INTERVIEW:'Woman's Hour' presenter and author Jenni Murray appears to have it all . . . but a turbulent relationship with her mother has cast dark shadows on her life, she tells Susan McKay
SHE'S AN ACCLAIMED and popular journalist, able to boast that she gets to interview everyone she ever wants to. She drives a snazzy car and wears big diamond and opal rings. After 20 years as the presenter of Radio Four's Woman's Hour, her mellifluous voice is one of the best known and best loved on the BBC.
She and her team have turned a programme that was always feisty into one that is entertaining, eclectic and cutting-edge. It seamlessly combines interviews, celebrity and otherwise, a classic serial - most recently Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook- chats about gardening (though these bore Murray), and campaigns for women's rights. Almost half the listeners are men.
She has a loving partner and two fine sons. A good and successful life. But, as she sits behind the desk in the deep silence of her post-show studio in BBC Manchester, Jenni Murray ressembles nothing so much as a large bird that has just about survived a long and stormy Atlantic migration. Exhausted, shook, the glossy plumage ruffled. The handsome brown eyes have clearly looked on trouble.
It has been a hellish couple of years. The love of Murray's life was her mother. She also hated her with a passion, and battled with her right to the end. Win Bailey died in 2006, after a long and traumatic illness. On the same day, Murray learned, having just been diagnosed with breast cancer, that she had to have a mastectomy.
Murray reckons her own children had a lucky escape - they were both born boys. "If I'd had a girl I'd have been every bit as difficult as my mother," she says. "My daughter would have had to be a High Court judge before she was six. She'd also have had me glaring at her and saying, 'Don't think you are going to go out looking like that'. "
She smiles. A sad, wry smile. "During my first pregnancy I even made the same mistake as my mother made. I named my child Eve." Murray's mother's mistake, which, when her daughter was a small child, she duly related to her, was to be so convinced she was having the boy she longed for, that she named the baby in her womb David Robert. She was inconsolable when told she had a "sweet little girl" and couldn't think of a name for her. It was a granny who came up with Jennifer.
"I heard the wistful disappointment in her voice every time she told the story," Murray writes in her autobiography, Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter. Bailey also told her little girl that the experience of giving birth had been so horrific that she could never go through it again.
"There is plenty of evidence," she says carefully, "that relationships between girls and their mothers can be extremely difficult." She has always got on fine with her own sons, Ed, who's now a vet, and Charlie, a student with a passion for rugby, though she admits that she has heard herself say to them, "Who ever told you life was fair?", echoing her mother. She even wrote a book, That's My Boy, because she felt boys were always being put down, stereotyped as violent and stupid. "They're not," she says. "And they are probably easier to manage than girls." Murray was, by her own account, decidedly difficult to manage. "My mother was raised by Edwardians, who laced her tightly. She tried to do the same to me," she says. Bailey had an excoriating tongue and believed in rigorous punishments, including serious smacking.
Bailey wanted to bring up a "proper young woman", but what she had on her hands was at once a tomboy and a rival. "I enjoyed dressing up in her wedding dress and red lipstick, and making tarts for my dad," Murray says.
Her parents were madly in love and Murray was jealous, adoring her father, reserving all her rage for her mother. She preferred helping her grandfather to place bets on horses to shopping or playing with dolls. Though the Yorkshire matriarchs among whom she grew up had their power, she saw the domestic drudgery that lay behind boasts such as "you could eat your dinner off my toilet seat."
When she was 11, her father, an electrician, got a job in India. Her mother would go too, leaving her with her grandparents. The child went to Manchester airport to see her mother off. "As I stood on the tarmac there was a mix of real excitement - this was liberation - my gran wasn't nearly as strict, and feeling completely broken-hearted," she says. "I realised how much I loved her. I realised what love was."
"It hurt. I tried very hard to switch it off, " she says. It was an emotional decision that has had long-term consequences. It is probably why she threw herself into the public eye, she says, "seeking the approval of an audience." But she has ruined countless relationships, needing to be the adored centre of attention. There's a coldness in her, too: "I never really recovered the ability to feel that passionately again. Other than when my babies were born."
