06/07/2009

Associated Press

Sometimes all you have to do is ask. So Steve Miles did.

Miles, code enforcement officer for the City of The Dalles loves the British Broadcasting Company's "World Have Your Say" radio program, carried weekday mornings on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The program visited Portland in 2007. Recently, show host Ros Atkins announced the show was returning to Oregon, in part to host workshops at a conference of public radio news directors in Portland.

Miles invited producers to bring their program to The Dalles, a Columbia River town of about 13,000 some 90 miles east of Portland, for a day, and the producers agreed.

On Wednesday, June 10, the show will originate from Mama Jane's Pancake House.

"We picked this particular spot because he invited us to come there," producer Madeline Morris told the Chronical newspaper of The Dalles in a phone interview from London last week.

"We were looking to do something outside of Portland. We're very aware that Portland is not all of Oregon. We had a little bit of a look at the sorts of things that you do there and we thought it might be a really nice antidote to Portland."

World Have Your Say will broadcast two shows from The Dalles. From 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. the show reaches around the world except for Africa. From 11 a.m. to noon, a second live show will be broadcast in Africa.

It's a fast-paced show, with two presenters circulating through the host audience for comments, and people calling from around the world to comment on current events.

And there's a lively e-mail discussion. One producer keeps an eye on that and reads appropriate comments to the audience.

Morris ticked off some of the broadcast sites since the first of the year: Indiana for President Obama's 100 days, Mexico for the swine flu, Israel for the Israeli elections.

"We've been in India and Pakistan as well this year. That was a great show. We went there particularly to link up audiences in India and Pakistan and we did a fantastic program where we had one audience in Lahore, Pakistan and one in the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, which is the one which was attacked.

"And we had Pakistanis speaking to Indians and they never get to do that normally."

Morris said she didn't have specifics on audience size. "For English language programming, the weekly reach of the BBC World Service is 50-60 million people," she said, "but we don't have audience figures for our particular program. It's too difficult to mesh up because we have 70 partner stations and so many people listen on satellite radio, Sirius and XM."

She said topics change with the day's news, and producers don't know what those are until the day of the show.

"The aim of the program is to bring the world together and give people a place to speak to one another," Morris said. "It's a program driven by our listeners and what our listeners want to talk about."

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Information from: The Dalles Chronicle, http://www.thedalleschronicle.com