It’ s almost a week now since the death at the age of 75 of longtime Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray was revealed online and the tributes have continued to pour in. That’s extraordinary. A week is a lifetime in the frantic 24/7 world of social media and the seemingly ceaseless messages of admiration are a certain measure of how much she was loved, admired and respected by the listeners.
Yet, although she was undoubtedly a brilliant journalist and broadcaster, Murray was not the easiest of people. I spent a decade working for the production company behind her regular An Audience With…live theatre shows and know only too well how demanding and occasionally abrasive she could be.
But when it came to doing the job she was superbly professional and a peerless interviewer with a voice that brought a calm authority to the airways. She could be trusted to get the most out of any story and any interviewee.
She was also an innovator and during her 33 years at the helm of Woman’s Hour, she fought to drag the programme into the 21st century. By the time she stood down in 2020 it was regularly tackling subjects that would have been considered completely out of bounds just a few years earlier.
New listeners might be surprised to learn that the programme used to be rather mundane and it is largely thanks to the campaigning nature of Jenni Murray that it managed to free itself from the shackles of its unenlightened past.
It was originally launched in 1946 with content that rarely strayed from tips about cooking, cleaning and few romantic serials. With Murray, it gradually became a regular platform for subjects like the menopause, domestic violence, genital mutilation and sexual politics, and hosts guests that include leading politicians, health professionals, scientists, movie stars, writers, musicians, artists and many others.
Before Woman’s Hour, Murray presented Radio 4‘s Today programme alongside John Humphrys and the late Brian Redhead. She was awarded an OBE in 1999 and was made a Dame in the 2011 Birthday Honours list.
Like her onetime Woman’s Hour co-presenter Jane Garvey, she fought hard for gender equality and was apt to point out that when Woman’s Hour was first broadcast, it was presented by a man and until quite recently the perception that male presenters are somehow more appropriate for the network’s big-hitting programmes persisted among those at the top of the BBC hierarchy. Thankfully, that has changed and Jenni Murray was one of the highly talented female broadcasters who proved that such prejudices had no foundation.
She will be sorely missed.
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