1 TIMECODE NAME Dialogue MUSIC 00.00.01 NARRATOR This is the BBC academy podcast, essential listening for the production, journalism and technology broadcast communities. Your guide to everything from craft skills, to taking your next step in the industry. 00.00.15 CHARLES Welcome to the first of our new series of BBC Academy podcasts. I’m Charles Miller and this week I’m delighted to be in the studio of BBC Radio London, with its breakfast show presenter Vanessa Feltz and her producer Gemma Stevenson. Good morning both. 00.00.28 VANESSA Good morning. 00.00.30 CHARLES Well as a regular listener I’m looking forward to finding out how you put the show together, particularly the phone in element, but can we start with your schedule Vanessa. It’s still just 10 o’clock in the morning and you’ve finished a 3 hour show here but amazingly that was your second live show already today cos you already do one on Radio 2 every morning from 5 to 6.30. How do you manage that? 00.00.52 VANESSA I’ve no idea – I don’t know I do it. I don’t know – I’m fuelled very much by the love of the of the job – I mean it’s a great gig – it’s a fabulous thing to work on radio and the two shows I present are very very different. The first is early breakfast on Radio 2 which is mellow – there’s lots of music – there’s a review of the papers – there are lots of interactive activities for the listener – lovely listeners as I call him or her or all of my lovely listeners. 00.01.19 So that’s a very different mood and then I come charging across two roads and up various flights of stairs and I get here about 6.34 and we’re on air live at 7 o’clock, with topical news stories that pertain to London that day. 00.01.34 CHARLES So Gemma you’ve got a few valuable minutes between the end of Vanessa’s previous show and the start of your show with Vanessa. How do you use that time to prepare for the show? 00.01.44 GEMMA Well Vanessa and I will have been talking from just before 5 o’clock in the morning via various text messages, so we will know what stories we’re going to cover that morning. And so when she gets in, it’s just a case of getting all the scripts together. Vanessa writes her own introduction for the programme and the first scripts we’ll go through it – we’ll go through the guests we’ve got and I will very quickly give a really quick summary of everybody that we’ve got so she knows the important parts of the programme. 00.02.23 CHARLES So Vanessa I want to ask you about the phone in side of it in particular – what’s a good subject for a phone in? 00.02.20 VANESSA Well a great subject is a subject with a very clear yes or a no – a very clear you know you can feel very strongly in favour and you can feel equally strongly against AND people have had personal experience of it – it engages them – they respond. I mean today for example on the show we talked about school uniform because a headmaster in Margate had sent 50 pupils home on the first day of school – it was in fact his first day at the school himself as www.bbc.co.uk/academy 2 headmaster – he said he wanted perfect uniform for every child. 00.02.47 The parents were up in arms – the police arrived – there was a massive altercation and he responded on the second day of school by sending another 20 people home for imperfect uniform. So that’s a good subject cos most people can relate to it one way or another – people have strong views on it – some people think it’s character building to wear uniform – others think it smashes all individuality – it’s a terrible idea – I can be fairly personable about it because it’s not political and it doesn’t compromise the BBC in anyway if I am. 00.03.10 Gemma can be pretty personal as well and we can – you know we can all just kind of wade in with great kind of ferocity. So that’s a good kind of a subject for us really. 00.03.19 CHARLES Well I particularly enjoyed you being personal on the question of your own uniform and your old teachers. Let’s just have a quick listen to that bit of the show. 00.03.29 VANESSA (SHOW) It’s incredibly difficult to be a teenager and confined by school uniform and I particularly remember at the haberdashers out school for girls in Elstree – a teacher called Miss Sargenson who was so ancient then I can’t believe she’s still with us – if she is I wish her every good wish – but she used to have to measure our heels with what in those days used to be called a yard stick we were so pre- metric. And and you were allowed 2 ¼ inches and no higher – we were ever being sent to be measured. You know we could have been – we could have been doing something else – I don’t know what – probably sending notes to the boys across the road but we could have been gainfully employed – instead we were either in the chemistry lab having our nail varnish removed by Miss Gover with acetone or we were having Miss Sargenson measure our shoes. And at the time I thought it was utter bilge and I think even looking back I still think it was a load of absolute rubbish really. 00.04.15 CHARLES So that was absolutely fluent – was that completely made up on the spot or did you have notes about that or what? 00.04.20 VANESSA I don’t have any notes about that – that’s my own life I should be fluent. If I can’t be fluent about my own life and my own personal experience what can I be fluent about and also we require that from our listeners – we require them to ring in and be very fluent with their own memories and their own emotions. And actually they’re magnificent – I mean I call them lovely listeners because they really are – there is nothing that is either too high fluten too complicated too precise to exclude them –they’re absolutely magnificent. 00.04.45 And they regularly change what I thought was my mind pretty much on a daily basis. 00.04.51 CHARLES Gemma can you just talk me through what happens – if I phone in the show and I’ve got a point to make – what’s the sort of process between there and actually getting on air with Vanessa? 00.04.58 GEMMA I sit out out there with two people who will answer the phones and they will take the name, the number, the area they’re calling from and the story that they want to talk about. And they’ve very www.bbc.co.uk/academy 3 experienced at doing it so they can very quickly get to whether this is a a good caller for air – whether this is an amazing caller – you know they alert me immediately if they think this is – this is the best caller we’ve had so far because they’ve got this personal story. 00.05.23 And then I will go through them and we’ll decide which callers we want, it might be that we want any caller at some points in the show – it might be that we want callers from different sides – it might be that we want a different story. Or if we’re doing a couple of subjects we might want to mix the callers up as well. 00.05.39 CHARLES So Vanessa do you think that the ideal caller is somebody that the audience can identify with presenting their point of view or are you looking for something a bit more extreme – something with a lot of passion where people are just going to sort of stop in their tracks and say oh my god I can’t believe somebody’s saying that? 00.05.54 VANESSA Both – I mean I think we’re looking for callers who are funny and warm and have a charming story to tell. We’re looking for callers who are irascible and unpleasant and will alienate people so people will phone up. We’re looking for callers who are incredibly knowledgeable and informed and will take the discussion on because they are actually somebody who either is in the army or is a firefighter or has been in politics or you know has just had a miscarriage or whatever the thing we’re talking about is. So we’re looking for knowledge – we’re looking for warmth – oomph – humour and we’re also looking for you know an individual with whom I profoundly disagree or our listeners might disagree because obviously they take the story up a notch. 00.06.30 You know I I can’t think really of a caller that isn’t a good caller – if they can be bothered to phone in its not as if we’re offering them a cash inducement or a cuddly toy or a set of you know six candlesticks for phoning in – they just do it cos they want to and that’s the battle to get people to want to bother to phone in – they’ve all got lives – they’re busy and for them to make time for us I consider to be a great compliment and therefore I’m very pleased to hear from everybody.