The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and other Train Wrecks

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What he’s understood from writing the book, he says, is that there is a whole range of inputs into who you become – genetic, environmental – which are out of your control. Justin Webb is one of the BBC's leading broadcasters and currently co-presents Radio 4's flagship breakfast show the Today programme. That lack of a relationship with his father led my father to have personal problems in his life, and I’m pretty sure affected the way he brought me and my siblings up.

I went to have a look at their house, one of three set down a steep tarmacked drive, which brought to life a passage in the book about Justin’s step-father Charles who one Christmas decided in the middle of the night to drive off somewhere. We went to the festival in a park in Hackney and pretended to enjoy horribly distorted music played by people who screamed rude things about the Queen. In this crisp, un-self-pitying memoir, Webb reveals that he was raised in a household dominated by madness.His parents-in-law’s flat has a huge window looking on to the road, so they could wave and of course they FaceTimed. We take our coffees to nearby Ruskin Park, somewhere he visits most days to walk his dog Toffee (a labradoodle) after he has finished broadcasting, and where he often gets lobbied by people wanting to put their views across. And albeit that there has been a lot of suffering among the older generation throughout the pandemic which shouldn’t have happened, there’s also just this real sense of getting on with it.

Candid, unsparing and darkly funny, Justin Webb's memoir is as much a portrait of a troubled era as it is the story of a dysfunctional childhood, shaping the urbane and successful radio presenter we know and love now. On another occasion two friends and I had staged our own – rather less dramatic – mini-rebellion when we asked for permission to go to London to take part in a march and music festival organised by the Anti-Nazi League.To send a child to live away from home at the age of 11 may be forgivable in some circumstances, but not in most.