Radio: Today; The Reunion

You could say that Sue MacGregor has done as much for women on radio as Margaret Thatcher did for women at Westminster. You might, though, want to add that MacGregor survived for 18 years as the only woman presenter on Today, Radio 4’s chief news and current affairs programme, without finding it necessary to deepen her voice to make it more masculine or worrying about what she should wear. She soon established herself as being as essential to the programme’s character and stature as her colleagues, the late Brian Redhead, Peter Hobday and John Humphrys.

MacGregor has always done things her way — by adding a softer, gentler, yet not more pliable, touch to her interviewing technique. I don’t remember her ever screeching to make herself heard above the political babble, nor has anyone felt it necessary to put her down with that awfully condescending, ‘But, Sue…’ Her long-running Radio 4 series, The Reunion (and it really is ‘hers’ because no one else could do it as well as she does), never fails to engage and hold on to you, the listener, whether she has gathered round her table of confidences a quintet of girl singers from the 1960s or those involved in the collapse of Barings bank in the 1990s. It has cropped up in this column more often than any other programme precisely because MacGregor and her guests have so often created one of those radio moments, when all you can hear is the silence, as the people round her table take a pause while they try to take in the meaning of what they’ve just heard.

It happened again on Sunday morning as five people caught up in the King’s Cross fire met each other for the first time. With her journalist’s flair, MacGregor began by giving us a quick summary of what had occurred on that dreadful night in November 1987 when 31 people died and 56 were injured (seven severely) and London changed for ever for those who live and work in the capital.