Episode 5: Graham Miller
In this edition, Marcus Stead is joined by Graham Miller, an experienced journalist and broadcaster, probably best known for his years as the face of Saturday teatime sports bulletins on the ITN news.
Graham began his career in hospital radio, but his big break came in 1973 when he joined BBC Radio Birmingham, where he worked on both news and sport. A year later, he moved to BBC Radio London, where he covered the Moorgate tube crash of 1975.
During his radio years, Graham worked alongside some of the giants of radio sports journalism, including Bryon Butler and Peter Jones.
Graham moved into television, where at Anglia he worked as an in-vision continuity announcer and newsreader/reporter on About Anglia. He then moved to HTV West, where he worked as a sports presenter and producer. Colleagues included legendary newsreader Bruce Hockin and long-serving sports broadcaster Roger Malone.
In 1983, Graham moved to Thames News, where he worked alongside veteran newscaster Andrew Gardner, and on 31 December 1992, Graham presented the last ever bulletin before Thames lost the ITV weekday franchise in London.
A move to ITN followed, and Graham quickly became associated with the Saturday teatime bulletin, where he fronted a comprehensive roundup of the day’s sports news and the classified football results. During his years with ITN, Graham reported from around the globe on top sporting events including World Cups and Olympic Games, and he twice won the Royal Television Society Sports Presenter of the Year award.
After leaving ITN in late 2002, Graham set up public relations and media training company Media-Vu. Graham helps a variety of businesses, sports federations and individuals by advising on media strategy. His client list includes executives at Manchester United FC, the banking industry, and a range of individuals.
Graham continued to broadcast as a reporter for Gillette Soccer Saturday on Sky Sports, and he read news and sport for London Tonight and sports bulletins on Sky News.
In the latter part of the podcast, Marcus and Graham discuss modern trends in journalism, including the dangerous mixing up of ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ in mainstream news and current affairs programming. Graham and Marcus share concerns about the BBC’s move away from the emphasis on ‘facts and analysis’ towards more opinion-led campaigning journalism.
The podcast concludes by Graham and Marcus providing advice to young people starting out in journalism today. The industry is very different to when Graham took his first steps at hospital radio and at the BBC in Birmingham, so what can people entering the industry do to help themselves get on in these difficult times?
You can read more about Graham’s work with Media-Vu by visiting his website.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spotify and the TuneIn app.
Episode 4: Graham Perry
In this edition, Marcus Stead talks to Graham Perry, a leading authority on China and Anti-Semitism, as well as a former radio presenter on LBC during the 1990s.
Is China’s economic development and growing political influence something that should be feared or embraced? What will the long-term implications be for the USA’s dominance as the world’s leading political and economic power? Is China creating a slave empire in Africa, or is Chinese investment crucial to the continent’s economic development?
The podcast was recorded at the time when Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner have received the draft report into antisemitism from the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Graham has extensive experience as a speaker and educator on the subject of Anti-Semitism, including to the Welsh Labour Party and Wales’s First Minister, Mark Drakeford, who wrote him a letter of appreciation for his work.
Graham graduated from Churchill College Cambridge with degrees in History and Economics in 1968.
He qualified as a Solicitor and became a Partner in Clinton-Davis & Co in Hackney, East London and focused on representing clients in the Magistrates Courts of North-East London.
He made a career switch in 1979 when he joined the family firm, London Export Corporation, set up in 1953 by Jack Perry to focus on Trade with China.
Graham made his final career change when he became an independent commercial arbitrator resolving disputes between companies involved in the trans-national shipment of food, feeding stuffs and oils – which work he continues to undertake.
Graham was a Justice of the Peace from 1986 to 2002 and an Immigration Judge from 2002 to 2015.
He has made 100+ visits to China on business, with political groups and most recently with former Lord Chief Justice Woolf whom Graham arranged to give Lectures in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on the Rule of Law.
Graham writes and lectures on two main topics – China and Anti-Semitism and honed his presentational skills with LBC before focusing exclusively on his arbitration work.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud and the TuneIn app.
Episode 3: Geraint Powell
In this edition, Marcus Stead talks to Geraint Powell, one of Wales’s leading rugby union bloggers and writers, perhaps best known for his work on the Dai Sport website.
Geraint has a wide range of life experiences, having lived in South Africa and in various parts of England, and he has a good understanding of the problems facing rugby union at all levels.
In this wide-ranging discussion, Marcus and Geraint assess the problems facing the structure of club and regional rugby union in both Wales and England, which they trace back to mistakes that were made in the years before the game went professional in 1995. They lament key missed opportunities to restructure the game for the better in the early years of professionalism.
The ongoing pandemic has made the need to address the problems all the more urgent, with regional rugby in Wales and club rugby in England at crisis point, which has increased the likelihood of the Six Nations ending up on pay TV, as a means of bringing new money into the sport.
There is no ‘quick fix’ to the problems, but in Wales, rugby matches are attended by an ageing demographic, and TV viewing figures for the PRO14 are appallingly low. In England, the club game has been living beyond its means for a long time, and is now reaching crisis point.
