IT'S NECESSARY TO LISTEN, TOO

Nigella Lawson lasted a week at Britain's

newest national radio station. Here she explains why it is heading for oblivion

IT IS a Monday evening earlier this month: I am on the phone to Linda Bart- ley, producer of Talk Radio UK's four- hour breakfast show. 'Right,' she starts, briskly, 'at seven it's capital punishment Should We Bring It Back?, seven-thirty sport, at seven-forty music review and at seven-fifty Supermarkets — Just how fresh is the food on your supermarket shelves?'

Bartley is getting me up to speed on tomorrow morning's schedule and — with hanging, sport, music, supermarkets all in the same hour — I suddenly have the feel- ing I'm joining Spoof Radio Inc. The three remaining hours are to be filled with Euro- gossip from Honey B, a brief enquiry listed on the running order as 'The people who run the NHS say it's working: Do You Believe Them?', 'Is British Driving an Accident Waiting to Happen?', more sport, an interview with a television actress, a session with a nutritionist from California State University along the lines of 'Does a poor diet make your kids vio- lent', a frolicsome, matey debate on what heaven might look like and numerous fun- spotting 'flicks' through the morning papers.

Even then I was not despondent. 'But it's such a naff station,' a friend of mine said, not even remembering to be tactful when I told her what I was doing for the next couple of weeks. Of course I knew the arguments for turning down the invitation from Talk Radio, a new nationwide station about which nobody has been kind, and which claims to bring American-style Shock Jockery over here, but I was opti- mistic. I enjoy broadcasting.

In the few days before I was to start I took the precaution of tuning in to Talk Radio and it was then that I began to panic: this wasn't quirky, off-the-wall wacky stuff, this was plain, old-fashioned inanity. But I was told that the station's managers understood its deficiencies and were keen to give it a keener journalistic edge. This I was to supply. Happy to.

Both the breakfast show presenters, Sean Bolger and Dixie Stewart, are bright. It was partly hearing them in action that had me feeling it wasn't such a naff thing to be doing, but the pressure, when I went into the studios to watch, was clearly on to couch things in such reductive terms, to force every debate into absurd extremes. I am enough of a populist to think that being able to talk to people directly and have them respond to one immediately, spontaneously, is a wonderful opportunity. Why waste it on formulaic bundles of prepacked thought and clichds? I was sit- ting next to the producer in her little cubi- cle and heard her, when Dixie Stewart asked an intelligent question, hiss to her- self, 'This isn't Radio 4!'

It became clear straightaway that between hiring me and having me start there'd been a panic-induced change of plan. The preliminary listening figures had been published and were way worse than anything they could have feared. Ceaser the Geezer, the much-vaunted night-time loudmouth, was pulling no more than 30,000 listeners nationwide and Terry Christian, late of Channel 4's yoof gab- show The Word, had so few listeners the number was too small to be measured. The breakfast show, my show, the one the press was describing as Talk Radio's 'flag- ship programme' had fewer than 40,000 listeners at its peak time. These are num- bers which would be worrying for any large urban local station: for a heavily advertised station broadcasting to the `There are those who find watching fish relaxing.' whole country they were disastrous.

On my first day at work, I found the sports presenter was sitting in the chair that I'd been hired to fill; I was to recast as loose box or, as they don't say at Talk Radio, persona non grata. For suddenly a keener journalistic edge seemed a risk not worth taking. As far as I could work out from frenzied noises off, fortune and pros- perity were seen to lie rather in the oppo- site direction.

Panic travels fast, and this is such a small outfit that there's no place for it to go except round and frenziedly round. Talk Radio UK appears to be run by three men and a dog. One doesn't expect the cream of the intelligensia to be carving out a role for themselves in this particular slot. Ordinary muzzle-brained crassness need not have been a problem. But what all radio produc- ers need to be is calm. It is absolutely nec- essary, it matters above all else. But when Ms Bartley found that she had three pre- senters on her hands, she grew sweatily agi- tated. 'There are too many voices! Too many voices!' she kept saying, until I began to fear she was hearing them in her head, too. The answer was, she felt, to keep me out of the studio for as much time as possible.

Still, it was useful for me, as, sitting out of the studio but in with the producer, I was able to see exactly what was going wrong with Talk Radio UK. I offer another conversation by way of illustration. It was nine in the evening, and I was to be up at four the following morning. My telephone rang. It was Ms Bartley. She wished to apprise me of a little debate she'd lined up about make-up. 'You can take whichever side you want. You can either say, "Women should always wear make up. Never leave the home without it. I'm a slave to my lipsticks," or you can say, "Women should never wear make-up. It's terrible. Shouldn't be allowed!" and so on.' I said that I didn't feel entirely comfortable in either position, and surely one could frame the whole question rather different- ly? I tried to explain what I thought the issues were, and why I thought that aired honestly rather than presented in cartoon form they would actually address more people. She snapped, 'I must have black or white, black or white! I can't have grey! If it's grey it's porridge!' I kept silent. Eventu- ally I asked which side she wanted me to take. 'Look,' she snapped, 'I'm not asking you to compromise yourself.'

