— 39 mins.

Mike Allbut

EMOHA39/14

Leicester

Weekend Bazaar

4 January Neeta Kara 1994— 48 mins.

EMOHA39/18

Leicester

Six O’clock Show

EMOHA39/22

Lancashire

Mehfil

EMOHA39/23

London

Eastern Ear

EMOHA39/26

London

Bollywood Special.

5 January Kamlesh 1989— Purohit, 43 mins. Sangita Modha & Sarah Tully 31 Oct Siraj Patel 1984— 55 mins. 1984— Vernon 45 mins Corea & Geeta Bala May Geeta Bala 1986— 59 mins

Entertainment Show aimed at young British Asians Highlights of recording trip to Mumbai and Bollywood. Highlights of 1988.

Reaction to assassination of Indira Gandhi. South Asian/Jazz Fusion. 25 years of Bollywood.

Index1

A Aaj kal (BBC Radio Derby), 42, 88, 91, 94–96, 103, 113, 141, 171 Ainger, Greg, 3, 4, 92, 140, 143 Ali, Nasreen, 77 Allbut, Mike, 10, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 96, 98, 99, 103, 113, 126–128, 132, 135 AM (Medium Wave), 10, 26, 87, 89, 100–103, 105–107, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 156, 159, 165, 174 Annan Committee, 57, 68, 78, 122, 129 Anwar, Muhammad, 4, 32, 39, 42, 71, 76, 80, 88, 93, 125, 129, 167 Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye, 4, 20, 24, 25, 36, 39, 75, 114, 123, 157, 182 Asian, 1, 17, 53, 87, 121–152, 155–182, 187, 189

Asian communities, 3, 5, 9, 12, 13, 19, 21, 24, 25, 32–34, 38, 54, 55, 75, 76, 79–82, 98, 103, 104, 109, 112, 113, 115, 122, 127, 135, 143, 147, 156, 159, 161, 164, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179 Asian Network, 1, 4, 5, 8, 10–13, 18, 21, 22, 29, 36, 38, 44–46, 54, 56, 57, 66, 77, 78, 81, 82, 89, 90, 101, 103, 104, 106–116, 122, 124, 130–134, 136–138, 142, 144, 149–151, 155–182 Asian Programmes Advisory Committee (APAC), 27, 68, 75 Asian Programmes Unit (APU), 58, 59, 62, 63, 65, 74, 75, 130 Asian Voice (BBC Radio Bedfordshire), 96, 97 Audience, 3, 5–7, 9, 11, 12, 23, 24, 27, 32, 39, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. McCarthy, Finding a New British Asian Sound on BBC Radio, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35620-9

191

192 

INDEX

63, 65, 72, 79, 82, 91, 93, 96, 98, 99, 102, 105, 112, 113, 115, 116, 123, 146, 148, 151, 156, 157, 159–174, 176–181 Audience figures, 12, 123, 136, 157, 163, 167, 169, 180 Audience research, 4, 12, 39, 58, 59, 63, 93, 136, 179 Aujla-Sidhu, Gurvinder, 4, 11, 13, 18, 28, 44, 53, 54, 56, 73, 77, 78, 129, 138, 143, 147, 156, 164, 165, 180 B Bangladesh/Bangladeshi, 18, 31, 37, 40, 62, 76, 77, 127, 128, 137, 167 Barton, Michael, 19, 21, 29, 30, 37 BBC Asian Network, 1, 4, 5, 8, 10–13, 18, 22, 36, 38, 45, 46, 54, 57, 78, 81, 82, 89, 90, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108, 111–114, 116, 122, 124, 130–134, 136–138, 142, 149–151, 155–182 BBC Home Service, 4, 20, 23–25, 182 BBC local radio stations, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13, 21, 22, 36, 41, 46, 54, 63, 66, 75, 78, 82, 87, 90, 93, 101, 107, 113, 115, 123, 124, 129, 138, 139, 159, 172, 176–178, 180, 181, 189 Radio Bedfordshire, 145, 146, 159, 189 Radio Birmingham, 75, 77, 93, 130, 135 Radio Derby, 42, 76, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 103, 110, 113, 125, 141, 146, 171 Radio Kent, 99, 146

