Andrew Whitehead

The BBC World Service is today celebrating its eightieth birthday. Marquees in the Bush House car park - a day of special programmes - even the morning editorial meeting broadcast live to an unsuspecting global audience.

The exact birthday isn't until later in the year, but within a month the World Service  starts to decant to the fantastic new broadcast centre at New Broadcasting House on Portland Place. By the time the Olympics start, all World Service broadcasters and journalists (I'm one of them) will have left Bush House. So this is both early birthday and a public farewell to Bush House.

As well as listening avidly to today's programmes, my attention was drawn by my onetime boss Bill Rogers (he of the Trading as WDR blog, a sort of Guido Fawkes for the BBC - happily he describes today's programmes as 'much funkier that you would expect from an 80 year old's birthday party') to a wonderfully detailed account of the BBC career of perhaps the most famous World Service alumnus, George Orwell.

Orwell described his time at the BBC as 'two wasted years' - though the article by Peter Davison on the Orwell Society site makes clear they were professionally hugely productive. Orwell was also working with some emerging big figures in writing and culture, including Mulk Raj Anand, Balraj Sahni and Una Marson.

And if you have ever wondered where the real Room 101 was, here's the answer.

No, it's not England's score in the last one dayer. It's not even the Sri Lankan total. It's the medium wave frequency on which the World Service was broadcast - until this weekend.

You can still get the World Service in the UK on DAB digital audio and via the internet - if you go to the world page on the BBC News website, there's a listen live button for the World Service on the right towards the top. But 648, which has served the south-east of England, and parts of the continent, so well for decades is dead - a victim of public spending cuts.

I have a very nifty old portable radio in my bathroom wonderfully aligned so that if I press the FM button I get Radio 4, and press the MW button, it's the World Service - with no further fiddling required. Today the MW button produced just static mush. I tried in the car where 648 is pre set - the steady hum of nothing in particular.

So I've bought myself another digital radio - they're not exactly cheap: one in the kitchen, a portsable for my jacket pocket, and I guess I'll have to get one of those plug-ins that should work in the car. So sorry to see you go, 648.