The Art of Explanation by Ros Atkins

Author:Ros Atkins [Atkins, Ros]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472298423
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2023-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

DOES THIS SOUND LIKE ME?

A year or two back one colleague came over to speak to me. She very generously enthused about our programme and, in particular, its tone.

‘I just don’t know how you fill a whole hour without scripts,’ she added.

‘That’s very kind but I don’t,’ I replied, thanking her. ‘It’s all scripted.’ And it is. What I’m aiming for is something that has the precision and accuracy of a classic news script but also feels like me talking to you – just as I might do if we met in person or if I came to give a talk and you were in the audience. And how I go about this connects to my early experiences of going on air.

Dotun Adebayo was a fixture on the 5 Live show Up All Night when I was offered my first BBC presenting shift. The show had been created years before by another presenter called Rhod Sharp whose warm, lyrical style we all loved and was very much the original sound of the show. Rhod and Dotun now shared out the week’s responsibilities and, with my first shift looming, I asked Dotun for his advice. ‘Whatever you do,’ Dotun told me, ‘don’t try to sound like Rhod!’ He wasn’t being rude – far from it. We were all fans. Dotun’s point was that Rhod’s inimitable style was his and his alone. Anyone else doing the show would need to play to their own strengths and not do an impression of Rhod.

This rang true. Partly, because I could hear Dotun very successfully doing his own thing. Partly, because I thought back to the first time I’d ever presented on live radio. This was during the time when I was unemployed and had gone to the Independent for that ill-fated meeting. During that summer, the one thing I’d got going was a midnight-till-2 a.m. slot on an FM station with an audience that, I suspect, could have been measured in the tens. While trying to persuade the programme manager to let me and my record collection loose, I had made the case that I’d bring a more authentic, less stylised form of presentation than the classic daytime output. ‘You say that’, he replied drily, ‘but you’ll be trying to sound like Gary Davies before you know it.’ (Gary Davies was one of the biggest presenters on BBC Radio 1 in the eighties. I was an avid listener and a big fan, and Gary’s still going strong on BBC Radio 2 now.) He wasn’t being rude about Gary Davies or any of the big mainstream radio presenters. His point was that it’s human nature to copy others who are doing what we’re about to try – and that it’s harder than you might imagine to escape that. Sure enough, not long into my first show I was telling listeners to ‘stay locked to 107.9FM’ and so on. Finding my own voice, it turned out, was much harder than I imagined (as indeed was radio DJing all round).

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