Bush House in the Strand in London, the legendary home of the World Service, has always had an exotic allure for me.

On my first day in the BBC I was sent down there to work in the Overseas Talks department. I was 21 and clueless, having had no journalistic training, knowing no shorthand, and having come from a small city in Cumberland to an extremely small bed-sitter in Queen’s Park. I spoke only two languages, Cumbrian and rather halting French.

I was most impressed by the canteen in the basement where an extraordinary range of the world’s cuisine was available to a young man used to lunching out in Wimpys.

There seemed to be whispered conspiracies going on everywhere – well, this was the height of the Cold War - and I must have sat next to many future political leaders as they schemed their way to power.

Soon I was on air, conducting a bizarre interview about the introduction of giant rabbits into Australia for food. It had been a disaster, the animals had run wild and bred joyously and now there was a search for an effective predator which would not itself multiply by the millions and require yet another animal to prey on it.

I was not to conduct another on air interview for twenty five years.

Still my debut was heard by a former girlfriend working deep in the African bush, and she was impressed; well that’s what she said but by then she was engaged to be married, and I never saw her again.

I showed off, of course, taking my friends to eat in the Bush House basement whenever we were nearby on a night out. John Tidmarsh was already presenting Outlook, and he was married to Sheila Sweet, an actress with whom I had fallen in love when she starred in a BBC TV children’s serial about refugees after the second world war, the Silver Sword. I was all ready to hate him but he was very charming and considerate. I never met Sheila though- another of life’s regrets, not quite up there with a cancelled meeting with Julie Christie.

Also on air was the veteran Robert Reid, a hangover from the war who missed its great drama and wished we could be involved in another life-threatening conflict in which he- and the BBC - could play an important part. Then there was the producer who could never be found at lunchtime because he was having an affair with a leading actress who was on the stage every night and only available during the day.

Most of the journalists seemed to spend lunchtime in the BBC Club and be notably less coherent in the afternoon when they slumped into sleep before leaping up to meet the approaching deadline. After the programme it was back to the Club again for “just the one”.

I was too poor, and too sober, to follow them.

 

Now of course the World Service has left Bush House for New Broadcasting House and its news operation has been integrated into the main domestic news operation. The boss of the World Service no longer has a seat on the Corporation’s top management board and the Service itself is no longer funded by a direct grant from the Foreign Office but from the licence fee and so has to compete with BBC Television for funds. Not an easy task.

It also now takes some sponsorship and some advertising which causes concern among those who feel editorial decisions will inevitably be influenced by the sources of income.

In this week’s Feedback I talked to the outgoing boss of the World service who is retiring after 33 years on the Corporation’s staff.

Peter Horrocks has had a distinguished career, including editing Panorama and Newsnight , an has managed to choose his own date of departure from the BBC, not a feat many people manage.

You can listen to the programme here.

In three weeks time, the Controller of radio 4 will be on Feedback answering your questions. So let me have them!

Roger Bolton

 

Roger Bolton is the presenter of Feedback

Back to accountability, do please keep contacting Feedback. We can’t guarantee that you will get satisfactory answers from the BBC but we can guarantee that you will be heard.

By the way, on Monday evening I will be on a boat in the middle of Lake Windermere watching Gardeners Question Time being recorded – yes, on a boat. I will try to find out why the team has chosen that unearthly location, and if you have any questions for my old school friend from Carlisle, Eric Robson, his producer and the panel of experts do please let me know.

Roger Bolton

Roger Bolton is the presenter of Feedback on BBC Radio 4

 

Listen to Feedback

Also this week we talked to the BBC’s Director of News, James Harding, about the significant cuts he announced in his division.

On Thursday he said 220 full time jobs would go overall in an attempt to save £48 million.He also stressed the need to push on with the digital transformation of news.

Do let us know what you think of his plans

 

Roger Bolton

Roger Bolton is the presenter of Radio 4's Feedback programme

 

Listen to Feedback 

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In a couple of weeks I will be going to a recording of Gardeners Question Time and talking to my old colleague from Carlisle Grammar School, Eric Robson, who has a smallholding in the most remote and awe inspiring valley in the Lake District, Wasdale.

