Balancing Act: Radio 4’s Emma Barnett Reveals How She Does It All

Lucy Cleland asks Radio 4’s Today programme’s most recent recruit, Emma Barnett, how does she do it all?

Interview: Radio 4 Presenter Emma Barnett

The voice I often wake up listening to is not that of my husband’s but rather the lilting Mancunian strains of Emma Barnett, the BBC’s latest whipsmart recruit for its flagship Radio 4 current affairs show, Today. Emma, who is known for her no-nonsense, laser-focused
interview technique and an ability to hold an occasionally agonising silence as she waits for a squirming MP to answer a direct question, is having the most unparalleled broadcast career. Not yet 40 and already having put in three years on the BBC’s hallowed Woman’s Hour – as well as stints on LBC, BBC 5 Live and a Newsnight presenting role – she now gets up at 3.30am at least twice a week to wrestle with politicians and others, with the ears of around 5.5 million listeners tuning in. And all this without coffee: ‘I’ve never liked it; I wish I did,’ she smiles.

We meet locally, near her home in Herne Hill, south London, at Brockwell Lido for a cuppa (tea, natch), early on a Monday morning, the day after Joe Biden dropped out of the US presidential election. I’m bursting to know whether she wishes she was on air right now, instead of talking to me. She barely bats an eyelid. ‘I think when you’re a news person, you have to be good at compartmentalising,’ she explains. ‘Because you aren’t the news. The news is the news. How you present the news, how you bring yourself to it, how you share it for other people, is your signature.’

That’s told me. So I get her on a day off, although – and we’ll come to this – it strikes me that Emma rarely actually has a day off, so industrious is her output. Sitting here in front of me, she is as she appears to be on air – sunny, interested, relaxed, curious, kind, funny, focused – and striking in the flesh with her mane of blonde hair, trademark glasses (from The Eye Company in Soho) and megawatt smile. And she needn’t be.

It is well-documented that Emma has been through – and still endures – the most crippling dual conditions of endometriosis and adenomyosis. The first-person piece she wrote for The Times Magazine in May 2022 talked frankly about how the extraordinarily painful conditions had impacted on her ability to conceive – she now has two children, a boy (six) and a girl (19 months), but not without seven rounds of IVF and three tormenting years of trying.

The feature opened the floodgates on a subject that was previously little talked about – and prompted her to start her own Substack, entitled Trying, which has recently relaunched after a brief hiatus. ‘The word “trying” is a big part of my life,’ says Emma, who is keen on
putting women’s health in the spotlight (and is thinking about writing another book on the subject. Her first, Period. It’s About Bloody Time was published in 2019). But for now she wants a vehicle where she can share her thoughts on ‘trying’, however that comes up for people. ‘I just think life is trying,’ she says. ‘There’s a lot of different things that people are attempting or conversations I’ll have with somebody – which I think should be captured in a slightly different way, which other people will find interesting or useful. I’ve interviewed more than a thousand people now; I’ve been on air for 17 years and I speak to, on average, 25 to 40 people a week, so there’s a lot of ideas running through me. I think I can capture some of that and share it in a good way.’

Emma herself is ‘trying’ out playing with what she eats to see how that impacts her own health. ‘I’ve been finding some results with diet,’ she says. ‘Just restricting the hours that I’m eating in to try to reduce inflammation.’ This might sound like the wellness warrior behaviour you find all over Instagram, but for Emma, it’s pretty new. ‘I’m a proper bon viveur, I want to be at lunch for a long time, and I love a drink, all of that,’ she laughs. ‘Even with the IVF, I refused to change how I ate because I was like, “I’m here for the cold hard science of this.”’

Does she find it difficult? ‘Yeah, I do, but equally, I have to counsel myself with the fact that I’ve had 40 years of chips and whatever I want to
eat. That’s a good innings.’ Giving up chips aside, how does motherhood work with her demanding schedule? ‘I’m just learning how to be who I’m meant to be in each part of the day,’ she says. ‘And it’s not perfect. The hardest thing is actually coming in and out of family mode because when I go in, I really want to go in. I feel worse when I’m trying to do both.’

Family time must be important to Emma, because one of her latest endeavours is launching a business with her husband, Jeremy Weil, whom she first met at Nottingham University. Colour Your Streets are colouring books for adults and kids that focus on hyper-local areas, so rather than general London landmarks, for example, people can really engage with the streets and sites they know and love around them. Naturally, the first one they produced was for Herne Hill. Now they’re up to 88 books, ranging from Balham to York, via Hull and Haringay – and have grown enough not to have to stuff them in envelopes and post them from home anymore.

‘It was my husband who came up with the idea,’ she says. ‘We were walking very close to here and talking about the different sites we could see. Our son was listening but he’s still very visual and into craft, so I was explaining something to him, then thought, “Actually, let’s draw it and then we’ll take a photo.” And then he wanted to colour it in and that’s how it all started.’

Launching a business, she reckons, is not so far removed from being a journalist. ‘Journalism is very entrepreneurial. Getting your own scoops, finding the content, pitching ideas.’ It’s all, I guess, about spotting that elusive gap in the market, which is what Colour Your Streets has cleverly honed in on. And although the content might be hyper local, the business has big ambitions. ‘We’ve got a hot list of suggestions because people keep getting in touch,’ says Emma – the world, then, is literally their oyster. ‘I just love how much people love seeing where they live in a book, it’s very important to them. I think sense of place is huge.’

What’s huge is the breadth and scope of Emma’s life. News broadcasting’s top job, a Substack, books, columns, other professional projects she’s sworn to secrecy on for now, two children and a growing business with her husband, alongside coping with her chronic medical conditions. ‘I like a challenge,’ she grins. Oh, and she’s very good at compartmentalising.

To buy Emma’s colouring books, visit colouryourstreets.co.uk