The BBC and the Rise and Fall of the Empire Radio Feature, 1932-1966

This chapter examines the “empire feature,” a distinctive element in British and Commonwealth international broadcasting from the 1930s to the 1960s. Empire features combined recorded and live “sounds”—“actualities”—from around the British Empire and Commonwealth and often included the voices of “ordinary” people. They were used to evoke a sense of imperial unity and to promote themes of social and economic progress. Typically broadcast on Christmas Day, Empire Day, national holidays, and great royal occasions, they offered a distinctive soundscape, attributable to the complex technical feat of linking sequences from around the world together in a single program, and to attempts to overcome the vagaries of shortwave transmission. Many empire features displayed a bias toward the white “British world” and only began to include African and Asian colonized voices and perspectives after the Second World War, and even then, only in carefully curated formats.