IAN McMILLAN

CITED BY THE RADIO TIMES AS THE 22ND MOST IMPORTANT FIGURE IN UK RADIO, IAN McMILLAN IS ONE OF THE NATION’S LEADING BROADCASTERS – THOUGH YOU MIGHT NOT ASSUME THAT ON FIRST ENCOUNTERING HIM. HE’S WARM, OPEN AND UNPRETENTIOUS; KEEN AND GENEROUS ENOUGH, IN FACT, TO ENSURE THERE’S A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD IN CONVERSATION, DESPITE HIS LIST OF UNPARALLELED ACHIEVEMENTS AS A BROADCASTER, WRITER AND (VIA A WONDERFULLY ENTERTAINING TWITTER ACCOUNT) CHAMPION AND CURATOR OF THE SPOKEN WORDS OF ‘ORDINARY FOLK’.
McMillan has written comedy for the radio and plays for the stage. He’s worked extensively for BBC Radio (1, 2, 3, 4 and Five Live), as well as for Yorkshire TV and BBC2. He’s been poet in residence for Barnsley Football Club and for Humberside Police. He’s had almost forty books published – including NEITHER NOWT NOR SUMMAT (SEARCHING FOR THE MEANING OF YORKSHIRE). In this new edition of The Mouthcast (recorded over a cuppa before a gig with his occasional musical partner Luke Carver Goss), modest McMillan reflects on the qualities of his home county, giving an insight into what it is that has kept him living a mere 500-yards from where he was born, despite his great success. We also discuss the nature of language as a living thing – and how writers such as Barry Hines (who used local dialects in an unselfconscious and non-patronising way) did so much to ‘break the doors down’ for what has come since…