Radio Lancashire, 102, 144, 145, 176 Radio Leeds, 30, 31, 35, 36, 75, 102, 107, 108, 133, 134, 144, 176, 177, 180 Radio Leicester, 1–3, 8, 10, 12, 13, 21, 29, 32, 34, 35, 38–40, 42, 64, 70, 76, 78–82, 87, 88, 90–94, 96, 98, 101, 103–109, 111, 114, 115, 121–123, 125, 126, 128–130, 132, 135–137, 140, 143, 145, 155, 158, 159, 170, 173, 176–180, 189 Radio London (GLR), 6, 7, 32–34, 76, 101, 102, 106, 107, 112, 115, 145, 159, 169, 176, 180 Radio Sheffield, 19, 21, 29, 36, 74, 101, 102, 108, 182 Radio WM, 10, 35, 77, 90, 95, 101, 104, 107–109, 111, 112, 115, 130–132, 141, 144, 148, 158, 159, 176, 177 BBC News & Current affairs, 71 BBC 1Xtra, 158 BBC Radio 4, 131, 132 Asian Programmes Unit, 58 Immigrants’ Programmes Unit, 17, 25 BBC Radio London (GLR), 6, 7, 32–34, 36, 76, 99, 101, 102, 106, 107, 111, 112, 115, 116, 145, 146, 159, 169, 176, 180 BBC World Service, 31, 35, 104, 108, 158, 161, 181 Beech, Patrick, 25 Bengali, 25, 29, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 75–77, 101, 102, 104, 108, 128, 137, 158, 161, 175 Bentley, Owen, 2, 3, 13, 38, 39, 79, 80, 96, 101, 104, 109–111, 114, 123, 132, 137, 140, 182

 INDEX 

Bhalla, Anita, 109–111, 130, 131, 141–144, 148–150, 172, 177, 182 Bhamra, Bikram, 34 Bhangra, 80, 95, 105, 111, 160, 165 Birt, John, 22, 155 Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME), 9, 14, 53, 56, 66, 73, 145, 150, 156, 177, 180–182 Black Londoners, BBC Radio London, 115 Bollywood, 42, 43, 77, 87, 94, 104, 127 Born, Georgina, 5, 73 Brexit, 41, 45 British Asian, 3, 5, 7, 10–13, 18, 21, 22, 28, 29, 35, 40–46, 80, 82, 87, 88, 90–100, 102–108, 110, 113–116, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 135, 145, 146, 151, 156–159, 161, 163, 165–172, 176, 179, 181 British Asian sound, 1, 4, 5, 7, 10, 21, 22, 42, 57, 82, 87–116, 121–152, 155–182 Broadcasting House, 20, 23, 24 Broadcast policy, 90, 100 Buttoo, Sanjiv, 32, 107, 108, 133, 134, 138, 144, 145, 150 C Chignell, Hugh, 89 Choudhury, Barnie, 28, 72, 73, 147, 148, 180 Colonial/colonialism, 25, 55 Commercial radio (ILR), 87, 89, 101, 103, 115, 136, 171, 174 Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), 4, 28, 32, 33, 37, 39, 41,

