Rule, Britannia! Our new empire of culture is taking the world by storm

Even as the warplanes fly and politicians talk sanctions, any nation should keep an appreciative and encouraging eye on “soft power”, defined by the Harvard academic Joseph Nye as a country’s ability to attract and persuade without coercion, deliberate propaganda or economic pressure, but only culture, image and style. For in this vital area our tiny, creative, rock-bound island punches well above its weight.

It is natural that the vast, wealthy USA should flood the world with superheroes, Coca-Cola and the American dream. But the global soft-power reach of the UK is a phenomenon all on its own. We begin, of course, with the advantage of language: that English (partly due to Empire but largely to the USA) is a lingua franca is an inestimable boost. It’s the content, however, that counts in the end, and in one significant survey of global soft power published last summer (by the polling company ComRes and trumpeted in the Economist), we actually came top, beating Germany and the US.

An obvious asset is TV sales: say what you like about ITV’s Downton Abbey and the image it projects, it certainly spreads that image widely. So do series such as the BBC’s Sherlock, with its loyal Chinese fans, Wolf Hall, and (gulp!) Top Gear. But more basically, the BBC’s 300-million-strong World Service reach in radio as well as TV means offering more than just news – it shares a viewpoint and a civilised gentleness, speaking through the humblest hand-cranked radio in remote villages and fragile regimes.

Years ago, working at Bush House (then the World Service HQ), I had a friend visiting for a canteen supper and pointed out a couple of its announcers at the next table. She wept: she had been working in Angola during the recent civil war, and those calm voices had been – for her and the villagers she sheltered with – not only the one source of reliable news but “the only reassurance that there was a sane world somewhere”.

Today the BBC World Service broadcasts in 29 languages and on diverse platforms and relays – and there are even plans to add Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba services. Some 188 million people a week hear it. For all the irritation one can feel with the BBC, this is one of our greatest, and least compromised hands reaching out to the world.

The Coalition’s absurd decision – accepted by the easily rolled-over director-general Mark Thompson – to stop subsidising it and make the licence fee pay it all, has been partly reversed this autumn as George Osborne puts back £85 million. It needs it, to compete with the increasing number of broadcasters in the control of lands with “a democratic deficit”: North Korea, Russian-speaking areas, the Middle East and Africa. It’s money well spent: and editorial control, vitally, remains with the BBC.

So that’s one big, obvious soft-power source. Another is the utter fascination with our Royal family: evinced in visits, but also in huge overseas coverage. Our regal ceremonies rivet the world, and now there is a new generation of more intimate views: Royal babies, Harry’s high jinks and kindliness, and the Duchess of Cambridge’s fashion choices. For fashion itself is a big export: a world that does not necessarily see our more shambling High Street landscape has convinced itself thereby that we are pretty chic.

Sport matters, too: we may not be as heavily garlanded with gold medals as others but every joyful, quirky gesture from Mo Farah helps to convince the world that we are not racist or Islamophobic, and the jaunty return of Jessica Ennis-Hill to hurdles and the heptathlon as a new mother tells the world that we are bold triers.

Almost more than anything, though, we export the arts – including subversive, anti-government arts. That sense of free voices either appreciating or challenging Britain itself is a heady message. A sense of the people rather than the state speaking to the world is met with delight. Splendid that the play The Audience was a hit on Broadway, with its meditative fictional account of the Queen’s interaction with seven decades of prime ministers, and splendid, too, the historic appreciation of The King’s Speech. But note also that among our many Tony Award nominations (31 this year alone) are very different images: Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III was rather less reverent towards the institution; David Hare’s Skylight is hardly propaganda for a perfect Britain. Nor was Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem.

Actors as different as Mark Rylance, Hugh Grant and James Corden have been feted across the Atlantic in recent months – the best joke being that James Corden, whose brilliantly shambolic portrayal in One Man, Two Guvnors appears among other things to have charmed (perhaps due to her British roots) the world’s least shambolic, most tightly sartorially controlled and revered US fashion personality, Anna Wintour of Vogue.

But America isn’t everything: its Anglophilia is reliable enough, give or take a bit of friendly mutual mockery. More startling is the brilliant global reach of NT Live, the cinema relays pioneered by the National Theatre under Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr. It only began in 2009, across the UK and with the National’s own productions, but rapidly included other theatres such as the Donmar, the Young Vic, the RSC at the Barbican and recently, with a recent strange and riveting Complicité show, the Theatre Royal Plymouth. By this time the screenings had spread across Europe: to see queues in Prague and Milan for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was surreal. Now 22 countries take it: in different time zones such as Australia and China the plays filmed live are shown at different times, but with the same buzz.

Again, the important thing is that they have independence. There is some government arts subsidy – which repays itself several times over in exports, and is always being pared back – but the freedom of thought, the anger and mockery and philosophical exploration and powerful humanity of current UK theatre sends a message about us across the world that should be honoured. British theatre draws on our own experience but on the world’s, too, reflecting it back to its origins: so the world sees live-filmed relays of both Jane Eyre and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, As You Like It and Of Mice and Men, Treasure Island and Medea. And that’s before we even start on the operas.

We should be proud, though not smug, about soft power “that gives delight and hurts not”. Proud of plays and films and novels and TV exports, of Adele sweeping the world with wistful songs, and the merry racket of Status Quo still rockin’ all over the world; of royal ceremonial and royal infants, agitprop and anger and jokes and fashion and charity (Red Nose Day has now reached the US).

Shout, too, for the ongoing commercial successes: Colman’s mustard and Stilton on distant tables spreading a kind of peace and goodwill. The pleasure of “soft power” is that it is such an unguided missile: you never know what hook will catch.

I remember Romanian friends, fresh from the fall of Ceausescu, standing in a Suffolk lane reciting the whole of Kipling’s “If”, which they said had seen them through the bad times of hearing the truths they’d spoken “twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”. And there is something fortifying about remembering what a massive hero in Albania was the late Norman Wisdom: in the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha his slapstick comedies were the only Western films allowed, being considered a parable of class war because the little man always won. When he died, the new prime minister called Sir Norman “one of the dearest friends of our nation”.

That’s the British way – our soft power makes us dear friends all the world over.