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nicholasgrimshaw Wanna feel old? I started the

The presenter of new podcast Beyond Today reflects on the death of laddish media culture

Few shows have changed the working culture of the BBC quite like Radio 1’s Breakfast Show, but it took Prince William to point it out before one presenter took stock of the past decade.

“The first thing he said to me was that he was such a fan and that he’d been listening to me for years,” Tina Daheley, a former Newsbeat host, told the Observer. “The second was: ‘I’m really pleased that some presenters now aren’t as mean to you now as other presenters’.”

Daheley is having the last laugh now. As the BBC prepares to launch Beyond Today – a daily podcast spinning off from Radio 4’s flagship current affairs programme – its new host is clear about how much has changed since her time as a news presenter on the Chris Moyles breakfast show.

“When I think about my audition with Chris Moyles … it was just, what, eight years ago? You just wouldn’t get away with it now. At the time, that was the culture: laddy, brash from the top down. He wasn’t politically correct and he had diehard fans. But that’s just how it was, and you got on with it. It was only later on you think, ‘Ooh. Hmm. That was, erm, interesting’.”

On air, Daheley was picked on for how she looked and became a running joke as a potential date for visiting pop stars. “There was an assumption based on the music I liked, so Chris would try to set me up with Tinie Tempah or another black guest,” she said.

She credits Nick Grimshaw, who succeeded Moyles as the frontman of the Breakfast Show in 2012 – not “producers, editors or managers” – for “normalising” Radio 1, doing away with hierarchy and “a culture where the star is untouchable”.

Having spent “10 years talking to one in four young people in Britain [while on Radio 1]”, Daheley is keen to drive the editorial behind Today’s new offer, which comes as the Guardian launches its own daily podcast, Today in Focus.

“Anyone who has been paying attention knows podcasts are hugely popular with under-35s, and if you’re serious about reaching that audience, it’s the logical thing to do,” she said. Broadcasters are still struggling to reach contemporary audiences because they simply do not reflect them. “For me, a big thing is class and social background. We’re supposed to be holding a mirror to society and be representing them, but when was the last time someone who didn’t go to public school or Oxbridge presented the Ten O’Clock News?”

Daheley, a Sikh, Punjabi, working-class British woman from a London council estate, has moved into TV after a decade on breakfast radio, presenting both the Six and Ten O’Clock Newsafter a spell as a jobbing host on Points of View, Crimewatch and BBC Breakfast. She landed a royal interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and covered their wedding.

“The BBC gets a lot out of me,” she said. “I should be thinking: ‘this is brilliant, I’ve got this whole area locked off, I tick all of those boxes in terms of strategy – young women, brown people, so-called C2DE demographics – but I wish there were more of me. I had to work twice as hard and be damn good at my job to develop my career. I was doing 19 jobs and working for months without a day off [to get noticed] but there should be more people who look like me.”

She marvels at how different things were when she started out. “Put it this way, when we did our final [Moyles Breakfast Show] and could invite friends and family, I wouldn’t have dreamed of inviting my 6ft 5in dad in a turban there. Maybe that was down to me, trying to play down my otherness, but it was about how you would be perceived. I used to think it was a compliment that people assumed I went to public school and would tell me I spoke so well. Argh! Go on, finish that sentence; you mean you speak so well for a brown person,” she said.

“I’m happy now, I’m comfortable as myself,” she said. A couple of years ago, she was asked by a producer to cut her hair to present the news in order to be taken seriously – and she did. But when, earlier this year, Daheley’s “off-putting, cascading hair” became the subject of a viewer complaint to the BBC and went viral as a tabloid story, she laughed it off.

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