Whether you have just received your A-level results and are preparing for freshers’ week, are waiting for your next year of undergraduate study (like me) or have recently graduated from university, the idea of a career can seem daunting at the best of times.
Recently, I was lucky enough to speak with BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour producer and York alumna Lucinda Sebag-Montefiore about how it isn’t all just about getting A*s, that you needn’t be driven by an unbridled ambition and that your time at university doesn’t have to be the best period of your life.
Lucinda grew up in Hampshire and has lived in London since the early 1980s. Her father was a farmer and her mother was a marriage guidance counsellor. On the phone, she is upbeat and engaging, witty and eloquent, as would be expected of someone who has spent a sizeable portion of her time, for the last twenty-something years, forging a career in the world of words. With this in mind, I asked her where her relationship with words began.
“When I was a child I had a really good imagination. I wanted to be a writer and I also made radio programmes – as a commentator for the Grand National! I thought they sounded so funny. I actually hated radio growing up because my dad would wake me up by listening to ‘Farming Today’ at 6am in the kitchen, which was below my bedroom. I was a massive reader. I liked things like The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, What Katie Did – all really girly books. I read my way through the whole children’s library. I had to beg to be allowed to go to the adult library before my time. I loved reading”.
Thinking that Lucinda, being as bright as she is, would have had a pick of the universities, I quizzed her on why she chose York and what led her to her particular course of study. “To be honest, I did really badly in my A-Levels. I got a D for History, a D for French and a B for English. I was meant to be reading History and had received offers from places all over the country, like Bristol and Durham, but I didn’t get the results I needed. I was island-hopping in Greece during the 1970s, when I got my results, and I wrote a dramatic letter to my mother saying ‘I told you I’d end up working at Woolworths!’ Haha!”
There is hope yet for us all then – I had expected to hear a string of As. It is refreshing and somehow spirit-lightening to know that these are the results of someone who has, in my opinion, done very well for herself. “I was going to retake but there were lots of courses that didn’t get filled, it was very different in those days, so one of my mum’s friends suggested that I try for clearing to get onto an interesting course. It was my mother who suggested, and who had found, Philosophy and Politics at York. I had already become really interested in ideas by then, reading Marx and so on, and I was also starting to get interested in feminism and things like that. So I went up for an interview and I got a place! So I did not have an illustrious career at all!”
Lucinda revealed to me that she had felt at the time that by not studying English she would preserve her passionate love of literature: she had a feeling that studying English might somehow erode the relationship she had with a subject that still means a great deal to her. However, Philosophy appears to have turned out to be more than just an expedient choice: it has, in fact, made a very strong impression on her. “It was a really good course for me. I didn’t do much politics, I remember doing ‘Politics and the Novel’ but mainly I just did philosophy and I loved it! It just really, really engaged me. And I loved that feeling, sometimes it’s very uncomfortable, but I loved that feeling of having my mind stretched. When you’re really challenged to get what someone is saying, when you realise that you have to persist with it and then you will get it. I was very taken with Plato. A funny thing happened to me. I don’t know if it has happened to you? I wrote an essay on Plato and got absolutely top marks for it but when I came back much later to look at it, I couldn’t understand a word I’d written! I was so absorbed with it at the time. The summer after I left, I did a pilgrimage to Wittgenstein’s old house in Ireland. I didn’t read a particularly large amount of his work, although I did find his work on language fascinating. I was really intrigued by him”.
I was curious to find out whether or not, while still at university, she had made any goals or plans for after her graduation. “No goals or plans, except in my first year (1978) I saw a picture in cosmopolitan which celebrated Virago’s 5th year anniversary. Because I was quite a strong feminist, I looked at it and thought that if I ever, that is where I would like to work. And in fact I did, later. Although I wasn’t a very focused person, not very ambitious, not very anything, I suppose I did have more focus than I thought. I’ve never really had much of a career plan. I’ve never really been that ambitious. I know people who actively plan: ‘OK, if I go there then I can get to that position and if I go there then etc.’, that just isn’t me. What I’ve always wanted to do with my work is be passionately engaged and interested in something. I’m totally uninterested in climbing to the top of the BBC”.
Lucinda is open and candid, not only when discussing her academic and professional career but also when it comes to her personal experience of university, “To be honest, it wasn’t a great time for me. I got very depressed during my second year. My tutors were very good and I wanted to leave but they persuaded me not to. I don’t think I had my best years at York but I don’t think that is a reflection of anything about York. I think I would have struggled with things wherever I was. I was not a good student in some ways. I was very sociable, a bit druggy and probably got too into parties and boys. I was quite into my course, although I wasn’t too studious, I was also quite riotous. I did what a lot of people do and joined all sorts of things but I didn’t actually do a lot. Sometimes I wish I’d done drama or something like that. Sometimes I envied people who did something like that or who were in a band or something”.
I asked Lucinda what result she got for her degree and how important it was for the choices she made after graduating from university. “I got a 2:1”, Lucinda answered, “if I’d got a first I think I would have continued studying, philosophy or something in that area. I did have the right brain for it”. I asked Lucinda what she thought had been the most important thing she had gained from university? “Probably not being scared of engaging with ideas, learning that you have to persist and a sort of confidence in that. I think it was very, very, very good training”.
