Editor’s Note: This week Roger visited The Radio Festival. This is the biggest debating and networking event in the radio industry’s year. It attracts over 500 top executives, producers and presenters from the BBC, commercial and indie sectors together with community, hospital and student radio and other radio related companies.
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The Radio Festival took place in Salford this week and as the great and good and the desperate for work were all gathered there we went as well.
For me, it was something of a nostalgia trip.
I first visited the BBC in Manchester in the early 70s when its headquarters were in Piccadilly, returning in 1983 to run the Network Production Centre there. It was based in a new building in Oxford Road, and for 12 years, starting in 1998, I went back there at weekends to present the Sunday programme for Radio 4.
All through the first decade of this century I watched as Oxford Road was gradually run down and the Media City on Salford Quays began to arise out of the deserted docklands. Where once there was only industrial detritus there is now a flourishing community. A dazzling new building houses the Imperial War Museum North. The Lowry Theatre provides a range of spaces for rich cultural experiences and close by is the Manchester United stadium, where this season the experience has been mixed, but also costly. ITV has also joined the BBC on the Media City site.
Still the weather hasn’t changed and it was cold, wet and grey as I walked from my budget hotel to the conference venue at the Lowry.
I passed a water sports centre and declined the offer of kayaking or wind surfing on the gun metal grey waters.
Inside the Lowry a number of presenters were having a rare and, for some, a strange experience. They were actually meeting listeners. We met Kirsty Young and John Humphrys as well as the Controller of Radio 1.There was a lot of back slapping and networking, and people in positions of power were clapped a little too heartily. There were some preening presenters, but the worst was avoided because the proceedings were co-hosted by Jane Garvey and Fi Glover. Jane in particular has developed the art of irony and self-deprecation to a high art.
Initially, I felt a bit irritated with her since her Woman’s Hour series on Chore Wars has inflicted considerable, if deserved pain, on the male members of the Bolton household. I was soon won over, however, by a brilliant interview she did with Kirsty Young. They were wonderfully wicked together and the half hour session was over far too soon. Kirsty ensured tabloid headlines when she said Tom Jones must be “a killer in the sack”.
A few minutes later I did my own interview with Ms Young, who has just celebrated 8 years of presenting the programme with the best format in radio. I was distinctly non-lethal.
If you download the whole show you can hear John Humphrys discussing whether the political interview is in crisis and the 7 things that keep the Controller of Radio 1 awake at night.
Please keep emailing and phoning and tell us who you would like me to interview.If you absolutely insist, I will interview Kirsty again.
Roger Bolton
Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Radio 4
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