It seemed depressing beyond belief that I could even be having this conversation. You can't go down on a point of principle and dignity on the subject of lipstick.

A day or so later a doctor came on to discuss so-called 'after-death' experiences. He had just written a book which apparent- ly offered proof of their existence. Before he went on air, Bartley yapped at him, 'I don't want "my findings suggest . . . " want "the facts are: boom boom boom.' No grey here: we must have black and white.' She glared at me: 'And what do you think?' I said that I thought that these experiences might well exist — the bright white light and so on — but were the result not of introductory forays into the afterlife but of a shortage of oxygen to the brain or some such. In other words, there was a scientific explanation behind it all. I told her that I didn't go in for spooks. `Ha!' she said. 'I've heard all that before! I don't want you in the interview.' And that was that.

To give an idea of the general intellectu- al climate, I should tell you that for a cou- ple of days there was a discussion of `premonitions' lined up, which didn't, in fact, take place during my short stay at the station. It was based — and I'm copying it down straight from the typed-out running- order given to me — on the fact that 'a Hampshire man walked into a shop saying he'd come to buy a winning lottery ticket . and guess what? He won £50,000. '

One morning I went in and found Simon Garfield, a journalist from the Inde- pendent, hanging around. He was writing a piece about the station. The next day the piece appeared. Garfield had, rather kind- ly I thought, said that the daytime pro- grammes weren't quite as banal as the night-time ones. Linda Bartley was furious. 'He saw how good we were, but no! It doesn't fit into their bitter, preconceived little ideas. Oh, I know journalists! They're all the same. He came to write a hatchet job, and so of course he did. He couldn't say anything bad about us, that's why he didn't mention us.' I said that I really thought that hadn't been the case. It seemed an honest piece to me, and besides newspapers just didn't work as she thought. 'Oh, no. I know you probably think I'm being cynical but I know journal- ists.' I said that I didn't think she sounded Cynical, merely defensive. She ranted on: I'm a journalist too, you know. They make UP their minds before they come. They have an idea and everything is just made to fit.'

Certainly that's how Talk Radio works. You either want make-up outlawed, or it should be a crime not to wear it. Black or white. People have to fit into an idea, a type: it's one thing or another, no in- betweens. This is the tabloid mentality: a clichd-ridden parade of stereotypes. It was important, Bartley constantly tried to con- vince me, that I bring my one-year-old baby into the conversations as much as Passible because none of the others around had any idea of 'real life'. 'Nearly everyone around here is gay, so they just don't understand,' she wailed. It's easy to think of this tabloid mania for stereotyping as fundamental to this kind of radio, but it needn't be so. If any- thing, reducing everything and everyone to formulaic, easily taggable entities doesn't encourage the widest range of possible callers. If you have already decided how things are, which types exist, what sides there are to be taken, then there's not a lot else to do. The pace is pre-ordained: above all else, it must be fast. Everyone gets petrified with boredom, but, if you have 24 hours of radio to fill, the impor- tant thing is to learn to take your time. People who phone in must be allowed to say what they want to say, to be disagreed with or agreed with, but not just parcelled up, labelled and got off the phone as soon as possible. It's unsatisfying for the callers and it's unsatisfying for the listeners.

The danger of the boom-boom-boom approach is that before long it isn't excit- ing but repetitive and it gives you a headache. It's frightening to let a conver- sation develop the way it will, but one of the lures of phone-in radio is that one lis- tens half-fascinated, half-appalled. You have to risk making people wince.

The answer is not to be as outrageous as possible. Of course, what they want on Talk Radio is controversy: but just being barmy in the extreme is not the same thing. It won't work for one good reason: it's phony. Radio, more than any other medium, detects the fake. Rush Limbaugh is successful in America not because he says the unsayable, but because he thinks the unthinkable. You can't churn out any old mad idea; it has to be your own mad idea. Without sincerity, it won't work. Spontaneity is not something you can manufacture. That appears to be something Talk Radio fails to grasp. You cannot hand out opinions to people as if they were overalls. Nor can you worry, on radio like this, how something will sound to them out there. You don't need to either, for the simple reason that people will phone in and tell you themselves what they think. That's what should happen. If you try and stop that, then you're losing the whole point about this kind of broadcasting, which is that it is not wholly controlled by the broadcaster.

It is that element which is the most excit- ing about phone-in radio. Of course a lot of the people who ring in are tedious nutters. Some are sad, lonely people who have nothing to say, just the desire to find some- one speak to. Though car-phones have made a huge difference: so many people are stuck in traffic, and it would appear that quite a few of them have office-bought car-phones and are only too happy to run up someone else's bill while they kill time and stave off boredom.

I liked talking Ao those who rang in, when I was allowed to. It's curious how easy it is to talk as if the conversation were in some sense a normal occurrence: and what's more, if you actually pay attention to what people are saying, how you're sounding ceases to be the big issue. As in all forms of interviewing, the real gift is to be able to listen.