The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and other Train Wrecks

Product Information

The content is interesting, and it is very readable. However, I was surprised at the ragged quality of the narration, and the generally mediocre quality of the writing. I had assumed that an experienced journalist would be good at these things. There's one point (for example) where he is relating the story of how he entered a writing competition at school. It then jumps to prize ceremony and the audience reaction, without actually telling us that he won! It's surprising that the editor didn't spot this.

Webb admits that as a young child he wished Charles dead because he was aware that life without him would be so much easier. Yet when Charles does eventually die years later, Webb records it matter-of-factly and gives nothing away about how he felt. Was it a relief after all of those years, did he grieve for him at all? He doesn’t tell us. Webb was aware growing up that he didn’t have a male role model he could look up to, turning instead to watching the Bath rugby team to try to discover what it was to be a man. Webb has three children of his own but doesn’t tell us about his relationship with them. Does he think he’s a good father himself? Perhaps he feels unable to judge and doesn’t like to presume. “Plenty of dry humour” I had him boxed off as posh and privileged because he has what was once the only kind of accent we heard on the BBC. (Nowadays, thankfully, they let in people with regional accents, although they’re still in the minority). Webb grew up in Bath, went to boarding school, and his maternal grandad was Leonard Crocombe, a distinguished journalist chosen by Lord Reith to be the first editor of the Radio Times. So far, so upper middle class. On radio and television, Justin Webb comes across as one of this country's most relaxed and affable broadcasters. This moving and frank memoir tells a different story of a childhood defined by loneliness, the absence of a father and the grim experience of a Quaker boarding school. It is also one of the most perceptive accounts of Britain in the 1970s when the country was at its most stagnant and grey. But it is also a story of hope and how the gift of a radio changed the life of an unhappy little boy and put him on the road to becoming one of Britain's most trusted journalists. Misha Glenny, author of McMafia Strangely, despite Webb following in Woods’ journalistic footsteps at the BBC, he never sought out his father and never met him.

Retailers:

Candid, unsparing and darkly funny, Justin Webb's memoir is as much a portrait of a troubled era as it is the story of a dysfunctional childhood, shaping the urbane and successful radio presenter we know and love now.

Reading this autobiography was like taking a brisk walk in a favourite cardigan. So interesting to reflect on the attitudes towards and about mental illness in the 60s and 70s, which in conjunction with post war cultural values, created the fabric that clothed my childhood and adolescence too.

Last on

Out of pure nosiness, I really wanted the story to continue a little... How did his mother, who lived only for him for so long, react to his having relationships and marrying? Was she a different grandmother from the mother she'd been? I imagine her as the mother in law from hell, but who knows? It's incredible how Justin Webb managed to create a childhood memoir out of this uber-weirdness that is generally light and compelling. In all then, it wasn’t so much a deprived childhood as a lonely and odd one. Webb took his cherished radio to boarding school as a comfort, little knowing that one day his own voice would be listened to by millions, maybe some of them taking comfort from their radio too. Moving, darkly hilarious ... In his mother, Gloria Crocombe, Webb records a great tragicomic character. Melanie Reid, The Times He and I are about the same age, and I can identify with some of his experiences including, uncannily, a trip he made to Athens around the same time as me in the early eighties. He went with the Magic Bus company, I went with a similar operator but Greek – Theo Consolas. The fare was dirt cheap, you travelled more or less non stop with just a few minutes’ stop at emerging service stations, travelling across Europe including behind the Iron curtain into what was then Yugoslavia, arriving in Athens about four days later. Justin Webb’s memory of the drivers is something I share which has never left me and often relate to others. There were two coach drivers. When they changed shifts they didn’t stop the bus. As Justin Webb masterfully describes, “Grizzled driver would get the coach into fourth gear and lurch suddenly out of his seat while keeping one hand on the wheel. The coach was coasting along with no ability to brake. Fat Man would ease himself into the seat and grab the wheel, slightly correcting a course that was taking us into the middle of the road....the drivers did not sleep and did not eat.” I can vouch for every word because that’s exactly what happened on Theo Consolas’ coach. What didn’t happen to my coach is the incident Justin Webb goes on to describe and which I won’t reveal here, as it’s for you to discover if you read his book. All I will say is