The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and other Train Wrecks

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He captured the audience completely, there was dead silence as they agreed, sighed and laughed in all the right places. But actually what you have is most people still hoping, however imperfectly, that the cosmopolitan mixed society Alistair Cooke thought was impossible can still be achieved. They’re not going to look back on it as the most pleasurable period of their lives, but they’re going to see it as a time when they coped with adversity, which is part of life. His mother kept every one of the weekly letters he wrote her from school, and reading them, says Webb, made him realise the peculiar cruelty of boarding schools in those days. The longest-serving presenter on the Today programme always sounds cheerful, no matter how grim the news.

In its new foreword, Webb, presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme and a host of the podcast Americast, says Cooke would have been dismayed by both major political parties in 2023. We think the sixties came and we gave up on snobbism, but it was very much there, through the seventies and beyond, and to an extent it still is. I discovered reading the book that I live just down the road from the house where Justin and his family lived, in Wells Road.It never occurred to us that this was actually begging and nor, apparently, did it occur to the man.

Here, he argues that there is a fault line in the long-standing marriage between these two great nations; a cultural divide that separates us. Candid, unsparing and darkly funny, Justin Webb's memoir is a portrait of personal and national dysfunction. In fact, I had spent the entire year before these exams perfecting my table tennis technique and being cool. He stayed with them for six months, and in an affectionate article for the Telegraph, Sam wrote about how he was appalled by the fact that his grandparents ate microwaved vegetables and watched live television.Reading the book again, it struck me he has an awareness of that tightrope which is still walked today. JUSTIN WEBB: 'I weep for any child who, like me, is sent to boarding school at 11' - his doting mother did it for love and to toughen him up. I was brought up and still am a Quaker so was intrigued and shocked to read about Sidcot and slightly saddened that Webb refers to it as a cult. He rarely talked about his father, never had the urge to go and visit him even though he had his address.