Mishal Husain’s diary: Sachin, women secret agents, shipbuilding .. and telling the time.

I’ve worked for the BBC for years and have been listening to the Today programme all my adult life, but joining it as a presenter feels like exploring a new frontier. Being on top of your brief is one thing; the mechanics of a three-hour live radio programme quite another. Take the junctions leading up to the ‘pips’ at the start of each hour. From television, I’ve been accustomed to directors counting presenters down to these junctions while they ad-lib on air — the idea being to stop talking as the voice in your ear says ‘zero’. But radio presenters are pretty much on their own, watching the clock and navigating to a precise target of five seconds to the hour. To my presenter colleagues, all this comes naturally. To me, at present, it feels less like navigating and more like hurtling towards a roadblock in a speeding car. And then there’s the other time-related issue on Today — telling it. I already knew the importance of the on-air time checks. At my home on a school day, the end of breakfast must be in sight by ‘Thought for the Day’, and we’re all in trouble if shoes aren’t on by the eight o’clock pips. So I understood the alarm of a listener who tweeted one morning to say I had caused him to panic by announcing it was a quarter to eight when it was only a quarter to seven. I felt only marginally better when one of my Today colleagues generously said it was ‘surprisingly easy’ to get the hour wrong. Another listener has taken a more active approach, emailing in a bespoke website designed to assist Today presenters. The screen displays just two lines of text — one with the date and the other with the exact time written out in a full sentence and changing on every minute.