Archives for April 2010

I spent last weekend in Liverpool staying at my Dad's with my son Tony who is ten. I grew up in the city and I have Dad and five sisters still living there and so for me, the pull back to Merseyside is strong. If you've never been or haven't been for a while, I can't recommend it strongly enough. As Stephen Bayley explains in his book about the city published this week 'Liverpool has an almost overwhelming physical presence, not all of it good. Brooding, slovenly, magnificent, romantic, miserable, tatty, funny, proud, heroic, shameless, tragic, exciting in turns, it's a city that demands a response.'
How Liverpool returned from the dead - Stephen Bayley - Times Online.

We made the trip to Liverpool this weekend for two reasons - I had tickets for the Lord Mayor's Charity Dinner and Tony wanted to go back to the Maritime Museum at the Albert Dock. He's really interested in the Titanic and the last time we were there, it looked as though a whole new Titanic wing was under construction, so he was determined to see the results.

The dinner was in the Town Hall which is a magnificent neoclassical palace. The hall way floor is decorated with hand-painted tiles, featuring the city's coat of arms. There's a great Flemish craved wooden fireplace, and a grand staircase with a huge portrait of the Queen by the Liverpool artist Sir Edward Halliday at the top. The city's silver collection is displayed in great cabinets on either side and above a dome of blue and gold rises thirty feet. Around the inside, the city's motto inscribed in Latin reads: 'Deus Nobis Haec Otia Fecit' which translates 'God has Bestowed These Blessings Upon Us' and the date 1748.

The Mayor's bash was great fun. Despite the setting there was nothing stuffy about it - a school choir, a good meal, a Frank Sinatra-tribute crooner and a disco. Liverpool doesn't do stiff or formal in my experience and that's one of the characteristics I love most.

The next day we went to the Maritime Museum. There was me, Tony, and his cousins Lily aged 8 and Carmel 21. Carmel is a history graduate from Liverpool John Moore's University and so she's always keen to go to a museum. Tony was a bit disappointed with Titanic - not because it isn't good, just that there didn't seem to be any new exhibits. We'd probably misunderstood last time - they were only upgrading the sets. So we went downstairs to the International Slavery Museum. The exhibition charts the growth of the city through the wealth gleaned from slavery, displaying the fine tableware of the merchant princes alongside the shackles and implements of torture used to create the terror that kept those enslaved under the yoke. I confess we didn't enter the room that simulates the environment of the slave ships' holds where hundreds were crammed together, lying chained on pallets and many died on voyage. Two images stay with me: the fine portrait of a slave merchant, perhaps in his sixties, looks out from the canvas with a watery gaze. There is a distinct feeling of unease, his fingers clasped nervously before him. In the next cabinet there is an old bill of sale for an auction in the city, the lots include slaves with brief descriptions, such as 'good in the kitchen'; the youngest soul being offered that day was a boy aged one. I was reminded of the grandeur of the Town Hall and its date 1748 - so all that great edifice, dome and all, was built on this suffering, so much for the blessings God has bestowed.

After that we went up in the Liverpool Eye. I hate heights and I held on tightly to the seat my palms sweaty with anxiety. You had to laugh at the safety warnings - 'Don't Prise Open the Doors', 'Don't Dangle Your Feet Out' etc - as if!

Monday was back at work on an investigation I suggested. People sometimes ask if I am allowed to come up with ideas for You and Yours. I am and I do. Daily programmes use up a lot of items so suggestions are welcome, especially yours of course email us here. This week's grew from a personal trauma - wasps eating my garden furniture. It's bad enough when they buzz down and eat your lunch but in our garden summer starts with the little stripy blighters first dining on the dining table before they come back later in the summer to sample what's on it.

We got in touch with an expert Dr Stephen Martin from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences. You can listen to that interview here. It seems I'm not alone, 'They do that,' he explained (or as they say in my home town 'Day do dat doh don't day?'). In early summer the queen wasps chew off tiny bits of wood, fly away with it and use it to make a nest about the size of a golf ball. She'll settle down in it and lay her eggs. Once these worker wasps have hatched, they go off chewing wood and extend the nest until it becomes quite large. Only in late summer when the queen dies and the colony collapses do the wasps start eating your picnic. It's because at that point they are no longer getting a daily fix of nectar.

