June 7, 2009

BBC show comes to Momma Jane’s June 10

By Rodger Nichols
of The Chronicle

     Sometimes all you have to do is ask.
     Steve Miles, code enforcement officer for the City of The Dalles is a fan of the British Broadcasting Company’s “World Have Your Say” program, which has been carried at 10 a.m. weekdays on Oregon Public Broadcasting for the past two and a half years.
     The program visited Oregon in March 2007, originating one day of the worldwide live talk show from the Baghdad Theater in Portland in conjunction with Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB).
     Recently, show host Ros Atkins announced the show was returning to Oregon for several days, in part to host workshops at a conference of public radio news directors in Portland.
     Miles then invited producers to bring their program to The Dalles on one of those days.
     They agreed. Wednesday, June 10, the show will originate from Mama Jane’s Pancake House.
     “We picked this particular spot because he invited us to come there,” said producer Madeline Morris by phone from London Friday. “We were looking to do something outside of Portland. We’re very aware that Portland in not all of Oregon. We had a little bit of a look at the sorts of things that you do there and we thought it might be a really nice antidote to Portland.”
     World Have Your Say will actually broadcast two shows from The Dalles. From 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time the show goes to all the world except Africa. From 11 a.m. to noon, a second live show will be broadcast in Africa.
     It’s a fast-paced show, with two presenters circulating through the host audience for comments, and people calling, literally, from all over the world. In addition, there’s a lively e-mail discussion, and one producer keeps an eye on that traffic and reading appropriate comments to the audience.
     The program is well-traveled. Morris ticked off some of the broadcast sites since the first of the year:
     “We were in Indiana for President Obama’s 100 days, we were in Mexico for the swine flu. We were in Israel for the Israeli elections at the start of the year. We’ve been in India and Pakistan as well this year. That was a great show. We went there particularly to link up audiences in India and Pakistan and we did a fantastic program where we had one audience in Lahore, Pakistan and one in the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, which is the one which was attacked. And we had Pakistanis speaking to Indians and they never get to do that normally.”
     Morris said she didn’t have specifics on audience size, but it was large.
     “For English language programming, the weekly reach of the BBC World Service is 50-60 million people,” she said, “but we don’t have audience figures for our particular program. It’s too difficult to mesh up because we have 70 partner stations and so many people listen on satellite radio, Sirius and XM.”
     She said the topics for the show change with the day’s news, and producers wouldn’t know what they would be until the day of the show.
     “The aim of the program is to bring the world together and give people a place to speak to one another,” Morris said. “It’s a program driven by our listeners and what our listeners want to talk about.”