From Our Own Correspondent at 70

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Anna Foster and some of the BBC’s best-known foreign correspondents are joined by an audience of Radio 4 listeners to celebrate 70 years of ‘From Our Own Correspondent’. Since the first episode was broadcast on 25th September 1955, FOOC – as it’s affectionately known – has reported from almost every country in the world.

Anna’s guests for the event, recorded in the Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House in London, are Kate Adie, the presenter of FOOC and a former BBC Chief News Correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor, Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, and Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Russia Editor.

They discuss what the job of a foreign correspondent is these days when anyone can get on a plane, take a mobile phone and broadcast to the world. They reflect on how to report on a more hostile world. Together, they offer insights into the world of the foreign correspondent - including the time Jeremy Bowen once told the Mujahideen in Afghanistan that he was Lyse Doucet - and Steve Rosenberg takes to the piano to explain why his hopes for Russia rest with a newspaper vendor in Moscow.

Producers: Adele Armstrong, Serena Tarling and Polly Hope. Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts.
0:05.7	Hello and welcome to the radio theatre at BBC Broadcasting House in London,
0:10.7	where we're joined by an audience of Radio 4 listeners to celebrate 70 years of one of our most enduring radio programmes from our own correspondent, or Fouk, as it's affectionately known amongst its many,
0:23.2	many contributors around the world. Now, since the first episode was broadcast back in 1955,
0:29.7	Fouk has reported from almost every country and kingdom in the world, 107 of them just in the last year
0:37.4	alone. It's chronicled the rise and fall of
0:39.8	dictators, it's followed wars and warlords, and it's told the stories of hit women and hermits.
0:45.7	It's observed struggles for independence and strides towards civil rights, the demolition of the
0:50.7	Berlin Wall and the dawning of the digital age. But in all of these
0:55.0	dispatches, there is one thing in common, the tiny detail that really tells the story.
1:03.9	At the airport, the first site that greets you is that of row after row of abandoned cars. Many of
1:09.8	them now partly his trip.
1:11.8	These are the cars left behind by the Belgians
1:13.9	who fled after the mutiny of the forced public.
1:18.9	Earlier this week, I drove to another bomb site.
1:21.6	The sugar-pink apartment block
1:22.9	had been torn open like a dollhouse,
1:25.0	probably by a Russian cruise missile.
1:27.3	Family pictures still hung on the remaining walls.
1:30.0	A bath and sink sat in place four stories up, even though the bathroom floor was gone.
1:37.4	There have always been days in Lagos that test your sanity, but lately those days seem to be
1:43.8	piling up. Now the air crackles with tension.
	...

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