Her mother gone, Murray dedicated herself to planning her escape from Barnesley, and being part of the "coolest gang of clever, switched-on girls". When her mother came back, there were fierce showdowns. Murray wore skirts resembling extended belts and tons of eyeliner - Bailey called her a slut. In later years, she'd ring Murray after some prestigious TV interview to tell her the jacket she was wearing was all wrong, or her lipstick too bright. "I think she completely destroyed any confidence I might ever have had in the physical me," says Murray.
Murray does not spare her mother, but she also berates herself for her behaviour, and looks back in shame. "I should have been more generous. I should have been more dutiful. I should never have mocked her for her lack of sophistication. I had a lot of chances she never had. I should have understood her jealousy." In her book Is It Just Me Or Is It Hot In Here?Murray writes about the "explosive hormonal cocktail" of the menopausal mother and the teenage daughter. She tells me that her teenage rebelliousness was a bit protracted, by any standards. "I carried on like an infantile idiot well into my 20s and 30s," she says.
Her first marriage, to Brian Murray, whom she met at Hull University, came about largely because of her dread of what would happen if her mother found out they were living together. It didn't last. He pursued his career - she was expected to be a professional wife. She hated it.
When she joined the BBC in 1973, there were no female newsreaders, and a ban on women wearing trousers had only just been ditched.
She's forthright and opinionated and is proud to say that she was once called "the most dangerous woman in England" (after she wrote an article expressing ambivalence about marriage). She had been convinced that people had a right to decide when they wanted to die, and had made a film about it, long before her conviction was confirmed by her mother's experience of advanced Parkinson's disease. "My mother had asked me several times to help her to die but I had no idea how to go about it," she says. "She starved to death in front of my father. To force a man to watch his beloved wife become a Belsen victim is inhumane. She should have been allowed to die."
Win Bailey's last words to her 56-year-old daughter were: "For God's sake, Jennifer . . . can't you concentrate for one second? It's always been the same - all you can ever think about is yourself and showing off about the bloody BBC." Murray had been busy amusing her father with a story about a celebrity show she was to be on over Christmas, and had been careless while giving her mother a drink from a feeding cup.
"In my defence, I could say I was trying to make Dad feel better," Murray says. "But she was right. I should have been concentrating on her. In a way, it was comforting to see she hadn't lost her way with words. That little spark of fury was still lit." After her mother's death, her father pined, and before long, decided to die himself. He fully intended, Murray believes, to neglect himself to death. He did, in fact, die of lung cancer, within months of his wife, while Murray was herself undergoing a gruelling course of chemotherapy. She drove home over the Pennines feeling "as bereft an orphan as a small child".
She announced her breast cancer during Woman's Hour, and has talked on air about her treatment. It would, she says, have been unthinkable to do otherwise. One of her programme's missions, since it started 60 years ago, has been to "bring women's health out of the dark ages". Back in 1948, a BBC controller had sent an outraged memo to the editor after a broadcast about the menopause. "We do not wish to hear about hot flushes and diseases of the ovaries at two o'clock in the afternoon," he huffed.
Breast cancer, "the scourge of our time for women", has frequently been discussed during Murray's tenure. Her cancer was removed, but it was the chemotherapy, she is convinced, that left her needing both her hips replaced. She is amused by the way she now finds herself referring to a fleet of personal consultants: "my oncologist" and "my orthopaedic surgeon". She went privately, to the best surgeons, but rails against the injustice in the British health system.
Known as a fierce as well as a stylish interviewer, Murray famously asked Edwina Currie, the former Tory junior minister, when she last had a smear test. "She told me that day that she was a perfectly happy married woman," says Murray. "When she published her diaries, I noted that this was the very day on which she ended her affair with John Major."
Young women don't know how hard women fought for rights they take for granted, Murray believes. She seethes when asked when women were "given" the vote, and was furious to note that her son's 20th-century history text book devotes just half a page to the women's movement. "We have to be vigilant," she says. She has interviewed Victoria Beckham, she says, raising her eyebrows. "We had her and Gordon Ramsay. He'd done a book about puddings and bless him, he'd got the desk covered in them. She was late. In she sashayed, wearing what looked like Barnsley market denims, and we offered her some of these delicious things." Murray puts on Posh's accent. 'Oh no,' she said. 'I can't eat any of those. I've had my breakfast.' " Murray laughs, "I wanted to kill her." Ramsay, she reports approvingly, remained polite throughout. "He knew not to say the F word on Woman's Hour."
• Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter, by Jenni Murray, is published by Bantam Press (£15)