If you have any questions you would like me to put to him, do let me know.

 

Roger Bolton

 

Roger Bolton is the presenter of Feedback on BBC Radio 4

On this week’s Feedback we featured Jonathan Dimbleby making an unusual, and, perhaps for him, unique mistake on Radio 4's Any Questions. He attributed to a member of the panel a quote which was not theirs.

Here is the mistake in all its gory glory:
 

 
Now when a fellow presenter hears something like that there is often a moment of malicious glee, followed by a familiar cold tingle down the back of the spine as one realises that it could easily have been oneself making such a mistake.

Indeed I have done so, dear reader, though as a young assistant producer, first on Nationwide and then on Panorama.

In the case of the former I managed to invite onto the programme someone who was in favour of a proposition rather than, as I had been tasked, someone in opposition to it.

I discovered my mistake when the guest arrived with 20 minutes to go before we went on air. I excused myself and, in total despair, left the building and I thought  my career in television, too afraid to face the music, or rather the wrath of the presenter Michael Barratt.

Fortunately, I had gone only a few yards before sense returned and I steeled myself, went back inside and explained the situation to Michael, now with ten minutes to go before transmission.

He was calm, turned his questions around, and conducted a perfectly good interview.

Afterwards, on his way down from the studio, he gestured for me to join him in an empty side room where he proceeded to take me apart. Having done so he put his arm around me, confident that I would never make that mistake again, and took me into the hospitality room where he poured me a drink.

Subsequently he never mentioned the incident to anyone, and I survived. Thank you, Michael.

In the case of the Panorama programme I had just completed my first, and I hoped breakthrough, film for the programme, lambasting the Swansea Vehicle Licence Centre for a series of spending cock-ups and quoting a senior judge’s scathing comments in support. The trouble was he hadn't made them.

They had been made by another judge with whose views he violently disagreed.

He wrote me a scorching letter threatened to take up the issue with the Director General.

I had no defence so I crawled, abjectly, in print, and again survived. I’m glad to say the future rows in which I was involved were based on firmer journalistic ground.

So I have sympathy for Jonathan - or his researcher. I bet that particular error will not be repeated on Any Questions for a long time to come.

Meanwhile on Feedback I talked to Alison Hastings of the BBC Trust about its latest report on impartiality in science coverage and in particular about the concept of false balance, as defined by Professor Steve Jones, eg balancing someone representing an overwhelming scientific consensus with a non-scientist  who takes a different view.

The issue fascinates me because I think that too narrow a range of voices is heard on the air and I think that those who challenged the prevailing consensus should be given the air time to do so. However, as Steve Jones once put it to me. “You don’t need to balance a mathematician who says 2 plus 2 is 4, with a non- mathematician who says 2 plus 2 is 5.

I take his point.
 
Do let us know what you think about Woman's Hour coming south on Fridays, after decades of residence in Manchester, and about two front line women presenters on 5 Live being replaced by men. Not sure that was what the DG intended.
 
Roger Bolton
 
PS Sven was back this week - on Clue. Did you welcome his return or do you think he and Samantha should go off on a long holiday together?

Listen to this week's Feedback.

What would you pay for your favourite BBC Radio network, if it was funded by subscription? 40p a day? Actually that would get you all of the present BBC services today, if almost every household paid it.

It’s a theoretical question of course, but it soon may not be.

This week on Feedback I talked to the Controller of Radio 2, Bob Shennan, about the latest cuts in his network budget and the programmes he has had to cut as a result. Between 3 and 5 am in the morning during the week his network will now be running repeats. At the same time some back office jobs will go at Broadcasting House.

This is all as a result of the planned squeeze initiated by the DQF, Delivering Quality First policy, introduced by the last Director General, Mark Thompson, after the licence fee was effectively cut. The radio division was charged with finding £38 million of efficiencies, with savings helping to fund the BBC’s digital ambitions.

