I absolutely love that you've no idea on a particular day what's going to be news and what you're going to be covering. I can honestly say I've never, ever, ever had a boring day. Would you say your career is satisfying? Oh, amazingly satisfying! I can't quite understand why three of my daughters have chosen not to do it.
I had absolutely no clue what I wanted to do, so I purely studied subjects that I'd loved at A-level. When I was at University I just absolutely loved Latin and English, so I did a joint honours at Bristol.
A friend from Uni had started at BBC Radio Sheffield and I went to stay with him because I was doing a tennis tournament in Sheffield. I went with him to the station at Radio Sheffield and had a chance in the studio to speak into the microphone and read some news or something, and that really really sparked my interest.
When I finished University I just had this desire not to go straight back into a school. I thought I needed to see a bit of the world and do something different, so I had three to four years out. I spent a year with the British Tennis Umpires Association travelling around the country doing tennis tournaments and umpiring, then spent the rest of it with a stocks and shares company stockbroking to fill the gap. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do but it was a good company near to where I lived and it was a good stopgap. While I was doing that I began looking into broadcasting. I got some work experience in hospital radio and I happened, through hospital radio, to go to BBC Essex where Jonathan Overend, who was one of the key BBC sports broadcast journalists, was working. Because I was a tennis umpire, he got me to go and do some work experience at a tennis tournament and feed him some reports. Then I applied for a post-grad in broadcast journalism at Birmingham City University through a BBC sponsorship which guaranteed me a six-week stint with the BBC and that sort of gave me a springboard. Once I was on the course, I could start offering myself to broadcast stations and I gained a lot of experience through freelancing in different stations. I’ve been in this career nearly thirty years now.
Definitely. Definitely. I think the world can seem quite like your oyster, you know, vast with lots of opportunities, but it can be difficult when you’re a student. When you first graduate it can be really quite nerve-racking, particularly if you’ve got friends who are very sure about what they want to do, but it doesn’t need to feel as though it’s the end of the world if you’re not immediately employed in something you’d ideally like to base your career on. My advice would be to try and do something that is valuable in itself, even if it's not what you want to do long term. I chose tennis umpiring because I felt it was a valuable job. It was interesting, a bit quirky, I travelled round the country, I met lots of people. Don’t just sit around moping and worrying, find something to do!
I think you do have to be proactive. Ask around - if there are actually people that you know who do that career, ask them about it. Ask, you know, your parents, friends, or whoever to gain a bit of a sense from people who are actually in the job first. Then, if you can, get some work experience. Go for small independent companies or if you have a parent's friend or something, you can’t go wrong!
I always felt I was a bit of an impostor, to be honest. I always thought, when I started working for the BBC, “How on earth have I got this job?” and “They'll find me out”. Maybe in hindsight a lot of people feel that sense of imposter syndrome - when you start you're surrounded by people with vast experience and it's overwhelming. Maybe that's the same with any career that you choose, I think.
I think I felt I'd worked really hard to get where I'd got to at each stage and I thought, ‘Well, what else would I be doing at the moment?’. I do remember the first time I ever turned up at Worcester to freelance - I remember I was outside feeling really nervous and just thinking ‘Am I going to be able to do this? Am I going to be able to cope? What on earth is going to be thrown at me?’ and I just thought, you know, I could walk away now, or I could at least walk in the building, and I said to myself ‘If I walk in the building, that's better than not walking in’. I kept sort of breaking it into small steps. I kept thinking, “Okay, it's better now to talk to the news editor than to not talk to him”.
I think sometimes it can be colleagues – most people in the newsroom have always been really friendly, easy to work with, supportive, but there have been colleagues who’ve undermined or bullied – difficult personalities. I think my advice to my younger self would have been don't accept behaviour from people, even if they're your seniors - it's important to know when people are undermining you, and to speak up.
A wonderful friend of ours, a vicar, always said “Hold your shape”. What he meant was, don't be pummelled out of shape by other people and their needs and their desires. Just a metaphorical sense of holding your shape, I think it's brilliant advice. I often think of that. Don't try and project yourself differently to who you are because you think you have to, or you feel pressured to - just holding that space around you.
I can see myself working with the BBC until I retire. I think I can see myself working for another six, seven, eight years. But just, you know, either sticking with what I'm doing or when other opportunities come along, doing those.