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When I'm 65 on You and Yours

2012-07-17T14:18:34+00:00

Editor's note: As part of the new BBC season, When I'm 65, Radio 4's You and Yours has been focussing on covering some of the issues around ageing in the UK today. Here, Ben Toone from the show picks out some highlights. PM

The season certainly opened my eyes to the issues affecting older people, both good and bad.

We reported on all sorts of aspects of ageing, from exercise to work, education and ideas and advertising and care. We looked at the ideas to make ageing more comfortable as well as the ways to keep active in older age and most importantly the rewards of keeping a positive approach.

The BBC's World Affairs Correspondent John Simpson talked about his fears for the future whilst Birds of a Feather star Lesley Joseph shared her experience of living with a pensioner - Pat- who cares full time for her bed-ridden husband.

Advertising guru Sir John Hegarty talked about how ageing is portrayed in advertising and the media and The Apprentice's Nick Hewer talked about on working after the retirement age. On Call You and Yours, callers Hilary and Ray described the difficulties of finding work later in life and the difficultly of working after reaching 80.

You can explore other aspects of the series via our website - including finding out how Manchester is aiming to become the UK's first and Age Friendly City, exploring a Dutch dementia village and revisiting the University of the Third Age, an idea kicked off by a You and Yours interview 30 years ago.

Ben Toone is a member of the You and Yours production team.

When I'm 65: BBC's Ageing Season

2012-07-05T08:40:33+00:00

If you're over 65, is it how you imagined? If you're under 65, how much do you think about being old?

Day to day I don't, but since working on the You and Yours Ageing Season called 'When I'm 65' I have realised that I'm actually rather apprehensive about being elderly. And my worst fears? Perhaps the thought of sitting in a chair all day, with a knitted blanket over my knees, eating liquidised roast chicken dinner, and possibly not knowing my own name.

Of course this is not the reality for most pensioners. According to Guy Robertson, in his paper 'Positive Ageing - from the political to the personal' only a quarter of people over 85 have dementia, whilst in the Republic of Ireland 90% of the care budget is spent on only 4.4% of the people over 65.

I'm not trying to belittle the devastating effect illness can have on the quality of some people's lives but I have realised there are many reasons to be cheerful. And if you consider that scientists, health professionals and the like have spent so much time and energy finding ways to increase life expectancy, (1/3 of babies born in 2012 are expected to survive to celebrate their 100th birthday according to recent report by the Office of National Statistics)- it seems churlish, at best, to be frightened of actually living that dream.

Here on You and Yours, Radio 4's consumer programme, we regularly examine key issues confronting older people. Disability and care are part of our core remit and our recent series on Adult Social Care looked in detail at the government's new policy white paper and what it might contain to improve things.

So we were a natural partner to collaborate with BBC One for the 'When I'm 65' Ageing Season.

We'll be speaking to Nick Hewer from the Apprentice about The Town That Never Retired - an experiment where 15 retirees in their seventies are sent back to work and 68 year old Birds of a Feather Actress Lesley Joseph will talk about the challenges of being a full time carer, after living with two pensioners Pat and Malcolm for the programme When I get Older.

We'll also be talking about Silver entrepreneurs, older people in Advertising with John Hegarty and visit a pioneering dementia village in Holland.

Do get in touch to share your thoughts on the positive aspects of ageing or send us a picture showing why you're glad to be over 65.

Karen Dalziel is a Producer on You and Yours which is broadcast weekdays at 12.04.

More from the You & Yours archive

2010-10-12T16:15:34+00:00

Editor's note: more quite haunting glimpses of our former selves from the You & Yours archive. We've now published all of the five episodes of the programme from the 1970s found in the archive. If you have a recording of an episode of You & Yours from that decade, please leave a comment to let us know - SB.

"Very often you'd groan and think 'I'm not going to do school uniforms again'" Nancy Wise revealed when we discussed working for You and Yours in the 1970s. It must have been a regular topic, as only five complete programmes survive from that decade, and in one of them John Edmunds asks Betty Jerman rather despairingly whether any of the latest school uniform trends will finally enable girls "to look more feminine?"

Although the territory of some of these programmes is the same, it is the odd word or phrase that jumps out and makes you realise how much things have changed. My favourite example of this has to come from the "What's On Your Mind?" section of the programme which dealt with listeners' comments and queries. "The incessant flow of this boy's sales patter was a complete brainwash" complains Mrs Nina Gillings about a doorstep salesman in May 1972. It is only when he has left and she is "perspiring freely" that she realises that she has been "fooled by a confidence trickster"!

