When Fi Glover was an eager young radio trainee, one of her producers spotted a familiar face in an adjoining studio: Jeffrey Archer was preparing for his stint as a temporary replacement for Ken Bruce and the producer suggested that someone snatch an interview.
Glover volunteered and started off her questioning by pointing to recently published research that suggested his prose was worse than a Sun editorial. Archer, she recalls, tore her to shreds, called her a "jumped-up little prat" and reduced her – almost – to tears. Still, he was good enough to tell her (perhaps somewhat self-importantly) that this moment could be the "making" of her.
Now, nearly 20 years later, she is "made" and has returned to Radio 4 with The Listening Project, a joint initiative by the British Library and BBC, which started on Friday and aims "to capture the nation in conversation".
She is also famous for bringing what she knowingly describes as the "same level of emotional kookiness" to the rest of her work. This has included stints on Radio 5 Live's Sunday Service and Weekend Breakfast and most recently as the host of Radio 4's Saturday Live.
Getting Saturday Live right was, she believes, her greatest professional achievement to date, despite missing her final episode last April with pneumonia. When she started the show in 2006 it was compared, often unfavourably, to Home Truths, which had been dropped soon after its much-loved host John Peel had died.
Early Saturday Lives, she now admits, were too bitty, had too many parts, were "over-sentimental" and were ruined, she says, by her over-attentive script. "I used to joke how I put the Fi into Feedback," she jokes about the show's many critical appearances on the Radio 4 listeners' response programme.
It seems typical of Glover, that turn of phrase, making a calamity into a joke. But why leave, as she did a year ago? It's a question the former Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer asks her every time he sees her, she says.
But it seems that with two young children and a partner, Saturday mornings are too precious. "I will make no bones about it, I had been working shifts for 20 years – that's what you do on radio. The best shows are on at these very special times for you – they are fantastic for the listener but dreadful for you. Saturday Live was perfect for a working mum in many ways and I would have stretched my family life if I had had a normal life up until then, but I hadn't. There had been a lot of 3am shifts and for 10 of the past 20 years I have been working weekends."
What she calls her "leap" took much soul searching for herself and her partner, Rick, who works for Google:"I did think about my career: gosh, what have I done to it? If you have responsibilities outside work you have to balance them. But I am not weeping into my coffee on a Saturday morning telling myself I have done the wrong thing. I don't have a voodoo doll of [her replacement] Richard Coles that comes out every Saturday morning."
Her new show, The Listening Project, broadcast on Fridays and Sundays, hopes to provide an aural snapshot of the nation. "This is the first thing I have ever done that is trying to create a legacy – there will be an archive which is utterly brilliant."
She is also contributing to Radio 4's One to One series with a programme about digital entrepreneurs in Hackney and is also working on some other ideas of her own. "There are an awful lot of programmes on the radio that need to be filled," she notes.
Glover is enjoying the flexibility, and one reason she can do this, she believes, is radio's enviable record in deploying and retaining older women when compared to TV – a medium she believes "needs to get its house in order". Glover is clearly unafraid to wade into the thorny debate that has seen figures such as Anna Ford, Selina Scott and Lady Bakewell accuse broadcasters of banishing older women from the small screen.
Glover has a wealth of experience in this area, both as a broadcaster with the BBC and as a director of Sound Women, a lobby group intending to improve the profile of women in radio and to tackle some of the employment issues. "Most people who work in radio understand that what makes it work are experience, having a bright mind and being prepared to use it. These are things that are by no means diminished in women who are over the age of 50 – in fact I would say they get better and better.
"I am an older woman and want to see things on TV that are relevant to my life. You can understand how an ambitious producer is looking for the next big talent and that's younger people. But you must reflect the world. It needs saying more often. Women do not become hideous when their looks change… … I hope this is something that corrects itself."
For the moment she remains disturbed by Skillset's research on the relative lack of women over 35 in TV and radio, which she says "cannot be just about having kids … Women are not being promoted for one thing." She believes the BBC will change – "it's not an ostrich" – and needs to be given time to do so without offering work to every 60-year-old woman it can find. "If you were that woman and got that call you would know why people are ringing you all of a sudden and frankly it would be a bit insulting."
Bar a stint presenting BBC2's The Travel Show in the later 1990s she is rarely on screen herself, and is happy that way, saying she has "no real desire to be better known". It also doesn't help that she has been at the centre of prurient newspaper interest in her private life – when her marriage to the producer Mark Sandell ended after he started a relationship with her 5 Live colleague Victoria Derbyshire in 2004. On-air tensions were reported and newspapers pointed to her decision to leave the station and go to New York to write a book as evidence of a broken heart.
"It wasn't like that at all," she says, adding that the incident was "deeply unpleasant", now alive only in cutting files and "not in anybody's head". She adds:"I was amazed that a small piece of gossip would be turned into a huge thing like this. It was a long time ago and the situation has rectified itself and we have all found other people."
As for the future, she is "loving domesticity" and has no idea about when or if she will return to full-time radio work. But she does not envisage a future where she calls herself a mum without the word "working" before it. "I have never had a huge game plan. It depends on so many other things – who moves up, who the controllers are."
She loyally supports the direction in which current Radio 4 boss, Gwyneth Williams, is taking the station – more science and international coverage – but firmly believes this is the moment when people in charge of radio need to step up to the plate. "You could see a fragmentation of radio as a generation grows up that downloads and uses podcasts and totally circumnavigates the schedulers. You need incredible people like Gwyneth to keep people on track."
And of course, people such as Fi Glover waiting in the wings.
