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BBC Radio 5 Live visited our National Prison Radio studio at HMP Styal to train our prisoner-producers in how to deliver live commentary on major events, sharing insights and techniques from their own live broadcasting experience at 5 Live.
Radio 5 Live is BBC Radio’s home of breaking news and live sports coverage, bringing it’s audience major news stories and sports events as they happen.
Drawing on their extensive experience in live broadcasting, Lindsay, a Technical Studio Manager, and Izzy, a Broadcast Journalist, shared insights into the fast-paced world of live radio. They demonstrated key skills, showcased examples, and gave participants the exciting chance to try their hand at live commentary using real broadcast footage. That footage shared was the iconic clips of the Lionesses’ victory bus parade last July, celebrating their triumphant EURO 2025 win.
The women discussed the types of facts that might be included in live commentary and explored how to describe visual elements effectively.
National Prison Radio is entirely pre-recorded, so this workshop offered our prisoner-producers the opportunity to broaden their skills and gain insight into a completely different side of broadcasting.
Workshops like this help build a wider mix of skills – the sort that can open doors in radio and podcasting after release. We’ve seen more and more women from HMP Styal go on to paid roles in the audio industry in recent years. Most recently, Toni – who you can meet in our brand new blog:
As always, our team of women at HMP Styal fully embraced the challenge and threw themselves into the task with enthusiasm, creativity, and quite a bit of laughter.
The workshop was led by Abbey, our Director of Operations and Women’s Projects, who spearheads our work in women’s prisons. She shared how proud she was of the women for their hard work, focus, and willingness to step outside their comfort zones throughout the session.
The team at BBC 5 Live enjoyed the experience just as much and reflected positively on the workshop:
“It was an absolute joy to work with the women last week – every single one of them was brilliant and are really talented in what they do. I came away buzzing as well! They should be really proud of how they handled that task, it wasn’t the easiest but they were brilliant. It was great to be able to have a laugh with them all too.”
You can read more about our work with women housed at HMP Styal here: https://prison.radio/iwd/
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The Prison Radio Association is a registered charity. We work with women at HMPYOI Styal and men at HMP Brixton to create award-winning, rehabilitative radio, while supporting them to build confidence, skills and networks that can pave pathways into better futures beyond bars.
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