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Mohit Bakaya

Mohit Bakaya

MOHIT BAKAYA – the BBC man who has the ear of millions of Britons … and all from his daughter’s bedroom and beyond.

When you meet Mohit Bakaya, the first impression is of a quiet, fierce and securely intelligent man, someone comfortable in his own skin. He listens intently. He thinks quickly. Then he speaks, deliberately and passionately.


“It’s been amazing,” he says about the past 12 months. “It’s been amazing mainly, I think, because it has really shown the value of Radio 4 for me something which, obviously, I believe in passionately and have known for many years. “But it has really amplified the importance of Radio 4 to the nation I hope in terms of the way in which we’ve provided companionship, as well as kind of explaining the virus and doing all the things we need to bring people together at a time when there’s so much unsettlement and anxiety.”

Most of us outside the world of broadcasting are unlikely to appreciate that Bakaya has one of the most difficult jobs in the UK media world. As the controller of Radio 4, the ears, opinions and views of middle-class Britain are constantly scrutinising him. According to the BBC, Radio 4’s target audience “35-54 ABC1 (commonly termed ‘replenishers’) makes up 24 per cent.” The good news is that since he took over, listenership has gone up. The current figures are almost 11 million, up an impressive 4.8 per cent year-on-year. The bad news is that everyone has an opinion. Think about the criticism of the “Archers monologues” during the pandemic. Not that Bakaya minds, after all he is firmly 100 per cent a servant of public service whose master is the listener. In his short tenure so far, he has tried to change the culture of the station he controls.

“While some might seek to exploit divisions in society, and promote confrontation, I think our job at Radio 4 is trying to bring people together. I don’t mean by that, to bring them together to agree necessarily, because we live in a culture, and it’s ever been thus, where people have different perspectives and points of view, and that’s fine.

“My strong feeling is that Radio 4 is a civilising and civilised space, which is there for people to express their differences, their points of view, their perspectives and their experiences, in a way where they listen to each other, rather than just shout at each other. And I think, as we know, social media and other places seem to amplify the more kind of oppositional side of communication, I want us to be a place where we allow people a space to explore with evidence.”

He warms to this theme. “What I’m most proud of are programmes like Rethink, where we’ve got a whole bunch of essays, starting with the Pope’s, which we would never normally get, getting through to George Soros and Samantha Power (former American ambassador to the United Nations), and all kinds of extraordinary people who gave us essays, thinking about how the world may reset after the pandemic, to be a better place.

“That was, again, trying to build on that positivity – all we’ve done with the ‘Listening Project’, where we brought people who were locked down, quite isolated, lonely, probably scared, anxious. We brought them together with other people. They just had a conversation, trying to do that thing that I really feel strongly about, which is that Radio 4 is a public square, a space for people to come together, rather than to drive people apart.

“Another thing we did, which again, in the teeth of the pandemic, was really amazing that the team were able to do it, we got people to nominate the song or a piece of music which got them through lockdown back in May. So, those are the things I’m really proud of, because it just shows Radio 4 off in what we do really well, which is to provide companionship, but really to just be a civilised force in a world which kind of needs it.”

He has a huge smile on his face which lights up the room. We are speaking virtually, and he is in his daughter’s bedroom which has become his make-shift office, where he holds most of his meetings. It is clear that what he has missed since lockdown is the camaraderie of his team. That inability to bump into colleagues for that “water cooler moment”.

“The main thing I’ve missed is my team. I’ve got a lovely team, brilliant team, and they’ve been so supportive to me, many of whom, obviously, I’ve been working with for many years as commissioning editor, and so on. We see each other like this on Zoom, and we can do business, and in some ways we get to talk to each other more. What you really want to do is just open the office door, have a cup of coffee with someone and just kick ideas around. So, some of that stuff where I would have done naturally, just because I hope I’m quite a collaborative controller.”

When he was a commissioner, Bakaya earned a reputation of being fiercely intellectual. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the award-winning columnist with The i, and a professor at Middlesex University, confirmed this view.

“I’ve delivered programmes for him, and he’s a terribly, terribly tough commissioning editor, which is a very good thing,” she tells us. “So, he would really test your ideas in ways I’d never had tested before. It’s like being in an oral exam. He understands radio, he understands rather complex ideas, whether he says yes or no. So, if you are commissioned, then you know that he really believes in your idea.”

Bakaya chuckles when I mention this and ask where the rigour, discipline and ‘fierce intelligence’ came from.

“My background is in politics and philosophy,” he begins. He read PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at Keble College, Oxford. “I was brought up in a household where, as a friend of mine at my wedding said, ‘You’d go to Mo’s house when you were young, and the first question would be quite straightforward, like, what football team do you support? And quite quickly, the questions moved to how do you know you exist?’ And that was kind of what my household was like.

“There were lots of political debate, and lots of, I wouldn’t say argument, but kind of rigorous, conversation and exchanges of views. So, I am a bit like that and of course, I try, because I think it’s the right thing for the controller of Radio 4 to do – kick the tires on ideas that come my way to make sure that before I put them in front of the audience, they’re the right idea, and they’ve been properly tested.”

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, an Indian instrument, 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 also speaks fondly of his father and his two brothers.

“It was a tricky old time. I have two brothers and they were naturally coming out of university, and probably, at that point, would have gone on to live their lives and branch out. But as a result of my mother dying, they had to come back to London, and, not all the time, but kind of be around enough to help my father, who, not initially, got Parkinson’s, so he wasn’t incredibly well towards the end of his life.

“I think we struggled a bit as a family, but we pulled through, and I was lucky to have my brothers who were incredible during that period, some very good friends, good close family friends, where I would spend quite a lot of my time after outside school. I think I probably benefit from the resilience I acquired.”

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 was in the BBC, and partly, I think, because he was in news and television, I chose to go into radio and arts. So, 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.”

Bakaya remains the first and only south Asian, indeed ethnic minority, to become the controller of a national station in radio, television and digital services in the almost 100-year history of the BBC. He is also one of the few south Asians who can be considered truly senior in the corporation. He puts his success down to luck.

“I made quite early on in my career a documentary with Jatinder Verma, co-founder of Tara Arts,” Bakaya recalls. “It was about his taking his father’s ashes back to scatter in the Ganges, a journey I’d made with my father’s ashes five years earlier. It was about him taking the ashes back and then going to search for his father’s house. I had no idea what I was doing and amazingly, it won a Sony award [the equivalent of a radio Oscar].

“As a result, a lot of doors opened for me there and people trusted me, and I was very lucky. I was the first to produce Front Row on Radio 4. So, I was incredibly lucky that I had all the way through my career really brilliant bosses who supported me and gave me opportunities. It wasn’t tough for me, I was fortunate and doors opened for me.”

This Radio 4 controller understands the meaning of diversity in its widest sense, not just in the narrow racial sense. Anita Anand, for example, fronting the year’s prestigious Reith Lectures may be an obvious example, but appointing Chris Mason, and his northern vowels, to host Any Questions surprised many in the industry. “I want Radio 4 to be representative of the nation it broadcasts to, that’s all. I don’t think that’s an outrageous ambition, and I don’t think we’re there yet. So, having a range of voices from all around the country, having a range of presenters and producers that reflect the kind of diverse nature of the country – and that’s about class and about disability and about regionality, as well as about being about race and colour and gender, of course – is just a no-brainer, it makes us a better station.

“That’s the point I think I feel most passionate about. This is not some tedious tick box activity. This is about being an even better radio station, the more representative we are, the better our journalism will be because we’ll tell better stories.”

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