Who tuned in to the BBC? The Italian Service, its target audiences and listeners

Abstract

The analyses of the radio transcripts in Chapters 5 and 6 confirms that the BBC played an ambiguous role in Italy. In order to win the war, it was crucial to demonstrate that the Allied coalition was a superior military force. As the BBC often repeated, the Allies would not treat the Italians as enemies if they got rid of fascism and the Nazi occupiers. However, they could also bomb their cities. The contradictory role of the Italian Service has also emerged from Chapters 3 and 4. The Italian exiles working for the BBC experienced several issues with the British Foreign Office and were not always free to express their political opinions, despite references in their memoirs to the BBC being a second home. By analysing the BBC’s target Italian audiences and the reception of the programmes, this chapter aims to understand how the myth of Radio London was constructed. By focusing on the work of radio historians and scholars, the first part of the chapter explains how difficult is to obtain reliable quantitative estimates about radio listeners in the 1930s and 1940s. The second part concentrates on the categories of Italians that the BBC hoped to reach and analyses some programme extracts. The third and fourth sections concentrate, respectively, on some indirect and direct sources of qualitative information on the listeners: the BBC surveys on the audiences of enemy countries and the letters sent by listeners to the Italian Service to Colonel Stevens.