Why does Radio 4 ignore LGBT+ listeners like me?

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Evening Standard
Paul Flynn2 September 2022
WEST END FINAL

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Sometime during the last decade I fell through the strange middle-aged crack in the pavement where Radio 4 becomes life’s background noise. As the radio dial sticks, your mind’s rhythms bend to a polite mix of boarding school voices, reasoned debate, Westminster gossip, weird panel shows and a rural soap opera which seems to date to the 1800s. Radio Four is the most unwavering wing of the national broadcaster. I guess it’s meant to be, moving at a slow cant towards modernity, never quite clashing with it. Like, say, the Catholic church.

When it settles in, you begin to wonder “what’s in this for me?” For LGBT+ listeners, that question is murkier still. For five dedicated Woman’s Hours a week, there is premium quality magazine broadcasting reminding us how marginalised the mainstream concerns of more than half the population are when mediated mostly by straight men. Yet nobody seems to have located a single corner of the schedule for LGBT+ Hour. Why is that?

In the same timeframe it’s taken me to attune to Radio Four’s immovable, anachronistic charms, Radio One has had a brilliant breakfast show presented by a volubly gay anchor, Nick Grimshaw. Between Rylan, Clare Balding, Graham Norton and Pauls O’Grady and Gambaccini there was a point where Radio Two could not have sounded any gayer. Yet Radio Four is still bereft of any regular slot fashioned for us. This sends out a clear message to listeners: gays are for the fluff, not the serious stuff.

That subtle exclusion is one you hardly notice until something like Monkeypox happens, when you want dependable voices on a benchmark show who can speak with authority, from your perspective about something that directly, disproportionately affects you. That is nowhere. That hard news story could be softened by experts rummaging through the disciplines of literature, film, fashion, medicine, sex, religion, drugs and, yes, politics to find the material that directly talks to us, packaging them up into a digestible hour. It would give us a proper stake in the network. If the national broadcaster can’t find an hour to dedicate to us, who will?

Gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people pay for Radio Four, too. Unlike, say, the Catholic church, the BBC doesn’t operate on opt-in, opt-out circuitry. The undiscriminating licence fee is a beacon of diversity and inclusion compared to its flagship news broadcaster. It should repay us that favour. Come on, give us an LGBT+ Hour, once a week. Make it Sunday evening, just prior to popping in an Uber to Horse Meat Disco, so we’ve got something of consequence to natter about before we get to the equally serious gay business of dancing, drinking and mating.

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