Hands across the sea no more

What's going on with the closure of BBC Sounds to overseas listeners?

It was on holiday in France some time in the 1990s when I discovered how far abroad — in those pre-internet days — the BBC’s domestic radio service extended. The Loire valley turned out to be the point at which the signal started to disappear, but on Radio 4 longwave it was still just possible to pick up Test Match Special — for some reason not actually in the house I was staying in, but on the car radio.

There were afternoons when rather than lying by the pool, I’d be sitting in the driver’s seat — door open, the car parked in the shade of a tree — straining to hear the voices of Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Trevor Bailey through the static and the fading in and out. I can’t remember which Test series it was, but the miracle of connecting with life back home in this way has stayed with me.

Some 30 years on, listening to BBC radio wherever you are in the world is taken for granted. You go online and there it is on BBC Sounds, and indeed one of the fun things about listening to live radio in the UK is the messages that come in from listeners who are beyond British shores.

I was listening to Radio 2 on Saturday evening. One of Liza Tarbuck’s listeners messaged in from Copenhagen. A little later, Gary Davies was fielding a message from someone in Baku, which sounded a bit less likely and I did start to wonder whether people make this stuff up. Sunday morning Radcliffe and Maconie on 6 Music were sceptical when a listener claimed to be enjoying the show from the vantage point of a boat on the Caspian Sea.

The other listeners they often quote who are in, say, the US or Australia sound genuine enough, and that worldwide listening is happening on a huge scale is undoubtedly the case, given the strength of the response to the news that BBC Sounds will soon be made unavailable to overseas listeners. Amid an outcry, It’s not clear why the BBC is doing this — even Radio 4’s Feedback, in its most recent edition, could not get to the bottom of it. No doubt there’s money involved though it’s hard to see quite where the expense comes from.

The change reminded me not just of my TMS-in-deepest-France moment but of an obscure bit of Radio 4 history when, in the aftermath of the first Gulf War — in 1990 — it was mooted to turn Radio 4 longwave into an exclusively rolling news service. In the end Radio 5 came along — later 5 Live — but not before the then Controller of Radio 4, Michael Green, had made a special trip to Antwerp to appease some of the Continent’s listeners alarmed at losing access to Radio 4 as they knew it.

So back then it mattered a lot to BBC radio to keep its overseas listeners happy. Now it appears to be the opposite. Very strange.

I see that one of the many people dismayed by the withdrawal of BBC Sounds abroad (I read that Radio 4 and the World Service will still be available, plus a wodge of podcasts) is the opera singer Matthew Rose. Launching a petition to campaign for the decision to be reversed, he said that BBC radio is “our greatest export, our greatest gift to ourselves and the world — important for us and our friends around the world”.

Matthew has launched a petition at change.org — “Prevent the BBC from Ceasing Worldwide Broadcast of Radio Stations”. I’m signing it because for all the wonders of the World Service, why wouldn’t I want to be able to pick up my favourite BBC radio stations on a foreign trip. The shedding of some light on the whole business would be welcome.