The then DG told me that this was the last time that such a squeeze could be applied. Next time (conveniently after he had stepped down) services would have to go. That prospect sends a shudder down the spine of most executives who remember the outcry when the Beeb tried and failed to close 6Music and the Asian network. Of course some critics in the commercial world say that the BBC is overstaffed and more economies can  be found. That may be so but they tend to compare apples and pears. The airtime could be filled by just a DJ and records or more phone ins,  but if you want pre planned features, reports and investigations, they require journalists and time to prepare, and are arguably what differentiates a public service broadcaster from a purely commercial one whose main aim is to make a profit.

However the new Culture Secretary has made it clear that he thinks the present licence fee is very onerous, particularly on the poorer section of society. So expect the issue of subscription to figure largely in the discussions surrounding the future of the BBC and the licence fee, although if Scotland does vote to become independent in September, the British Broadcasting Corporation as we know it will have to change significantly in any event.

Meanwhile here is what Bob Shennan told me about the immediate cuts he is implementing on Radio 2

Please do let us know what you think about these issues. After all it is supposed to be your BBC.

Roger Bolton.

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Radio 4.

Listen to this week's Feedback

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As you well know BBC programmes are supposed to be impartial but I’m not sure if that can be said of Woman’s Hour, at least when it comes to feminism. Woman’s Hour is in fact a powerful advocate for women’s empowerment and this week as part of that campaign it produced its second power list.

Last year the list was designed to identify the 100 most powerful women in the country. No 1 was the Queen, which some thought was an unoriginal choice. This year the power list was much shorter; there were only ten women on it and it focused on so called “game changers”. Top of the list this time was Doreen Lawrence, the mother of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence. She was introduced by the Home Secretary who lauded her campaign to get to the truth about what happened to her son, and when the now Baroness Lawrence walked on stage the 250 or so women present in the radio theatre in Broadcasting House rose as one to applaud her.

I sat up in the theatre balcony watching what was going on and it was impossible not to be moved by her story and those of some of the other women on the list, and the way in which the audience responded to them.

In the question and answer session that followed transmission the audience members spoke equally movingly about what Woman’s Hour had meant and does mean to them.

In a “warming-up” speech before the broadcast the Controller of Radio 4, Gwyneth Williams spoke, with only a slight exaggeration, of the two “megastars” who present the programme, Jane Garvey and Jenni Murray and called Woman’s Hour an “immense powerhouse”.

So I felt somewhat exposed when I raised possible criticisms of the power list with Jane and with some listeners.

Fortunately I was also armed with comments from an unimpeachable source, the ageless Gillian Reynolds,  radio critic of the Daily Telegraph, a role model for all journalists and as independent as they come. She has written that such power lists are “meaningless froth”.

I tried to find out whether anyone there, including the usually outspoken Ms Garvey agreed with her.

Will there be another power list next year? I would place money on it.

Here is our Woman’s Hour power list feature.

Also this week we ran a piece about some new productions of “lost” Tony Hancock radio programmes. There were lost by the BBC of course, like so many other programmes, but frequently found by fans who made illegal recordings, thank heavens.

I look back in dismay to my early days in BBC Television in the 70s when we were routinely asked to cull the archive so that expensive videotapes could be reused.

As most of the current affairs programmes I worked on were soon out of date, not too much of importance was lost but of course it is often only much later that one realises that something which once seemed trivial is now valuable. Particularly when it comes to pompous presenters and their youthful indiscretions, not to say ludicrous hairstyles and wardrobes. Why even I once had shoulder length hair, a Zapata moustache, a flowery patterned shirt and bell-bottom trousers. But I did not inhale.

Roger Bolton

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Radio 4.

Listen to this week's Feedback

Nick Ross is only the latest of a significant number to opine. And he would doubtless argue that he has every right to do so since:

1. He is a freelance who is not on the staff of the Corporation (like me)
2. The Corporation is supposed to stand for free speech and not for the censorship of debate
3. His primary loyalty is to public service broadcasting not to the organisation which is designed to deliver it

However presenters like John Humphrys are now on the staff. Should they be silent?

It is required of them that they do not publically express their views on controversial subjects since that would affect the audience’s view of their handing of such subjects on air, and interviewees, particularly politicians, would not be slow to claim that the presenter’s personal bias was evident in the questions asked. 

