Sometime during the last decade I fell through the strange middle-aged crack in the pavement where Radio 4 becomes life’s background noise. As the radio dial sticks, your mind’s rhythms bend to a polite mix of boarding school voices, reasoned debate, Westminster gossip, weird panel shows and a rural soap opera which seems to date to the 1800s. Radio Four is the most unwavering wing of the national broadcaster. I guess it’s meant to be, moving at a slow cant towards modernity, never quite clashing with it. Like, say, the Catholic church.
When it settles in, you begin to wonder “what’s in this for me?” For LGBT+ listeners, that question is murkier still. For five dedicated Woman’s Hours a week, there is premium quality magazine broadcasting reminding us how marginalised the mainstream concerns of more than half the population are when mediated mostly by straight men. Yet nobody seems to have located a single corner of the schedule for LGBT+ Hour. Why is that?
