Huna London

The total weekly reach for the BBC's Arabic Service including digital, BBC News Arabic TV and radio is 42.2 million. The digital part of that is 12.7m.  I can't find a current split between tv and radio, but ten years ago, tv was reaching 24m. So today, at 1300 GMT the BBC World Service broadcasts its last radio bulletin in Arabic after 85 years, surrendering an influential audience of up to 5m.  

On the 3rd of January, 1938 Ahmad Kamal Sourour Effendi began the very first broadcast to the Near East region with "This is London .. Ladies and gentlemen we are broadcasting from London in the Arabic Language for the first time in history". The Arabic service was the first non-English broadcast from Britain, and it came in response to Mussolini's anti-British propaganda stations broadcasting from Bari and Rome. Spanish and Portuguese services were launched just weeks after Arabic; Persian and Turkish services as well as German, Russian, French and around ten other European languages followed between 1939 and 1942.

The stations first 'organiser' was Stewart Perowne, who had learned Arabic working in education in Palestine since 1927. He later became a diplomat and embarked on a 'lavender marriage' with Freya Stark. Kamal Sourour was from Egypt; the Italians had been using Tunisians, harder to understand further east. The first bulletin was not without controversy.  Sourour reported “Another Arab from Palestine was executed by hanging at Acre this morning by order of a military court. He was arrested during recent riots in the Hebron Mountains and was found to possess a rifle and some ammunition.”

The item had already appeared in English on the Empire Service bulletin, and George Rendel, the head of the Eastern Department of the Foreign Office, said “the fact that we had not concealed this item of news was a guarantee of our statement that our news would be straight news, and not carefully selected for the audience.”

The whole enterprise was funded jointly by grants-in-aid from the Empire Office and the Foreign Office - a position maintained until George Osborne stitched up Mark Thompson in 2010, with licence fee payers bearing the cost from 2014 on.