From Marianne Faithfull to the wild horses of the American West: Susan Marling and the art of storytelling

An interview with the founder of Just Radio as it approaches 30 years of great programme-making

Susan Marling made her debut as a radio voice back in the 1980s with an item for You and Yours about emergency plumbers. And over the years since, I think it’s fair to say that she has been offering a pretty valuable service herself. If you need a radio programme made, then you couldn’t call on anyone better than Susan.

Many of us will recall her work as a broadcaster, co-hosting (alongside the legend who was Bernard Falk), the Radio 4 travel programme Breakaway. But for the past 30 years she’s largely stepped back from the microphone, as head of the independent production company Just Radio. During that time, Just Radio has made — Susan estimates — hundreds of programmes on myriad topics.

By way of examples, she tells me about the Just Radio programme in which the comedian Susan Calman celebrated the recorder, another about German reunification, another about a house in Nottingham set up to accommodate sex offenders, another about the time the composer Philip Glass earned a living as a New York taxi driver.

“We’re sort of uncategorisable,” Susan says. “We go from the lightest of touches to the most serious.”

Just Radio has been prominent on the airwaves just this past couple of weeks with three very fine pieces of work — an Archive on 4 about Marianne Faithfull, a World Service programme about a population explosion among wild horses in the American West, and another US-based World Service programme, about women preachers in the Black churches of the southern states.

It all adds up to quite the CV — the variety being “what you have to do to stay afloat”, Susan says. It’s a remarkable example of the craft of radio, and of not just surviving but thriving — through an era in which the commissioning side of radio has changed out of all recognition.

Back in 1997, when Just Radio was founded, the BBC hadn’t opened up its radio output to independents to anything like the degree that is the case today. That changes the equation even for someone with the credentials of a Susan Marling.

“Yes, to a certain extent, commissioners want to know who is offering — as distinct from what the idea is — and if you have a reputation, then of course that’s all to the good,” Susan says. “But beyond that, there’s no privileged position, however long you’ve been in the game. I’m standing at the door like everyone else.

“The major difference from when we began is that there are now so many more people pitching. I see the names of scores of companies that I don’t recognise. I guess it skews the market for people like us, but the BBC must do what it needs to do in order to attract the largest and widest audience, and I’m a huge supporter of the BBC. I hate to see it knocked.”

After an upbringing in suburban south-east London, and university in Sheffield, Susan found her way into radio via an unusual route. She first spent six years teaching English in a north London comprehensive school. I asked Susan if there was any overlap between these two worlds. “Well, I’m not saying that the BBC is like a school! But there is a certain type of hierarchical quality which they both have.”

The Breakaway years ran in tandem with Susan having a very active newspaper and magazine career, both as a travel writer and a consumer journalist. She worked on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, but it was Breakaway that really established her in radio, the programme a highly effective double act in which Susan played foil to Falk’s persona as an old-school Fleet Street-type. “He was down-to-earth and Liverpudlian, and I was considered this posh southern person, and we used to spar quite a bit. It made for a lively programme.”

I was interested to learn where the name Just Radio came from, because it turns out to have an association that might not occur to listeners when they hear it name-checked at the end of a programme. “Just” isn’t a synonym for, say, “Simply”. It comes from the company’s roots as a branch of Just Television, an independent production company that specialised in campaigning programmes about miscarriages of justice.

Topics drawn from the legal world have remained of keen interest to Susan, with Just Radio having been behind one of the most acclaimed Radio 4 programmes of recent years — The Punch. This was the series which told the story of Jacob Dunne, who aged 19 was convicted of manslaughter for killing a man with a single punch. Jacob’s transformation in the years that followed made for riveting listening. Later the story was turned into a play by the prolific James Graham.

A name that needs mentioning alongside Susan is that of Victoria Ferran, a Just Radio producer responsible for a huge amount of its work in recent years. Victoria produced the Archive on 4 about Marianne Faithfull, in which the journalist Jude Rogers revisited an interview she had done with Faithfull in Paris in 2018. That programme is here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002ppvr

And I offer up four more Just Radio programmes:

Philip Glass: Taxi Driver (producer Paul Smith), which won a Prix Europa for Best European Radio Music Programme. That’s here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b065tqz1

The Punch (producers Kim Normanton and Victoria Ferran), which is here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000l2r4

this Radio 3 Sunday Feature about Henry David Thoreau and his 1840s experiment in living, Walden (producer Victoria Ferran):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0948p5w

and, from last year, Germany: United and Divided (producer Susan Marling):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002hkw3

“We all love storytelling,” Susan says, which sounds like a mantra. And Just Radio is a storytelling exemplar.