TO MANY, the typical Radio 4 listener is white, 55-plus and in the ABC socioeconomic group - fond of marketeers and those types. In other words, bright, fairly establishment and the stereotype of a Brit who wants to know what is going on in the world. Its controller – the person responsible for the entire output – fits the demographic to a tee… Except… Mohit Bakaya is south Asian and in 2019 was appointed the first person of colour to run a network radio station in the corporation’s 100-year history. More than that, in May 2022, he was promoted to his current position – director of speech. And speaking to the GG2 Power List, Bakaya could not help being proud of the achievements his colleagues – and it is incredibly important to him that they share the credit – and he that 2023 was an “amazing” year for speech radio. “We won station of the year, which is a huge accolade because the ARIAs are the main audio awards in this country. We’ve won over 70 awards for programmes in our speech area, both in Radio 4, and Five Live. Just bringing all the speech content into one commissioning team has been really exciting, and we’ve have some amazing commissioners. Programmes like I’m Not a Monster, The Shamima Begum story, which has won countless awards, and Call Jonathan Pie, really broke through for us in comedy.” He believes his Radio 4 team did the hard groundwork into the Post Office Horizon scandal: in 2020, they did a 10-part series on it. “We did the journalism. We’re just starting to really build an audience on [BBC] Sounds and on digital for our podcasts. Most of our stuff is in the top 10 of all BBC Sounds most listened to content. So, it’s great.” Bakaya is a humble man, quiet, fiercely and securely intelligent, someone comfortable in his own skin. He is firmly 100 per cent a servant of public service whose master is the listener. In his relatively short tenure he has, oh, so subtly changed the output without fanfare. Whisper it ever so quietly, we hear more racially diverse voices and original stories. The world’s longest running radio soap, The Archers, welcomed a South Asian heritage brother and sister to the everyday story of farming folk. Lord Bragg’s series In Our Time, discussed the Hindu text, The Ramayana. And who can forget Takeover – now in its third series – described as “high-stake deals and sibling rivalry set in the world of the super wealthy”. What Bakaya has done, almost without anyone apparently noticing, is making Radio 4 less white, younger and friendlier, said one broadcast veteran. The BBC man does not see it that way. It is about talent for him. “I have a very simple principle, which is that any national radio station has to reflect the nation that it broadcasts to.
If you look at the last census figures, you’ll see there are about 9.6 per cent of Asian heritage, about four per cent Black-African, Black-Caribbean, and then probably the majority, 85 per cent or whatever, is white. It’s very important that Radio 4, like any station, reflects that. So, I wanted to bring more diversity onto the network not to play some sort of tokenistic game, but to try and just make sure that we were reflecting the nation we broadcast to. By doing that, we are being better journalists being better storytellers. “It’s not doing some political identity bingo, it’s about simply saying we must be representative of the nation we broadcast to.” Bakaya was brought up in Battersea, London. His family were the only south Asians in his neighbourhood in 1960s Britain. Bakaya’s mother met his father when he was working in Bollywood, the Indian film industry. When they came to the UK, his father, Madan Bakaya, made it his mission to bring the films of his birth to this country. So, young Mohit remembers, as many south Asians of the 1960s and 1970s, going to venues where his father would screen the latest Bollywood blockbuster to eager audiences.
“My mother was a brilliant mathematician. She was in computers. She was one of the early women who worked in computer software,” he remembers with obvious pride. “So, that was her job, but she also was quite extraordinary. She died when I was eight, sadly, but in that time, I knew that she was amazing. She played the sitar, she gave recitals in our flat in Battersea. She was a potter, she was a painter, she was really interested in the arts as well as having this incredible kind of scientific brain as well.” Bakaya joined the BBC in 1993 in his late 20s, seven years after graduating from Oxford, as one of its prestigious production trainees. By that time, his father had passed away, but his brother, Samir Shah was already in the corporation in a senior position. But here is something which speaks to Bakaya’s integrity. “I have to say the fact that neither my mother nor father saw that I joined the BBC, let alone become controller, really affords a source of eternal regret for me. Samir went into news and television and Bakaya stuck to radio and the arts. “I stayed quite far away from him for quite as long as I could, until he left. I didn’t tell a single soul he was my brother. We have different surnames, we have same mother different father, so they wouldn’t associate us. But it was absolutely essential for me that I did it on my own two feet and terms, and no one thought that there was anything untoward. He didn’t even know I was applying, I kept it very far away from him.” Today, Samir Shah is the chair of the BBC, and you know they will keep their distance and ensure integrity between governance and day-to-day running of the organisation. He’s excited about the year ahead – even with the pressure that will come about as a General Election looms. “It’s recognising that our job in a world of increased disinformation is huge. We have to be a reliable source of information for so many now.” There is a new environmental show called Rare Earth, which is about a different way of thinking about the climate crisis. There will be Three Million about the Bengal Famine of the 1940s and Bakaya believes his station has new archive and testimony no one has heard before which will tell the story in a dramatic way.
