Relevance is key to striking right balance for audiences

The challenge of the ‘specialist factual’ brief is just how specialist should you go? Too much and you can alienate the general audience, too little and you can sound banal and patronising.

The London season, which has just ended on Radio 4, did, in many ways, throw up a lot of the same challenges. How do you tell the story of the extraordinary transformation that London has undergone in the past 30 years, while still interesting the denizens of, say, Inverness or Plymouth, many of whom feel that the ‘Great Wen’ is already horribly over-covered by the media.

London: Another Country? was Radio 4’s exploration of contemporary London and the changing relationship the capital has with the rest of the country - a two-week season to coincide with the fifth anniversary of 7/7.

Migration, deregulation and cultural innovation have transformed London, but left it a mass of contradictions. It is home to 7.5 million people speaking 300 languages, but two thirds is covered in greenery or water. It is third in the global league table of billionaires, but also has the highest proportion of poverty anywhere in the country. The very diversity that helped it win the Olympics also enabled four suicide bombers, the very next day, to slip unnoticed into London’s public transport system and blow themselves up.

So how to sell this most Marmite of subjects to the Radio 4 audience?

Well, the first thing was the title. London: Another Country? contained the mischievous proposition that London might now be so different to the rest of the UK that it feels like a different nation, more in common with the rest of the world than the UK.

The next thing was to commission programmes that challenged any preconception that this was a season celebrating London. There’s More To Life Than London, presented by Stuart Cosgrove, looked at the corrosive effects of London-centricism - the extent to which London sucks the cultural and economic energy out of the rest of the UK.

In The Report, Mukul Devichand explored how life was for those left behind in the London revolution, namely the white working class - people equally marginalised in the media.

Finally, the challenge was to present compelling stories, tales that would grip people wherever they lived. In London Nights (every night over the two weeks), Andrea Levy featured the voices and stories of some of London’s most fascinating inhabitants, such as the Zimbabwean maize farmer with his 60 acres in Enfield; the woman on the tube witnessing the unexpected embrace between a tramp and a businessman on a crowded carriage; or the family living within a cemetery in Lewisham.

Getting the balance right for both those already open and receptive to the story you are trying to tell them and those disinterested - or worse, hostile - is not easy. As with all subjects, whether science, religion, politics or history, the trick is to be relevant.

And in this era of seasons, partnerships and big events, the other trick is not to overdo it - like Marmite, you have to spread it on ever so thinly if it is to taste good.

Mohit Bakaya is commissioning editor, specialist factual, Radio 4