The BBC Burmese Service today made the first live broadcast from the BBC’s new state of the art news studios at Broadcasting House in central London at 1.45 pm GMT Sunday. The BBC Director General recorded an interview for the broadcast and welcomed the Burmese Service to the new facility at Broadcasting House.
BBC Director General Mark Thompson said: “The Burmese Service is one of the jewels in the BBC’s crown and I know is listened to and enjoyed by many millions of people in Burma. This is a great day for the BBC and the Burmese Service. The Burmese service is the very first service to make the move and to be broadcasting today from its new home.” Asked about the future of BBC World Service, Thompson said: “I think the BBC’s mission, which is to bring great, trustworthy, impartial, reliable news to the world [.] that mission doesn’t change. But the way in which we deliver it has to change because of the way the world’s changing. That means new technologies, it means making sure – as we do with the Burmese Service – that we’ve got a great web presence with video on it as well as the radio that so many people rely on.” Thompson said the move would lead to The World Service and all its language services working much more closely with the rest of the BBC News.
The migration to the new home of BBC News over the coming months will see the integration of all the BBC’s international and domestic UK multimedia newsrooms under one roof, to create one of the world’s largest, single concentrations of journalistic expertise.
The Burmese Service marked the broadcast with a special programme featuring an exclusive interview with Aung San Suu Kyi. Regarding foreign broadcasts she said: “It’s very important that the external media keeps up an awareness of what is happening in Burma. Because we don’t really have absolute freedom of information, we don’t have absolute freedom of the press. We must remember there is such a thing as censorship in the country.” The programme also featured greetings and well wishes from listeners and a special phone-in for the listeners who would like to know more about the New Broadcasting House.
Peter Horrocks, the BBC Director of the World Service, said: “It is fitting that the first broadcast in the new Broadcasting House is from the BBC Burmese Service. BBC Burmese is emblematic of why the BBC World Service remains so important, acting as lifeline for international audiences who are hungry for impartial and independent news. We will continue to represent the voice of free media where there is no other access to fair and authoritative news.”
Helen Boaden, the BBC Director of News said: “In a multimedia world, we need a multimedia building which encourages greater efficiency through new technology and greater creativity through collaboration. Simply being in the same building should encourage our ambition: for example, the Today programme will have Language Service colleagues from the World Service in the same building. When there’s a breaking foreign story, those World Service colleagues will be able to give the context for the Radio 4 audience. And of course it should work in the other direction too.”
The original Broadcasting House was the first ever purpose-built broadcast centre in the UK. It was built in 1932 for the BBC, eight years after the corporation first came into existence. Over the last decade, Broadcasting House has undergone extensive redevelopment with the addition of a major new extension and new John Peel Wing. Now complete, this 80,000 square metre structure will provide state-of-the-art, digital broadcast facilities for nearly 6,000 staff – the majority of them frontline programme-makers from BBC News, the World Service, Radio & Music and staff from BBC Vision (BBC One, Two, Three and Four). Together, they will be providing public service broadcasting via three 24-hour television news channels, 9 radio networks and 26 foreign language services to a worldwide audience of more than 241 million people. At the heart of the building will be the largest live newsroom in Europe.
The BBC Burmese Service was founded in 1940 and has covered independence, uprisings and long years of military rule. Small teams based in Bangkok and London broadcast to more than an estimated 20% of Burma’s adult population, and in times of national crisis these figures soar. An estimated 8.3 million weekly listeners in Burma and the BBC Burmese Website attracts over 100,000 unique users every week and features with video and audio plus picture galleries. Independent surveys also show that BBC Burmese has established itself as the most trusted, reliable source of information in Burma.