Presenter of Feedback
Whatever happened to Sue Lawley?
Since she handed her desert island over to Kirsty Young she has hardly been heard on radio, or TV for that matter.
Now she may be very happy running a local arts festival and playing with her grandchildren in Budleigh Salterton but I miss her being on air, as I do Olivia O'Leary and some other great women reporters and presenters who are not heard as regularly as they once were. I can't help thinking that BBC Radio is poorer for their absence.
That also goes for some fine women editors and producers in their 50s who left the Beeb, often to have children, and who have found it difficult to re-enter broadcasting at a high level and part time.
Now of course it could be that they are glad to be out of the rat race, the rush hour, and wearying internal politics, and that they now have happy, fulfilled, and much richer lives.
But I am being selfish, I want them back making cracking programmes.
I'm not sure that young aspiring broadcasters, male or female, would agree, not least because their opportunities would be more limited as a result. If only there was another Radio 4, another high quality speech network, to provide both competition and more opportunities.
These reflections have been triggered by the last couple of Feedbacks which have focused on the gender imbalance at the BBC in front of and behind the microphone.
The Corporation is making efforts to rectify the situation, not least by holding a training day for woman experts to help them adjust to the demands of broadcasting, and one would hope, with a woman running Radio 4 and the mammoth News Directorate also being run by a woman, that such efforts will continue.
However there are real problems ensuring a gender balance on programmes like Material World, as its (female) boss told us this week.
Excerpt from last week's Feedback, with Roger Bolton and Deborah Cohen.
Elsewhere in the programme, as Radio 4 ponders on whom to appoint as its first writer in residence, we talked to the man who is doing that job for the World Service, the Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov.
Will Self is rumoured to be in the frame for the Radio 4 job but if you have any suggestions for some non Self candidates, and views about what the chosen one should do - please let us know.
May the thaw be with you - Roger Bolton
Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Radio 4.
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