BBC’s Justin Webb: ‘Everyone’s terrified of discussing trans issues, but we have to speak freely’

He’s a BBC lifer, but Justin Webb – who tells Julia Llewellyn Smith his own childhood was ‘absolutely bloody miserable’ – isn’t afraid of being outspoken about the way adults confuse and upset children about sex, gender and sexuality

Webb, a BBC ‘lifer’, says he is ‘really interested in old-fashioned impartiality' (Rii Schroer/eyevine)

There’s no question that Radio 4 Today presenter Justin Webb had a terrible childhood. Now 62, he was brought up in Bath by his mother and his schizophrenic stepfather, who – despite being “eccentric to the point of being frightening” – never received medication for his condition, and whose later diagnosis came in the form of a blunt GP pronouncement: “I regret to inform you your husband is stark, staring mad.”

Webb was eight years old when he found out who his real father was. Watching newscaster Peter Woods present the BBC news, his mother simply nodded at the screen, said “That’s your father”, and left the room. There was no further discussion. Over the years, Webb gradually learnt how he had been born as the result of an affair when his mother was working as a secretary at the Daily Mirror (she was sacked for becoming pregnant). But Woods (who died in 1995) was married with a family, and only met his son once, when Webb was a six-month-old baby.

Webb recounts all this – plus his seven years in a “hellhole” boarding school riven with violence and neglect – in his memoir The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and Other Train Wrecks. It sounds like a classic misery memoir, yet his tone isn’t remotely self-pitying; in fact, if anything, it’s faintly comedic. “I really did write it for a laugh, because the 1970s were funny times,” he agrees, sitting in the study of his house in Camberwell, in south London.