Talk - An Evening with Janet Street Porter

Allegedly Janet Street Porter was responsible for a number of early-morning car crashes in London in the mid seventies. Not that she was driving: she was in the radio studio miles away, co-hosting an early-morning show on LBC. The other host was the urbane, well-spoken journalist Paul Callan. They were put together to create a comic juxtaposition for their contrasting accents: engineers nicknamed the two ‘cut glass’ and ‘cut froat’. By all accounts they hated one another, and it was obvious to the listener. It was also, albeit unintentionally, uproariously funny. Hence the crashes: commuters, on their way to work, losing control of their cars because they were laughing so much.

Hopefully Janet will be provoking a similar response, albeit intentionally this time, as she stands in front of the Gardner audience promoting her new book Fall Out, which talks about her relationships and friendships during her rise to fame, as she hopped from job to job and medium to medium in roles as diverse as being BBC’s head of youth (henceforth ‘yoof’) TV and editing the Independent on Sunday, for which she still writes a column. She will undoubtedly recall her adventures in the jungle in ‘I’m a Celebrity Get me out of Here’ which pushed her back into the sort of limelight she enjoyed back in the 1970’s when both Kenny Everett and Pamela Stephenson regularly did impressions of her. The accent, the teeth, the glasses, the hopeless lack of self-awareness. It wasn’t exactly difficult. AG