On 22 February 2022, Justin Webb, the longest serving presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs programme ‘Today’, Radio 4, was live in conversation with Iain Martin, editor of Reaction. They discussed Justin’s new memoir The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and other Train Wrecks.
Candid, unsparing and darkly funny, his memoir is a portrait of personal and national dysfunction. So was it the brutal experiences of his upbringing, or an innate ambition and drive that somehow survived them, that shaped the urbane and successful radio presenter we know and love now?
For the best part of four decades, Justin Webb has been a voice on the airwaves or a presence on our TV screens. He joined the BBC in 1984 as a trainee, and has reported from around the world, as a war correspondent in the Gulf and in Bosnia, on the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the first democratic elections in South Africa. He was Europe Correspondent when the Euro was introduced, and for eight years he was the chief correspondent in Washington DC. Among his awards is Political Journalist of the Year, which he won for his coverage of the Obama presidential campaign.
Event kindly hosted by Maitland/AMO.
