News / From our foreign correspondent…in Pitt Lane
Have you heard the one about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Welshman…not to mention the two Shetland lasses?
If you’ve been tuning in to BBC Radio Shetland for the past two weeks that is exactly what you have been hearing.
Since producer Mark Inchley went on a one year sabbatical to Radio Guernsey six months ago, the community station has featured a variety of new voices standing in for him.
The latest is a voice that may sound rather familiar to listeners to Radio Scotland, or even Radio Four or Five Live.
Fifty four year old Huw Williams is the third broadcaster to head north from BBC HQ at Glasgow’s Pacific Quay to exchange the high pressure world of national broadcasting for…the equal but differently high pressure world of small community radio.
Huw started his broadcasting career in local radio before moving to Radio One’s Newsbeat and found himself coming to Glasgow on a two month contract to work for Radio Four covering Scotland.
That was 12 years ago. In that time his masters changed, but his patch did not; that is until he was taken on by Radio Scotland and found himself reporting not just from all over Scotland, but from all over the world.
“It was Good Morning Scotland where I got taste for travelling around and not being based in an office,” he recalls.
“With Newsbeat I went to Rwanda not long after the trouble with the Hutus and Tutsis to talk about the recovery, and I went to Kosovo and Macedonia where the Albanians were taking refuge after being expelled.
“Since I’ve been at Radio Scotland though I’ve been to Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Dubai, Ireland…all very interesting places.”
His travels also took him to Shetland for the Sakchai Makao deportation row, and to Fair Isle for the official opening of the new bird observatory.
He liked the place enough to return for a holiday last year and when the opportunity for a two month attachment came up he argued with his editor until they let him come.
“It would be stupid to talk about coming to Shetland as a foreign correspondent, but clearly it’s a special place. The people here are special…and perhaps for me there is an element of trying to get under the skin of the place.”
Huw has brought a new flavour to the station with some lively reports where we’ve heard him being thrown onto the floor by judo enthusiast David Gray and interviewing cross country runner Luke Holt while running alongside him around Lerwick.
His up front approach hasn’t always gone down well with the locals either. Interviewing parents before the public meeting in Aith about the proposed school closure, he was accused of being “a bit harsh” and one parent refused to be interviewed because he was “too aggressive”.
“I’ve learned that you have to perhaps be a bit more courteous than you would be on Radio Scotland, but that’s because of the very special place that Radio Shetland has in the life of the community.
“People don’t think twice about ringing us and telling us what they think of the way we are covering the stories.
“That’s certainly not the immediate feedback I would get at all if I was sitting in the newsroom at Glasgow, perhaps because we’re not as ingrained in the community of Scotland as we are in the life here.”
He says he’s loving the variety: “At ten to six I was reading the what’s on saying Delting’s junior sailing was off because of the weather and at ten past six I was live on Radio Three’s In Tune programme telling Sean Rafferty about the opening of Mareel.”
He’s also loving being in Shetland: “I went to Walls in a break between the broadcast and the meeting in Aith. It was a terrible day, absolutely teeming down with rain, but it’s just such a beautiful place. I want to see more of it, all of it…I want to be here for more than two months.”
His editor in Glasgow would probably not be too happy about the prospect of losing one of his most experienced general reporters, but Radio Shetland’s chief producer John Johnston would not complain.
As part of the nationwide BBC spending cuts, the Pitt Lane team lost one producer post when Carol Anderson left the station after 15 years to become head of communications at Shetland Islands Council.
When Mark Inchley took off for 12 months, John decided to advertise internally for people to come north.
“I was taken aback by the level of interest, so we decided we would bring in a variety of voices through the year.
“But to get such an experienced journalist as Huw to come and work in community radio is a real bonus. He’s hit the ground running and brought lots of new ideas, new ways of telling stories and using sound.
“It just shows that Shetland may be a long way from centres like London or Glasgow, but there’s a lot happening.
“And there is no other place in the BBC where you can be involved in everything from presenting and reading the news to doing the What’s On, or report on such a variety of stories from agricultural shows to serious disasters.”
Huw himself has been taken aback by how much goes on in Shetland both in and outside the studio.
“My overriding impression is what hard work it’s been. It’s such a small team here and there’s such a demand for output for the lunchtime bulletin and the evening programme and the community programmes when they start, so I haven’t really had much time to stop and look around the place.
“I love being in Shetland, but I haven’t told JJ yet that my unofficial goal is to get to Foula – I’ve been to Fair Isle on holiday and for work – so if anyone’s got an idea for a story that would get me to Foula I’d very much like to hear it.”
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