Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson are a formidable journalistic double act whose joint interviews appear in The Times every Saturday. (Yes, yes: we are obviously sister papers, but have you never heard of sibling rivalry?)
Over years of interviewing, they began to notice how many successful people had difficult childhoods. This thought has now been turned into a Radio 4 series, A Place Called Home, which begins on Tuesday.
The former home secretary David Blunkett is the first subject to talk about his early years. He will be followed by the retail guru Mary Portas, the actress Frances Barber, Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, and Nat Wei, a social entrepreneur and one of the youngest members of the Lords (not that there is much competition for this title).
There can’t be many people shaped more by their childhood than Lord Blunkett, who has been blind since birth. “He talks movingly about being sent off to boarding school at the age of four,” Sylvester says. “Unbelievably, they used to cane the children on their hands — which, of course, was what they had to use to read and feel their way around.”
Let’s be frank. There is every chance that you now have your head in your hands and are calling piteously for mercy. We have, after all, been treated to quite a lot of political interviews recently. Yet I’d suggest that we’d feel more kindly disposed to politics, and better informed, if more interviews were, like this, allowed a bit of space (30 minutes in this case).
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Radio and TV interviews have become an elaborate ritual dance. Broadcasters hope desperately that their guest might accidentally say something interesting, and guests are equally desperate to avoid this. Being interesting is not career-enhancing: ask Diane Abbott.
With more time, everybody relaxes. The guard drops and there’s a chance that we listeners might inadvertently learn something, even if it’s only the fact that David Cameron would enjoy being stranded on a desert island with Ernie, who rode the fastest milkcart in the West.