I’ve had athletic relationships with all kinds of people
As she leaves the BBC for Classic FM, a liberated Moira Stuart gives a revealing interview to Anita Singh
Moira Stuart is a private person. I hear this from her former colleagues and I glean it from the fact she has only done two proper interviews in the past 30 years. And when I meet her it turns out to be true, and there turn out to be powerful reasons for that which she will break her silence on for the first time, but she is also warm and funny and rather fabulous company.
“I’ve got nothing to hide,” she says, a twinkle in her eye. “I promise you I haven’t attacked any kittens.”
Stuart has been one of the BBC’S most recognisable faces – and voices – for decades. On air since 1978, when she began as a Radio 4 announcer, she transferred to television news in 1981. After being dropped in 2006 amid accusations of ageism, she made a surprise comeback four years later on Radio 2’s Chris Evans Breakfast Show.
But now it’s all change. Stuart has joined Classic FM, where she will not only read the morning news but host two of her own music shows. It is a terrific coup for the commercial station and a new lease of life for Stuart, who is a very well-preserved 69.
Let’s get the main question out the way first. Why did she quit the BBC? Did she and Evans, who left at the same time for a job on Virgin Radio, have a pact? Was she – heaven forfend – edged out by bosses keen to replace her with a younger model?
“This time it wasn’t a matter of being made redundant but a matter of having a fabulous challenge,” she explains. While she remains “a great admirer and supporter” of the BBC, Stuart was pigeonholed as a news presenter.
“With the corporation it was news and maybe once every three, four years a documentary. The wonderful Sunday music shows that I was doing were a very small portion, so if I had moved from news I would have had very few weeks of work.”
Evans announcing his departure and Classic FM making an offer was “a perfect storm”, she says. “Mind you, I ain’t saying it was easy.”
She loved working with Evans, loved his production team even more (“So young! So gorgeous!”). He teased out her fun side. And it seems that Stuart has had a lot of fun in her life. She has never given much away about her romantic history except to say that she twice came close to marriage. Today she is more forthcoming.
“Boyfriends have been delicious,” she says at one point, “particularly coming up in the Sixties, before Aids and whatever else. You didn’t even bother to shake hands… You had wonderful, open and, how can I put this, energetic, athletic relationships with all kinds of people.”
Stuart was born in 1949 and her passion for music started early. She was raised in London by her Dominican mother, Marjorie – her parents split when she was 10 months old, and her father later died in a car accident – who hailed from a wellto-do family but worked several jobs to keep a roof over everyone’s head. Marjorie, a strong influence, died last year.
Young Moira listened to her mother’s gramophone records, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday, and discovered classical music through radio. “This is when you had the likes of Callas, and no matter what your preference you cannot deny when music moves your soul.” Her uncle was a jazz musician who took her to clubs as a teenager, where she hung out with Dizzie Gillespie and members of the Count Basie band.
She was painfully shy and never planned on a career in broadcasting, but was plucked from the production assistant ranks by an executive who had presumably heard Stuart’s voice and thought the world should hear it.
She became the BBC’S first black national newsreader, and speaks of that role with pride. I ask if she deliberately remained private because she didn’t want her personality to intrude upon the job, and she replies: “Ah. No. No, no, no.” At first she jokes about avoiding publicity: “Ain’t no way that I want to be caught with rollers in my hair and looking like hell.”
But then she turns serious. “From the first moment I started broadcasting, the hate mail has been extraordinary,” she says. “Because of people’s preconceived ideas as to who I was, who is welcome and who is not.”
These were the days of the National Front, and the racist messages were vicious. Did the BBC not intercept this bile and keep it from her?
“I demanded to know. I needed to know. There were gangs roving around then. It’s one thing to be an anonymous person walking the streets – I have been in school uniform and attacked – but it is another thing to be known, and therefore a walking target.”
Dealing with this affected many aspects of her life. “My antennae are honed. It takes a hell of a lot for me to trust anybody. I think it has interfered privately and personally with relationships – man-woman relationships.” She has, she says, spent her life as an outsider. “I was the first, and that was why there was such an extraordinary reaction, and why the hate mail, and why the threats.
“I’ve always felt that if I’ve done nothing else useful then I have opened the door with my whole being for others to walk through. And that has cost. And if that has impinged on my emotional, psychological or whatever side of me, well, tough, it’s a price worth paying.”
And this explains why, despite the BBC Women group having her “full attention and full sympathy” as they campaigned on gender pay gap, she did not join them. “I could have been writing letters, signing letters, from race through to gender, my entire life.”
On an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? she explored her family’s connections to slavery. But prior to that, the corporation’s impartiality rules meant she was never able to speak out on racism or politics. “I could not come out and scream and write in the press about what was happening in whichever community.” Parity on women’s pay may be important to her, Stuart seems to be saying, but it is only the latest of many injustices she has encountered. “I have a lot of sympathy for a lot of causes,” she concludes.
Stuart is a good talker and a good listener. “I don’t know why but I’ve often been the one with the soaking wet shoulder pads because people come to me and tell me about their emotional needs. Maybe I should have gone into psychiatry or something,” she laughs.
She insists that her life has been “more joys than sorrows”, including this new Classic FM job about which she is thrilled. When the BBC made her redundant in 2006, disregarding her years of experience, she wondered if her broadcasting days were over.
“There are various ways of doing things. It is no joke being in senior management and I wish them well. But it is very easy to throw baby out with the bath water. I’m not saying you’ve got to have 100-year-old people dragging themselves in to whichever organisation and boring the hell out of people, no, but there are 100-year-old people who are absolutely fascinating and gorgeous and would be an asset to anybody.”
How wonderful to be starting this new chapter as she approaches her 70s. “It is extraordinary at this age and stage to do different things,” she beams. “And I still have things to do. I would like not to be seen in one dimension.”
Moira Stuart joins Classic FM as morning news presenter from Monday. Her new Saturday show, Moira Stuart’s Hall of Fame Concert begins in July
‘Boyfriends have been delicious. Coming up in the Sixties, you didn’t even bother to shake hands’
‘From the first moment I started broadcasting, the hate mail has been extraordinary’