Bejamin Kuras - broadcaster, writer, commentator, eurosceptic
My guest today is Benjamin Kuras, who himself worked at Radio Prague for a couple of months in mid-1968. Not long afterwards Mr Kuras - who is now a well-known author, playwright and conservative political commentator - left Czechoslovakia for the United Kingdom, where he lives to this day. When I spoke to Mr Kuras at his quiet north London home, he told me he was extremely close to graduating from university when he emigrated.
What did you do when you first came here to England?
"Oh the usual things, washing dishes in restaurants, packing books...in Foyles. I did apply for the BBC Czech service job which was then advertised, and which I got about six months later."
How was it working at the BBC? It was the World Service...
"Oh it was quite amazing. It was like being thrown in the middle of the ocean without knowing how to swim. And it was very painful to become aware of the gap, the twenty-year gap in culture and education and manners and general level of civilisation between the Czechs who left before 1948 and us who had been left to live there under communism for 20 years."
How were the older generation different?
"Well, they were civilised old people you see. They had what we had not acquired, a certain work ethic...they knew that they had to become fully responsible for what they do, there wasn't anybody they could blame for not getting things done. When they discovered, with horror I suppose, the state that we were in both mentally and culturally, they took great pains to bring us up to as close to their level as possible in a short a time as possible."
Was their Czech in a sense fossilised after so many years outside the country?
"Well, it might have sounded fossilised but it wasn't, it was actually more precise and actually meaningful rather than the...fluffy, meaningless language that we were brought up in under the Communist regime."
So the Communists corrupted the Czech language in some way?
"Yes, it was dangerous to actually be caught saying something that meant anything, because you never quite knew what was allowed and what was not. So you learned to fudge things around and what we had to start relearning was purity and clarity and even colloquialisms, back to the old colloquialisms. When we started translating news bulletins and commentaries, we would go into this - or I would certainly and I know my two colleagues did the same - a sort of a Communist newspaperese, if you like. What one of my colleagues advised me to do was just read the English sentence, make sure you understand it and then say it as you spoke when you were ten. And that then worked to actually get back to a language that was understood at the other end."
To digress for a second, do you think that Czech now still bears some legacy of Communist thinking?
"I think that has not quite disappeared. Whenever I get to correct or edit, or help somebody with a statement or a programme or a description of things, I find that it can be cut down certainly by one third at least without losing one piece of information, usually to about half."
Did you have much contact with other language sections at the World Service?
"Yes, we had a very nice relationship with the Poles and the Hungarians and the Finns, who were on the same floor as we were in the Central European service. The Finns were put together with us because there was nowhere else to put them, all the Scandinavian language sections had been closed down. And they were mostly listened to in Estonia rather than Finland, because the two languages are apparently very close. There was this kind of homey Middle European atmosphere. Most of the Poles and the Hungarians were also of the old generation, so you got many Poles who fought in England during the war. You had a few counts and barons and possibly princes even - I don't know how far up the hierarchy they went. The English used to take the mickey out of the Central European services, and said if you're not a count you're certainly a doctor or a professor. And actually quite a lot of highly placed and reputable people did work there."
Did the 1968 generation - I know a lot of people left then, many of them came here - did they stick together or did they do their own thing and go their own way?
"I think there was less of a cohesion among the Czechs than there was among the Poles. The Czechs sort of tend to rather hate each other's guts than stick together. And one might think for good reason, because the 1968 emigration was riddled with people who had been Communists or even had worked for the Czech secret service. And if you wanted to stay from that sort of set-up then staying away from the Czechs was a good way of going about it."
Now you're known as a playwright, an author and a commentator - which of those hats do you most enjoy wearing?
"Depends on demand. It's actually turning out to be stacking up in favour of the political commentating, because that's where I get more demand for drama writing, and actually I haven't written a play for something like six years."
You commentate on events in the Czech Republic - is it hard for you to stay on top of events, to know what's going on?
"Yes, I have to spend a couple of hours a day, or an hour a day, on the Internet finding out what's new there, and what is the easiest subject to take the mickey out of, which I then do about six times a month."
Speaking of events in the Czech Republic, one big recent event was the election of Vaclav Klaus as president - where do you stand on that election?
"I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. The man won the election six times, even though he never got the absolute number of votes, but he was always horse number one. And I thought even in the last minute they still had to find somebody, anybody almost, who could run against him. I thought why waste so much time."
Mr Klaus calls himself a eurorealist. I know you're involved with an organisation called Euroskeptik - could you tell us a bit about that?
"Yes, it's a group of a few journalists and young businessmen - of whom I'm the oldest actually - who just put together a website as a forum for presenting negative information about the European Union. The negative true information about the European Union, because most of the Czech media are actually putting a blackout on anything negative about the European Union and, as you know, there's something negative about it every day if you give yourself a bit of time."
Do you think the Czechs simply shouldn't join?
"I think they don't know what they're getting into. The fact is that if they get in they can't get out, they have no idea how it is going to affect them. I've been telling them for five years to join EFTA instead because they would all the access to the European markets..."
Which is?
"Which is the European Free Trade Association, leftover of a bigger organisation which now only has Norway, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Iceland, but they have a neat treaty with the European Union on free trade between them. And the Czechs could have already probably been members if they had thought of it five, six years ago, could have been doing a roaring trade with the European Union without losing any slice of their sovereignty."
The referendum is in June - how do you think it will go?
"I have no idea but I was told recently that since the split in the European Union over Iraq - Iraq, Chirac - Chirac's statement actually made the eurosceptic vote go up by a sizable margin. So it is still not quite a hundred percent decided, and I'm going to pump articles there until the very last whistle."
You can find out more about the group Euroskeptik at www.euroskeptik.cz
