R4? I turn it off, says Justin Webb

BBC presenter Justin Webb has revealed he refuses to listen to Radio 4 – despite the fact ‘it pays my bills’.

The Today programme host said he prefers ‘silence’ to the BBC’s main station, which broadcasts his flagship morning news show. Equally embarrassingly for the BBC, he dismissed Radio 4 as ‘informative [background] noise’.

He told Craig Oliver on the Desperately Seeking Wisdom podcast: ‘I am more at home with silence than I am with even informative noise.’ Webb, 61, whose memoirs are being serialised in The Mail on Sunday, learned aged eight his father was BBC news presenter Peter Woods, a married man who had an affair with Webb’s mother.