Tag Archives: Today Programme

BU’s Dr Kate Murphy features on BBC Radio 4 taking about women’s history in radio.

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By Dean Eastmond

Bournemouth University’s Dr Kate Murphy (Senior Lecturer in Radio Production) featured on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this Saturday talking about the 80th anniversary of a woman presenting on the radio.

Former actress, Sheila Borrett, applied for the role of Radio Announcer in 1933 and raised a lot of controversy as her job was seen as a typically male dominated position.

“She was very glamorous with that lovely fruity voice and it’s a shame she didn’t go down well…” said Dr Murphy, who has researched the history of women in radio and the BBC.

She added. “The majority of complaint letters came from women”.

With Sheila Borrett’s first broadcast airing on the 29th July 1933, Dr Murphy explained that even though “the BBC was seen as a modern organisation”, Borrett wasn’t as popular and successful as the BBC thought she would be.

Dr Murphy continued by explaining that “there was a huge outcry so the BBC panicked”.

However 90% of positive letters were written by women.

Women had been heard on radio before Borrett, but as experts in their fields of work as opposed to presenters and announcers. Names such as Virginia Woolf were mentioned during the interview as examples of people that had appeared as guests on BBC radio.

Kate also spoke about the subject on the BBC World Service.

Listen to the full interview on The Today Programme

Dean is a student at Budmouth College in Weymouth, who is working at Bournemouth University in the Press and PR Department. He joined BU on a Sir Samuel Mico Scholarship, which provides 10 students from his college with essential work experience for four weeks over the summer.

Dr Andy Johnson talks chewing gum and concentration on The Today Programme

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Psychology lecturer Dr Andy Johnson spoke on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme about his research into chewing gum and concentration.

Andy was part of a team of researchers who found that chewing gum can help people focus better while doing tasks.

“In this study our participants undertook a very monotonous and repetitive constant vigilance task, where participants were presented with a sequence of digits and they were looking out for a particular signal,” he told presenter James Naughtie.

He added that participants who chewed gum had less of a decrease in performance throughout the task, and reported being significantly more alert.

He said: “So what we suggest is that chewing gum can facilitate vigilance during a monotonous task but that this is only found when performance has dropped to sub-optimal level, so when it starts to fall down that’s when gum has some scope for having a benefit.

“But if we are at our normal operating levels, we are sort of at ceiling effect, so there is nowhere for cognition to go. So only once our performance begins to drop does gum introduce a benefit in performance and vigilance.”

Dr Johnson, who worked on the study with researchers from Cardiff University, explained that chewing increases blood flow to the brain and that increases delivery of glucose and oxygenated blood to the parts of the brain that are doing the task.

He was also interviewed on BBC Radio Solent’s Breakfast Show, local station Wave 105 and BBC Radio Scotland about the research, which appears in the British Journal of Psychology.

You can listen to Dr Andy Johnson on the Today Programme here for the next seven days.