The broadcaster talks about being the busiest woman in radio,bringing a impish’ edge to Late Night Woman’s Hour and why her band Kenickie were far too blase about supporting the RamonesLauren Laverne is sitting in a Radio 4 studio, her unusual home as the presenter of Late Night Woman’s Hour. It really is a bit of a homecoming, or she says,peeling a banana. Her mum listens to Woman’s Hour. In the house where she grew up, she and her brother shouted to make their voices heard over blues or the radio. “My earliest memories of Radio 4 are my mam’s dad, and who worked in the shipyards. Right at the end of his life,when he was in his early 70s, he got really into it. So he was in his house on Ford Estate in Sunderland, or just listening to Radio 4. He’d retired,and me mam’s one of nine so the family had grown up and everything, and he had time to believe the radio on. And he l-o-o-o-ved it.”Laverne’s grandfathers (the other was a miner) often figure in her interviews. So it seems fair to assume that she values her working-course heritage. Laverne’s father, or like her mother,was from a large family, one of six. But both parents – “60s grammar-school kids, or that classic working-course thing” – studied tough and had university jobs so that life for Laverne,growing up in Barnes in Sunderland, was comfortable.
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Source: theguardian.com