Housewives’ favourite? No, grindingly right-on Woman’s Hour is a turn off!

ONE of the highlights of my career took place some years ago when I was given the honour of being a guest presenter on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Sitting in for the magnificent Jenni Murray, perching at her desk wearing her earphones, was a true privilege for me, a devoted fan of the show for three decades.

This month, Woman’s Hour turned 70, and became the longest running radio magazine programme in British broadcasting history. With that significant milestone behind it, you might imagine it’s in better shape than ever.

Not so, sadly. Despite the fact Jenni’s husky voice and sharp intelligence is still heard with reassuring regularity, the sad fact is that the programme’s content is light years away from the original downto-earth format.

Where once Woman’s Hour was quirky, appealing, emotive and uplifting, today it’s often just grindingly right-on. You’re more likely to hear an extended discussion of female genital mutilation than any pertinent domestic issues that affect most women’s lives in Britain.

Today, the programme’s natural listeners — the middle-aged women of Middle England, more often than not housewives and mothers — have their concerns ignored, while producers and BBC bosses seemingly preoccupy themselves with the concerns of a liberal elite.

Any drive to gain new listeners, meanwhile, has been targeted on the ‘yoof’ market. In 2015, a monthly spin-off, Late Night Woman’s Hour, was launched, containing highly explicit content to attract younger listeners to the ‘brand’.

I’m certainly not exaggerating when I say I now fear for the show’s future.

Launched on October 7, 1946, it quickly captured the hearts of its listeners, with an agenda that covered everything from the ‘sheet famine’ brought on by linen shortages after the war to where women with big feet could buy shoes.

The latter, according to then presenter and producer Olive Shapley, was ‘the most successful programme ever’.

Big issues were dealt with, too — equal pay was discussed as early as 1946 — but the tone was utterly different to today. There was none of the presumption that all evils are maliciously perpetrated by powerful men against weak women, a thinking that often now makes Woman’s Hour such unattractive listening.

Rather than celebrating how women’s lives have improved, the current programme seems determined to emphasise that we’ve hardly progressed since the show’s first outing.

One can’t help but wonder what the women of the Forties and Fifties, who had genuine reason to feel subjugated and downtrodden, would make of it.

The show rarely uplifts me any more. I often feel it is, at best, out of touch with the women it claims to represent and, at worst, arrogantly looks down on them.

Take a major dilemma women face today — whether to be a stay-at-home mother, pursue a career or try to juggle family life and work?

Woman’s Hour seldom acknowledges that for those who have opted to forsake their careers to care for their children, this is a choice — not a male conspiracy to keep them in the kitchen.

BUT then the decision to be a housewife remains anathema to its progressive agenda. You simply can’t imagine the programme running shows like 1959’s Hooray For Being A Housewife, which saw regular contributor Ba Mason declare with great humour: ‘Can you think of any other profession into which one goes in at a managing director level purely on looks and personality?’

But this was when the producers weren’t just concerned with the niche concerns of a metropolitan elite. The show was conceived of as a platform to help women rebuild home life after World War II. And, goodness, those early shows evoke abject pity for those who went before us — when a woman’s existence was a constant battle against lack of money, lack of opportunity and the back-breaking labour of running a home.

As economist Honor Croome said on the show in 1948: ‘Even convicts rest on Sundays... not mother. There’s no limit to her liabilities, as long as she’s capable of standing on her feet.

‘Many a woman gets the only real rest of her married life when she’s in bed with a new baby.’ The show was initially aired at 2pm — a quiet time for women, as the controller of the BBC’s Light Programme, Norman Collins, explained: ‘The morning household tasks and lunchtime washing up will be over, but the children not yet back from school.’

It was moved to 10.30am in 1991 — which signalled the first hints of disconnection from its core housewifely audience. Despite lobbying to keep it scheduled after lunch, then controller Michael Green was unmoved.

He said the women of Britain could vacuum at a different time if they really wanted to catch the programme, much to the horror of the late Today show presenter Brian Redhead, who said: ‘Without Woman’s Hour at two o’clock, there won’t be a decently ironed shirt in Britain.’

Ignoring complaints, the show was moved. Slowly, the rot set in.

Indeed, when I listen to the programme’s archives, I’m struck by how, where once Woman’s Hour described genuine injustices and inspired women, today it seems determined to paddle in the shallows of political correctness, blinkered to the idea that women are anything but benighted. It’s nonsense, of course — we’ve never had it so good. As the show’s archives reveal, not so long ago a woman’s basic biology was considered unworthy of discussion.

Contributor Claire Rayner recounted her first period on the show in 1988. Despite her then youthful ignorance, her mother slapped her when she told her what had happened and was told: ‘Don’t ever bring home a bastard.’

And Olive Shapley spoke revealingly in 1976 about attitudes to the menopause: ‘We did a programme on the change of life [in the Fifties]. Even magazines in those days wouldn’t talk about it. We had hundreds of letters from women who thought they were suffering alone.

‘We had to have all female engineers [in the studio] that day. It was considered not quite nice.’

Indeed, when the word ‘vagina’ was said on air in 1946, there was a national outcry. As a result, the term ‘birth canal’ was used for decades afterwards.

What a contrast to the Woman’s Hour of today, which recently held a debate on whether it should be made illegal for men to send women unsolicited images of their manhood.

Presenter Jane Garvey even invited u.S. artist Whitney Bell on to the show to add his perspective, as he’s turned 200 such images into an exhibition.

NOT forgetting Tracey Emin’s appearance in 2011, when she asked Jenni Murray live on air whether she masturbated. (Marvellous Murray indignantly replied: ‘How dare you!’)

As sexually explicit content now seems to dominate the show, the emotional profundity of the early years has almost disappeared.

Listen to the testimony of an anonymous woman in 1958, who described the desperation of being trapped in an unhappy marriage.

‘And so the rift between us has widened… We have given up trying to solve our differences, but go our separate ways, often not exchanging more than a dozen words each day. We have separate rooms and, as often as possible, I contrive to have my meals alone.’

The bleakness is palpable. And there was no better platform to voice the unvoiceable. How sad that, today, Woman’s Hour prefers political correctness to voicing everyday women’s emotions.

Yesterday’s edition included a woman who blends rum for living and an interview with the Nigerian author and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. While she may be esteemed in African literature, the running order didn’t cast much light on the life of the average British working woman in 2016.

Though I tune in most days, normally I switch over to BBC 5 Live within minutes of hearing what the Woman’s Hour agenda is for the day — it’s rarely mine.

And certainly it’s not that of my friends of all ages, former devotees, who have become occasional listeners. One, a 62-year-old selfemployed man who has listened to Woman’s Hour since he was 21, said it was once useful for giving an insight into the workings of the female mind. No longer.

Another former fan, a 40-something married career woman who often works from home, is simply worn down by its worthiness.

And there’s the nub. Woman’s Hour finds itself between a rock and a hard place, trying to be an ‘at-home’ programme, while also fitting in with the BBC’s neverending, minority embracing remit.

There’s no doubt the show is still a national treasure. But it desperately needs to celebrate that women can be homemakers, career mavens — or a bit of both.

After all, many female listeners have made their peace with the world. They’re not angry with their lot. They don’t feel duped by men. And they see no contradiction in a woman being as comfortable in the boardroom as she is baking for her children.

If only the right-on producers of Woman’s Hour could see that.