193

42, 59, 63, 70, 71, 76, 80, 93, 125, 129, 130, 167 Community cohesion, 4, 38, 82 Community Media Association (CMA), 38, 175 Community radio, 6, 12, 38, 44, 78, 105, 122, 157, 174, 175, 181 Community Relations Council / s, 30, 38, 80, 102, 109 Connections (BBC Radio Leeds), 102, 107 Controller (BBC English Regions), 25, 26, 55, 114 Controller (BBC Radio & Television), 17, 25–27, 45, 55, 58, 62, 114 Curran, Charles, 75 Curtis, Mike, 163–165, 174 D Darpan (BBC Radio London), 33, 76 Demographics, 37, 45, 78, 80, 122, 148, 171, 176, 179 Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), 168, 174, 176 Dhamaka (BBC Radio Nottingham), 103 Diaspora (South Asian), 4, 6–9, 12, 17–46, 89, 104, 114, 122, 124, 128, 143, 151, 152, 156, 157, 160, 166, 167, 172, 174, 180 Diversity/diverse, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 19, 38, 44, 46, 53–82, 112, 115, 116, 125, 129, 132, 137, 143, 147–150, 155, 156, 159, 160, 166, 167, 172, 173, 176–178, 180–182 Dudrah, Rajinder, 95, 96 Dyke, Greg, 8, 11, 22, 44, 45, 54, 57, 81, 112, 149, 151, 155, 156, 161, 162, 172, 178, 182

194 

INDEX

E East African Asians, 1, 32 Eastern Beat (BBC Radio Leicester & BBC Radio WM), 104, 108, 158 Editorial independence (BBC local radio), 21, 26, 45, 56, 82 Editors (station managers), 32, 156, 160, 173 English language, 33, 76 Equality, 14, 39, 72, 148 Ethnic, 6–9, 19, 21, 33, 35, 53, 60, 61, 71, 82, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 112, 114, 126, 129, 132, 134, 144, 149, 159 Ethnicity, 5, 62, 69, 139, 143, 147, 167, 175–177 Ethnic minority (and minority ethnic), 5, 9, 13, 14, 17, 45, 46, 55–66, 68–72, 74, 81, 82, 97, 99, 102, 104–106, 114, 115, 129, 137, 138, 149, 156, 159, 173, 174, 176, 177, 181 Extending Choice, 65, 89 F Faith, 37, 38, 93, 175 Family/familial, 19, 32, 37, 45, 87, 99, 125, 126, 128, 137, 155, 158, 163, 169, 172 First generation British Asian, 42, 44 FM (VHF), 10, 44, 87, 89, 100, 101, 114, 165, 174 Foley, Maurice, 20 G Gaelic, 60, 64, 77 Ghetto/ghettoised, 7, 55, 107, 140 Gillard, Frank, 5 Gillespie, Marie, 43, 77, 94 Government broadcast policies, 100

Greene, Hugh Carleton, 4, 8, 20–23, 25, 54 Green paper, 100, 102, 106, 107, 114 Gretton, David, 24 Grist, John, 55 Gujarati, 25, 34, 35, 37, 64, 76, 77, 93, 104, 127, 173, 175 H Hasan, Ali, 31 Hendy, David, 20–22, 27, 56, 57, 67, 123 Henry, Sir Lenny, 66 Hesmondhalgh, David, 5 Hindi, 4, 25, 33–35, 77, 87, 94, 104, 108, 158, 161, 175 Hindu, 37 Hindustani, 3, 4, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25, 30, 32–35, 42, 55, 62, 75–77, 93, 123, 182 Hirsch, Afua, 69 Home Office, 31, 105 Husband, Charles, 10, 17, 41, 55, 75, 129, 138, 175 I Identity, 7, 40–44, 57, 77, 87, 97, 100, 126, 127, 161, 166, 171 Immigrant/immigration, 2, 4, 9, 12, 18–28, 31–34, 37, 41, 42, 45, 55, 57, 60, 67–71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 88, 98, 114, 128, 138, 139 Immigrants’ Programmes Unit (IPU), 4, 7, 8, 17, 20, 21, 23–25, 27, 28, 33, 45, 54, 55, 58, 73, 81, 123, 124 Inchley, Tony, 131, 132 Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), 78, 105

