“This is a bad time for us at the BBC,” writes BBC News’ John Simpson

By Minnie Wright

Published: Saturday, 19 February 2022 at 12:00 am

By: John Simpson

For many years, at every hour of the day or night, the BBC World Service would play the traditional tune Lilliburlero to announce its news bulletins. Around the world people would sit up and listen. Why? Because the BBC was trusted.

It still is. I was in Afghanistan recently. Outside the city of Herat I spoke to a crowd of farmers who’d been driven off their land by drought and poverty. These were some of the poorest people in one of the poorest countries in the world, yet one of them explained to me that the crisis was caused by the outside world’s refusal to unfreeze Afghanistan’s international assets in the wake of the Taliban takeover of power. I was amazed by how accurate his ideas were, so I asked him how he knew all this.

“I listen to the BBC,” he said. So do a big majority of Afghans. They believe the BBC because they know it’s straight-dealing and honest.

It’s hard to put a financial value on that kind of trust, but given the BBC’s funding situation, after the Government’s recent licence fee settlement, we are already having to consider the financial value of our programming. For instance, Unspun World, our new worldwide current affairs programme, will be running on a small budget and with a small team.

This is a bad time for us at the BBC; the financial model that funds the news and other services is under threat. Yet, at the very moment the Government is cutting BBC funding, BBC audiences worldwide are reaching half a billion. You don’t get an international vote of confidence like that if people think you’re biased or unreliable and the value this gives to Britain right round the world is incalculable.

Which is why, rather than be disheartened by the prospect of shrinking budgets (and despite picking up Covid on my trip to Afghanistan), my instinct is to carry on doing our job to the best of our ability – and remind everyone the BBC remains the most trusted news organisation both in Britain and in the entire world.

The BBC and its journalists have to fight on and to do so it can draw upon some of its priceless assets that tend to get forgotten in the storm of often unjustified criticism it faces at home.

Naturally, I want to turn to some of the BBC’s well-known faces in my new show but given the extraordinary range and quality of people in our 42 language services – among them, of course, BBC Russian, BBC Arabic, BBC Persian and BBC Chinese – I will be interviewing many of them as well.

My hope is that at a time when, for domestic political reasons, we are being accused of bias, the audience will see and hear for themselves how balanced and insightful our journalism genuinely is. That, I believe, is the best response the BBC can possibly make to the attacks on it.

But there are other, perhaps more important, ways of calculating the value of BBC news services. The next few months and years could be really dangerous for the world, with the possibility of war in Ukraine, and that China might invade Taiwan. People at home and around the world always turn to the BBC even more than usual at this sort of time. The BBC is a calm, balanced, informed voice in a scary world. We need it more than ever in times like these.

That’s why, when it came to the title music for Unspun World, I asked the composer to add in a few notes from the BBC’s old theme music, Lilliburlero, as a salute to the BBC’s worldwide values and history. See if you can spot it.