Not just looking but kicking a gift horse in the mouth

May 5 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

IT’S always a surprise when you hear somebody who should be keeping the show on the road start rubbishing the metaphorical vehicle in which they are travelling.

So it was with Jane Garvey, new presenter of Women’s Hour, one of BBC Radio 4’s flagship shows, who caused a fuss when she criticised the “massive middle-class bent” of the station and said it featured “too many posh women talking about cookery”.

This is so willfully wrong. BBC Radio 4 is not for middle- class or posh people per se, but one of the last bastions of intelligent broadcasting in the UK with an astonishing range of programmes (unmatched worldwide) devised to stimulate our neurons. It is one of those fundamental and hugely outdated mistakes to equate intelligence with so-called “poshness” which really Ms Garvey, herself a product of Merchant Taylors’ Girls School, Crosby, should have twigged years ago. In fact, she’s acting in a typically middle- class way by disparaging what BBC Radio 4 is trying to do, clearly fearing that if it’s not dumbed down then somehow it doesn’t count.

This is also patronising to those people who don’t consider themselves as middle-class and yet do want intelligent programming. One of the irritating aspects of Radio 4 is that far from pushing posh female cooks at us, it tends to lurch the other way and try to be all things to all men.

What the station should simply use as its rule of broadcasting is to merely consider “is this interesting?” as we do on the Daily Post. If I can be permitted to name drop for a moment, I recall when interviewing Alan Whicker asking him how he decided on subject matter for an entire lifetime of top-rated television series. A former Reuters journalist who obviously has an incredible eye for a story, he replied that his measure was no more complex than believing if a person or subject interested him, then it would interest 12m other viewers. To some people that might seem arrogant, but to me it’s the self-belief necessary to bring material to a wider audience – that’s what he’s paid to do.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too critical, as Ms Garvey, 43, who was inspired in her career by listening to Janice Long on BBC Radio Merseyside, has helped raise Woman’s Hour listening figures by 200,000 to 3.06m in her first full quarter.

Perhaps she’s feeling a bit sore at the response to her replacing former Daily Post columnist Jenni Murray as the voice of Women’s Hour. She says: “I have had dog’s abuse since joining Woman’s Hour.”

She’s been branded “ill at ease” and “awkward and unfriendly and aggressive” and a misogynist – the latter for asking the perfectly legitimate question: “At their core, in their hearts, do women really want the top jobs?”

At least Garvey does, however, feel passionately about Woman’s Hour and about the role it plays in covering subjects that are not especially glamorous.

She realises that Radio 4 has some advantages over her former home of Five Live, and says: “Woman’s Hour provides opportunities to talk frankly about something very personal and intimate on national radio and that’s so important – on Five Live you couldn’t have done that and there wasn’t time for that.”

This latter point is precisely why Radio 4 is so important in a sound-bitten world.

More interesting is the question she floats about whether dear old Radio 4 will exist in 25 years’ or more time. She says: “I don’t know. My daughter has no channel loyalty and whether that generation of children will take to radio, God knows.”

I think there is a great deal of truth in this.

She adds: “They approach media as consumers from the age of five.

“As for this show, I cannot say I have succeeded at all yet. It’s not mine yet, that would probably take 15 or 20 years.”

We’d better give her another chance to redeem herself.

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk