''World Have Your Say'' (''WHYS'') is an international BBC global discussion show, that was broadcast on

BBC World Service The BBC World Service is an international broadcaster owned and operated by the BBC, with funding from the British Government through the Foreign Secretary's office. It is the world's largest external broadcaster in terms of reception a ...

every weekday at 1600 hours UTC and on

BBC World News BBC World News is an international English-language pay television network, operated under the ''BBC Global News Limited'' division of the BBC, which is a public corporation of the UK government's Department for Digital, Culture, Media an ...

every Friday at 1500 hours UTC. World Have Your Say won Gold in the 2008

Sony Radio Awards The Radio Academy Awards, started in 1983, were the most prestigious awards in the British radio industry. For most of their existence, they were run by ZAFER Associates, but in latter years were brought under the control of The Radio Academy ...

, in the category Listener Participation. The show described itself as "the BBC News programme where you set the agenda." Typically each edition addressed a question, or number of questions, raised by the users of its

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and

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site, as well as emailers to the BBC. It encouraged callers to talk to each other and directed questions asked by listeners to the guests on the programme, intervening as little as possible to keep the show more of a conversation than a talk show. The show also occasionally worked as a forum for the

's global audience to put questions to a particular guest. Previous guests included

Aung San Suu Kyi Aung San Suu Kyi (; ; born 19 June 1945) is a Burmese politician, diplomat, author, and a 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who served as State Counsellor of Myanmar (equivalent to a prime minister) and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2 ...

Philip Pullman Sir Philip Nicholas Outram Pullman (born 19 October 1946) is an English writer. His books include the fantasy trilogy '' His Dark Materials'' and '' The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ'', a fictionalised biography of Jesus. In 2008, ''T ...

and

Thilo Sarrazin Thilo Sarrazin (born 12 February 1945) is a German politician and former member of the SPD, writer, senator of finance for the State of Berlin from January 2002 until April 2009, former member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank u ...

History

The

launched the programme in October 2005, featuring Anu Anand and

Steve Richards Steve Richards (born 6 June 1960) is a British TV presenter and political columnist, who has written columns for the ''Guardian'', ''Independent'', ''New Statesman'' and '' Spectator''. He regularly presents Radio 4's '' Week in Westminster'' and ...

as presenters and Mark Sandell as editor. Ros Atkins replaced Richards in early 2006 as the main presenter. Since February 2011 the programme had a weekly television edition on

on Fridays produced by the same production team. Topics for discussions were set by listeners, who could email the show prior to it going on air each day, or even call into the studio office. Some of the comments left on the WHYS blog and Facebook site, together with emails, Tweets and SMS text messages, were read on the air. Callers from all over the world were the key part of the programme by calling in and debating the daily topic. On occasion, the show would leave the studio and go on the road, to discuss subjects from a particular country but often with a global impact. For example, in 2011, they went to Berlin to discuss the legacy of Nazism in Germany, Jakarta to talk about revolution in a Muslim country, and Bangkok to talk about sex tourism. Most of the time, the topics for the days' show were offered by e-mail. Some stories were suggested by a single person, others by the number of people wanting to talk about it. Increasingly, use was made of the programme's

site as a source of comment on news stories. Sometimes, these were stories from the listeners' point of view. In fact, some of the reporting of current events for the show was done by real world people, most with no journalism experience.

Television

began presenting a version of the programme in 2011 with Ros Atkins as the presenter. The programme, presented on Fridays at 1500

GMT Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, counted from midnight. At different times in the past, it has been calculated in different ways, including being calculated from noon; as a cons ...

, encouraged viewer discussion on some of the top stories from the week. Occasionally, correspondents and high-profile individuals close to the issue at hand would join in the conversation. Similarly to the version on radio, the programme heavily utilised social media; especially

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

and

. As of late 2013,

Chloe Tilley This is a list of newsreaders and reporters currently employed by BBC Television and BBC Radio. BBC News employs many presenters and correspondents who appear across television, radio and contribute to BBC Online. BBC News provides televisio ...

played a more active role as a presenter.

References

External links

* (

)
''World Have Your Say''
(

) {{BBC News BBC World Service programmes British talk radio programmes