FEATURE:
Station to Station
Part Fourteen: Emma Barnett (BBC Radio 4)
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RATHER than feature…
PHOTO CREDIT: BBC Radio 1
a broadcaster on a music-playing radio station, I am focusing on someone who is more known for talk radio. Though, of course, BBC Radio 4 plays music, Emma Barnett is one of the hosts of Woman’s Hour. Though the show has been in the news regarding Zara Mohammed experience on the show, and the fact Sinéad O'Connor pulled out of an interview recently, Barnett’s presenting is excellent and hugely popular. She presents Woman’s Hour alongside Naga Munchetty. I will come to an article regarding both and what the reaction has been like to their introduction – they replaced Dame Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey this year. Before getting to an article and a couple of interviews, here is a little background about Emma Barnett:
“Emma Barnett (born 5 February 1985) is a British broadcaster and journalist. She has been the main presenter of Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 since January 2021 and is one of the regular presenters on BBC Two's Newsnight.
Barnett worked for BBC Radio 5 Live for six years, beginning in 2014, after three years working for LBC. Between 2016 and 2020 Barnet presented 5 Live's mid-morning weekday programme. Before beginning her broadcasting career Barnett worked for The Daily Telegraph firstly as its Digital Media editor and latterly its Women editor, being credited with bringing a more serious edge to the coverage of women's issues in the paper. Between August 2016 and 2020, Barnett was a columnist for the The Sunday Times and, from June 2017, a co-presenter of BBC One's Sunday Morning Live. In autumn 2017, she co-presented the live discussion programme After the News on ITV”.
A multi-talented broadcaster, writer, author and writer, Barnett is someone you should follow on Instagram. I have been listening to Woman’s Hour for years. I loved when Murray and Garvey hosted. Although Barnett and Munchetty have different styles to their predecessors and one another, they are fantastic hosts. I am surprised there are not more interviews online with Emma Barnett. She is one of the most important broadcasters we have in the U.K. I am keen to pull from an interview and a review of her and Munchetty hosting Woman’s Hour. Just before that, I want to bring in a little more detail regarding Barnett’s radio achievements – in addition to her valuable charity work:
“Emma was named Best Speech Broadcaster of the Year 2020, winning Gold, at the Radio Academy Awards. She was also named Radio Broadcaster of the Year by the Broadcasting Press Guild in 2018 for her agenda-setting interviews. The Emma Barnett Show (Monday-Thursday 10am-1pm) won Gold at the the Radio Academy Awards 2018, for Best News Coverage of real-life stories. She was also named Broadcaster of the Year 2017 by the Political Studies Association.
On radio Emma makes documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service - in which she has investigated a wide range of subjects including: the march of military women to the front line; the personal hypocrisy within religion; the rise of mindfulness and whether we have a right to be forgotten in the digital age. She started her broadcasting career on LBC radio - where she used to host the Sunday drive-time programme and for which she was named the best new radio presenter at the Arqiva commercial radio awards 2012.
She then landed her first BBC radio show on Sunday evenings for Radio 5 Live called The Hit List - which revealed the 40 most shared and talked about stories of the week - before transferring to her own named programme in the station’s daily schedule. Emma writes a monthly column for the i Paper. For 4 years, she wrote a weekly column for The Sunday Times Magazine. Entitled Tough Love, she advised readers who came to her with their deepest problems - from difficult children to even worse partners”.
Emma is a patron of Smartworks, a charity which helps economically disadvantaged women get back into the workplace through interview training and having the right outfit to make the best first impression. She has been a volunteer dresser for more than a decade - helping women discover the best outfit to land the job - and in 2017 was very proud to become one of the charity’s patrons.
She also supports Endometriosis UK, a charity dedicated to helping women suffering from Endo navigate each day and raising money for much-needed research into this incurable disease”.
It seemed like a natural progression to appoint Barnett as one of the hosts of Woman’s Hour. She has settled into the role really well. The news stories about guest complaints takes nothing away from her talent and suitability. In fact, I feel like she will be helming the long-running show for many years to come. It would be nice to know a little more about the woman behind the microphone. I was interested reading Mark Lawson’s reaction to the new hosts of Woman’s Hour. He was writing for The Guardian on 4th January, 2021:
“Barnett started by reading out a letter the show had solicited from the Queen, congratulating Woman’s Hour on its 75th anniversary this year: a counterintuitive traditionalism from a 35-year-old presenter, although segueing to a specially recorded song by the former Spice Girl Mel C suggested a desire to cover the generational bases. Munchetty also started with music, reading her menu of the items coming up over a thumping drum’n’bass track, which seemed mainly designed to make the show sound different from Barnett’s reign, and from Munchetty’s other gig on BBC One Breakfast News.