I'm jealous of the reporters of some of these pieces too. "Turkey breast cooked with almonds or herb lemon and cream sauce, sole and mushrooms and mussels, strawberry peach salad and orange rum gateaux" are just some of the meals sampled by Tim Matthews at a country house in Gloucestershire in a feature about holidays on a £20 budget. While he interviews the proprietor - the very plummy Captain Barker - you can hear him lighting and sucking his pipe!

Each of these remaining four programmes from the 1970s contains similar gems but then you suddenly come across a comment with contemporary resonance. In a report on care homes for older people, for instance, it is shocking to hear one resident confide that she finds it hard sharing a bedroom with five other people. But then comes some timeless wisdom and advice to those going into a care: "They must realise that they are going into a new life... they mustn't keep thinking about the life they've left and regretting it... but try and take as much possible interest in their surroundings and regard it as an experience from which they can learn something of interest."

We published the first of the five 1970s editions of You & Yours last week. Here are four more quite vivid slivers of social history for you to listen to:

7th June 1971: Nancy Wise presents a programme which includes an interview about family budgets, Tim Matthews reporting on the kinds of holidays you can get for £20 and there's also an item on rheumatism.

3rd February 1972: John Edmunds presents and Joan Yorke is sent to Walthamstow to look into revolutionary health centres, where doctors are grouped together with nurses all on one site! School uniforms are discussed at length and Derek Cooper goes to Battersea Dogs Home to find out if it is possible to keep dogs in today's big cities!

15th February 1972: Joan Yorke presents advice about the fuel crisis including tips on doing housework during blackouts! There's an interview with the NUT about teacher's pay, Tim Matthews gets to shadow the fire brigade, and there are letters about "slow learners", British rail fares and "new pence".

25th May 1972 Derek Cooper presents this edition which starts with an interview with Dr Lyall Watson about his new book 'Omnivores', Lucille Hall reports on care homes for older people There's also an item about how to bring up genius children - is it best to be 'totally permissive' or is it all in the genes?

And here's the earliest episode of You & Yours we could find in the archive, from 7 May 1971, introduced by Jeanine McMullen.

Clare Walker is a producer on You & Yours

Listen to last week's fascinating look at forty years of You & Yours here.
The picture shows a memo from Controller Tony Whitby concerning a 'possible daily magazine programme'. There are more pictures from the You & Yours archive on Flickr.

A year of anniversaries on Radio 4

2010-10-06T09:22:28+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qps9

So You and Yours is forty. Congratulations. The programme launched in October 1970 to give Radio 4 listeners advice five lunchtimes a week on 'everyday affairs from savings to sex, from holidays to health'. It swallowed-up older programmes such as Can I Help You, Listening Post, and You and Your Money. And although in the four decades since it's often been parodied mercilessly, it was quickly judged a success, adding to the network's listening figures and drawing praise for its down-to-earth manner.

You'll no doubt have noticed quite a few other series on Radio 4 celebrating their anniversary this year: PM, The World Tonight, Analysis. The coincidence might seem strange. After all, the network itself had been born out of the ashes of the BBC's Home Service not in 1970, but in 1967. Yet it was in 1970 that the really big programme changes came.

One man in particular lay behind it all. Radio 4's Controller at the time was the young and dynamic Tony Whitby (pictured), a former civil servant and television current affairs editor. Whitby had a reputation for shrewdly picking out the ideas of others and embellishing them by throwing out his own thoughts and suggestions. He'd no intention of creating a new schedule from scratch. But he wanted a more topical and a more varied flavour - to make Radio 4, in his words, like a 'well-labelled library that has a few surprises in it'. So, in 1970, along came the unashamedly serious Analysis and the magisterial World Tonight, the bright and breezy 'commuter magazine' PM Reports and a phone-in called It's Your Line, the satirical sketch-show Weekending, and, of course, You and Yours.

None of this happened without a good deal of grumbling from listeners and critics. Some thought there were too many magazine programmes. With their succession of disparate items, magazines seemed like an abandonment of quality - suspiciously tailor-made for a distracted, inattentive audience. They were, the Observer muttered, the 'great ragbags of our times': cheap, predictable, and banal.

This was a little unfair. Very different programmes were being lumped-together, then stereotyped crudely. Looking back at the schedule as a whole, what's most striking about Whitby's revolution of 1970 is how genuinely eclectic it made Radio 4, with programmes stretching across a suddenly wider spectrum, from the intellectually demanding or disturbing at one end to the faintly scurrilous or comforting at the other. The changes 40 years ago set Radio 4 on its long-term trajectory: away from the dusty tones of the somewhat middlebrow old Home Service, to the tougher, livelier, more authoritative, network we have today.

David Hendy is the author of Life on Air: a History of Radio Four. He teaches broadcasting history at the University of Westminster.

You & Yours producer Clare Walker wrote about her visit to the archive here on the blog.
Listen to Peter White's history of the programme on the Radio 4 web site.
David Hendy's page on the University of Westminster web site.
There's a fascinating audio slideshow about the changes to BBC Radio's branding that also happened in 1970 on this page from the History of the BBC site.
The picture shows Radio 4 Controller Tony Whitby in 1970, alongside Broadcasting House, Radio 4's headquarters. It's from the BBC's archive.

Opening up the You & Yours Archive

2010-10-04T10:51:37+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00v1nhd

Editor's note. Clare Walker's post about the You & Yours archive starts with a complete episode of the programme from 1971 which you can embed on your own web site. Click 'embed.' - SB.

Last month I took the train to Reading, hopped on the bus to Caversham and in a white bungalow in the leafy suburbs discovered a hidden realm - the BBC written archive. With the 40th Anniversary of You & Yours coming up, I'd been searching for archive material but very sadly discovered that no one had kept the first You and Yours broadcast on 5th October 1970 and that a mere five editions had survived from the entire 1970s.

As Simon Rooks the Head of the Radio Archive explained to me, space was limited back then and programme makers didn't keep a comprehensive record of what went out on air: "The idea was more to select programmes, extracts of programmes, and sometimes commission new recordings itself that were either of clear historical value or would be of likely repeat or re-use value to future programme makers."

So highly topical content of the sort broadcast on You &Yours although a precious record of social history now, may well have been seen by producers then as ephemeral.

So it was time to do some digging in the written archive - to find out how the programme came about and whether we could, at the very least, find the script of the first show.

The BBC written archive is a tranquil, soothing place. I had to sign a piece of paper agreeing to keep quiet, treat all items with care, leave my water bottle, mobile and pens outside - and proceeded with my stubby HB pencil to a table with files of highly confidential correspondence about You & Yours.

I discovered that the programme was the brainchild of the then controller of Radio 4, Anthony Whitby, but that his idea of having a live magazine programme at noon every day was not met with universal approval. Some producers worried that the name You and Yours was too "twee", others that we might have less time to cover subjects in depth.

"I can see dangers in the suggested "two-way letters and telephone calls" section. Advice given on the air, as you know, has to be accurate. Can it be done under "rush hour" conditions?" wrote producer Barbara Crowther in the June of 1970.

What was incredible reading this correspondence was that the same concerns we have now as producers of the programme, were being discussed back then. "I emphasised I hope rightly," wrote editor Steve Bonarjee, "that we should avoid this becoming a gloom sequence concentrating on miseries and woes. There should be a strong constructive element concerned with opportunities and aspirations and people's concern to make the most of things - even happiness has its problems."

But what about the first programme? Archivist Jeff Walden led me to the microfiche room, reeled up the tape and we whizzed through until we found the running order and script of the first programme.

Topics in that first week included titles such as: 'How to buy your first house', 'Do it yourself trends', 'Pensions for the over eighties', 'Pangs of Parting', 'Tomorrow's Living Rooms' and 'Firework Hazards'!

But have a listen to the first programme we have from the archive. It is only fifteen minutes long as they used to have government announcements on a Friday which meant it was a shorter programme with a leisure theme. Jeanine McMullen is presenting and they are celebrating the fact that Arsenal is aiming at the double in the Cup Final, and interview Danny Blanchflower, former Spurs captain. You wouldn't hear a modern footballer commenting about the game on You and Yours now!

There are also tips for the cheapest ways to experience London for free: Punch and Judy shows, watching people "coolly spending thousands" at the auction rooms of Southeby's and Christies, fishing in the Royal Parks, or tucking into a kipper breakfast in Billingsgate Market.

In the next month we will add the other four programmes from the archive to this page. Just to whet your appetite we get to go behind the scenes at the fire brigade, hear about care homes for the elderly (where one woman discusses coming to terms with sharing a room with five other people!), and there's a discussion about whether it's possible to turn your children into geniuses by bringing them up in a special way! Enjoy!

Clare Walker is a producer on You & Yours

Listen to today's telephone-themed episode of You & Yours on the Radio 4 web site and to Friday's fascinating look at forty years of You & Yours here.
The picture shows page one of the script from the first episode of You & Yours. There are more pictures from Clare's visit to the Caversham archive on Flickr.

Got a question for Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell?

2009-10-27T09:12:57+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours/coming_up.shtml

Paul Scoins, who works on You & Yours, emailed me: "I wondered if this might be worth flagging up... We've got Tessa Jowell on today to take calls on people's views on the 2012 Olympic legacy."

The programme looks like this:

First half:

Are you still as enthusiastic about the Games as you were when they were won?
What kind of impact do you think the Games will have on the whole of the UK?
What will be the economic impact of the Games? Should the money be spent elsewhere?
Are you concerned that there is a metropolitan bias to the Games?

Second half:

Is the infrastructure needed for the Games to be a success in place?
What will be the legacy of the Games - long term jobs, investment in sport, culture?
Where is the 'added value' to be had? Is the UK making the most of the tourism opportunities?

If you'd like to join in and question the minister, the lines are open now. Call 03700 100 444 or fill in the form on this page. Full details are on the You & Yours home page.

Paul is particularly interested to hear from people directly affected by the Games construction and people who live in Stratford or the other affected areas of East London.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Today's You & Yours is presented by Julian Worricker and starts at 1200. You'll be able to listen again here after the broadcast.
The picture, London 2012 Olympic Stadium, is by Mat and is used under licence.

Peter White's week

2009-09-18T11:24:17+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mjr9v

One of my delights over the past few years has been following the so-called 'children of the Olympic bid'. If you've missed it let me fill you in.

These are the youngsters who back in 2005 played a key but little known role in snatching the games for London from under the Parisian nose. Aged between twelve and sixteen at the time, they were selected from east end schools to demonstrate the diversity that London would bring to the games.

Up on stage, as Sebastian Coe put the London case to the International Olympic Committee. Their contrast with 'the suits' that the other cities had on show might just have made all the difference.

I was in Singapore at the time, but I have to admit, it was my producer who cooked up the idea with our commissioning editor at Radio 4 that we should follow these youngsters all the way through to the games themselves and see how their lives were shaped by the event they'd done so much to bring about.

It's been a joy! The first in the current series went out last Monday. We've spent a good deal of this week editing and scripting the second programme.

The great thing about these youngsters is that they have been so welcoming, so frank, so un-phased by having microphones thrust in front of them. There's a presumption that teenagers between about thirteen and seventeen are loathe to utter more than a monosyllable, but nothing could have been further from the truth with this group.

They've welcomed me into their homes, let me watch at close quarters their disasters, sporting and otherwise, and then politely answered questions about them! Talked about their love lives, their beliefs, their ambitions, without a hint of defensiveness. None of this "lessons will have been learned from this". When things go well for them, they share their uninhibited delight; when they screw up, they tell you what went wrong! Anyone with a jaundiced view of today's younger generation should listen to them; they could learn a lot!

You and Yours has also thrown up two particular delights for me this week: first of all my guest on Monday was Margaret Mountford, the businesswoman who has become something of a heroine to viewers of the BBC's 'Apprentice' for her withering look when dismissing the antics of Lord Sugar's most excruciating job applicants.

The You and Yours team have had quite a lot of fun trying to explain to me what a 'withering' look is; one of the great advantages to having been blind from birth, is that withering looks can be safely ignored!

I think Margaret must have got most of her withering looks out of the way while she and the producer negotiated over what she would, and wouldn't answer questions on!

By the time she got to me, she was all smiles (one of the joys of being a presenter; we're a cosseted bunch). She was only too happy to talk about women in the city, the fact that a lot of people came on The Apprentice just to secure a career in television, and even what she thought of a man whose nose was ensured for five million pounds, because it was so good at grading cheese.

But an even higher point than that was my trip on one of the first Greyhound buses to make a scheduled journey in Britain, from Southampton to London.

The iconic American company (actually now British-owned) reckons it can make a go of it here, but we probably haven't helped! And it was all going so well: barrelling up the motorway, Managing Director giving me his pitch, American studies academic waxing lyrical about the music the Greyhound had inspired! In fact, my worry was that this could all turn into far too much of a puff for the company!

I needn't have worried: somewhere near Windlesham in Surrey, so far not a subject of popular song, a keening, whining sound impinged on my interviewing. It quickly became apparent that we were losing power: Soon, with a nifty bit of piloting, the driver slid us to a halt on the hard shoulder! We'd broken down! It's the moment a company dreads

I have to be fair; they took it on the chin, fronted up for the inevitable interview, and summoned taxis to take everyone on to their final destinations. In fact, judging by the response to our programme, its probably done them less harm than they think; but, given that one of their great selling-points was tickets for a pound, I did rather treasure the pay-off: the lady who phoned her son to tell him what had happened, only to receive back this text: "you get what you pay for, mother".

Series four of Children of the Olympic bid is on-air now.
The picture shows Ashley Mitchell whose 'light-touch organisational unorthodoxy' features in episode two of Children of the Olympic bid.
Peter's Greyhound Bus item was on Friday's You and Yours and Margaret Mountford's on last Monday's.