Now wasps may have tiny jaws but many wasps make light work of garden tables and chairs. Ours were covered in silvery trails where the surface had been chewed off. When I got them out of the shed this year the wasp damage had encouraged moss and mould to grow. They looked dreadful. I telephoned the manufacturers who sold me two separate treatments - a cleaner and sealant - don't they warned put teak oil anywhere near it because it will spoil your furniture. I know, lots of people use teak oil and swear by it. First though, I had to sand those bite marks off. It took hours, not least because the wasps seem particularly partial to the bits in between the slats of the chair backs. While the chairs were lined up waiting for the treatment, a big wasp landed on one of them and gnawed off a bit. The good news is that not a single one has been near them since.

I know, I'd like to say that I come up with the really learned ideas of high value and international importance but it wouldn't be true. I guess I won't be asked to stand in for Melvyn Bragg any time soon.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

• You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.

• Wasp picture by Omeuceu. Used under licence.

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If you think there's too much coverage of the General Election campaign - there may be a very good reason for that. If the experience of You and Yours is anything to go by, every public organisation involved in UK public life has gone into election "purdah."

Among the bodies which have either cited purdah or something less specific like wishing to avoid raising political hackles as a reason for not appearing on the programme in the last week or so are the Food Standards Agency, National Fraud Authority, Office of Fair Trading, Consumer Focus and the Health and Safety Executive.

The guidelines governing election purdah are drawn up by the Cabinet Office and they're designed to prevent civil servants becoming involved in the political hoo-hah that is a General Election.

The general principle in "communication activities" is "to do everything possible to avoid competition with Parliamentary candidates for the attention of the public." (p24) Staff are required to confine themselves to "factual explanation of current Government policy, statements and decisions" and avoid becoming "involved in a partisan way." ( also p24)

Interestingly the rules don't only apply to Government departments but to non-departmental public bodies and other "arms length" public sector organisations. (p 49)

Some journalists would like to extend purdah even further. Have a look at Ed West's blog.

The frustrating thing is, the stories we've found difficult to persuade interviewees to talk about are hardly the stuff which will determine the 2010 General Election. They include calorie counts on menus, first aid training rules, credit card regulations, the efficiency (or otherwise) of the National Fraud Reporting Centre and a new code of conduct designed to protect homebuyers. But equally it's hard to think of a story which doesn't have the potential to become controversial - especially in the heat of a tight-fought campaign.

So the press officers say "No" and all we can do is grin and bear it. And wait for May 7th.

Andrew Smith is the Editor of You and Yours, In Touch, Fact the Facts and The Media Show on BBC Radio 4.

• You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.

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It's not every Saturday evening that the 'You & Yours' editor, Andrew Smith, gives me a call. But when he did so last weekend he told me he was considering doing a special programme concentrating on the effects of the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland, and wanted to know how I felt about the idea. I said I was keen and we spoke again later on; he timed his second phone call expertly...just after Spurs had completed their home win over Chelsea. I think it's fair to say my mind had been elsewhere during the previous hour and three quarters.

It's the first time since I've been presenting You & Yours that a programme running order has been entirely discarded in favour of something more pressing. Our dilemma was that the story would clearly be extensively covered by other news-based programmes on Radio 4, so what could we add? We concluded that there were so many angles for a consumer-based programme that we were right to pursue them and that to do so comprehensively would take up the entire fifty-two and a half minutes. It meant a lot of extra work on Sunday and there was a bit of extra adrenalin in evidence during the Monday morning programme meeting - we went to a different room and the controller popped along briefly too - and it meant the revised running order was decidedly fluid until moments before we went on the air.

