Fiona Susannah Grace "Fi" Glover is a British BBC journalist and presenter who currently presents The Listening Project for BBC Radio 4, Shared Experience for BBC Radio 4 and My Perfect Country for the BBC World Service. Until March 2011, she was the host of BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live, and before that presented BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House. She previously worked at BBC Radio 5 Live for 7 years. In 2014 she was the host of BBC One's reality history show, 24 Hours in the Past.
Career
In 1993, Glover began her BBC career as a filing clerk on various local radio stations including BBC Somerset Sound, Humberside, Northampton and GLR. She won a silver Sony Award for her GLR breakfast show presented with Gideon Coe. In 1996, she joined BBC Radio 5 Live, where she spent seven years as a key broadcaster in news and political coverage. She also presented The Travel Show on BBC Two from 1997 to 2000. In 2000, Glover travelled the world visiting notable radio stations, which resulted in the book Travels with my Radio: I am an Oil Tanker. The title reflected the hazards of live broadcasting with Dickie Arbiter's opening statement "I am an oil tanker, Dickie Arbiter is on fire in the Gulf." The radio stations documented in the book include a temporary BBC station for the Euro 2000football tournament, run from a café in Belgium, an English-language station in Geneva, a station run by Irish UN peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, and Montserrat Radio which broadcast throughout the 1996 Soufrière Hills volcano eruption. In 2004, Glover took over from Eddie Mair as host of Sunday morning news analysis programme Broadcasting House, but left after the birth of her son in January 2006. Following a period of maternity leave, she became the host of BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live from its inception in 2006 until 2011. In May 2008, Saturday Live won Best UK Speech Programme at the annual Sony Radio Academy Awards. In a press release of 17 March 2011, it was announced that Glover had decided to leave Saturday Live and that her replacement host would be Richard Coles. Her last programme was scheduled for 2 April 2011 but as she lost her voice owing to a throat infection on that day, her actual last programme was on 19 March 2011. Glover returned to Radio 4 with The Listening Project, a joint initiative by the British Library and BBC, which started on 29 March 2012, aiming "to capture the nation in conversation". She has also presented a series on Radio Four called Shared Experience, a programme which interviews people who have had similar – and frequently traumatic – experiences, such as being victims of bullying at school, coping with addiction, being held hostage or being forced to settle in a different country to one's native country. This series was broadcast in the autumn of 2015.. It started a new series in the late spring of 2016. In Autumn 2015, she launched My Perfect Country, on the BBC World Service, a current affairs show in partnership with the Institute of Global Prosperity at UCL. It became the first ever radio show to be broadcast from a sitting session of the UN, it opened the UN Ecosoc session of 2016 in New York City. On 29 March 2017, Glover, together with broadcaster Jane Garvey started a feminist weekly podcast series on BBC Radio 4, Fortunately: A frank look behind the scenes with broadcasters Jane Garvey and Fi Glover as guests from Radio, TV and podcasting share stories they probably shouldn’t. In April 2017, Glover began to present a Radio Four series called Glass Half Full, presenting debates between optimists and pessimists on various issues, such as health care or gender equality.
Personal life
Glover grew up in Hampshire, with her mother Priscilla and sister Isabella, whilst her father was in Hong Kong establishing a business. Her parents eventually separated. She attended St Swithun's School, an independent girls' school in Winchester. She studied classical civilisation and philosophy at the University of Kent from 1987 to 1990. Glover's first husband was Mark Sandell, who used to edit Nicky Campbell's show on BBC Five Live, but the marriage ended after his affair with her 5 Live colleague Victoria Derbyshire in 2004. Media reports at the time suggested that there was no love lost between the two women and that this was a factor in an on-air spat that occurred between Derbyshire and Campbell on 4 April 2003. The following day, Glover made a joke about the incident in live conversation with Campbell who asked her to retract it. Glover reportedly later left the station to go to New York to write a book. Glover married Rick Jones, a Google executive, in April 2014. They have two children, a son, Hector, born in January 2006, and a daughter, Honor, born in August 2008. In 2014 she was made a Fellow of the Radio Academy.
