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Anyone who dismisses Jenni Murray as the voice of Middle England is in for a rude awakening
All was set for it to be Year of the Lad at the Sony Radio Academy Awards on Monday night, with wins for Frank Skinner, Robbie Savage and (ahem) Ronnie Wood. Until, that is, Jenni Murray was summoned onstage. The Woman's Hour presenter who received the gold award for a career of exemplary broadcasting is everything that the Stones guitarist is not. She has many qualities, but blokeish is not one of them. Yet anyone who heard her interview a survivor of the 7/7 bombings last week could hear her qualities in surround-sound detail. For someone who recognises the balance between asking the questions everyone wants to hear and protecting their interviewee from descending into their own grief, Murray twice brought her eloquent witness to tears by drawing her back to the point in her narrative where she acknowledged the guilt she felt at having survived the blast. Forthright, maybe; direct, certainly. This was radio at its rawest – and yet everyone kept their dignity. Anyone who dismisses Murray as the voice of Middle England is in for a rude awakening. She has a deceptively warm radio voice which she uses both to entice the likes of Caroline Flint into the studio for the first time since she resigned from Gordon Brown's cabinet, and to cut through the flannel when her quarry is in the seat. Her achievement has been to make the programme she presented for more than two decades one of the flagship brands of Radio Four. She leaves the blokes of radio far behind.
