In 1955, Pearl Prescod, an obscure hairdresser and amateur singer, caught the ear of a few influential people in Trinidad. They immediately wrote to the Secretary of the West India Committee in London, hoping to secure her employment so she could pursue a classical music education in England. Not only did the secretary get her a job as a switchboard operator in his own office, but he also arranged for her to audition at the BBC— all on the strength of a personal recommendation. Prescod was from Tobago, considered a rural backwater by many West Indians (and especially Trinidadians), but she procured a string of BBC contracts over the years and went on to a stage career. The BBC's reach, it seemed, extended to every nook and cranny of the empire.

As the most extensive and influential purveyor of British culture, the British Broadcasting Corporation attracted a steady stream of artists and entertainers arriving from the West Indies after 1945. In fact, the BBC was often their first stop in London for several reasons, not least of which was its international renown, based on its commitment to educating, informing, and uplifting listeners, and later viewers, throughout the Queen's realm. In the context of the Second World War, it forged a common culture to bind the empire together in the face of foreign aggression. As one Jamaican settler remembered:

Despite these connections, however, relations between West Indian artists and the Corporation were not always smooth. Artists found themselves circumscribed by producers who had a narrow conception of their role on domestic BBC broadcasts. As a result, their efforts to break out of the BBC's mold consisted of alternative and increasingly politicized articulations of what it meant to be both West Indian and British.