The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud and the TuneIn app.
The Aftermath
The podcast was recorded on the afternoon of Wednesday 1 July. On the Tuesday evening, Geraint retweeted a comment from actor and activist Laurence Fox, which attracted little comment, but several hours after the podcast was recorded, it attracted the attention of Ben Jeffreys, CEO of Pontypool RFC. Jeffreys then published a tweet making it clear that Geraint was no longer welcome at their matches, despite having supported the club through thick and thin since childhood.
In his social media posts, Geraint has rightly pointed out that the Black Lives Matter UK movement has Marxist and anarchist objectives, including the ‘dismantling’ of capitalism and the ‘defunding’ of the police, and it has also expressed anti-Semitic sentiment.
Jeffreys received some support from the ‘woke mob’ on Twitter, but his actions were widely condemned in the ‘comments’ section of the Wales Online article, suggesting that out there in the ‘real world’, a very large number of people agree with Geraint’s stance and consider Jeffreys’s actions absurd.
Talk Podcasts prides itself on providing our listeners with a wide range of views and perspectives. We condemn racism and anti-Semitism and support the Kick It Out campaign against racism in football.
We also applaud the efforts of Geraint and our friend Jonny Gould, who in recent days have gone to great lengths to expose the toxic agenda of Black Lives Matter UK.
Episode 2: Jeremy Jacobs
In this edition, Marcus Stead talks to Jeremy Jacobs, a familiar voice to radio listeners in southern England, who has worked as a football reporter for Capital Gold Sportstime, BBC London and BBC Kent, as well as having read sports bulletins on a range of commercial radio stations.
Jeremy is also a widely-respected conference and events host. Sales is another of his passions, and he now can teaches others what works in today’s world and shares insights about the future of sales. His methods work and are constantly evolving. For more information about his work, visit: thesalesrainmaker.co.uk
In this wide-ranging discussion, Marcus and Jeremy look at the impact the coronavirus pandemic is having on the NHS and the economy, particularly within the M25.
They assess the effect it is having on small and medium-sized businesses, and ask whether enough is being done by the Government to help business owners and the self-employed.
Later on, they discuss the Football Association’s decision to suspend leagues at semi-professional level. Jeremy, a passionate Margate fan, is far from happy with the way the FA has handled the situation.
Towards the end of the podcast, the conversation turns to the way in which the pandemic has forced individuals and businesses to explore new ways of working, and they look into the ever-changing world of sales, and talk about how Jeremy is adapting to a rapidly-evolving environment.
Episode 1: Karen Harradine
In the first of an occasional series of long-form interviews, Marcus Stead meets writer Karen Harradine, where they discuss the issues raised in this article she wrote for the Conservative Woman website.
Karen calls for the creation of a Christian equivalent of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and explains that Christians are the most persecuted group in the world today, especially in the Middle East and parts of Africa.
A wide range of related subjects are debated during the hour-long interview, including the wilful decline of the United Kingdom’s Judaeo-Christian heritage, and the dangers of ‘identity politics’, narcissism, and fashionable virtue-signalling.
The discussion turns to the Orwellian control of language and how accusations of ‘hate speech’ are a serious threat to freedom of expression, and of how the brainwashing of innocent children on transgenderism is nothing more than child abuse which will have serious repercussions in years to come.
On Brexit, they discuss the difficulties Leave supporting students face on university campuses, and ask whether British universities are places for rigorous debate and an exchange of ideas, or whether they are indoctrinating young people.
In the latter part of the podcast, the discussion turns to the Israel, Palestine, antisemitism and whether Christian organisations are harming followers of their own faith by backing Palestinian militants and organisations with links to terror.
The discussion concludes with Karen’s thoughts on how to tackle Islamic extremism and the importance of creating a single, united British identity.
About Karen Harradine
Karen was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up in a traditional Jewish home. Her parents placed great emphasis on education and her father passed on his fascination with politics to her.
She obtained an undergraduate degree in Journalism, Classical Civilisations and Anthropology and an honours degree in Anthropology (a separate degree in South Africa) at Rhodes University, and a Masters degree in the same subject from the University of the Witwatersrand (more commonly known as WITS University). In 1998 she emigrated to the UK.
As an immigrant living in London, Karen worked in whichever job she could find, ranging from secretarial work to private tutoring. She married in 2006 and moved to Ipswich, Suffolk. In 2010 she decided to study again, and the following year she completed a course through the Woolf Institute at Cambridge University called ‘Jews, Christians and Muslims in Europe: Modern Challenges’.
Karen obtained a post-graduate diploma in Journalism from the University of Suffolk in 2015. Shortly afterwards, she and her husband moved to Singapore temporarily. Due to restrictions on my spousal visa she was not allowed to work. She had been following The Conservative Woman website for a number of years and so sent them an idea for a blog. The editors approved and she has been writing for them since March 2016.
Growing up under the apartheid regime has made Karen wary of big government, extremism of all forms and totalitarianism. She a life-long interest in politics, religion, spirituality antisemitism and Zionism.
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