Download Interview Transcript. Biography: Somerville, Keith. British Broadcasting Company News, journalist ; British Broadcasting Company World Service, journalist, ; Legal Online online course , ; Executive Producer, Sources, Scoops, and Stories course , ; co-author and role-play developer, Keith, thank you very much indeed for agreeing to talk to me.
I wonder if you could begin, please, by speaking about how you came to work at the BBC. I know that you had established an interest in Southern Africa as a schoolboy and as an undergraduate. But how did you then make the transition to the BBC? KS: The Monitoring Service then was very much an organisation that was both news gathering for the BBC and also a source of, what you could call, bulk political, economic and sometimes even military information for the government.
I tried and I think my lucky combination of factors meant that I was the ideal sort of person they were looking for. From my research I had a good knowledge of Soviet sources and the current Soviet propaganda line and the current Soviet ideological approach to Southern Africa and to Africa as a whole. Therefore I would be able to spot what they wanted to spot, not just in order to inform BBC news gathering but also for their official clients, Foreign Office, MoD.
I could spot changes in emphasis. KS: Absolutely. The deal was the Monitoring Service was this funny hybrid organisation. So we had a base in Nairobi, which we still have β an East African unit which monitored the Horn of Africa, East Africa and bits of Central Africa β and then the base that I worked at for a period in Lilongwe in Malawi, based in the British High Commission and we monitored South African domestic and external broadcasts.
KS: In English. Zimbabwean broadcasts in English, Malawian, Zambian, Botswana. By the time I went there it was Zimbabwe, but when it was originally set up it was monitoring Rhodesia. In fact I think that was one of the primary reasons it was set up β to monitor Rhodesian radio and to monitor also South African radio.