Did it work? I think and hope so, but you may disagree! Have a listen! We tried to balance the individual stories of frustration and derring-do with wider information about compensation and insurance...and we threw in some science and some engineering too. And we've continued exploring those angles in subsequent programmes.

Of course one thing on Monday was left unsaid...the name of the offending volcano. I have unashamedly wimped out of that one so far. When I was broadcasting on the World Service last weekend a colleague displayed his flair for Icelandic pronunciation by naming it with great ease and confidence. I tended to side with an Australian journalist who was a guest on the programme at the time; she said she'd climbed the volcano in question but had never dared pronounce it. When advised by a fellow Icelander she said she was told that the secret was to say the name quickly and as if slightly drunk!

Julian Worricker presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

• You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.
• Other Links. Elisabeth Mahoney at The Guardian

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Hi; its hair shirt time for me, I'm afraid. Over a rather busy time since Christmas, I'm aware - indeed, some of you have made me aware that the Disability newsletter has been conspicuous by its absence! But we now have a master plan, that I hope will put things right! As part of my contribution to the Blogomania which is sweeping through You and Yours, I intend to use part of my blogging contributions to revive the service we've been trying to provide for those interested in our disability focussed output. So: that will include the background to the items covered on the programme, plus information about things coming up in the near future which you might be able to help us with, or express a view on. Plus, what other parts of the Radio Four network are covering on disability subjects, whether its documentaries, features, interviews, drama and the arts.

I'll be blogging on average monthly, which is how the original newsletters were intended to operate, so I sincerely hope that this will fill the bill: I'm sure you'll tell me if it doesn't.
This means that everyone will get these details, but we will email my blogs specifically to those people who were on the Disability newsletter mailing list, and can add people to that list if you let us know your details.

So: the first thing for me to do under the new arrangements is to say that on the Tuesday of next week (April 27th), both You and Yours and In Touch will be putting your questions to representatives of the three major parties specifically on disability issues, with In Touch concentrating on issues which relate to visual impairment.

We'd expect to be putting questions to them about things such as their plans for social care, policies on employment, provision for disabled people from public services such as health or public transport, disability benefits, or the need for additional legislation on discrimination; but basically, the floor is yours.

Clearly, we can't guarantee to use all questions, but we really would like these sessions to reflect what's on your mind. You can email your questions via the website - www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours.

I hope we've now got a formula which will ensure that you get regular information specifically about our disability-related output, which we're very keen to make as comprehensive as possible. Good Listening!

Peter White presents You and Yours and In Touch on BBC Radio 4

• You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.

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The You and Yours day for me starts on the train journey in - I have a whole hour to read the paper - luxury! I buy my own of course - just in case you were wondering and don't choose the same one everyday. I always have a cup of tea too from the station café and take it with me on to the train.

I get in for the meeting at Broadcasting House in London at around eight. The team of six or so people working on the day's programme will have been in for an hour or more and have gone through the office set of newspapers. We look at the papers but we don't rely on them - lots of material comes directly from listeners in emails and calls. When I come in there is full programme already prepared, so it's a question of whether anything in the news should push out something we've already set up. Sometimes we apply the test of whether we all wanted to talk about it in the meeting. So yesterday we put in a piece about the quality of food served to small children in day nurseries. The Local Government Association had studied food served to toddlers in over 10 nurseries in England and Wales over a two year period. You can read their findings here.. They were concerned that children were being given too little food and too much fruit - so the sort of restricted diet that might benefit some adults but is insufficient to meet the needs of growing children.

This was one of those items that I felt could have been given a bit more time. I'lI tell you here about one of the things our guest June O'Sullivan wanted to talk about, but we didn't have time for - which just goes to show no matter how well we think we've planned the timings in our morning meeting... it doesn't always work out - that's live radio for you!

Jane runs a chain of nurseries in London called the London Early Years Foundation. She's developing the first 'National Standards for Early Years Chefs' - a qualification in children's catering. June thinks it's important for staff in nurseries to learn to cook the food they give their charges. She thought that would be more helpful than a set of guidelines or rules and advice imposed from the outside.

