A Jubilee year for GBC

This month has seen a landmark birthday for our national broadcaster.

60 is a diamond jubilee and it would be fair to suggest that the whole community has celebrated the achievement of the steady and enduring journey that has endeared GBC to its public.

I spent over twenty years of my life in GBC television (1980-2001) and still marvel at the achievements of my predecessors whilst being slightly envious of the current crop of broadcasters, ‘envidia sana’ may I add.

How I wish I could have pushed the boat out further in my day, but the reality is that those who put our TV and Radio through its paces today are probably thinking ‘if only we had more budget we could do this, that or the other much better.’

That is the spirit of the creative, always trying to improve on their work with flair and originality. It’s a vocational trait and it’s also the fire in the belly that has driven those who dedicate themselves to broadcast communication to achieve the best results possible.

The public has been well prepared for this GBC birthday. The ‘Flashback’ and ‘Rewind’ series of past TV programmes has seen many old gems given new screenings to new audiences, and older, those who were there to see the first runs.

This has sparked a sense of realisation among the community that even twenty, thirty or sixty years ago, despite what critics of the day might have said, the GBC programme content of local interest was our social history and it still has value today. Even more so when we vie for awareness of our identity and culture in a world where screens are milked for information.

Never is this better illustrated than by the Chronicle’s Alice Mascarenhas and her weekly Table of interesting guests who provide her with their fabric of social history for her to weave those stories worth being told so that they are not lost.

That thirst for nostalgia has also provided the backdrop for the interest and success that Stephen Cumming’s ‘Recordandote’ GBC story has garnered, whilst the excellent GBC exhibition at the Gustavo Bacarisas Gallery has ensured that the wider community does not forget what has been achieved in broadcasting over the last six decades.

Going around the vaults at Casemates with family and friends whilst attracting conversation from visitors to the exhibition has been humbling and gratifying and has cemented my long-held view that ‘we’ must have been doing something right to have survived this long and that, today, GBC is well poised to face the future in the knowledge that its target audience is behind them and that the broadcast remit to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ has been met in the past and will continue to be met in the future.

I hope that schools will take the opportunity to show pupils around before the exhibition closes at the end of the month. There is a lot to learn from good old-fashioned TV and radio that might inspire the young to do it even better in the future.
That could only be a good thing.

The exhibition held at the Gustavo Bacarisas Gallery in Casemates will be open to the public until January 31. The Gallery is open on weekdays from 10am to 6.30pm and Saturdays 10am to 2pm.