Jayne Dowle: Today’s news isn’t about regional relevance

Apologies, I forget which presenter it was, because Today is like white noise in our house. I’m always reminded of that line in one of novelist Wendy Holden’s rom-coms, which describes the despair of a character who “wakes up to the sound of two men arguing on the radio”. I wake up to the sound of two men arguing every morning, and it’s all my fault.

I’ve been addicted to Today since I was a news editor on a national newspaper. I swiftly realised that work didn’t start on the desk at 8.30am, it started at 5.50am, the time you set your alarm in order to drag yourself awake to catch the first agenda-setting news bulletin of the day.

So I guess I am a tiny, but vital, part of Gwyneth’s 17 per cent. The Today programme, in all its glorious Thought-for-the-Day eccentricity, is surely beyond any kind of market-research targeting nonsense. And if it isn’t, it should be. I reckon that being schooled in it by my fierce old news boss was a bit like being taught by the Christian Brothers. You might rebel against the doctrine, roll your eyes at the rhetoric, but its fundamentals stay with you for the rest of your life. I don’t want Gwyneth Williams to mess with it, and make it more “relevant” to me in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, the North.

I love the fact that the politicians, the captains of industry, the Queen, probably, and little old me, running round the kitchen looking for swimming kit and yelling at the kids to turn off the laptop, all get the same, could-change-our-lives, serious national and international stuff every morning.

It makes me feel, on those bleary dawns where I can’t see much further than getting down the hill to school, that I belong to a much bigger world, a world full of potential and intrigue and exciting happenings. So please save us from any regional “initiatives” such as the – “now for the news where you are” – slot on BBC television. If ever anything reminded you of your provincial existence, it’s that jolting gear change from burning revolution, war and natural disasters in the House of Commons to Mrs So-and-So losing her hamster for six months behind her kitchen work-tops, delivered by a desperately enunciating reporter who’s coming on as if he’s at the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But Radio 4 is about more than the Today programme. There are mornings, after a particular good one, when I wish it could go on all day. I know I am a geek, but there is no other radio programme like it, anywhere on the planet. But no, airtime has to be found for drama, and consumer affairs and subjects like bird-watching, and The Archers, and that show on Saturday mornings that used to be done by John Peel.

My husband will testify to the almost sadistic pleasure I derive from switching off the radio the second a certain theme tune comes on and flicking on Capital or Classic FM or Spotify instead.

That said, I like Desert Island Discs. Not just because of the lovely swooping music, but because I am desperately nosey. There’s been a bit of debate recently about the shifting ratio of old buffers to people-you-might-actually-have-heard of.

I suppose this is part of the great out-reach programme, so it’s interesting that northerners must be presumed to be more into popular culture than their southern cousins. And although the latter category has made me sob openly on occasion – tenor Alfie Boe describing his father’s death from a brain tumour, actor Timothy Spall talking about his recovery from leukaemia – I really like the old buffers.

In fact one, a doughty blue-stocking Dame, gave me the best advice ever on how to be an effective working mother: tidy up the house by 9.30am, and the day is yours.

So, in case Gwyneth Williams hadn’t realised, your typical Radio 4 listener is characterised by random idiosyncrasies – wherever they live. We don’t fit into easy categories, or tick many coherent boxes, and we reserve the right to pick and switch.

We don’t really want to “engage with the network” as you put it, and we won’t all be converted to bird-watching, even if you do get a bloke from Rotherham to present it.

Regional accents? That’s so 20th century. People have different accents. Get over it. We have. And accept this; in today’s multi-channel, multi-media world, where my eight-year-old selects his own entertainment on YouTube every morning, 17 per cent of anybody’s attention is quite an achievement.