On her first day in front of the microphone on Woman's Hour, Martha Kearney wrote her own name down on a piece of paper. "I did it because I was so terrified I'd say `This is Woman's Hour with Jenni Murray'. Because those words were so much part of the background of my life for years and years." Woman's Hour has been part of the background of countless women's lives: as housewives, as students at home in the holidays, as young mothers for all of the 51 years it has been going. While post-war women's magazines offered little more than knitting patterns, romance and tips on cleaning windows, Woman's Hour never patronised its audience. It raised contentious issues long before anyone else: it discussed the break-up of marriages after the war, the menopause in 1947; cancer in 1950; artificial insemination in 1958; contraception in 1962; venereal disease in 1964. Its presenters have mirrored its inherent seriousness, and Martha Kearney is the latest in a lineage of formidable women such as Marjorie Anderson, Sue Macgregor, Jenni Murray.
Woman's Hour has always been a daytime programme. However, as part of the shake-up at Radio 4, women who work outside the home can catch up with a Saturday compilation programme. Jenni Murray, Woman's Hour's presenter for the last 10 years, only does four shows a week (the former Friday programme was regional), so an additional presenter was needed for Monday and Tuesday. Enter Martha Kearney.
As Newsnight's Northern Ireland reporter for the last four years, Martha Kearney has become a familiar figure on BBC2, and at first glance the shift to Woman's Hour seems an odd choice. However, as anyone who heard Jenni Murray's confrontational interview with Harriet Harman recently will confirm (Harman walked out), the styles of the two programmes are closer than you think. "What I wanted to do was broaden out from the things I normally do, which is very serious, hard-news politics," explains Kearney. "Woman's Hour gives me a chance to interview people like Whoopi Goldberg.
"I can do softer things and at the same time bring an edge to the rest of the programme." And Martha Kearney's two-days-aweek stint at Woman's Hour is not instead of, but as well as, her three nights at Newsnight - a tough schedule by any standards, particularly with Northern Ireland and the Belfast Agreement so high on the political agenda. Martha Kearney's interest in Ireland is not accidental. She was born in Dublin where her father, Hugh Kearney, was a history lecturer at UCD. (He taught Brian Farrell and Tony O'Reilly.) Also among his students was her mother Kate, a first-year student from Dungannon, Co Tyrone. Although he specialised in Irish history, Kearney senior was from Liverpool, of Protestant Irish descent. Her father's position as an outsider mirrors her own. "They told him `Always remember, Hugh, you're only a poor Englishman'. And people would treat him very well. As soon as he pretended to know anything, he had to watch out. I think it's much better to appear to be on the outside. It's seen as not taking sides and not being so caught up in the conflict." (Hugh Kearney is currently working on Irish Nationalism In Perspective, to be published by Gill & Macmillan.)
She often wonders what would have happened had she stayed on in Ireland. But when Martha was four her father took up an appointment at the University of Sussex. Later came Edinburgh University and finally the US, by which time she had her place at Oxford reading "Greats" (Classics). At this stage she had no idea of a career. As a child she had hankered after the stage. "I did a lot of acting in the village in Sussex where I grew up. But I think I got shyer and shyer as I got older and by the time I got to Oxford I was very self-conscious."
However, her acting experience stood her in good stead. ("I think you have to have a certain amount of confidence to go behind a mike. You're performing, aren't you?") In her final term at Balliol College she tried her hand at hospital radio. "It was just when commercial radio was starting up and I heard that there were shifts going at LBC radio in their news information department, so I started doing that. I thought it was so glamorous. It was completely anarchic. It was behind Fleet Street which was still proper Fleet Street, and I thought `This is it'." Soon she was presenting a late-night phone-in and for three years was a reporter on the breakfast show doing everything and anything. "I remember doing `Frog Watch' year after year. When it came around for the third time, I thought I'd better move on." Politics seemed as good an antidote to frogs as any and she became lobby correspondent for IRN, the radio arm of ITN.
Martha Kearney's interest in politics waxes and wanes. She has never been interested in participating. "I thought student politics was awful - the pomposity of it. My college were always sending telegrams to the Kremlin or to Castro from this little sub-post office. They took themselves very, very seriously." Westminster politics, however, she found fascinating. At least at the beginning. "It was when Mrs Thatcher was in power, when Bernard Ingham was her press secretary. I was a very shy, quiet member of `the lobby'. It's a real club with rules that I never understood."
The move to television came after the 1992 election in Britain. She proved a natural, her good looks and apparent ingenuousness masking a steely control of her subject matter. Channel 4's A Week In Politics took her away from Westminster to Hong Kong, France and Washington where she snatched a much-prized interview with an elusive Bob Dole, purely on the grounds, she believes, that he liked her accent. Then came Newsnight and Northern Ireland.
"Apart from having an Irish background, I was interested in doing Northern Ireland because I did feel this was a real place, with real things happening." Kearney has never forgotten the virtues of being "just a poor Englishman" and sees her objectivity as crucial. Her knowledge of Ireland extends well beyond politics. Not only are there regular visits to Dublin to visit aunts, uncles and cousins but, with her partner Chris - they have been together for 21 years - she regularly visits the sheltered Camphill Community in Co Down, to visit Chris's younger brother, who has Down's syndrome and who works there on the farm in the Mourne mountains. Above all she values the ever-present sense of humour.
"Pretty well everybody in Northern Ireland you meet is amusing and funny off-camera. From Ian Paisley to Gerry Adams. And Ian Paisley Jnr as well. People have a dark, stark sense of humour. There are very few people that you meet that you wouldn't mind spending a bit of time with. Sometimes when you talk to people who you know have done really terrible things and you find yourself talking to this intelligent, engaging person and it's very difficult to marry the two." As well as a broader range of subject matter, Kearney's return to radio offers her a change of tempo, like not having to worry what her hair looks like. "It's such a relief. There's the producer saying `Martha do your fringe', and I'm thinking about my questions."
The distractions on Woman's Hour will be different. With a programme that has such a strong presenter identity it's quite difficult, Kearney says, not to take on that person's persona. "In Woman's Hour I quite often hear Jenni's voice in my head and I really have to think, `Now hang on, this is me, not her'. And when I hear continuity say, `And now here's Woman's Hour with Martha Kearney,' I think, `Are you sure'?"
