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The head of Czech Radio, Václav Kasík, has told Lidové noviny he came under pressure from numerous lobbyists warning him to step down - or risk being recalled from his post. In an interview for the newspaper on Friday, Mr Kasík said that the pressure had political roots and vowed not to give up. Mr Kasík has headed Czech Radio - home to a number of stations including Radio Prague - since 1999. He began his second six year term in 2005. Lidové noviny wrote that Mr Kasík’s post was offered up as part of an alleged backroom deal initiated by top members of the Social and Civic Democrats: the post was supposedly to have been freed up for the head of Czech TV, Jiří Janeček, had he given up his bid to continue as general director of the public broadcaster. He did not and was re-elected as Czech TV head this week.

The head of Czech Radio, Václav Kasík, has told Lidové noviny he came under pressure from numerous lobbyists warning him to step down - or risk being recalled from his post. In an interview for the newspaper on Friday, Mr Kasík said that the pressure had political roots and vowed not to give up. Mr Kasík has headed Czech Radio - home to a number of stations including Radio Prague - since 1999. He began his second six year term in 2005. Lidové noviny wrote that Mr Kasík’s post was offered up as part of an alleged backroom deal initiated by top members of the Social and Civic Democrats: the post was supposedly to have been freed up for the head of Czech TV, Jiří Janeček, had he given up his bid to continue as general director of the public broadcaster. He did not and was re-elected as Czech TV head this week.

I first met John Tregellas just after the Velvet Revolution, when we both started working for Radio Prague at a time of huge changes in Czech society. At the time neither of us suspected that nearly two decades later we would both still be here. These days, John, who grew up in the English county of Devon, runs a successful business organizing tours in Central Europe for choirs and orchestras from all over the world. Speaking near perfect Czech, he says that he now feels every bit at home in Prague as he does in his native Britain. I went to see

In the last years of the Cold War, Radio Prague’s English department was many times bigger than it is today and divided into several sections, devoted to different parts of the world. One of the most important was the Afro-Asian service. Africa was an important Cold War battleground and Radio Prague’s Afro-Asian service was not just telling the people of Africa about Czechoslovakia. It also covered events within Africa itself, following closely the Soviet political line. At one time the department was receiving tens of thousands of listeners’ letters

In the 1970s the Cold War was fought on many fronts. One of them was Northern Ireland, where the tension and violence that raged throughout the decade also became part of the propaganda war between East and West. At the time, Czechoslovak Radio’s correspondent in London was Karel Kvapil, who had entered the radio after the wave of sackings following the 1968 Soviet-led invasion, and later went on to become its last communist era general director. In 1977 Kvapil travelled to Belfast, to report on the Troubles. For part of his programme he spoke

In the course of 1969 and 1970 Czechoslovak Radio was transformed back into what it had been in the 1950s, a tool of hard line propaganda. In the process, over 700 radio staff were forced to leave their jobs. Those who stayed found their freedom of expression severely curtailed. To give an idea of the extent to which things had changed by August 1969 - the first anniversary of the Soviet led invasion – I will start with a short extract from Radio Prague’s broadcasts back in 1968, as the tanks rolled into the city. At the time the radio was playing

Today in Mailbox: Czech Radio’s Regina building and the City Tower on Pankrác Plain, a comment on president Václav Klaus’s speech in the European Parliament, a request for a programme about the Czech brass-music composer František Kmoch. Listeners quoted: Tony Nuttall, Jaromír Hauzar, Karl Strauss.

On the airwaves, 1968 ended very much as it had begun. For New Year’s Eve, Czechoslovak Radio chose the same format as the year before, with the light-hearted musical cabaret of the Semafor Theatre. But behind the scenes, the Soviet-led occupation in August had changed everything. The Soviets were only too pleased for the radio to give the impression of normality. A gradual, almost imperceptible drift back to hard-line communism was beginning. The process came to be known cynically as “normalization”, a word that was first used by Alexander Dubček himself

In the days immediately after the Soviet invasion in August 1968, staff at Czechoslovak Radio played a cat-and-mouse game with the occupying forces. For the first couple of days, they managed to continue broadcasting directly from the radio headquarters, despite the presence of tanks outside.

Ask practically any inhabitant of the capital for directions to Czech Radio and you'll be pointed to an imposing functionalist building, tucked just behind Wenceslas Square. In this, and the neighbouring buildings, hundreds of 'rozhlasáci' crouch over computers, talk on telephones and read reports such as this in one of the numerous studios. But, as well as the mothership on Vinohradská Street, Czech Radio owns a surprising number of other, smaller buildings, scattered all over the capital, which are overshadowed, perhaps sometimes unfairly, by