The BBC World Service will rebroadcast The Sound of Soft Power—the excellent radio documentary exploring the enduring influence of international broadcasting and shortwave radio—via its shortwave service on the following dates:
- First transmission: 18:00 GMT, Saturday, 1 August 2026
- Final transmission: 11:00 GMT, Sunday, 2 August 2026
I’ll post the frequencies as soon as I’m notified, although I expect they’ll follow the BBC World Service’s normal shortwave transmission schedule.
I’d love to add a good off-air recording of this broadcast to the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive. I’ll certainly try to make a recording myself, but I may not be in the best location for reception. If you’re able to capture the broadcast, please consider sharing your recording!
If you missed my original post about The Sound of Soft Power when it first aired on BBC Radio 4 in May, you can read it here: BBC Radio 4 explores shortwave broadcasting and soft power (May 2026)
The podcast was not available from Radio 4. I winder if it will be now that the WS is broadcasting and streaming the program. Very often content from Radio 4 is repurposed for the WS as “The Documentary” but edited down to 23 minutes or so if originally 1/2 hour. This program was originally sourced on “The Archive” and was originally about 43 minutes I think. So it will be interesting to see how it’s repurposed by the WS.
I wrote Audience Services to complain that the program was not available as a podcast, whether an overseas listener paid a subscription or not. I suggested to them that more might subscribe by paying a fee if all the content available to license holders were made available to subscribers, subject to the usual exceptions for rights reasons. I was told my suggestion would be escalated.
Don’t count on it being available on SW. The scheduled English language transmission times are quite limited.
But it can and would be available via the WS Internet stream. The schedules are identical.
So, the BBC does a documentary on the influence of shortwave while they are systematically shutting down much of their shortwave facilities.