We have a wonderful new programme editor in the hotseat. She's called Emily Wilson and her presence means we now have three strong-willed Scottish women in the newsroom. Which is fine by me. Emily has a long and illustrious past as a radio journalist, and once edited BBC's Today programme. Here's how she's finding the change:
"A bigger contrast with More4 News you couldn't find ... Unless you moved from working on Big Brother to Radio 3's Jazz Record Request. Not that I'm suggesting that the Today programme is like being imprisoned in a small space with a bunch of dysfunctional obsessives. Certainly working at the other end of the day makes the presenters less grumpy on More4 News.
"Dealing with the vagaries of presenters sleeping patterns and late-night social commitments is one of the main jobs of a Today programme output editor. Waking them up in the middle of an interview with Geoff Hoon is an important duty.
"The other is having to take phonecalls at 9am from irate special advisors who're not happy about the line of questioning taken with their respective ministers.'How dare you ask David Blunkett if he's ever smoked cannabis! He'll never do you ever again!' (yeah, right ...). Thankfully neither of these are issues on More4 News..."
But if you like esoteric stories about extinct birds or dead African musicians, they don't tend to be able to force their way on to a half hour tv programme. It's also much more difficult when you have to have pictures ... The excitement of a live programme is the same, though. Barking questions at the presenter that they then ignore, and desperately having to drop stories when an interview runs over."
So the gauntlet has been thrown down. Now we have to prove we can annoy press officers by asking their MPs if they have ever visited a sex club (or is that too much a case of Scottish politics for this programme?)
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