I had heard that Lucinda is a great networker. Her tone briefly takes on mock outrage, “Who have you heard this from?! Actually, I am a good networker, I’m a very sociable person and quite confident socially, which is always a help”.
Lucinda moved to London in 1981, without ever a thought about going back to live with her parents. “No one did in those days. It was possible to get very cheap accommodation in London and that’s where all my friends went too”. I asked Lucinda to sketch a brief outline of her career in London, from her initial move to where she is now. “After university I took a short secretarial course, which of course, being a feminist I hated the idea of, and for my first job, I was secretary to the editor of Therapy Weekly. I was a dreadful secretary, always correcting my boss’s use of English. Then, I became assistant editor at Quarto, a book packaging company specialising in illustrated books, then editor at Pavilion books with authors like Madhur Jaffrey and Antonio Carluccio, then my dream job at Virago Press. I left university at 21 and was 25 when I got my job at Virago, which lasted for four and a half years. Publishing contracted and I was made redundant in 1990 but I was lucky enough to get the equivalent of one year’s salary redundancy money – because it was tax-free. I also met my husband that year”.
So what came next? “I took my time, paid myself monthly from the money I had received and went travelling to Uganda and the Himalayas. I decided not to go back into publishing and had a think: what else do I enjoy? Listening to Radio 4! So I applied for a BBC production trainee-ship. It took forever but I got it. I joined the BBC in August of 1991. Six weeks of training and then straight on the programme: they throw you in at the deep end. My first programme was with Melvyn Bragg in Start the Week. Very scary! I think they were impressed with the types of people I had published. They put you through lots of difficult interviews, luckily I perform quite well in interviews – dreadful questions they ask you! Very hard! Questions like, how would you make a programme about a cardboard box interesting? So, aargh!”
Skills and experience were the next topic of discussion. “My publishing career was very helpful, the skills were transferable. An editor has a similar role to a producer. Whether you’re editing text or editing audio it is not that different. If you’re liaising with your authors it is not that different from working with guests. Writing back or front cover for books or writing questions and briefs for the BBC, for both jobs you need to be very literate and of course you meet a lot of people”.
I thought it would be interesting to find out exactly what her role as a producer for Woman’s Hour involves. “Being a producer: it’s a great job! You have to come up with ideas for the programme and we’re a hungry, hungry programme because we’re on five days a week but we get sent a lot of ideas too. You then have to find the right guests for the discussion and then have to be able to speak to them beforehand on the telephone. It is crucial that you really brief your presenter well because your presenter is having to assimilate so much information and they obviously don’t have much time to do that. You have to basically write an essay for them and write questions and a question structure for them but it’s up to them whether they follow it or not! You have to be able to do that. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines!”
A day in the life: “Woman’s Hour is a live programme and I love doing live programmes. The day you’re studio producing, you’re in at 7 in the morning briefing your presenter and making sure everything is up and running – I work in the old BBC building, Broadcasting House, near Oxford Circus. If things go wrong you have to be quite ‘cool’, in a way. Well, people aren’t cool but it’s a lot of fun! I prefer live programmes to recorded programmes. I love that sometimes I feel very challenged. This week I did a discussion about female sexual desire – some American bloke wrote a book about it called, ‘What Do Women Want?’. I had to read the book, speak to him, find another guest etc. So for a week I have to be an expert on female sexual desire and the next week I’ll have to be an expert on something else and I love that. I love that challenge. It suits me, it really suits my mind”.
I suggested that she must learn a lot in this line of work. “You learn a lot but then the trouble is you forget it all. I mean, journalists are such a pain aren’t they? They’re experts for about 5 minutes and then they forget it all”.
Lucinda had a lot to say on the positive aspects of her work at the BBC. “I love the team at woman’s hour. Sometimes it’s great, in the green room it sometimes turns into a party. I love our ideas. I’m about to do a publishing-special programme and I might get Kate Mosse to come in and present it, so that’s going to be amazing! I’ll be looking back at some things I used to be involved in and there are some really interesting publishing stories at the moment. The best thing for me this year is that I have been in charge of fiction. So I decide which authors come on. It doesn’t mean I just do fiction but I get to read all the latest books”.
This is a happy coupling of two subjects which are of great interest to you, I suggested to Lucinda. “I know, I’m so lucky! I’m a producer, I haven’t risen up the sort of laureate but it has been amazing! I’ve had three kids while I’ve been there and the BBC have been very good about letting me work part-time. I love work but I love other things as well”.
Sensing that the interview was coming to a natural close, I asked Lucinda if she thought that she had found an ideal job for yourself. “Well, sometimes I think so but sometimes I don’t! Things go wrong. But I do love it. I’m very lucky. It’s pretty full on when you’re there but I like that. One thing that’s quite nice is that if something goes wrong or isn’t brilliant then we’re on to the next immediately: so that’s the joy of live radio, you can’t dwell on it”.
Tune in to Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 at 10:00 each weekday morning to catch an hour of discussion on various worldly affairs from a female perspective.