Feedback presenter Andrea Catherwood: 'I'm not here to give people a hard time just for the sake of it. But when it's necessary ...'

The voice of the listeners on what it's like putting colleagues on the spot

Rather like Pick of the Week, Feedback is another Radio 4 programme that is essential listening if you want to keep up with what’s going on in BBC radio, but whereas PotW is very much a celebration of output across the stations, the latter deals in listener opinion and often hefty doses of contentiousness, as programme-makers respond to what’s being said about — more often than not complained about — their work.

I’ve always felt it takes a brave journalist to present the programme because the job requires you to put your colleagues on the spot, and with the last edition of the current series of Feedback coming up this afternoon, I’ve been talking to its presenter Andrea Catherwood to find out exactly how she does it.

Is this not the trickiest presenting job in radio, I suggested. “Honestly I don’t think it is,” she replied. “Because mostly when people come on to Feedback, they really do want to engage, and I get to engage with what’s going on. That makes all the difference. What worried me when I started the job [back in 2022] was that we’d struggle to get people to come on the programme, but that hasn’t happened at all.”

None the less there are moments when she’ll be challenging someone who she is actually pretty friendly with outside of the Feedback studio, and not many presenters find themselves in that position. Among the people she brackets in that group are the Editor of Woman’s Hour Karen Dalziel (Andrea has presented many an edition of WH), International Editor Jeremy Bowen, and a former ITN colleague Jonathan Munro, who is the deputy director of BBC News.

“I think the thing is we are all professionals, and they know I have a job to do. I don’t recall there ever being any fall-out afterwards. There is definitely the feeling that I have to separate myself from really good friends, but I like to think I’ve managed to do it. In my experience the only guests who might have had a problem with the programme are the ones who haven’t prepared properly.”

Prepare poorly at your peril. Andrea is a vastly experienced and accomplished broadcast journalist who’s reported hard news at home and abroad and presented numerous documentaries on Radio 4, notably on issues relating to her native Northern Ireland. She is no soft touch, has a natural authority, and I’m often struck by how hard she will push a guest on behalf of the listeners.

A good recent example was when the Radio 3 controller Sam Jackson went on Feedback to be confronted with a volley of listener criticism about changes he was making to the schedule. That Sam “is so lovely” didn’t stop Andrea. “He knew he was going to get a hard time, and it was my job to do it, and he didn’t flinch. He answered all the questions I put to him, and by no means everyone would step up like that.”

Does she enjoy the edgier aspects of the job? “Well, I don’t think I’ve ever tried to create controversy when there isn’t any. I don’t want to give people a hard time just for the sake of it, that’s not what Feedback is about. But yes over issues like the cuts to BBC Singers, or cuts to local radio, it was right to be able to put those questions as robustly as possible. And if I feel someone is blustering, then yes I quite enjoy putting them on the spot. I’d certainly feel uncomfortable if I was told I couldn’t give someone a hard time.”

Andrea’s predecessor Roger Bolton had been in the job more than 20 years, and I wondered whether succeeding such a longstanding figure had generated its own listener response? “You know, surprisingly there was no reaction. I often say that listeners don’t like change, but I think the change they don’t like is to the schedule not the presenters. There have, for example, been a lot of changes among Radio 2 presenters in recent years, but I think listeners understand that people can’t stay in the same job for ever.”

Andrea’s respect for the listeners has deepened during her tenure. “You should never underestimate them. I’m always impressed by the quality of their comments. The comments are much more nuanced than just complaints. I’m thinking of Radio 4’s recent series about boarding schools and the listeners who contacted us about its lack of coverage of girls’ experience of them.” The editor of the series, Clare Fordham, went on to Feedback and accepted the criticism and ”took it on the chin”.

My own feeling is that Feedback is one of those programmes that is such a public service that it should be on air 52 weeks a year. In fact its editions number about 30, and plenty of issues crop up when it is absent. Andrea told me she’d be happy to present it all year round, but on the question of “Should it be year-round”, she was diplomatic. “That’s not for me to say!”

Andrea agrees that it is of enormous credit to the BBC that it will air criticisms of itself (Feedback is made by the independent production company Whistledown), and that in her time it has always passed the compliance test without any executive ever questioning the content, quite lacerating though it can sometimes be. But I think that’s also a tribute to Andrea Catherwood herself.

Here’s an example of her outstanding reporting away from the Feedback studio — a 2021 series she presented about what Unionism in Northern Ireland now means:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000xz49