2024i23, Tuesday: On the air.
It's been years since I did any broadcasting. After a first slot on BBC Three Counties Radio in my 20s on the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing (I've got a tape of it somewhere; it probably belongs with some of my jazz and soul reviews around the same time in the metaphorical box marked "embarrassingly unskilled; never to be seen or heard by other human beings"), and then popping up from time to time on BBC News 24 while I worked for the Beeb almost 20 years ago, there's a long gap.
Till last weekend. My old friend and chambers-mate Daniel Barnett presents LBC's Legal Hour on a Saturday night. And he was kind enough, following my musings on private prosecutions, to let me join him to talk about them.
Not too shabby. The performance, that is. We can agree to disagree about the facial hair...
Um. Fun but lots to learn:
- Wow, I move around a lot.
- “I’ll come back to one point later” is dumb on a live broadcast. You never know if you’ve got time to do so. And I didn’t. (The point to come back to was that it can be cheaper if you pile ‘em high - and that since you can claim back your costs, often far above legal aid rates, there are organisations that are accused of turning this into a conveyor-belt-style nice little earner - notwithstanding that the people they prosecute might never have made it past the Full Code Test and end up with a conviction they might not really deserve. An important point, that I should’ve stressed.)
But all told: not too bad.
