My guest is Justin Webb.

Justin Webb is the presenter of BBC Radio Force Today program in the morning.

Welcome to the podcast, Justin.

Thank you for having me.

Justin is the author of a new book, The Gift of a Radio, My Childhood, Another Trainwrecks.

You say in the book, Justin, a spoiler alert, that the idea for the book came from

your agent. But when he suggested the theme, did you have any kind of hostile, nervous reaction

to the idea? To be honest, Paul, I didn't know what he was talking about. He said, can we meet

and have a chat? And I said, yeah, of course. And I I've written a piece a very short piece for a

website about my school days I mean literally one and a half thousand words saying that I had I went to

very strange Quaker boarding school and he said I thought he wanted me to write a book about

America actually where I spent a long time as a correspondent and I write a bit about America for the paper.

So I went along thinking that, and he said, no, it's about you.

And initially, with not only due modesty, but also actually just a sense of why.

I mean, what could possibly be interesting about my childhood.

But he then persuaded me.

And I think this is why I went ahead and wrote it,

that actually writing the story of anyone's childhood

allows you to say other things about the period, about the issues that there were, etc., etc.

And, you know, my childhood was deeply eccentric, to put it mildly, not to say, completely screwed up.

And but it was happening in the context of Britain in the 1970s,

which was also deeply eccentric and screwed up.

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