Real fur is no worse than fake
IHAVE so much sympathy for Evan Davis, the presenter of Radio 4’s PM programme, who’s revealed how unhappy he was when he was asked to replace Jeremy Paxman on newsnight in 2014. Evan suffered from stage fright and was concerned his head looked too small on TV. It’s unusual for a man to feel anxious about his appearance on screen. Believe me, I’ve known plenty who would breeze into makeup, dot a bit of powder on their noses and swan into the studio, confident that the way they looked mattered not one jot.
Women tend to fall very much into the Evan camp, knowing, without a doubt, that their hair, their clothes, their size, their makeup were far more important to their bosses and the audience than what they actually had to say.
I used to be infuriated at having to spend so much more time in make-up than my male colleagues, when I would have preferred to be using that half-hour honing the quality of my script or preparing for my interviews. Even before social media, the audience never failed to make its views known.
In the 1980s, when I presented South Today in Southampton and worked through my first pregnancy, the abuse I received was horrible. It came through the post, of course, and consisted of ‘How dare you flaunt your revolting condition on my TV’, ‘Why are you working in that condition. Don’t you have a husband to keep you?’ and ‘Why are you taking a man’s job?’
WHEn, like Evan, I moved to newsnight in 1983, I’m afraid it was my mother who was the chief culprit. She would phone every night after the programme. I would ask her what she’d thought of the interview I’d done, say, with norman Tebbit.
Her response, invariably, went along the lines of: ‘Oh, sorry, love, I didn’t really hear what you were saying, but you know that red top you were wearing? A bit too bright, I think. And do get your fringe cut. Your eyes are your best feature and we can’t see them if your hair’s too long.’
So, just as it has for Evan, going to radio made a huge difference. no one could see me. They had no choice but to listen to what I was saying. no time was wasted fussing about the size of our heads or the length of our hair.
I worry about the new fashion for radio to have pictures attached through the latest technology. Radio should be about sound. The audience should be making its own pictures in its head.
I can’t, though, go along with Evan and his declared tendency to be more likely to burst into tears than his interviewees.
Yes, there are so many times when you have someone in front of you who is relating a heartbreaking story. You’d be an unfeeling monster not to be moved by the girl abducted and forced into prostitution, or the woman dying of cancer after a series of failures to give her an accurate diagnosis.
It is, though, the job of the professional to be detached from the other person’s agony and help them to relate their story.
In my 33 years on Woman’s Hour, I shed a tear only once. I was talking to Deborah Spungen about her book on life with her daughter, nancy, the girlfriend of the punk rocker, Sid Vicious.
Deborah described how nancy’s brain had been damaged because of a lack of oxygen at birth, how she’d been a nightmare to raise as she stole cars, ran away and would constantly ask for money. Why, I asked her, did she always give her money when she knew she would only use it to buy drugs? ‘Because,’ she replied, ‘she’s my child and I loved her.’ We both wept.