While playing ‘ground-breakers, obscurities and session tracks’ on BBC Radio 1 by night, John Peel was taking a ‘wry look at the foibles of family life’ on BBC Radio 4 by day. That Radio 4 programme was Home Truths which Peel was to present each Saturday morning for six years.
Home Truths was, in fact, the offspring of an earlier series called Offspring that Peel had hosted for four series between 1995 and 1997. It had, according to Radio 4 controller Michael Green, been “an unlikely booking”. Perhaps what swayed him was that John had already been writing, since September 1993, about family life, his work, whatever was on the tv or radio or indeed anything however inconsequential, in a weekly column for the Radio Times titled John Peel’s Family Album; a column initially dismissed as “toe-curlingly folksy” by the Daily Telegraph.
Offspring was first broadcast on Saturday 7 October 1995 with a promise that John Peel would drag listeners on to “the wreckage strewn battlefield of family life” in a new exploration of families of every size, type and background.
Writing in that week’s Family Album column, John gave us an idea about what he might hear:
Essentially it’s all about the family, but, as almost everyone at some time or other, has been part of something that could be described as a family, this gives us considerable licence.
So far I have travelled to Lancaster to talk and walk along the beach with two widowed women who chose, for a range of sound reasons, to buy a house together; driven to Sowerby Bridge to sample the wares of a father and mother, son and daughter who run a brewery and pub, and sped through torrential rain to the southern tip of the area covered by the Birmingham A-Z to watch triplets being put to bed by their parents. Not very rock ‘n’ roll but, in each case, strangely uplifting.
When Michael Green left the BBC in 1996 his replacement in the top job, James Boyle, would introduce his revamped schedule in April 1998. On Saturday mornings between 9 and 10 am out went Sport on 4 and Breakaway and in came a new vehicle for John Peel, Home Truths.
Ahead of the new schedule Peel wrote: “We haven’t quite worked out what’s going to be in Home Truths; there’ll be a sports element, definitely, but for the rest it’ll be family-orientated without being too sentimental. I always viewed Radio 4 as the senior service, and I used to get very excited when I was the only Radio 1 DJ to get invited to Radio 4 parties – though I think that was more to do with my having been to public school than anything else”. (Radio Times 4 April 1998)
The first Home Truths aired on Saturday 11 April 1998. Writing, again in the Radio Times (see above), Peel explained something of the programme’s ethos, and again there was that mention of ‘sentiment’.
The programme’s producers decided on this name only when it became an administrative imperative that it was called something. I could fill this page with a list of the suggestions that were made. One of these was Scouse...no, I mustn’t go on. So Home Truths it is and I lurch towards the first programme with a certain trepidation. The things is, as with the hard-hitting, rigorously unsentimental Offspring, the precursor of Home Truths, we need listeners to phone, fax and e-mail their responses to the things they hear, and you can’t really engineer that entirely successfully for a first programme.
John opened the show like this:
“Hello, and welcome to Home Truths, a name chosen only when it became an administrative impossibility for programme planning to continue without a name. We're still getting to know each other in the Home Truths office: shy glances, apologetic dances like courtship rituals of some endangered species, that sort of thing. But we think that we've got a pretty neat programme for you nevertheless. Saturdays mean doing it yourself, or getting out into the country and maybe killing something, or going to work, or lying in bed, or going to the match (it's Ipswich versus Tranmere Rovers for us this afternoon). Until this morning, Saturdays to me would involve my getting up ahead of Sheila, and feeling insanely virtuous, walking the dogs, feeding the cats, and emptying the dishwasher. I once made the mistake of saying to her later, with insufferable smugness, 'Well, darling, I've done your jobs for you.' 'My jobs?', she started. 'My jobs???' Well, you can imagine." (As quoted on the John Peel Wiki site)
Despite this early trepidation the programme would, eventually, prove to be an enormous success. At first it met with some criticism: “inconsequential”, “infantile rubbish” or “droning nonsense”. But in time it would secure one and a half million listeners, garner four Sony Awards (three gold and one silver) and landed a Broadcaster of the Year award for John. His “predilection for a kind of gently self-mocking world view” ensured it remained a Radio 4 fixture until Peel’s death in 2004 (and then continuing on for a further couple of years until 2006).
There are a number of editions of Home Truths from 2003-2006 available via the John Peel wiki site but here’s an earlier edition, or at least part of one, from 22 July 2000. The recording was kindly sent to me by Richard Tucker and is the first 45 minutes of what was a 57 minute programme.
John is back after two weeks away during which he was part of a Radio Times sponsored trans-Atlantic cruise in the company of Alan Hansen, Delia Smith, Barry Norman and about 100 of the magazine’s lucky readers. As usual it strikes the balance between “absurdity and weightiness” from ‘what colour is John Peel?’ to cerebral palsy. John would become adept at ‘the handbrake turns in tone and pace’ the format demanded.
In this Family Album column John writes about that cruise and the trip to New York that he and Sheila made the week before.
John’s last Home Truths turned out to be the one on 16 October 2004 just before taking a two week break to “recharge the batteries, getting on with the book, that sort of thing”. Covering for John was David Stafford. Just over a week later came the shocking news that John had died on a working holiday in Peru.
On Saturday 30 October BBC Radio 4 broadcast this tribute to John and his time on Home Truths. It’s presented by Roger McGough (who had previously deputised for John). As well as clips from the programme there’s a tribute from regular contributor Bryan Gallagher and an update on Tom Ray. A 30-minute version also aired at 11 pm that day.
Offspring
Series 1: 7 October to 25 November 1995 (8 episodes)
Series 2: 10 August to 28 September 1996 (8)
Special: 24 December 1996 Offspring Christmas Special
Series 3: 26 April to 14 June 1997 (8)
Series 4: 4 October to 22 November 1997 (8)
Special: 25 December 1997 Offspring Christmas Morning
The first series won a Sony Award in the Magazine category
Home Truths
Presented by John Peel from 11 April 1998 to 16 October 2004 on Saturdays at 9 am
Christmas Specials on 25 December 2000, 25 December 2001 and 25 December 2002
Providing holiday cover for John were Roger McGough (1999, 2000 & 2002), David Stafford (2001-04), Maureen Lipman (2002) and Benjamin Zephaniah (2004).
The series continued from 23 October 2004 to 24 June 2006 with presenters David Stafford (who presented the majority of the programmes), Tom Robinson, Paul Heiney, Linda Smith, Michael Rosen, Jo Brand and Jenny Eclair
Some quotes come from And now on Radio 4 by Simon Elmes, Life on Air by David Hendy and Margrave of the Marshes by John Peel & Sheila Ravesnscroft
