NOT THE TOKEN WOMAN: My BBC Life 1975-1992

Fifty years ago, the Sex Discrimination Act became law promoting equality of opportunity for women in the workplace. It was also the year when the author became the one woman in a group of eight trainees on the BBC’s News Training Scheme. Journalists in BBC newsrooms were overwhelmingly male in 1975. Sexism was rife.
In a very personal narrative, she tells how she survived and even thrived, especially at Current Affairs in Lime Grove Studios. She also describes the challenge of being a working mother from the mid-1980s when it was still a rarity and developing her own less macho managerial style, when she became a news editor.

Fiona’s career is set against a backdrop of the political and social turmoil of the period and the rapid technological changes which swept away the old methods of TV news production. Her own career was directly impacted by the closure of Lime Grove, after years of hostility from Mrs Thatcher’s Government and the arrival of a new management regime under John Birt.

Fiona’s contemporary, Dorothy Byrne, describes this compelling and timely book as a ‘shocker’ as well as an ‘entertaining yarn’.