Jonny Saunders, the sports reporter on Chris Evans’s Radio 2 breakfast show, leaves this week to pursue a career in teaching. (Some listeners will have noticed his recent absence from the programme, while sitting his Open University exams.) At 36, the tectonic plates in his life have shifted, to borrow an arresting phrase used by the Bishop of Norwich about new ordinands in Thought for the Day last week.
Saunders and his family are facing a spectacular drop in salary. Even if, after many years, he rises to the top of his new profession and becomes a headteacher, that will still almost certainly pay less than he currently earns on Britain’s highest-rated breakfast show. Indeed, pay is probably why so few people leave the media for teaching. Inquiries last week yielded only one other name — Anastasia Tolstoy, descendant of Leo. She made a promising start as a BBC radio drama producer some years ago before opting for a less glitzy, but doubtless more satisfying, life in the classroom.
Plenty of people make the move in the opposite direction. Radio is full of former teachers. They include: Chris Tarrant, who sits in for Steve Wright on Radio 2 from tomorrow; Stuart Maconie, of 6 Music;
Mary Kalemkerian, the head of programmes at, and brilliant architect of, Radio 4 Extra; Jim Eldridge, creator of King Street Junior; and Susan Marling, my distinguished predecessor as Sunday Times radio previewer and now the producer of, among many other things, a lovely new series called Mabey in the Wild, beginning this afternoon on Radio 4 FM.
I wonder what radio would have done without all the teachers who, over the decades, have strengthened and nourished its corporate body. They are not famous names, but they have made their mark. They have inspired, educated and entertained. Marilyn Imrie, the director of last year’s Clarissa on Radio 4. Colin Smith, who brought Alan Bennett to radio, adapting and producing his readings of The Wind in the Willows and Winnie-the-Pooh. Joan Griffiths, who brought Michael Rosen to the airwaves. Geoff Marshall-Taylor, who produced radio’s first Chronicles of Narnia. John Fawcett-Wilson. Even Alistair Cooke enrolled for teacher training in Cambridge before embarking on the more glamorous, globe-trotting and lucrative route of journalism and broadcasting.
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Of course, the teaching profession has also produced writers, among them William Golding and JK Rowling, and musicians, such as Sting and Art Garfunkel. Yet perhaps there is a clear overlap between teaching and British radio that has led so many of the former into the latter: the ability to hold an audience, the need for a clear, attractive voice, left-of-centre idealism and an emphasis on words.
The last of these points explains why so many of the teachers who have entered radio have been English teachers (as Saunders himself will become if all goes well). Long may they come forward and share their knowledge.
But may they also be joined by those from maths and science, people who will use their talents to help make us, in due course, a less ignorant nation.