Jenni MURRAY
After 33 years presenting Woman’s Hour, Jenni Murray will need time to adjust, says Libby Purves
Some departures feel significant – like the last mail ship, or the ravens leaving the Tower of London. Dame Jenni Murray’s coming departure from Woman’s Hour has something of that quality.
The programme is a national institution. Next year, it turns 75. I dimly remember when it moved from Radio 2 to Radio 4 in 1973: my Granny couldn’t retune her radio but wouldn’t give up her light music, so my mother had to buy her a second set, labelling them radios “2” and “4”.
For 33 years, the main presenter of Woman’s Hour has been Jenni Murray, succeeding Sue Macgregor, who, in 1987, went on to Today. She is the programme’s longest-serving presenter, and one of the longest survivors on the network. She is a feminist, campaigner, humanist, confessionalist and sometimes a bit of a controversialist, but always above all a forensic, listening journalist: curious and self-possessed.
Now we learn that, come October, another voice will lead Woman’s Hour. I would bet on her being far younger and representing at least one minority; the corporation’s hunger for “diverse” presenters does not readily include “over-60s”. Not female ones, anyway: Marrs and Melvyns soldier on forever.
But the grammar school girl from Barnsley is, unquestionably, one of the best presenter-interviewers BBC radio has ever had.
I do not say this lightly. To be honest, I tend to swerve Woman’s Hour these days, with its tendency for a wearingly “woke” editorial agenda on every subject (not just feminism). But if Jenni is in the chair, rather than the excitably gabbling Jane Garvey, who seems to tell every interviewee that she is thrilled to meet them, I often stick with it.
I particularly enjoy those moments when the basically sensible Murray has to choke out fashionable campaigning words like “intersectionality”. She avoids hype and aggression, expressing interest in everything: yesterday, after an interview with Donald Trump’s niece Mary, it was the quest for an explanation of Tiktok. This she did without either a John Humphrys harrumph, or any attempt to sound down with the kids. That’s journalism: neither patronising to minority groups nor over-effusive towards the famous.
To leave that platform, which she admits she adores, seems not too difficult a decision. I managed to grab a moment on the phone and she confirms that she was not pushed out, still loves the BBC and her colleagues, and warned her bosses of her departure a year ago.
She looks forward to a few quiet months enjoying her new home near the sea – from my own experience, she will need time to decompress after being attached to one programme for decades – and then trying other work
‘I would bet on Jenni’s replacement being far younger and from at least one minority’
of the kind the Radio 4 job precluded.
You could say she has been pretty “intersectional” all her life, speaking her mind on a wide variety of interlocking subjects. She expresses strong opinions in print, and occasionally beyond the BBC’S comfort zone. She is president of the Fawcett Society and campaigned for equal pay on the national level, though was notably quiet while the “BBC Women” gender pay gap campaign breathed outrage.
That she was not in the forefront surprised me, and I wondered whether she perhaps even shared my own eccentric Reithianism, considering the men overpaid and greedy, rather than the women underpaid.
But in our brief conversation yesterday, she merely affirmed that of course she believes in equal pay, which Woman’s Hour was talking about four years before she was born. Yet she couldn’t quite be bothered for that BBC fight; others won “the little raise we did get”, so she signed one letter, and that was it. Not that fights and campaigns deter to her. She is a patron of several charities including the Breast Cancer Campaign (she talked openly and bravely about her own experience).
More controversially, in 2017, she fell foul of the trans lobby over what a “real woman” is, got a BBC “impartiality warning” and was threatened with “no-platforming” at Oxford. She even ruffled feathers by opposing the “fat pride” movement because, as she writes in her new book, she never enjoyed being on the weighty side, doesn’t think it healthy and has resorted to surgery.
So she is never short of an opinion. But on air, Murray’s strength is properly journalistic: asking the right questions, brief and better phrased than the long wittering semi-essays of the Naughtie or Peston variety. She listens with rare attention: whether facing Margaret Thatcher or Monica Lewinsky, she concentrates, sounding as if she is genuinely thinking about what they just said.
Indeed, such is my respect for her skill that when we published our son’s book a year or so after his suicide, she was the only UK broadcaster I agreed to be interviewed by. She’s a grown-up, whether you agree with all her views or not.
Back in March, she stayed in London to work from Broadcasting House while her husband was at their New Forest home. The BBC knew that familiar radio voices would be even more important in the uncertainties and griefs of lockdown. So she carried on, missing not only her husband but, she wrote, her familiar grooming appointments. Always wellpresented, Jenni: sailing down the BBC corridors like a flagship, pashmina across her shoulder, unrufflable.
But in May she turned 70, “taking me, officially, beyond the mere middle age I’ve embraced for so long”. Like many of us 1950 babies, she didn’t feel or look elderly, and wasn’t ill. But the BBC observed the catch-all Government demand that anyone over 70 must be sheltered.
She began presenting from home, still alone in London, until the permission for weekend “bubbles” with her family. She was fed up with this “ageist discrimination”, and any BBC executive – or unsatisfactory researcher – will tell you that a fed-up Jenni is alarming. But she knuckled under, and such is her poise that you can never hear the join. She may have strong opinions, but also has that grown-up ability to keep her mouth shut, and will not say a word against the Corporation she loves.
Her next step will be interesting: like me in my 40 years on Radio 4, she never used an agent for work there, but has now signed to a top broadcast agency. Television, perhaps: she started her career on South Today, presented Newsnight in the Eighties, and in the Nineties did a Sunday morning programme on ITV, co-presenting with my husband, Paul Heiney.
They got on splendidly, giggling together over how highdefinition TV was dreaded by the over-40s as make-up artists approached them with heavy pancake make-up on which to sketch in youngerlooking faces.
Paul remembers her as strict on language: a script speaking of “servicemen” was rebuked. Of course, these days you’d have to say “servicepeople” in case some of them identified as non-binary.
So it’ll be interesting to watch how such a strongly flavoured presenter adapts to new employment in an age with new preoccupations. I doubt any of it will faze her.
‘She sails down BBC corridors like a flagship, pashmina across her shoulder’