Call You & Yours and the Volcanic Ash Cloud

A rare newspaper review for Call You and Yours this week. It was a rather different kind of programme - we tried to capture the problems caused, mainly in Scotland, by another of those volcano ash plumes which wafted over the UK from Iceland. All our preparations had been for a phone-in on Mary Portas' brief to breathe new life into the High Street but with the ash making its way south and a backlog of cancelled flights building up, we decided to throw out our plans and go for the moving story - literally in this case. Our previous "volcano special" in April 2010 won a Travel Press Award so we know the subject and BBC Scotland promised us help with coverage and we decided to go for it. Producer Sally Abrahams did a brilliant job of holding things together even though we got far fewer telephone calls than for a phone-in reflecting a national debate. As Elisabeth Mahoney points out in her review, Julian Worricker is the perfect anchor to tackle an emerging story where the devil is in the detail. So were we right to follow our journalistic instincts? Or would you have preferred the debate on the High Street? I'd be interested to hear listeners' views - and just to say we are intending to run the shop debate now on Tuesday June 7. Get you comments on that to us now.

Andrew Smith is the Editor of You and Yours and The Media Show on BBC Radio 4.

• Listen to the Call You & Yours Ash Cloud
• Read Elisabeth Mahone's Radio Review on guardian.co.uk

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Reddit
• - What's this?