Asked last year if she would be tuning in to Emma Barnett’s inaugural episode of Woman’s Hour, outgoing host Jenni Murray said: “I probably will, if only to say, ‘Oh God, she made a mess of that’.” Murray, who ended her 33-year tenure on the Radio 4 magazine show in October because she wouldn’t stop calling trans women “men in skirts”, will have been disappointed this morning. Barnett rarely makes a mess of anything.
Barnett’s first show as host was a confident, zippy affair – though it didn’t half have a strange hodgepodge of guests. Those hoping the 35 year old was going to drag the show towards something a little more radical might have been disappointed; there was an opening message from the Queen and then a musical performance from Mel C. I suspect Barnett thought her first interview guest, former Tory adviser Sonia Khan, might have something explosive to say. She didn’t.
Khan, a “committed Conservative” who was fired by Dominic Cummings and then settled an unfair dismissal case out of court, was an evasive interviewee. She didn’t want to talk about what happened in that room with Cummings. Here, Woman’s Hour listeners got their first glimpse of Barnett’s unrelenting interview technique. Those familiar with her 5 Live show, on which she grilled politicians such as Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, will know this already: offer a pat or pre-rehearsed answer at your peril.
“You do have to, for our listeners, explain what happened,” said Barnett firmly, after Khan had said she didn’t want to go into it. “You were called to meet Dominic Cummings. What happened?” But her efforts failed. Even the armed police officer who escorted Khan out of the building was, she insisted, “actually really nice”. Barnett did well not to bang her head on the table. Still, even if Khan had been forthcoming, she would have felt like an odd choice for a first interview guest.
Next, Barnett came good on that recent “open invitation for men to come on to Woman’s Hour”. She welcomed two men: Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of British charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been unjustly imprisoned in Iran since 2016, and former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt. “Is it really the position of the UK government that they don’t need to look after their citizens... overseas?” she asked Hunt, with what felt like a pointed pause between those last two words.
My heart sank a little when Barnett asked her next guest, the actor Imelda Staunton, whether she considers the Queen to be a feminist icon. It sank even further when I heard Staunton’s answer: “The Queen might be an original Spice Girl, because… girl power…” Right.
So how, based on her first 45 minutes, will Barnett breathe new life into a show that has been criticised for its increasingly creaky approach to womanhood and femininity? I’m not quite sure. But I will continue to listen, and I suspect Murray will too.