Nonetheless some presenters like John Humphrys do publically express their views on the BBC and some would argue this is to the Corporation’s credit.

What other organisation would tolerate such openness or insubordination?

Mind you, if I was the Director General Tony Hall, trying to mastermind Charter Renewal and the licence fee negotiations in the face of some vitriolic and self-interested media criticism, I would not be best pleased.

You will be relieved to know that you do not have to suffer my views on the BBC’s future, as presenting Feedback does mean I have to remain neutral, however I will try and say something controversial on the issue.

It is this. Don’t take too much notice of what presenters say because most don’t know much about the issues involved.

I speak as someone who has been on both sides of the fence, a former BBC executive (dispensed with in politically sensitive times) as well as a presenter.

The latter are primarily performers, preoccupied with the content of the programmes they are presenting. If they have a strong journalistic background they probably think most management is a waste of time and see its representatives as roadblocks to be driven around.

Many know little, and care less, about budgets, training and other issues. So don’t pay too much attention to them, or me.

BBC executives are, of course, self-interested when discussing the future of the organisation that feeds and clothes them, but many do care passionately about the BBC and public service broadcasting. Some presenters are just self-centred.

Having said that (you see I am BBC to the core of my being and have to present the other side and, some would say, climb back on the fence), Nick Ross is one of the most interesting and thoughtful broadcasters around!

Enough of these esoteric issues, as Bill Clinton might have said, it’s the programmes, stupid! The Controller of Radio 4 said she wanted to introduce anarchy into Radio 4 through the so-called Character Invasion. This week on Feedback we asked her commissioning editor for drama, Jeremy Howe, all about it. Here is our feature:

In the next few weeks, the Radio 4 controller, the editor of The Archers and the editor of Today are all coming onto Feedback. So please let me know what you want me to ask on your behalf. I am your highly paid servant. (I jest.)

Roger Bolton

Listen to Feedback

Do you know what a pop-up studio is?

Well if you can get down to the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank of the Thames before Sunday you can see one in action. Radio 3 has built such a studio next to the Riverside café on the first floor.

It can be put up in a few hours, is made of perspex and is sound-proof, although much of the network’s musical output is transmitted from the area just outside it. When I visited the café the Gypsy Orchestra of Budapest were in full flow, watched over by a grinning Sean Rafferty.

Most presenters love performing in front of audiences rather than being confined in a lonely windowless studio and Sean had his own fan club in the front row of the audience, knitting furiously. Were they making pullovers for him or, like Madam Desfarges in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, waiting for an execution, or at least a cock-up?

When I was there, there weren’t any that I could see. Everyone was very relaxed and enjoying themselves hugely.

Of course Radio 3 says its reason for having a pop up studio there is to get closer to its audience and to hear what they have to say about the station and its output.

I tried to find out if that was what was really happening. Here is our Feedback report

I went to the South Bank shortly after Roger Wright, the Controller of Radio 3 and also Director of the Proms had announced he was leaving the Corporation to run the Aldeburgh Festival. My namesake has been Controller for the last 15 years and for the last 7 years has run the Proms as well.

It requires a unique combination of talents, and extraordinary stamina, to do both. Mr Wright never missed a prom and was always back at the Royal Albert Hall early the following morning, as well as keeping an eye and ear on Radio 3 during the day. Of course, after 15 hour days he took taxis home, for which he was roundly criticised by some newspapers. They, of course, are much more scrupulous about expenses.

The two jobs have not always been combined. I can remember when a former Controller and a former Proms Director were not on speaking terms and hardly cooperated. This was extremely counter-productive, and also unpleasant for those who had to work for two quarrelling masters.

I do hope the BBC can find a person qualified to take on both jobs. The Corporation will undoubtedly miss Roger Wright. Although some Feedback listeners were very critical of what they saw as Radio 3’s dumbing down during his tenure, he was always prepared to come onto Feedback and face the flack, and he was always extremely courteous, even under fire. He has many fans.

ROGER BOLTON

PS Just a reminder that the Editor of Today, Jamie Angus, is soon to come onto Feedback. Do let me know what you would like me to ask him.

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Radio 4.

