I BELIEVE this is the first time that the External Services of the B.B.C. have been the subject of a general meeting at Chatham House. It may be convenient to divide up what I have to say under the following headings: first, to place the External Services in the perspective of B.B.C. operations as a whole; secondly, to describe briefly what the External Services really are; thirdly, to give an outline of their history, constitutional position, and organization; and finally, to discuss some of the special problems current at the present time. Here I will make some reference to the Russian and Arabic Services and to the most recently introduced African Services. The B.B.C. has, at present, a staff totalling around i6,ooo. Of those, some 2,000 are directly engaged in the External Services in one capacity or another, and another 2,000, largely engineers, are concerned with the technical operation of the External Services. Thus a total staff of some 4,o000, or a quarter of the B.B.C.'s entire staff, is engaged full-time in external broadcasting; and their work represents something in the nature of a quarter or a third of the total broadcasting effort of the B.B.C. In the aggregate, the External Services put out about eighty hours of programmes a day, spread over about ten different networks. In all, this amounts to about twice the total programme time devoted to the domestic sound and television services together. One of the biggest problems, of course, in external broadcasting is the question of the clock. We have to straddle the time differences across the world, literally right round the twenty-four hours. It is very difficult, I think, for people in one country to realize what that means in terms of communicating with people in another at a convenient time for them to listen. At the moment-I.30 p.m.-it is I.40 a.m. tomorrow in New Zealand and it is only about 5.40 this morning in Western Canada; I just quote those examples as illustrations. It means that a great deal of our broadcasting has to be done from here at a time of day when most people in this country are in bed, but the staff and the artists and speakers contributing to those services have to be as wide awake as we all are in the middle of the working day. My second point is what is comprised by the External Services. First of all, there is the broadcast output: this is primarily on short-waves; medium-wave and long-wave are used to a limited extent for the nearer parts of the Continent of Europe, and more widely afield in hours of 170