Talk Back is BBC Radio Ulster's award winning daily political and current-affairs phone-in programme, currently presented by Wendy Austin. It was launched on 8 September 1986 and runs from Monday to Friday, from just after the midday news to 1:30pm (1pm on the Radio Foyle simulcast).
The programme's first presenter was Barry Cowan, who died in 2004, aged 56. Talk Back took the Silver Award in the 2006 Sony Radio Academy Awards for the News and Current Affairs programme of the year, and the programme marked its 20th anniversary on Friday 7 September 2006.
Barry Cowan was replaced as presenter in 1989 by David Dunseith -- affectionately known by some Northern Ireland politicians as "the great interrupter". Until March 2009, just after Saturday's midday news headlines, he also presented the Best of Talk Back which took a look back at the top stories covered by the Talk Back team that previous week. The Saturday edition only lasted one hour.
Talk Back has been described by The Guardian as "an alternative peace process", and by Stephen Coleman, Director of Studies at The Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, as "a public sounding board which reaches a larger listening audience than any other European phone in.
Famous quotes containing the words talk and/or radio:
“At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1966)
“There was a girl who was running the traffic desk, and there was a woman who was on the overnight for radio as a producer, and my desk assistant was a woman. So when the world came to an end, we took over.”
—Marya McLaughlin, U.S. television newswoman. As quoted in Women in Television News, ch. 3, by Judith S. Gelfman (1976)