Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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The Truth about that pathetic box

Tongue in cheek contribution to Science Week, The Afternoon Shift, BBC Radio Four, March 19, 1997

I saw the truth lying at the dark heart of  the radio set when I was only a small child in the Kurdish highlands of the Middle East. My father would every night sit in front of  the wooden box, with its frowning face and cuneiform inscriptions, to listen to voices who claimed to be: THE PERSIAN SERVICE OF THE BEE BEE SEE IN BRITANNIA THE GREAT. BRITANNIA was the pompous version of Engelestan, the Land of the Engels, as normal people called it.

Judging by the way most grown-ups in the house would join my father and huddle around the box, something big went on between the Engels and their enemies, the Almans. I didn't quite know which side were worse, but I certainly disapproved of the Engels. Even though some of them came to lunch with my father sometimes and were nice enough to ME, they had these turbaned guards from a place called Hindustan who, one day, just lifted their rifles outside our gates and shot down most of the storks that had begun to nest on the Sycamore tree in the middle of the village.

For me, a big puzzle was the voices that came out of the box every night. One moment they'd be on caravans of great ships carrying food across the ocean for the other Engels at home, the next they'd be on a tiger shoot in that place, Hindustan, and my father would believe it all! They even said that all Engel women were six feet tall!

Clearly the truth lay somewhere else and I saw it. I saw that the FEMALE voice who boasted: THIS IS THE BEE BEE SEE IN BRITANNIA THE GREAT sounded exactly like my grandmother, who had recently quarreled with my father over my mother. Now, Amme, my father's young cousin told me one day in the stables that my grandmother couldn't STAND my mother just because my mother didn't come from our village, but from the nearby TOWN, and my grandmother would stop at no trick to regain her influence over my father again. I also noticed that the claims that came out of the radio box became more fantastic each time that shifty-eyed boyfriend of Gandmother's came down from the cliffs to borrow more of her money. The two of them were definitely in it together. Amme agreed!

Another proof that radio boxes were not all the same came to me on a visit to my young, in my mother's maiden home in that town my grandmother so hated. Whereas my father's box was big and menacing and took itself so seriously, my uncle's radio was small and glowed with a soft light in the dark and played MUSIC. It had no evil motives. But then, of course, my uncle wasn't married and no-one wanted to gain influence over HIM.

Years later, but as a direct result of owning that box and falling under the influence of the Engels, my father made one of the biggest mistakes of his life. He decided to send me, his ELDEST SON, to the land of the Engels for my education. Greybeards among his people begged of him: "Send your SECOND son there. We need your eldest son to remain here. He might change too much over there, and he might stay and marry a six-foot-tall Engel woman."

But my father wouldn't have any of it. "Hazhir is my FLESH AND BLOOD", he shouted, and "he WILL return. I just want him to go and learn some of the goodness of the Engels and bring it here for all of us!"

Yes, I'm afraid, that was decades ago, and, yes, the other predictions also came true. I did marry an Engel woman, though a great deal shorter than six feet, and even produced two Engel children, both being thoroughly brainwashed by Engels now. On his part, my dear old father still loves the Engels. Do you know what he told me once when he was allowed to visit me. I took him to the National Gallery in London and he said: "This building is worth more than a whole country".

So star-struck remains he that I don't even have the heart to deny that I'm NOT the voice inside the BEE BEE SEE IN BRIT ANIA THE GREAT who pretends to be ME! My father thinks he hears his son, and what harm does it do, I tell myself? He is, after all, 86 years old now, and a simple Kurd who's spent virtually all his years in those remote mountains.

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