 INDEX 

Independent Local radio (ILR), 76, 87, 101, 103, 105, 106, 114, 115 Indian, 4, 18–20, 23–26, 36, 37, 40, 45, 58, 76, 93, 108, 127, 167, 168 Indian Workers Association, 30, 58 Inequality, 68, 147 Institute of Race Relations (IRR), 67 Institutional racism, 5, 13, 14, 46, 61, 125, 149, 179 Interviews, 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 11, 13, 24, 110, 111, 121, 124, 125, 129, 133, 137–139, 160, 163, 169, 176, 177, 179 Islam, 108, 145 J Jhalak (BBC Radio Leeds), 30 Jharoka (BBC Radio London), 33, 76 Journalist/journalism, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18, 19, 32, 53, 54, 56, 66–74, 81, 82, 108, 110, 132–134, 136, 137, 142–144, 147, 157, 158, 162, 165, 173, 175, 177, 179 K Khamkar, Gloria, 8 Khatkar, Perminder, 108, 110, 111, 126, 131, 132, 142, 150, 158, 160, 161, 166, 167, 170, 171, 182 Kotak, Don, 3, 92, 103, 122, 123, 140 L Language/language programmes, 8, 10, 11, 17, 20, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32–34, 36, 37, 45, 46, 55, 56, 60, 62–64, 74–79, 93, 94, 104, 107, 109, 127, 128, 138, 143,

195

152, 156, 158, 161, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175 Leicester, 1, 18, 54, 87, 122, 158, 189 Leicester Mercury, 1, 41, 104, 115, 122 Lewis, Peter, 6, 21, 35, 38, 104, 112 Licence fee, 5, 9, 12, 17, 18, 22, 24, 26, 29, 45, 46, 54–56, 59–61, 63, 66, 68, 73, 81, 89, 155–157, 165, 174, 176, 178, 179, 181, 182 Linfoot, Matthew, 6, 21, 29, 56 London Sounds Eastern (BBC Radio London), 33, 76, 115, 145, 159 Luton, 5, 88, 91, 96–99, 114, 134, 135 Lyca Radio, 174 M Macpherson Report, 149 Mainstream, 6, 39, 43, 44, 46, 68, 94, 99, 111, 128, 144, 159, 173, 175, 177, 181 Maitlis, Emily, 68 Majlis (BBC Radio Sheffield), 21, 29, 101, 102, 182 Malik, Sarita, 9, 24, 55, 56, 73 Marathi, 175 Marginal/marginalized/ marginalization, 4, 5, 7, 9, 27–29, 35, 38, 39, 45, 73, 81, 82, 105, 124, 141, 146 Media, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 17, 19, 20, 23, 38, 41–44, 46, 55, 57, 70, 71, 73, 77, 87, 104, 105, 110, 114, 115, 122, 133, 138, 175, 180, 181 Medium Wave (AM), 10, 26, 87, 89, 100–103, 105–107, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 156, 159, 165, 174 Mehfil (BBC Radio Blackburn), 34, 35

196 

INDEX

Migrant, 44 Milan (BBC Radio Leicester), 3, 4, 32, 35, 123, 127 Minorities, 5–7, 10–12, 19, 21–23, 28, 31, 55, 56, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 71, 73, 74, 78–82, 107, 112, 128, 129, 145, 152, 156, 176, 178, 179, 182 Minority ethnic, 13, 14, 66, 97, 149, 156, 177 Mirpuri, 77, 78, 175 Mitchell, Caroline, 6, 29, 30, 35, 90 Mother tongue, 3, 8, 17, 33, 36, 64, 76, 77, 104, 107, 127, 128, 156, 161, 168, 172, 175 Multicultural/multiculturalism, 55, 58, 65, 79 Munchetty, Naga, 57, 69 Music, 7, 18, 42, 44, 80, 87, 88, 91, 93–96, 98, 99, 101, 106, 108, 113, 121, 123, 126, 127, 132–135, 137, 138, 151, 156, 158, 161, 164–166, 173, 175, 177, 179 Muslim/Islam, 37, 71, 110, 175 N Nandy, Dipak, 68 National Front (NF), 1–4, 34, 38, 39, 70, 71, 122, 123 Nawrang (BBC Radio Nottingham), 30, 79 News, 19, 22, 39, 44, 53, 55, 62, 63, 68, 70–73, 76, 80, 104, 107, 108, 113, 144, 150, 158, 161, 173, 175, 178, 180, 181 Newton, Darrell, 11, 20n1, 44, 56, 71, 155

