I lost my show, but radio is still the love of my life

IGO BACK a long way with radio. Not just to being a studio operator in t he 1970s, or presenting on Today till 1981 or Midweek, which I hosted for 33 years until it was axed last week, rather to my sadness. It’s an older romance than that. As a child in the 1950s, I longed for what we still called a ‘tranny’: the early, miniature transistor radios.

Since grown- up radios ( my mu m’s , always tuned to Woman’s Hour) were big, heavy things, pocket portables were as exciting to a child as smartphones are now. I built one from a mail-order kit.

To sit in your den in the hedge with the Goons, or just Big Ben’s live chimes from distant London, was a serious magic.

I have never got over this affection: radio is not just a vehicle for music – though it is wonderful for that – but speech broadcasts are a marvellous thing: nimble and agile, rich in sound clues whether voices or backgrounds.

Radio emphasises character and meaning simply because there are no pictures. It doesn’t soothe as TV does, but stimulates. If someone on telly talks rubbish we don’t care so much because they’re stuck in that little box in the corner. You can look away and ignore them.

A voice on the radio is all around you in the room, and you judge it more sternly (all of us on air get fiercely judged, oh yes!).

A fascinating development, indeed, is that in our TV age this quality of speech-alone is being appreciated again: more and more print publications and individuals take to ‘podcasting’.

But there is still extra magic in conversations coming out of the air to be captured free, in real time, by the tiniest, cheapest radio.

By historical accident, in Britain the first broadcasts fell into the hands of BBC founder and idealist John Reith, who believed its duty was to offer people something better than they thought they wanted.

Not pompously: he also said ‘unaffected simplicity of utterance alone gets over’, and warned staff that people ‘could not forever be listening to grand music’ and thoughts, but needed dance bands and comedies.

That idea of balance, sharing high and low culture, developed into a more democratic sound as the Radio Ballads of the 1950s gave voices to ordinary people, and then to ever more unfettered discussion of real lives (and some very unReithian lifestyles) on talk shows now.

BEYOND Radio 4 – the original ‘ Home Service’ – radio has exploded into other genres: music stations, personality-DJ chatter, local radio, phone-in arguments. But Reith’s thoughtful ghost lives on most vividly in Radio 4, where I have spent a lot of my working life. I find myself reflecting on its unique value – because there is no station like it on the planet – and on which parts of it we should cherish.

Its news is mercifully less distracted by dramatic pictures and odd- l ooking politicians than the telly bulletins. Drama and crafted documentaries are precious too.

But what I particularly love, and slightly fear for, is the risky and fascinating craft of diverse live interviews. Not just in news, where it’s often a ritual dance of contradiction, but in general programmes like the late Midweek.

I have found that being interviewed live has a curiously invigorating effect on people. Even the very shy rise to the occasion, simply because of the sense that people are listening right now: I’ve seen this in teenagers, first-timers, and people who have been through tragedies with a story to tell.

If they trust the interviewer they’re fine, knowing that there can’t be ‘dead air’ – so if they do dry up it’s not their responsibility to keep things going.

You can effectively vanish by just shutting up – that is an underrated and relaxing advantage of being interviewed live.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum of fame, supercelebs who have been written about often and maybe inaccurately know that they can’t be cut about or quoted out of context; they can contradict the presenter if he or she repeats a wrong rumour. Believe me, they do that. So both kinds of interviewee rise to the moment.

I have loved making crafted documentaries too, but the biggest buzz is going live. Just as it must have been in 1922, when the first voice crackled out and the first listeners bent their heads, marvelling, to a makeshift crystal set…