Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Broadcaster and journalist who presented That's Life and founded Childline and Silverline.
On the island
Eight records
it's a song about love, and it's a song about an extraordinary performer, and it reminds me of a very indiscreet moment when I tried to copy her badly.
if I get depressed... this song would immediately cheer me up.
it's about hope at the darkest time... I think about him, I think about hope
Christmas for me is Snowman... this is the voice of a lovely little boy singing a fantastic Christmas song.
BBC Concert Orchestra (conductor Barry Wordsworth)
I think this is a wonderful lyrical description of the English countryside.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:06Where does that energy come from?
I had a very energetic father. He was quite sporty. He played squash well into his 70s. His brain was always working. And my mother was extremely energetic and appearing in my various talk shows when she was in her 90s. She always got a round of applause usually by sending me up rotten. So I suppose on both sides, genetically, I have that inheritance.
Presenter asks
2:29Were you aware of being a trailblazer at the time?
I was. I was terribly aware that if I didn't do a job well, preferably better than a man would, then I would make it much harder for the next generation of women. And I did know that women weren't given this responsibility before. And I also knew that a lot of the programmes that fascinated me, which were very often about people's emotional life, were not considered suitable for broadcast by gentlemen. So I was making programmes about things like postnatal depression and stillbirth and things that affected people's real lives. And because I was trained by my late husband, Desmond Wilcox, always to get first-hand experience, I was not getting experts to tell me what it was like to lose a baby. I was actually listening to the people who'd had that experience.
Presenter asks
13:50You had an experience with a distant relative that remained buried for a long time. What happened and what prompted you to recall it?
The keepsakes
The book
Wendy Cope (foreword)
I will sit there trying to learn them all by heart, which will be good for my brain. The thing about poetry is that it is emotion recollected in tranquillity. It does cover the whole range of feelings. And so I will use it. I will plunder it.
The luxury
a bath with hot and cold water and champagne sometimes
I would like a bath. And I would like a bath that can sometimes be hot water and sometimes be cold water, depending on the temperature. And sometimes be champagne, which I'm allergic to, but I would like the sensation of having a bath in it.
Yes, he was no blood relative, and I can see him to this day. And he used to call me Bright Eyes, and he had one of those creepy smiles. He took me out to buy me a present, and he found a way of getting me a loan, and he sexually abused me. Not the most serious of salts, but still horrible. And then he told me not to tell anyone, and I ran to the train. And I told my l lovely mum And she didn't really believe me. So that was educational. And as you say Whether I blocked it or whether I chose to forget it, is that the same thing, maybe? It really didn't occur to me, even after we set up Child Line, even after those children were talking to me about terrible things that had happened to them. But then some one asked me the question. And the answer was yes, I have been. How extraordinary And you see, my mum, like many parents, cared about the social circle she moved in, cared about not making problems. and in a way wanted me to carry on meeting him. Really? And I said under no circumstance. So didn't. When I was eighteen. I did up to then.
Presenter asks
24:09How do you look back at that time now [when your relationship with Desmond Wilcox was a secret]?
I wish it had been different. Of course, I didn't want that to happen, and nor did Desmond. I suppose if he or I had been tougher we would have emigrated or done something drastic, but we just fell deeper and deeper in love. And Our marriage lasted, and we have three wonderful children, so I don't regret it. But I wish it had happened differently.
Presenter asks
29:22How shocked were you by the 50,000 attempted calls on the first night that ChildLine launched?
Well, when we opened the helpline after the edition of that Slife, and it was absolutely jammed with children describing sexual abuse, which was the great taboo at the time. which they had never been able to disclose to anyone else. I knew there was a demand. Did I predict 50,000? No. Did I predict that 50,000 would stay at that level for six weeks? No. Did I predict that mobile phones would be invented and replace the landlines and the phone boxes children had to run to? Absolutely not. Or the fact that now three quarters of our children contact Childline on the internet? Absolutely not. When we opened, it was mainly problems to do with horrible things people were doing to children, be it physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, whatever it was, bullying. Now so much of it is about unhappiness, anxiety, depression, self-harm, eating disorders. And of course bullying has changed. It's become cyber-bullying that you can't escape from. So I think the need is as great as ever. And we've now helped nearly five million children, but I reckon that we're going to have to be there. Forever. I think children will always need the capacity to talk to a stranger about something they can't talk to at home.
Presenter asks
34:47What made you want to speak out about your own experience of loneliness, and what was the reaction when you did?
What happened was that I downsized from the family house to a flat, and I'm an agnostic, but my older daughter is religious. So I was a little shocked to hear myself saying to her, You know, Em, I think God wants you to move in with me. And fortunately she laughed, and I did what I always do when I need therapy. I rang the Daily Mail and said, I'd had this conversation. They said loneliness, good topic, write about it. So I wrote about it, and was inundated with response. More response than anything, I think, that I've ever written. Some of it from people who said it was brave of me to admit to it, because there's a stigma attached to loneliness. Some of it from people saying, don't know why you're complaining, suppose you were disabled like me and looking at the same four walls day in, day out. Some of it saying, but we keep trying to reach out to isolated older people. It's just so difficult to find people because once loneliness strikes you, you shut the front door, it becomes so difficult to get out through it because you lose confidence, you think nobody wants your company, you stop taking exercise, you stop eating properly. I was living on cheese and biscuits. So there's every reason to try and combat loneliness. And when I wrote about the piece, I was invited to a conference to talk about loneliness, and that's when I had my second light bulb moment. First one with Childline, second one with the Silver Line.
“I was terribly aware that if I didn't do a job well, preferably better than a man would, then I would make it much harder for the next generation of women.”
“I wish it had been different.”
“It did feel like having your guts pulled out of your stomach and examined.”
“Follow your hopes, and if you fail, don't get disheartened, because that's how you learn.”