In an unashamedly candid conversation with Wendy Pilmer, she also spoke of her optimism about the future of The World Service; the importance of knowing your audience, and the pressure placed upon the BBC (and herself) in the wake of the Jimmy Savile Scandal.

In the week in which Donald Trump was inaugurated stateside, Helen began by questioning so-called fake news.  “News is a commodity,” she told an audience at the University of Sunderland.  “To some it doesn’t matter if it’s true — it may be your truth.  But impartiality is something absolutely founded in fact.”

Impartial reporting of news will be at the heart of her next move as she heads to America to begin a Harvard fellowship exploring the idea of whether “impartiality in news can survive in an age of anger?”

As former Director of BBC News — “a role not for the fainthearted” — Helen knows the importance of an impartial news service.  She was right at the epicentre of Newsnight’s handling of the Jimmy Savile Scandal and the alleged BBC cover-up that followed.  “My concern was… just because someone was dead it doesn’t mean to say you can anything about them, and although now we all think we knew about Jimmy Savile, the reality is almost nobody did.  A brilliant man from the NSPCC said “he groomed the nation”.”

“It really was the most extraordinary thing to be at the centre of the story… I had to leave my home as it was surrounded by the paparazzi, and that happened four times.  It was very sobering.

“I was determined to get up every morning and go to into work… I may have made mistakes, but I did not suppress the Journalism.”

Away from the scandals of The Hutton Enquiry and Savile, Helen Boaden looked at the lessons radio could learn from the successes of TV, and quoted Charlotte Moore’s plans for strong broadcast content on BBC 1.  “She’s very keen to remind people about the importance of BBC 1, because it’s still bloody big.  The last episode of Bake Off on the BBC got an astonishing number of people watching television… it’s not going to be Morecambe and Wise at Christmas, but these numbers are much bigger than you might imagine.”

She admitted to having some worries about the next generation of broadcasters.  “There’s not enough valuing of radio skills (and in particular radio production skills) due to the dominance of a television mindset.  Television journalism is a really valid and difficult thing to do, but the thing with sound and brevity and language means that great writing is vital, and I worry that the next generation aren’t coming through the newsroom with those kinds of radio skills.”

In a room full of students at the David Puttnam Media Centre, her parting advice to emerging talent was “Be practical and listen a lot.  Be clear in what you want, but be flexible.  Keep your expectations low and outpace them.”

Alex Whelan