O Ofcom, 44, 55, 57, 66, 115, 129, 137, 150, 159, 181 Open House (BBC Radio Merseyside), 33 P Pahari, 175 Pakistan/Pakistani, 4, 18, 20, 24, 25, 34, 36, 37, 40, 41, 58, 76, 123, 128, 167 Panorama (BBC), 1, 2, 53, 72 Pashtu, 175 Patel, Deepak, 127, 132 Paternalistic, 24, 75 Peacock Committee, 89 Pilkington Committee, 5 Pirate radio, 43–45, 77, 105 Policy, 1, 8–11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21–25, 28, 29, 38, 45, 46, 53–82, 87, 89, 90, 100–107, 112, 114, 115, 125, 129, 147, 156, 158, 159, 178 Powell, Enoch, 9, 31, 67, 69, 70 Public service broadcasting (PSB), 8, 63 Punjabi, 25, 33, 76–78, 95, 104, 175 Punjab Radio, 171 Purohit, Kamlesh, 88, 89, 91, 93, 99–100, 108, 109, 126–128, 135, 136, 138, 139, 145, 150, 158, 170, 173, 174, 177 R Race, 5, 60, 67, 69–71, 140, 150

 INDEX 

Race relations, 1–4, 20, 31, 34, 38, 54, 55, 67, 68, 70, 71, 79, 123, 140 Racism, institutional racism, 2, 5, 7, 11, 13, 14, 46, 61, 68, 69, 71, 124, 125, 137–139, 141, 149, 150, 179 Radio Authority (RA), 109, 111, 112, 159 Radio Bedfordshire, 10, 42, 90, 91, 96–98, 101, 102, 113, 134, 145, 146, 159, 189 Radio Birmingham, 75, 77, 93, 130, 135 Radio Derby, 42, 76, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 103, 110, 113, 125, 141, 146, 171 Radio 4, 17–19, 25–28, 31, 36, 39, 45, 53, 58, 62, 63, 67, 114, 131, 132, 164 Radio Joint Audience Research (RAJAR), 160, 166–170, 174 Radio Kent, 99, 146 Radio Lancashire, 102, 144, 145, 176 Radio Leeds, 30, 31, 35, 36, 75, 102, 107, 108, 133, 134, 144, 176, 177, 180 Radio Leicester, 1–3, 8, 10, 12, 13, 21, 29, 32, 34, 35, 38–40, 42, 64, 70, 76, 78–82, 87, 88, 90–94, 96, 98, 101, 103–109, 111, 114, 115, 121–123, 125, 126, 128–130, 132, 135–137, 140, 143, 145, 155, 158, 159, 170, 173, 176–180, 189 Radio Sheffield, 19, 21, 29, 36, 74, 101, 102, 108, 182 Radio 6 Music, 138, 163, 164, 179 Radio WM, 10, 35, 77, 90, 95, 101, 104, 107–109, 111, 112, 115, 130–132, 141, 144, 148, 158, 159, 176, 177

