Confession time
- 20 Sep 06, 03:46 PM
We aim to tap into what the audience is talking about, and with Chris Tarrant's marriage breakdown all over the papers I felt we should cover it on the Victoria Derbyshire programme.
There are always those who accuse us of dumbing down (and several listeners did) but affairs affect lots of us and I was confident people were interested. Not everyone in my production meeting agreed. "Do we really think people will own up to having an affair on the radio?" asked a colleague.
The truth is, I wasn't completely sure, but there's something about the phone-in format and Victoria's style that gets people to open up. Rather than dwell on poor Chris and Ingrid, we asked how someone can possibly live a double life for 10 years.
We needn't have worried about people confessing on air. Perhaps the best caller was a quietly spoken man who told us about his 30-year affair with a married woman. When I asked him off air why he wanted to come on national radio to talk about this he said: "I guess I want to tell someone".
Harriet Oliver is an assistant editor at 大象传媒 Radio Five Live
