Kirsty Wark’s debut on The Reunion: how did she do?

In the first few days of a new job, what you want is an easy ride. Get your feet under the desk, buy IT support some muffins and ease yourself in. In Kirsty Wark’s case, taking over from Sue MacGregor on The Reunion after 16 years, she was probably hoping for something like a Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson gabfest about the Footlights over some Nice biscuits.

Instead her opening Reunion (Radio 4, Sunday) was Black Wednesday, an event that still casts a pall over the country 18 years later. Her reunited cast was a phalanx of political big beasts, acronym-spouting economists and smooth-talking city traders. Could Wark walk the walk?

First there was the topic – the events surrounding the collapse of sterling that forced then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont to withdraw Britain from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. It meant Wark had to get her principal speakers – Sir Alex Allan, John Major’s private secretary; Mark Clarke, a foreign exchange dealer at the Bank of America; Jim Trott, the Bank of England’s chief currency dealer and Jeff Randall, who was the Sunday Times City Editor – to explain what the ERM was, why we were in it and then why, suddenly, we weren’t.

As if a five-minute Forex trading primer wasn’t complicated enough, Wark’s opening Reunion was also a virtual reunion. Anyone who has spent the past few months remote-working knows that a virtual meeting and an actual one are not the same thing. Part of what made MacGregor’s Reunions different from, say, a panel on The Today Programme, was the noises off: the sense that there was an actual table with real people sitting around it who were talking not just to you and Sue but to each other.

It wasn’t Wark’s fault, of course, that her first reunion was an e-Union, but it did make for a more stilted discussion and that, in turn, made it just that bit easier to think about how much you were missing Sue MacGregor (whose name almost rhymes with “National Treasure” if you say it with a mouthful of crisps.)

On this showing, Wark will make the programme different but not necessarily worse. The Reunion is one of R4’s strongest formats, but it’s up to the presenter to ensure that it doesn’t descend in to a love-in. Here Wark, whose voice and presence are both that little bit more abrasive than MacGregor’s, was right on the money. Clarke was the foreign exchange dealer who made ￡10 million for his employers in eight hours of trading. He then made the mistake of boasting about it on Channel 4 News (with braying traders swigging Bollinger in the background). In the next day’s papers Clarke was voted Britain’s sixth most hated man. Yet the atmosphere on this Reunion was clubby at first. What larks all of these men had had, setting off a chain of events that turned our relationship with Europe into the major political faultline of the next 30 years.

But Wark wasn’t having it. “Do you have any regrets? No worries for people that struggled with mortgages?” she asked Clarke. The jab was followed with a right and a left – “Did you get a bonus?” He did. “How much?” “I think I did quite well.” I think Kirsty did quite well too.

If you’re looking for potential radio stars in the making (and possible future Reunion hosts) then New Storytellers, a series of quarter-hour features that ran after The World at One all last week, threw up plenty of candidates.

The series featured the five winners of the 2020 Charles Parker Prize for the Best Student Radio Feature. This year’s Gold Award went to This Ain’t My Life, an examination of homelessness on the streets of Birmingham produced and presented by Alex Morgan, a student at Birmingham City University. One evening, on her way home after a night out, Morgan happened to get chatting with Kane Walker – a man whose face she next saw on the news under the headline ‘homeless man freezes to death in underpass.’ Morgan’s empathy was affecting and her reporting instinctive, often capturing sound on her iPhone when that was all she had to hand.

But I preferred Richard Queree’s Projectionists from the day before, as well as Gabriel Green’s Palores: the Bird of Cornwall the day before that. One was an elegy for old cinema, for 35mm film, for the machines that showed it and the people who worked them. The other was a requiem for the Cornish chough – and who can honestly resist the trilling tones of a nice chough? Both programmes showed young storytellers doing what radio does best – using words and sound to evoke memories, fresh as the day they were formed.