Listen to this week's Feedback

Why is it so difficult?

Well it is live and has four highly intelligent very independently minded panellists who spend most of the time with their backs to the presenter as they interrogate witnesses at the opposite end of the table. The presenter has to try to shut them up if they overrun their allotted time or start to browbeat a witness, and, towards the end of the programme, chair a discussion about the key points which have been made, and then finish the programme on time.

I was shattered by the end of the editions I presented. Michael, by contrast, seems to negotiate all those hurdles without breaking sweat.

One of the panellists I had to deal with was Dr David Starkey, sometimes called ‘the rudest man in Britain’. Off air he was quite delightful. On air he could be terrifying, particularly if you tried to rein him in. He made Melanie Phillips seem almost bashful. (Another member of the panel was a young journalist called Michael Gove. Don’t know what has happened to him.) In one edition, not chaired by me, Dr Starkey’s then producer walked into the live studio, stood behind his presenter, and placed his hands round the Doctor’s neck in an effort to shut him up. It had no effect.

I also appeared as a witness in an early edition. I can’t remember what it was about but I would prefer to face an eminent QC in the High Court on a murder charge than do it again. As a witness you don’t get the chance to talk to the panel  beforehand and are led into the studio while the programme is on air, put in the very hot seat and  cross-examined. After what seems a very short time you are told to leave, having hardly got out a fraction of what you intended to say. Or that is what it feels like.

In the early years the live broadcast was followed by an enjoyable dinner at a local restaurant with Hockney drawings on the menu. Much wine was imbibed. Today sandwiches, coffee and crisps are all that is on offer. The Roundheads are now in charge.

Here is our Moral Maze feature.

Don’t forget that the Editor of Today is coming onto Feedback soon. Please keep letting me have your comments and questions about his programme.

 

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Radio 4.

Listen to this week's Feedback

It was produced in Manchester (now its done in Salford), and I would travel up by train the day before, work until 10.30pm on scripts and interviews, be up and in the office at 5.30 am, broadcast from 7, and be on the train down south again by 9am. Often track repairs meant that we had to go on a bus between sections of railway line. I would get back home for a late lunch and fall asleep in front of the fire. (Susannah Reid knows what it is like.)

All this so I could sit alone in a studio and talk to my guests, nearly all of whom would be almost 200 miles away in London. I loved presenting the programme, but not the travelling, or the isolation. The production team of Radio 4's Broadcasting House, and its presenter Paddy O'Connell, have it rather easier. For a start they live near their work and their programme does not transmit until the civilised hour of 9 am -  and they operate from a newsroom which has other people in it. I spotted my former Sunday colleague Ed Stourton preparing to present the World This Weekend.

Then they actually see many of their guests, such as the paper reviewers. Ever the groupie, I managed to share a tangerine with the great Tom Hollander, whose Rev series is about to come back on air. I would have talked to Camilla Cavendish of the Sunday times, who had cycled in to Broadcasting House dressed as if she was going to compete in the world cycling championships, but she was too busy talking to an Admiral.

I was there, at the programme's invitation, to see how it interacted with listeners and whether their correspondence was taken seriously and really made a difference.

 

I also wanted to discover if Paddy really was as nice and friendly as he sounds on air. (He is, quite puts me to shame).

This is our Feedback report.

Also this week I talked to BBC Arts and Entertainment Correspondent Colin Patterson about his Alan Patridge moment on the Today programme, and whether there is any point interviewing stars like Bono, who rarely say anything significant, particularly when they are on a red carpet. Many of our listeners think such interviews are a waste of time.

Please do continue writing to Feedback, not just about programmes but also about policy and anything else to do with BBC Radio. Nothing is off limits, even salaries, so do write in and say I don't get paid enough! (I do, I do!)

Roger Bolton

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Radio 4.

Listen to this week's Feedback

 

I’m not usually a fan of horror. There is enough in real life to sate any appetite I have for being scared stiff. Yet horror can be cleansing, even cathartic. How else to explain our feelings at the end of Coriolanus or even King Lear? My first introduction to horror was BBC TV’s Quatermass and the Pit which quite put me off ever wanting to visit London, where the pit was located. Later, I found the daleks in Dr Who pallid in comparison.

