Liz is spreading her wings across the county

Award-winning radio presenter Liz Green is the voice of Yorkshire during a BBC experiment in programme sharing running across the county. Sheena Hastings reports.

A FEW minutes into a grey Friday afternoon in Leeds, and Liz Green Live is already at cruising speed. Sonny and Cher have given way to Billy Ocean, and the woman who’s in her natural habitat presenting three hours of live radio five days a week is firmly into the groove inside her very own Starship Enterprise.

Whipping up her audience into a frenzy of interactivity by phone, text and email, Green trails what’s to come in the first two hours of her show: should the rules on organ donation be changed, possibly in favour of some kind of opt-out scheme? and the second hour will chew over the problems listeners have had with hidden charges on credit card transactions such as buying airline tickets, concert tickets or other services.

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Mike Tiplady talks movingly to Liz and listeners via phone about the loss of his 31-year-old son Andrew while he awaited for a lung transplant. His touching testimony, urging everyone to register for organ donation, gets the bush telegraph twitching. Emails, texts and tweets appear on a screen in front of Liz, and calls fielded by producer Kim are listed for possible ring-back, once she and colleague Julia have got the gist of the story.

Barbara from North Yorkshire recounts how her best friend gave her the kidney that has kept her alive for the last 12 years. Another woman explains how she and her husband had lost their baby but the hospital returned the body with the organs removed without asking permission.

Each hour of the programme has to include news, weather and travel reports updates. Liz, who has been queen of early afternoon at Radio Leeds for a couple of years now, following a long and very successful spell hosting the breakfast show, was recently chosen to spearhead a six-month trial by the BBC which involves sharing the same show with adjacent local radio areas covered by Radio York and Radio Sheffield.

Each of the three areas still has its own news, sport and jingles, but most of the three hours will be broadcast from West Yorkshire by Green.

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You won’t know this because we’re talking radio, but she obviously takes great pride in her appearance, and couldn’t be more meticulous with hair, nails, stylish but relaxed plain black outfit and silver accessories, if she were presenting daytime TV.

Now waving her arms around to Billy Joel – while sweeping regular glances across the six screens of information including news wires that surround her – Green, who grew up in Huddersfield before a degree in English at Loughborough University, campus radio and the radio journalism course at the London College of Printing – gets her second hour of phone-in into action by getting the nitty-gritty out of a consumer expert from Which?

They’re putting in a super-complaint about “rip-off” charges loaded onto card payments. Soon the phones are jammed. It’s true what radio folk say: choose a subject that affects the head or heart or wallet and you’re onto a winner. From Scarborough down to Sheffield, people are riled by what they see as sneaky costs that can include a charge of £5 for a payment that only costs 20p to carry out, according to Which? Hilary Benn, Labour MP for Leeds Central, arrives for his one-hour interview and music session with Liz. While easy listening croons to the region she nips out of the studio to say hello, her open tone and manner very much the same off-air as when speaking to the region.

Come 2pm, and there’s a change of pace, as Benn takes his seat and they set off on an hour-long One-on-One examining the effects on a young Hilary of losing his mother, being the son of Tony, how it feels for Labour to have lost power and more.

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It’s a laid-back conversation, Desert Island Discs without the book or luxury thrown in. There’s no trace of tension generated by sparring egos. Green believes “it’s about the material, not you”. The format may be relaxed but Mr Benn still has to face searching questions about where the New Labour project went wrong. Kim and Julia relax a little, enjoying the MP’s choice of music while they write up reports on phone-in traffic during Liz’s show.

Having waved goodbye to Mr Benn and signed off for the week, Green grabs the latest in a long line of coffees that started on her arrival at work from home near Halifax at 7am. “When I come off air I feel a bit tired but exhilarated,” she says in her slightly fruity accent.

“The One-on-One hour is fixed and researched in advance, and I script it the night before.” Other recent interviewees have included Claude-Michel Schonberg, who wrote the music for Les Miserables and Northern Ballet Theatre’s Cleopatra, children’s heart surgeon Sara Matley and first lady of Rugby League Kath Hetherington.

“Big questions of the day that we ask during the two hours of phone-in are decided between 7am and 8.30am, after we’ve had a chance to read the papers and other sources. We then sort out any experts we might use, read a bit more, and I sketch out the show. “I love coming in not knowing what those two hours are going to be about and creating a show from scratch every day that will interest people enough to want to talk to me or write. Obviously some subjects get people going more quickly, but we’re lucky that listeners aren’t generally shy.

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“They often come on and tell very poignant personal stories.

“That shows a kind of trust which I think is a privilege,” says Liz, who has won two Sony awards and a clutch of other gongs including a prestigious Gillard Silver last year.

The opportunity to reach a wider audience in Yorkshire thanks to the programme sharing pilot has given her a triple-sized gene pool to fish in for her One-on-One sessions – no bad thing when there are five slots to fill each week.

As for the rest of her daily output: “So long as the content is there, driven by issues, issues, issues and how they affect people in our region, listeners in North and South Yorkshire seem to be willing to give you a go.”

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Social networking has undoubtedly made it easier for the live phone-in format to stimulate interest, she says.

Liz says she never gets bored with being on-air, but disciplining herself to an 8pm bedtime is a must during the week.

She follows the arts in Yorkshire and also goes to events where she might “bag one or two people for One-on-One”.

A tip to would-be radio presenters is the best advice she ever had: “‘Keep it real, be yourself’. That’s what I try to do, every day.”

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• Liz Green Live and One-on-One, Monday to Friday noon to 3pm on BBC radio across Yorkshire.

EARLY BIRD HOPE OF BBC CHIEFS

The BBC is conducting a six-month pilot across five radio stations in England to assess whether sharing content in some daytime programmes is the way to find cash to invest in increasing audiences for other shows. One pilot is taking place in the South-East, and the other involves BBC stations in Leeds, York and Sheffield sharing an early afternoon programme. Staff freed up by the pilot will help to strengthen content for programmes earlier in the schedule to capture audiences that, it’s hoped, will stay all day. At the end of the trial the BBC Trust will decide whether to keep the arrangement permanently.

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