One of the great things about researching an item for You and Yours is that you get to watch good programmes you've missed. In preparation for our discussion on palm oil on Wednesday I caught up with Raphael Rowe's Panorama: Dying For a Biscuit.

You can still see it on the BBC iPlayer and I recommend that you do. Even for those of us who don't lose much sleep over the rainforests and the fate of orang-utans, it makes for disturbing viewing. More than half of the world's palm oil comes from the Indonesian island of Borneo. Raphael saw the process of ripping up and burning virgin rainforest there first hand. It's still going on regardless of the world protests and the promises from the Indonesian government.

It only seems to take a reporter to take a trip out of the UK to the developing world to find laws and solemn pledges being broken, whether they're about working conditions in clothes factories or palm oil grown on sites designated as 'protected' by world bodies.

Big companies these days all employ people whose job it is to trace where the materials they use originate- they have titles like 'sustainable agriculture director' - the job of a man called Jan Kees Vis from Unilever who came on to talk about palm oil.

Unilever uses palm oil in Flora margarine but since it's the cheapest vegetable oil in the world, it's an ingredient in an estimated half of all processed food. It's also used in soap, detergent and cosmetics and in biofuels.

To their credit Unilever agreed to put up a spokesman Mark Engel on Panorama and offered Jan Kees Vis to talk about palm oil on You and Yours. They are open about the fact that 85% of what they use is from 'unsustainable' sources. They don't - as Raphael Rowe pointed out - label products as containing 'palm oil' but rather 'vegetable oil'. If you listen again to You and Yours you'll hear why. So as a consumer, you can't really choose to reject it, unless you turn your back on most processed food.

Winifred Robinson presents You and Yours on BBC Radio 4

• You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.
• School dinner picture by Ishikawa Ken. Used under licence.

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A word about tomorrow (Tuesday). Usually I'd be presenting Call You & Yours rather than the more familiar programme format, but during the election campaign it's been decided that our weekly phone-in will be rested. This is simply to make way for the election calls which are being incorporated into extended editions of The World at One.

A weekly phone-in is a hard programme to get right. If its subject matter is dependent only on the news of the day then it risks duplicating phone-ins on other stations, most notably Radio 5 Live. But if we opt for a topic which is significantly divorced from the news agenda then people aren't talking about it and are less likely to call in.

One of the other dilemmas we face, of course, is how we decide who to put on the air. On a busy Tuesday we may get several hundred calls, but realistically only between fifteen and twenty of them will make it onto the radio. There are several rules of thumb; a good caller will have personal experiences which add to the subject matter being discussed and/or a view that they can back up with some evidence and expertise. In other words we're aiming to shed more light than heat on our chosen subject matter via you, the callers. And if we can move to a constructive conclusion at around five to one, that rounds things off very nicely too.

As for my role...I think it's best described as a juggling act. If you come on the air I must show you the courtesy of allowing you to express your point of view. But I also have to bear in mind that at some point either someone else wants to have their say, or the vast majority of you who are just listening would like me to move things on. Or express a bit of healthy scepticism on your behalf. Then there are the guests to bring in and the e-mails to make space for. The fifty-two and a half minutes tend to go very very quickly.

I'm not sure what we'd have talked about tomorrow had 'Call...' been in place as usual. But I do know that if we'd opened the phonelines today on either dazzling headlights or native daffodils, we'd have been debating both topics well into the afternoon.

Julian Worricker is a presenter on You & Yours

• You & Yours is on BBC Radio 4 at 1200 weekdays. Listen to today's episode on the Radio 4 web site.
• Telephone picture by Dan Brady. Used under licence.

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Fixing interviews from three thousand miles away can be a deeply frustrating business. Producer Cheryl Gabriel and I have just been to the States covering stories both for You and Yours and In Touch.

Americans are charming people, who will promise you the earth if you can ever get them to answer their phones, but will then studiously ignore your emails and calls as you try to finalise the details; which is how we came to find ourselves gate crashing a press conference in New York's City Hall, on a subject in which we had no conceivable interest, with scarcely a working eye between us, trying to attract the attention of a man who couldn't see us either.

