BBC World Service Celebrates 80th Birthday

The BBC's international World Service radio station turned 80 on Wednesday, as the broadcaster hailed a boom in its Iranian audience despite steep budget cuts.

"The programs will neither be very interesting nor very good," BBC chief John Reith had dismally predicted in 1932 as the World Service, then called the Empire Service, launched using short-wave radio technology.

But 80 years on the BBC said it was determined to reach ever larger foreign audiences via television, radio and the Internet, announcing that BBC Persian TV had doubled its audience from 3.9 million weekly viewers in 2009 to nearly 7.2 million.

"More than one in 10 Iranians now watch BBC Persian TV each week," said the BBC, which regularly complains that the Iranian regime jams its broadcasts.

World Service radio, meanwhile, marked its 80th year with a special day of live programming, encouraging its 225 million global listeners to participate in shaping the content in a dozen languages.

"These are historic and changing times for the BBC World Service," said the BBC's Director of Global News Peter Horrocks.

"We want our audiences to be at the heart of both the commemoration of the past and conversation about the future."

The British government, which pays for World Service through its foreign ministry, slashed the radio station's £270 million ($431 million, 323 million euro) budget by 16 percent last year.

The World Service has broadcast in 68 languages over its eight-decade history, but now has just 28 services, many of which are only accessible online.

"A tight financial climate does not mean we need to shrink our ambition -- we want to reach more people," Horrocks said.

The BBC began international television broadcasts in 1991 through World Service TV, now called BBC World News.

The World Service is still paid for by the foreign ministry but from 2014 the duty to fund it passes to the BBC itself as the government seeks to cut a record deficit.

The Empire Service did not begin broadcasting until December 1932, but the BBC marks the anniversary on Wednesday as it moves out of its Bush House, its central London home for more than 70 years, to join the rest of BBC News.