The opening monologues spoke identically of “looking forward to getting to know” the listeners, part of the greater tendency of modern broadcasting towards emotionalism: the question used most often by each presenter to interviewees was: “How do/did you feel?”
Unusually, the recruitment of two women does not alter the gender balance of the airwaves; the 10am time-slot has had women simultaneously in charge on Radio 4 and Radio 5 since 2016, when Barnett took over mornings on Radio 5. And both have previously done holiday shifts on their new programmes, but having the front door keys, and being able to redecorate, is a very different proposition.
Barnett’s 5 live style was built around politics, showbiz and debates fuelled by social media; on Monday, it felt as if she was craving more texts to interact with. But, as her appearances on 5 live and Newsnight were aimed at the entire audience, the most intriguing question was to what extent she will acknowledge the implication in the title of Woman’s Hour (anachronistic to some, controversial to others) that it has a restrictive remit.
Barnett started very Westminster, with what was billed as the “first interview” with Sonia Khan, the Treasury aide dismissed by the former chief Downing Street aide Dominic Cummings. This was less of a scoop than it might have been. Surprisingly, as Barnett thrives on live radio, the chat was recorded, perhaps because of BBC legal fears about discussing the shortsighted Durham explorer without an editing safety net. Khan then repeatedly refused to “get into what happened back then” when Cummings sacked her, preferring to “focus on the learnings”. (Might the show have seen this coming, as the ex-aide recently reached an out-of-court settlement with the government?)
PHOTO CREDIT: BBC Radio 4/PA
Barnett used her considerable interviewing skill, but sounded increasingly frustrated, at one point somewhat tetchily telling Khan that she “must have” a view on Cummings. In retrospect, the second item should have been first. Daringly for Woman’s Hour, and possibly indicating Barnett’s intended flexibility with content, it was a conversation between two men – the admirable Richard Ratcliffe, whose wife, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, remains under house imprisonment in Iran, and the former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt.
But, on first-day form, the BBC has two sharp programmes with high-class presenters, although radio overlords may become concerned that these shows seem much closer in sound and content than when Murray and Barnett were going head to head. There seems a clear risk as well that Barnett will find herself in turf wars with the Today programme for subjects and guests, given that her core interests overlap so much with its.
The solution to those problems may be that within a few years, Barnett and Munchetty will be sitting around the Radio 4 studio breakfast table. For each of them, these new shows, which opened very enjoyably, feel like steps rather than destinations”.
I wonder whether Barnett will pursue other opportunities and ventures in the coming years – or whether her time on Woman’s Hour is going to take too much time up. It will be interesting seeing Barnett’s career bloom and evolve as the years go by.
I want to end by quoting a few questions from an interview that was conducted by The Guardian earlier this year. It was a quick-fire interview…though it did provide some interesting answers and insights:
“What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Impatience.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
I loathe people who are stingy with their time, their contacts or buying a round. I loathe people who don’t listen properly, and I loathe people who lie
What is your most treasured possession?
My glasses. I’m blind as a bat.
What makes you unhappy?
Having no plans in the diary.
What is top of your bucket list?
To catch a huge fish somewhere remote and beautiful, and gut, cook and eat it.
What does love feel like?
Very hard, meaningful kisses.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Perhaps. If I may. Thank you for your time. I’m just trying to understand.
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Not being able to have a baby for two and a half years. Lots of people say it made me a better person; I think it made me worse. You go to a very dark place with your friends because they are having kids, and you want to be happy for them but you’re not”.
I shall leave things there. It has been great spending a little bit of time with a hugely important and talented broadcaster. Although there are many strings to her bow, I am focusing on the radio side of her career. As she is so young, I think that Emma Barnett will work for a number of different stations. Her work on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour is exceptional. Though she (and Naga Munchetty) have big boots to fill (taking over from Dame Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey), they are making the show their own. Barnett is helping to bring Woman’s Hour to…
A whole new audience.