Hammer horror I found more interesting for the décolletage on display from the likes of Barbara Shelley and Ingrid Pitt than for the gallons of tomato sauce poured over Dracula’s victims.

My scariest theatrical experience was sitting in a very small theatre in Covent Garden almost  30 years ago watching Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in Macbeth. There was a single light bulb illuminating the stage, the cast were all in black, and shadows were all around. When the witches appeared beside me I almost jumped out of my skin. Even they, however, were not as scary as Ms Dench. Up until then I had seen her as a brilliant comedienne, radiating goodness. As Lady Macbeth she was the devil incarnate, an erotic nightmare.

I did not have any great hopes for Radio 4’s recent production of The Exorcist. Why do it when the film starring Linda Blair was still available on DVD? Some listeners shared my scepticism – beforehand. Afterwards, however, we received many plaudits to pass on. It was indeed scary, and also had some very explicit language. Not the sort of thing Radio 4 normally transmits just before midnight. Is this the start of a new trend?

In Feedback this week I talked to Jeremy Howe, the Radio 4 executive who commissioned the play of Exorcist, and to the producer who also directed it, Gaynor MacFarlane.

Here is our feature:

This week we also talked to the Editor of Woman’s Hour, Alice Feinstein, about her programme’s new Power List, and a 21-year-old Feedback listener took advantage of Radio 1’s open door policy to look inside that multi-media station.

This weekend I am going backstage at Broadcasting House on Sunday morning to try and discover whether listeners really do affect that programme’s content. I do hope the croissants aren’t stale.

Roger Bolton

 

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Radio 4.

Listen to this week's Feedback

So there I was in Bellowhead’s dressing room at the Royal Albert Hall, surrounded by empty bottles of champagne, caviar and lines of white powder. Draped upon the chaise longues, in the glow of low level  lighting which added to the deep red of the carpet and the velvet walls, were scores of groupies waiting for their personal interviews with the band.

Well that’s the fantasy. The reality was that the dressing room was closer to one you would find allocated to an away team at Hackney marshes before they went out to play onto the muddy windswept football pitches, there were no intoxicants apparent, and the only people in the room with the band were members of the Feedback team.

My producer and I were there, together with listener Diana Butler, to find out more about the BBC’s coverage of folk and whether it makes sense to talk of folk music as a separate discipline any more.

Well that was the excuse.

Apart from being very friendly and totally sober, the multi instrumentalists of Bellowhead were fascinating about the way they and other bands moved back and forward across the musical spectrum.

We moved on to a much smaller dressing room, where I hit my head on the ceiling. This was occupied by one of the Folk Awards presenters, Mark Radcliffe, whose ‘rider’ (what his contract says has to be in his dressing room) amounted to a large bottle of water, two small cans of pale ale, and some crisps.

Meanwhile, across London all sorts of exotic things were being consumed at the Brit awards. The latter dominated the next day’s headlines despite the fact that four and a half thousand people packed into the Royal Albert Hall for the folk awards, millions listened on Radio 2 at home or watched via the red button or via live streaming. And the musicianship of Clannad, Suzanne Vega, Bellowhead and The Full English who performed live was superb.

It all seemed a long way from the Isle of White in the 60’s when Bob Dylan was called “Judas” for going electric.

Here is the resulting Feedback feature. Far to short of course. You can still get the awards ceremony itself on the iPlayer radio.

   

Also this week masses of listeners wrote in about Today’s coverage of climate change and GM foods. The programme declined to put up someone for interview. As a result, when I talked to some of those listeners I had to put the BBC ‘s defence to them myself. Its not really a desirable outcome, and I think it is a shame that the programme, which always points out, with obvious disapproval, when politicians refuse to come on their show, refuses to talk to its own listeners who, via the licence fee, pay all their salaries. 

Roger Bolton

UPDATE: Since writing this blog, Jamie Angus, the Editor of Today, has told me he will come onto Feedback in March and answer any questions you want to put to him. So please contact Feedback with your questions for him.

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Radio 4.

Listen to this week's Feedback