New York's governor David Paterson is himself visually impaired (which is why In Touch wanted to talk to him), but we'd been told, despite former assurances to the contrary, that he wasn't going to be in New York that week. For some reason, in a week in which he was being accused of messing up the state budget, and of giving too much support to an adviser facing accusations of domestic violence, an interview with the BBC wasn't high on his list of priorities. So we did the only thing we could do: stepped out in front of him as he left the conference, brandishing white cane and magnifier, and introduced ourselves. It worked! As his aides spluttered impotently behind us, Mr. Paterson indicated that he'd heard of the programme (online is a wonderful thing), and would be delighted to give an interview. New York political machine nil, blind mafia one. You can hear about how he tackles his job on next week's In Touch.

Travel generally posed its challenges on this trip! We were in a taxi when, after some persistent schmoozing from Cheryl, we got the tip-off about the governor's whereabouts! It meant that we had to change our destination for the third time, causing the driver to eject us because, as he put it "we were spending too much time in his cab". Strange; but then New York cabbies are under pressure at the moment! They're being accused of an overcharging scam (accusations they hotly deny), and you'll hear the inside track on that story too on You & Yours in the next few days.

At odds with the cabbies, we turned to the trains, but they too, with their unfamiliar lines and ticketing systems can pose problems for blind and partially sighted travellers! After a few journeys spent hurtling in the wrong direction, we came across our most exciting rescuer! As we struggled to get our pre-ordered train ticket from Boston to Albany, we were helped by a charming man whom Cheryl, employing that famous magnifier, thought looked vaguely familiar. It turned out to be Jimi Hendrix's cousin, on his way to play a gig with some of Hendrix's former band in Providence, Rhode Island. Cheryl and Kenny Barber, that's his stage name, are now email buddies! Just another example of the bonuses to be had from needing help!

• Peter White is the Presenter of You and Yours and In Touch.

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Welcome to the new You & Yours blog...a chance for us to keep more in touch with you about the programmes we're making, and for Winifred, Peter and me to show off our literary skills. The former we can pretty much guarantee; the latter we'll leave for you to judge.

Those of us who broadcast live can see e-mails coming in as we speak. I've always taken the view that it's a bit of a double-edged sword; of course it's useful to gauge immediate reaction to a particular item, but there's a danger that we place too much store on the views of a tiny minority...and those of us of a sensitive disposition occasionally read things we'd rather avoid. I emphasise 'occasionally', and of course sometimes we deserve it anyway!

We receive about a thousand e-mails from you each week, plus a trickle of letters and dozens of phone calls...and they're always welcome. Often our best stories are generated by you; those when the world has dealt you an injustice, and we've been able to follow it up and hold someone to account. What this blog will do is extend that level of communication; the aim is for it to become a conversation between us and you.

So over the coming months you'll read contributions from me, Winifred and Peter. We'll give you insights into how the programme is put together, how our roles fit into those of the rest of the production team, and we'll be pretty candid about the moments when things don't go entirely according to plan. As, no doubt, will you!

You'll also hear from the programme's editor, Andrew Smith, whose literary skills the rest of us will naturally defer to at all times, and from some of the reporters working on specific stories. Andrew will be dealing with some of the thornier issues that arise - the complaints and questions about the complex agenda of You & Yours. I dare say he'll also reflect from time to time on some of the other programmes he edits - Face the Facts, In Touch and soon The Media Show.

And if you are relatively new to the world of blogging...then have a look at the main Radio 4 blog which gives you a bit more of an idea of what you'll get from us. I can't guarantee that the Radio 4 controller, Mark Damazer, will contribute as regularly as he does to that one, but I'm sure we can twist his arm to offer his two-penneth once in a while.

In the meantime I hope your appetite is whetted for what lies ahead, and I'll return to what for me is a day away from the live programme. So I can sit here writing and researching for interviews that lie ahead, while Winifred does all the truly hard work at the other end of the room.

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