Which radio station has changed the most in recent years? My vote would go not to any of the obvious contenders but to a service with only 452,000 regular listeners - though one that is as brave as it is small. The BBC Asian Network, which began a generation ago in the Midlands to offer Hindi and Urdu programmes to immigrant households, has changed from regional to national, from analogue to digital, from middle-aged to young and from sitar to guitar.
It is still half-music and half-speech, but the music includes not only Bollywood (now given a four-hour show every Saturday and Sunday morning) and bhangra, but lots of "desi beats" (Asian pop), some of which was showcased at Glastonbury last month. And the speech, most of which is in English, has one of the most candid and self-aware documentary strands on the airwaves.
The changes inevitably reflect the changing nature of Asian Britons - younger, more dispersed, more numerous and more influential, in both the mainstream and at the extremities. Our richest resident, Lakshmi Mittal, is an Indian; our new junior international development minister, Shriti Vadera, is a Ugandan Asian; Blue Peter's third longest-running host, Konnie Huq, is of Bangladeshi parentage; the spin bowler Monty Panesar is a Sikh. And, as yesterday's second anniversary of the events of 7/7 reminds us, some of Pakistani descent have turned to terror.
If the station were launched now, its name would surely be "BBC British Asian Network". Most of the music it champions is created and played now, in this country, by people born, educated and raised here, and indubitably British. The term "British Asian" is heard on its output over and over again. The station's head of music (Mark Strippel) comes from my own London borough, Hounslow, as does its best-known DJ (Bobby Friction, the stage name of Paramdeep Sehdev, who is also on Radio 1).
To me there is a subtle patriotism about the Asian Network: though not in denial about the past and, indeed, now asking the audience for experiences of the 60th birthday of painful partition and Indian independence, it is far more interested in where its listeners are going than in where they have come from.
Advertisement
Every Monday at 6.30pm it broadcasts the Asian Network Report. If anybody thought this would sanitise or offer woolly-minded liberalism, think again. Last week's edition was a biting attack on Asian racism, starting off with a white teenager in Glasgow who was abducted, set on fire and murdered by five "Pakistani guys", as they were described on the programme, in 2004. It was as critical of Asians who call those who want to integrate "coconuts" (brown on the outside, white on the inside) as it was of outside agitators keen to whip up race hatred. Tomorrow, it tackles homosexuality. Past topics have included honour killings, shisha bars affected by the smoking ban, and Asian-run pornography.
Tim Gardam, the former programmes boss at Channel 4, wrote an official report on the BBC's digital networks in 2004 in which he said that the Asian Network's journalism was "unambitious". He could not possibly make that charge now, and nor could anyone else.