"We meet"

London is no longer here

Dr..

Parvin Habib

January 31, 2023

“Here is London.. ladies and gentlemen, we are broadcasting today from London in Arabic for the first time in history.” That was 85 years ago, Egyptian broadcaster Ahmed Sorour uttered this sentence. I made him a star in the forties of the last century, only to end up in a mental hospital for four years. .

However, his famous phrase remained a slogan for the media, which has become a school whose stars shunned news television channels, beginning in the nineties.

The Arabic section of the British Broadcasting Corporation, or “BBC”, or Radio London as it was known for short, which was established in response to “Radio Bari” funded by the fascist Italian government at that time, made every Arab house own a radio to set its watch to the famous chimes of “Big Ben”. Followed by the majestic chorus “Here is London”, so that the luxurious voices of its announcers open our eyes to what is happening here and in the world, in an eloquent Arabic language that raised the Arab listener to it instead of descending to it. At a time when it was heard in the countryside and among the illiterate, no one complained about its elitism, nor I turn away from her, despite the ignition of competition later on from Radio Monte Carlo, France International, and the Voice of America, but... love is only for the London lover.

This radio accompanied me when I was small, and affected my professional formation greatly. While the men were silent in front of its news or reaping the benefits from its listeners’ symposium, the “Radio Memory” program was an important tributary to my poetic taste in the early formative years, as it was regaining it from the episodes of “Say upon Say” by the writer Hassan Al-Karmi, and the dramatic plays supervised by the author of “Season of Migration to the North,” the novelist Tayeb Salih, took my hand to the brink of dreaming of the voices of actors who became pioneers of Arab cinema.

As for the “Sandouq Al-Nagham” program, presented by Nahed Najjar, he used to carry me on the wings of music with the voices of singers of the beautiful time throughout our Arab world.

When I visited the BBC headquarters in 1996, accompanied by the Saudi media, Huda Al-Rasheed, and she was the first Arab female voice to speak in it, I felt that I was “Alice in Wonderland.” Here is the school in which Rashad Ramadan, Salwa Al-Jarrah, Mahmoud Al-Musalmi, Madiha Al-Madfai and dozens of voices that charmed me with their professionalism shone. When I was a news anchor on Bahrain TV in the early nineties.

The lack of funding and the pervasiveness of the means of communication defeated the Arabic section of the BBC, but many of us, when describing ourselves, will say: I am from the “here is London” generation.

@DrParweenHabib1 

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