Dhiren Katwa, senior news editor at Asian Voice, spoke at the Coventry Conversations series on Thursday about the possibility of the BBC’s Asian Network being scrapped in the face of strategic cuts. He said Vijay Sharma, head of the Asian Network, has been “in hiding” over the current situation.
The Asian Network’s audience fell by 15 per cent to 357,000 in the third quarter of last year, and is expected to struggle for survival after director-general Mark Thompson’s forthcoming strategic review of BBC programming.
Katwa, a member of the Equality Council of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said he thought it would be a shame for the Asian Network to go, but added that he didn’t believe the BBC should be specifically broadcasting to minority groups. He told the audience that “with the Asian Network working within a silo, it’s promoting or contributing to segregation rather than integration”. He said that the solution is to embed minority targeted elements of the BBC more firmly within the corporation.
When asked about the network’s fall in ratings, Katwa said commercial competitors such as Sunrise Radio had contributed to the network’s struggle to reach it’s young target audience, but put its current problems largely down to “a lot of internal issues”.
Caroline Thomson, the BBC’s chief operating officer, told the House of Lords Communications Committee on Wednesday that the idea of one network serving the UK’s entire Asian community wasn’t the right way to represent such a large and diverse audience.
Katwa echoed her assessment in his talk, and suggested that “the BBC Asian Network needs to be embedded within the BBC as a corporation with more faces from black and Asian backgrounds.”
Sharing Katwa’s view, broadcast journalism lecturer and founder of Coventry Conversations John Mair added: “There is no role for something separate or segregated, it should just be part of the mainstream. Not ‘now Radio Four’s Asian hour’, every hour should be Asian hour”.
Katwa said at the talk that his opinions were his own and did not necessarily reflect the views of Asian Voice.
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Why The BBC Asian Network Still Scratches My Niche.
The UK Asian radio & Media marketplace is thriving. Zee, TV Asia, Star and a galaxy of local stations like Sunrise & XL are still loud and proud; jostling for advertiser revenue. So why, you ask, is the one British Asian media giant that doesn’t have to worry about sponsorship bailing out in a bull market? How has the Asian Network gone from hyped powerhouse to the BBC’s most expensive listen? The answers are simple. On the air, the station has a clear line up of winners, all setting the pace for UK Asian music culture. In the back office, the BBC management has no clue what the station is for and partitions its airtime from above like Mountbatten in 1947. When the BBC’s COO Caroline Thompson told the House of Lords that the Network was confused because it had to “cater for many disparate groups simultaneously”, what she was actually told us was that for some at the BBC, the Network is still a multicultural project and not the professional entertainment venture we know it should be. And however well meaning that sentiment is, we know it dooms the UK Asian music industry to failure. That’s why the BBC needs more Desi programmers and managers at top level – we’ve spent sixty years establishing our Asian selves, our Asian businesses and our Asian entertainment industry here in the UK. Any self described community leader who writes in to my business with demands for representation based on dodgy demographics has posted their letter thirty years too late; we listened to those people before and found out they just don’t bring anything to the table.
I happen to believe that the music of South Asia is up there with the best in the world. I also happen to know that the new, fused, engaged, exciting sound that the Asian Network is currently fostering is going to be even better. What we must do, today, is to get the office bound BBC hierarchy to listen to that music and get some contemporary context from professionals across the UK music industry. They need to know this music is open, urban, diverse and immediate – it’s the unique sound of our contemporary UK streets and clubs. The Asian Network will succeed when programmers stop try to respond to demographic breakdowns of supposed listeners and start getting Desi artists and tracks on the playlists of new listeners. Listeners from the world beyond the Asian massive and its welcome but limited circle of enthusiastic converts. Sadly, even the name is a admission of limitation. It’s a “network” when it should be a station, a structure when it should be a rallying point, a maze when it should be a signpost. The Asian media industry needs to take charge of the BBC Asian Network tomorrow with the goal of making it genuinely popular across the UK as a whole, not just potentially representative of abstract interest groups.
Still – I’m not surprised there’s knee jerk reactions in the carpeted corridors of power. The recent listening figures must make uncomfortable reading at Yalding House. Nearly twenty percent of the Asian Network’s audience turned it off for good last year. So where have we gone, all of us Desi divas? Is there a secret station in Southall, staffed by Masonic Indian brothers, that only we know about? The answer – for Asian listeners at least – is that the digital dial is crowded out. We’re all of us online 24/7 now; surfing stations that speak to us in our mother’s mother tongue. We tune into Mumbai drivetime and Delhi downtempo. And of course, the demographic that really matters is the youth; and they’re busy playlisting bootlegged Desi tracks onto their smartphones via YouTube. For kids today, that’s their Asian Network,
The closure of a national radio station is no small thing in our current economic climate. One hunded plus media professionals are today hoping that their nightmare won’t come true; that the door hasn’t shut forever on their careers. But for some there will be a dream they dare not speak aloud – that this is their moment, that the mainstream is ready for them; that a ladder will come down from above. But is a Desi Asian radio professional going to be climbing up to a mainstream drivetime or syndicated breakfast show anytime soon? Let them dream on. Many young bloods won’t remember, but “Mainstreaming” is the word that haunted the emerging Asian media business, during the big Bhangra crossover of the eighties – the one that never happened. But aren’t things different today? Contemporary Asian media pundits argue that Bollywood has successfully crossed over to the UK’s big time media. What they can’t or won’t see is that it plays as a cocktail party cliche; just as the US mainstreamed Latin sounds into “Mambo Italiano” fakery of the 1950s; stripped of its grace and pathos.
The fact is that only people in the media think that contemporary music benefits from being bracketed by big name DJs, quizzes and chatter. What people want to hear is new, fresh music and classic tracks that continue to hit the spot and light up their day. When, as now, programming and scheduling appear desperate and convoluted, it’s proof positive that station management have little confidence or understanding in the sounds that go out over the air. Our campaign must be, not just to save the Asian Network, but to turn it into a flagship for the new, hot and popular music that draws deep from the well of Asian culture and can engage every listener in the UK. It’s all about the music.
Ammo Talwar
Sign the petition
http://www.petition.fm/petitions/6musicasiannet/1000/
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/BBCcuts?source=homepage#petition