The Arts Hour on Tour, the BBC World Service arts and culture program that visits cities all over the world, will be in Bucharest next week to record a show on topics relating to the cultural life in the city and Romania. Television and radio broadcaster Nikki Bedi, who curates, writes, and presents the program, told Romania-insider.com more about the upcoming show.

The Arts Hour, the BBC World Service’s flagship arts and culture program, turns into The Arts Hour on Tour several times a year as it travels to different cities to bring that country’s top artists and creatives for a debate before a studio audience. Now is the turn of Romania’s capital, which Nikki Bedi expects will have interesting stories to tell, like “any city or country that has tried to find its way after the fall of Communism.”

The program aims to offer an eye-opener to those less familiar with Romanian culture, with a lineup of guests including filmmaker Bogdan Mureșanu, actor and director Alina Șerban, singer-songwriter Irina Rimes, musicologist Bogdan Simion Mihai, and comedian Gabriel Gherghe. The program also has a pre-recorded feature, The Culture Cab, exploring spots in the city that carry a particular cultural meaning to one of the guests. Besides the voice of the artists on stage, the program has a place for input from audience members, who “often bring up something we haven’t even considered,” she explains.

More on why Bucharest has been added to the Arts Hour on Tour map, the edifying experience of visiting over 50 cities to record the show, and her work to make arts and culture accessible in the interview below.  

When and how did you decide to take the Arts Hour on Tour around the world and how does the format compare to the regular Arts Hour program?

I have been flattered by the description that I am a ‘cultural courier.’ In a way, that is my job: to be the conduit between artists and creatives across the world, to tell their stories on the BBC World Service.

The regular Arts Hour is a weekly program, where I write and curate the best of the arts interviews across the BBC, including interviews that I do myself. If Ariana Grande is in London, she will be in the Arts Hour studio, but there are also other arts and culture interviews that we have on the BBC. […]

We began the Arts Hour on Tour about nine-ten years ago. It started with us going to New Delhi, in India. Then we went to Shanghai for the Biennale. On those trips, we realized there was something in it. We are the BBC World Service; we tell the world stories. If we can be on the ground, learn, and share, what better way of putting people’s stories out there? You understand so much more when you have the magnetic pull of the physical city underneath you, when you are looking people in the eyes, when all your senses are alive in that city. That’s when we realized we could do this regularly. We’ve been to over 50 cities around the world and every single one of them has been an education; it’s been edifying and a real privilege.

With the Arts Hour on Tour, when we travel to a city we start quite a long time in advance, trying to understand not just that city today, but what has brought that city to the point it is at now. It’s often the most interesting thing when you find filmmakers, writers, and comedians who are using their past to inform their work today or who are making a comment about things that are happening in society. The arts are a place where you can have debates like no other in the world. In the arts, you can say things that very few other people can say without it being a head-to-head battle of opinions and wills. It’s an absolute privilege for us to travel the world and do that.

Why Bucharest? Why now? Was there anything in particular that drove the decision to have a program here?

Personally, I have loved seeing the cinema coming out of Romania in the last ten years or so, whether it’s Cristian Mungiu or Radu Jude. I’ve learned so much about the past, the present, and people’s hopes through cinema, through music. You have elections coming up in May; there has been interest in the political situation. Also, any city or country that has tried to find its way after the fall of Communism is going to have very interesting stories to tell.

What would you say Romanian culture looks like from the UK?

It’s interesting because people will say, ‘I was speaking to an Uber driver the other day, and they were telling me they’re from Bucharest,’ or ‘I know nothing about Romania except that Communism fell.’ I don’t think that a lot of people are as familiar with Romanian culture as they should be, which is why - this is part of our purpose - we are able to go, ‘Hey, here’s an hour that is going to open your mind and your hearts to a country, to a city, to cultures by just beginning to understand them.’ It’s not just cinema; it’s music, it’s literature. I am genuinely fascinated by how people have recovered and what is happening next.

How did you go about selecting the lineup of guests? What can the public expect from the event in Bucharest?

I came across Bogdan Mureșanu’s film The New Year That Never Came and thought it was really interesting. Here is a contemporary filmmaker, making his debut feature film about the few days leading up to the Christmas Revolution. Our listeners - because, let’s face it, the world doesn’t know enough about its neighboring countries, let alone about countries on the other side of the world – they may not even know what happened in Romania, they may not even know there was a revolution, that it was the first revolution to be televised. […] I thought it would be a great jumping off point to talk to a contemporary cinema maker who is reflecting on the past. He was only 15 when the revolution happened. To be able to access his memories, to be able to look at the way he has treated that was really interesting.

Then, we have the Roma writer and director Alina Șerban, the first Roma woman to have a play included in the repertoire of the Bucharest National Theatre. All her work speaks not only of her Roma heritage but also tells everything through a Roma perspective. Because Roma communities have been persecuted historically, she is going to be a great voice to teach us about her heritage, her life, and how she sees things now.

We always have a comedian on the Arts Hour on Tour because comedians can sometimes say things that nobody else can. Here, we have Gabriel Gherghe. Often, when we have the comedy set, it will encourage people to say, ‘I don’t agree with that’ or ‘Yes, this is true.’ Because we have a live audience in the studio, I regularly ask them whether they would like to say something, so we get the voice not only of the artists on stage but also of the people in that theater.

We have musicologist Bogdan Simion Mihai, who describes his music as alternative folk music. Because he has traveled all over Romania, he understands how the music differs and where the influences have come from. We have Irina Rimes, a coach on Romania’s version of The Voice.

We also do a pre-recorded feature called The Culture Cab. We go out with one of our guests and ask them to show us two or three places in the city that have cultural significance to them. We generally go to places we wouldn’t find on our own. With Gabriel, who is going to be my guide, we will talk about the street art in the neighborhood of Pantelimon. He will also take us to a comedy club and another place that is of interest to him. This allows us that day, before we actually do the show, to feel the city, see bits of it, and really experience it on a vibrational level.

When it comes to making arts and culture more accessible, how do you see your role and what are some of the aspects you focus on in your work?

All over the world, when people need to cut back on spending, and when governments need to restrict what has been given out, the arts are the first thing to be cut. We are seeing that everywhere. To have a weekly art show on the radio and an art show that travels around the world regularly, it means we can disseminate all these things to potentially around 96 million people around the world. What we’re doing is joining the dots. When I do a regular Arts Hour, we’ll have somebody from India, somebody from Mali, someone from New Zealand, or Sweden. I try to have as many different representations from countries around the world as I can so that really is making arts and culture accessible. Someone sitting in their car, driving along the freeway in Los Angeles, may have never heard Finnish folk music or understood what the Parthenon of Norse Gods is. They might not know what people living in an impoverished area of Mumbai do as a side hustle. It’s that, really.

What do you hope the public will be left with after the program in Bucharest?

In terms of the audience in the theater, I will be the person who is left with something because they are always the most fascinating people. When they put up their hands and say, ‘I think this’ or ‘I want to tell you that,’ that is the greatest cultural conveyance we can have; it’s wonderful. It’s often somebody in the audience who brings up something we haven’t even considered. Then all the people in the panel start talking and that dialogue is amazing. In terms of the listeners, they are going to get the perfect slice of a cake they will want to taste more of from Bucharest and from Romanian arts, culture, and entertainment.

The Arts Hour on Tour is recorded in Bucharest on March 4 at Teatrul de Comedie. The program will be first broadcast on World Service English on March 29. It will be available on BBC Sounds and online here.

(Photo: courtesy of Arts Hour on Tour/ BBC)

simona@romania-insider.com