197

Rahman, Mintu, 127, 128, 137 Rajani, Rupal, 40, 100, 125, 126, 136, 137, 151, 152 Rana, Satvinder, 88, 89, 93–96, 100, 110, 125, 126, 141, 146, 147, 171 Redhouse, Peter, 32, 33, 75 Religion/religious, 18, 26, 28, 37, 67, 77, 98, 126, 138, 143, 156, 175 Robinson, Nina, 46, 53, 57, 61, 66, 68, 73, 150, 177 S Sabras Radio, 100, 136, 174 Saha, Amanik, 5, 9, 28, 44, 95, 159 Sangam (BBC Radio Derby), 93, 94, 125 Satellite, Satellite television, 44, 46, 64, 87, 159, 161, 167 Schaffer, Gavin, 4, 8, 18, 20, 20n1, 25, 39, 41, 69, 75, 123, 124, 128 Second generation British Asian, 7, 88, 113, 114, 125, 145, 158 Shah, Samir, 66 Sharma, Surinder, 39, 40, 148 Sharma, Vijay, 109, 111, 112, 121–124, 128–131, 137, 139–143, 150, 151, 155, 156, 158, 160, 162–164, 171, 173, 178, 179, 182 Sheffield, 19, 29, 30, 38, 76, 102, 114, 176 Sidey, Phil, 31, 38, 75 Sims, Monica, 27 Sindhi, 175 Singh, Gurharpal, 79 Singh, Talvin, 95 Six-Fifteen (BBC Radio Leicester), 3, 4, 35, 79, 104, 121–123, 140, 179

198 

INDEX

Six O’clock Show (BBC Radio Leicester), 10, 35, 38, 40, 42, 87, 88, 90–93, 96, 98, 101, 103, 109, 126–128, 130, 136, 139, 143, 158 Smit’ Petite and the Karachi Kid (BBC Radio Bedfordshire), 91, 113, 134 Social cohesion, 22, 29–40, 79, 104 South Asia/South Asian, 4–9, 12–14, 17–46, 54, 57, 58, 60, 62, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 87–90, 96–100, 103, 104, 107–116, 122–125, 128, 142, 143, 151, 152, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163, 166–168, 170, 172, 174–176, 180–182 Staff, BBC Staff, 5, 6, 9–13, 25, 28, 30, 44, 46, 53, 55, 57, 62, 66, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 80, 93, 96, 97, 100, 110, 111, 116, 125, 129, 131–136, 138, 140, 141, 144, 146, 148–150, 155, 156, 159, 162–165, 172, 178–180, 182 Stoller, Tony, 89, 101, 103, 105 Sunrise Radio, 44–46, 106, 112, 113, 115, 159, 162, 174 T Thatcher, Margaret, 10, 70, 87, 89, 90, 113, 114 Tokenism/tokenistic, 5, 6, 105, 114 Transmitters, 10, 26, 36, 87, 89, 100–103, 105–107, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 156, 159, 165, 174 U Uganda, 1, 2, 40, 92, 125

Ugandan Asians, 8, 37, 38, 67, 92, 103, 122, 178 Underserved audiences, 180 Urdu, 19, 21, 25, 29, 33, 35, 36, 38, 75, 77, 97, 101, 102, 104, 108, 130, 158, 161, 175, 182 Usmani, Saadia, 42, 88, 89, 96–99, 134, 135, 145, 146 V Very High Frequency (VHF) (FM), 19, 89 Voice of Kenya, 32, 34 Volunteer/volunteers, 6, 30, 62, 90, 107, 116, 124, 133 W Waine, David, 109, 111, 182 Weekend Bazaar (BBC Radio Leicester), 42, 91, 96, 103, 135, 136, 143, 189 Welsh language, 60, 64 West Midlands (WM), 5, 11, 18, 21, 22, 35, 36, 44, 60, 66, 77, 88–90, 95, 101, 104, 105, 107–112, 114, 115, 126, 130–132, 141, 142, 144, 148, 151, 155, 158–161, 163, 169, 172, 175–177 Whitby, Anthony, 26, 58 Whiteness/editorial whiteness, 9, 56, 67–74, 81 Y Young audiences, 99, 151, 170 Youth, 11, 12, 35, 40–42, 45, 46, 90, 100, 102–104, 108–110, 130, 132, 134, 158, 161–163, 165, 166, 169