Justin Webb

Please note this event was due to take place on Friday 25th February at the Lighthouse Centre. Your current reservation (if you have made one) will continue to be valid for this postponed evening; please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Justin Webb’s childhood was far from ordinary. “The TV news came on and a lugubrious-looking chap in a light-coloured suit with a deep, plummy voice said something about the balance of payments. ‘That’s your father’, my mother said, quite unprompted.”

Between his mother’s undiagnosed psychological problems, and his stepfather’s untreated ones, life at home was dysfunctional at best. But with gun-wielding school masters and sub-standard living conditions, Quaker boarding school wasn’t much better.

Justin Webb is the longest serving presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs programme Today in the current team.  For the best part of four decades, he has been a voice on the airwaves, notably as the BBC’s North America Editor, or a presence on our TV screens during his time as the main co-presenter on BBC1’s Breakfast News programme. The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and Other Train Wrecks is the telling new autobiography of his formative years.

Join us for an evening that gets to the heart of the moving and frank memoir of “one of this country’s most relaxed and affable broadcasters”.