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Her Media Diary Episode 16: “Nobody knows that story unless you tell it” With Marverine Cole
17 Plays1 year ago
Marverine Cole is a multi-award-winning broadcaster and journalist with over 30 years of experience working as a reporter and news anchor for the UK’s leading media stations including the BBC
She has produced several radio documentaries, including Black Girls Don’t Cry which earned her ‘Journalist of the Year’ at the Mind Media Awards in 2019.
In this episode, Marverine shares her journey up the media ladder as a black woman in a white-dominated UK society where a person’s skin colour plays a vital role in what they can achieve.
She also shares how she has been able to deal with the rejections which took a toll on her for so long while maintaining an outward look that everything’s great.
Marverine’s story is that of resilience and of overcoming one’s limitations to undo stereotypes. It speaks to those who are experiencing different forms of discrimination as a result of their race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Subscribe to Her Media Diary now on your favourite podcasting platform https://linktr.ee/hermediadiary
Learn about African Women in Media https://africanwomeninmedia.com
List of organisations for support with your mental health
Africa Mental Health Research and Training Foundation
National Institute of Mental Health
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Transcript
Broadcasting Career Challenges
00:00:00
Speaker
It's a lot of people go, wow, but you've done so well. You've done central news and Midlands a day and WM and you've been presenting and then you went to Sky and you're anchoring at Sky and you've done all this stuff. Some of those roles have been really difficult in terms of people not wanting me to succeed and willfully putting obstacles in my way around that or making sure a couple of roles, making sure that I was pretty much hounded out.
00:00:22
Speaker
But unless you tell that story, nobody knows that. So the outward face is, everything's great, look, I'm doing this, woohoo, right? And the rejections that I've spoken about over the years, and they do take the toll on you, even when you do have deep self belief that it will always get rocked.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:47
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of Our Immediate Diary, a podcast that captures the lived experiences of African women working in media industries. I'm Dr. Yemisi Akimbopoula, your host. In this episode, I'm joined by Mavrin Koh, a multi-award winning journalist and broadcaster.
00:01:04
Speaker
So welcome. It's such a pleasure to have you on this podcast because you and I have known each other for so many years, but I don't think we've really had that moment where we sat down and really, you know, talk so deeply. So I'm really excited about this conversation.
Mavrin Koh's Accomplishments
00:01:20
Speaker
But before we get into it, I do want to give you your roses because you are a multi-award winning journalist and broadcaster from Brom, right? And your career spans over three decades in radio and television, right? And you and I have been colleagues for the past, well, we were colleagues for about five years when we were sharing the same office and when you had, you know, stepped into academia to inspire those young minds and stuff. So, and
00:01:50
Speaker
On top of all of that, as if that was not enough, you're an accredited beer. I cannot pronounce that word. So, I mean, the beer bit, I remember the first time I first heard about that and that kind of threw me off. So, you know, we're going to get into that, but tell me about your incredible journey,
Inspiration from Family and Role Models
00:02:09
Speaker
Mav.
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, so the journey, I suppose, kind of my love of media came about through my mum. You know, my mum loved watching television news, the local news in Birmingham, which was on, you know, 6, 6.30 every night. I think we mainly watched the ITV news then, which is funny because there's a full circle moment.
00:02:35
Speaker
Yeah, and she also used to get the daily local newspaper, which is called the Birmingham Mail should also should always have a subscription to that. So the Paperboy would push a copy of that through our door every night.
00:02:50
Speaker
and she would read that cover to cover and she'd hand it to me, you know, I was seven years old, I was a really good reader, I was really good at school and I would read the paper as well, really into news, whole family was, not just me, my two older brothers as well. And I think that ignited a passion, I always just wanted to know what was going on in the local area, what was going on in the rest of the world.
00:03:12
Speaker
And we would also, of course, watch the evening news. It was nine o'clock or 10 o'clock. And that's where I saw Moira Stewart, who was one of the kind of early days black female news readers on BBC One. Obviously, Barbara Blake Hannah was the first black female TV reporter back in the 60s. But for me, growing up
00:03:35
Speaker
you know, as a little girl in the 80s, 70s and 80s, it was Mora Stewart was my first point of reference, and then Sir Trevor McDonald, you know, seeing him out in war zones, and then seeing him actually read the news, right? So how to legend, Yemasi? And I have had the pleasure of meeting him a few times and chatting with him, and it's just a mind-blowing experience when you meet your heroes. I've never met more heroes, I've been crossing my fingers that I come one day, but they were
00:04:03
Speaker
were my inspirations to go, wow, they look like me, you know, same skin color. These are black people on TV. Whereas, you know, in the 70s, there were lots of black people in entertainment, you know, Lenny Henry. So Lenny Henry was a role model as an upcoming comedian. He won the top
00:04:25
Speaker
a variety show of the, of the decades, you know, of the seventies, something like Britain's Got Talent, but way back then it's new faces. He won that when he was 16. Yeah. He was from Dudley. So he was leading the charge in entertainment and, but in news.
00:04:43
Speaker
and an authoritative media more and Trevor were it so they were my inspiration and so I was a quite shy girl though so um but really good at schools I went through school um secondary school went straight into university and at 18 I had a sense that I did want to become a journalist I knew I wanted to become a journalist and I investigated it because I was a little researcher at that age where I was quite
Educational and Career Choices
00:05:10
Speaker
Quite inquisitive. Yeah. And I remember writing off information about the National Council for the Training of Journalists, NCTJ, isn't it, in the UK. They had a training program. You could train to work in newspapers and you would either work, I think, in London, you'd go to London or you'd go up north to Newcastle.
00:05:33
Speaker
And at that age, I was very much a home bird. I wanted to be at home with mom. I was a little bit scared of even going away from Birmingham to go to university. But the one thing that put me off newspapers was that we did read the Sunday papers then as well, and it was the News of the World and The Sunday Mirror.
00:05:55
Speaker
and I picked up on the language that was used around black and asian people and it was not favorable it was very derogatory and I was thinking do I want to work in a field in an arena where this is what they're like how they speak about us why do I want to put myself in that environment so I decided against it I didn't
00:06:21
Speaker
I didn't apply for any of those training courses. I just about got as far as I thought I could handle. And I went across to Leicester for university at De Montfort because it was in good distance for the coach to get home every weekend. I was just a little scaredy cat. I really was, honestly. It was like, I was packing my bag. I was going into lectures on the Friday with my back on my weekend bag packed.
00:06:48
Speaker
to be straight on that goat on the Friday, get to my mum's. And it wasn't just about going to take my washing to get done and to get the food, but it was just the warmth, you know, my mum at home and just being at home and feeling comforted.
Early Career and Media Pursuits
00:07:05
Speaker
you know, and in a place where you belonged kind of thing. So I needed that. But basically, sorry, going back to what I studied, I studied business studies, B.A. honors business studies, just a generic degree that had all sorts of different modules in it around HR, human resources. I think they called it personal management back then. In the 80s. It was personal management.
00:07:28
Speaker
marketing, a little bit of advertising, a little bit of computer studies. It was like a mishmash of everything and I thought, oh well that would give me a wide rounded education. So I did that, got a 2-1 and it wasn't until I left university that really, you know, that itch, that bug around working the media came back
00:07:53
Speaker
So I did lots of haphazard things through my twenties, all sorts of different jobs, won't bore you with them, but at the weekends,
00:08:02
Speaker
I would be working for radio stations or traffic and travel, bulletins. You know, like on radio too, there's Sally traffic. If anyone listens to radio too, there's Sally traffic through the day. There's Richie Anderson, my old mate from BBCWM. He does the traffic and travel through the mornings and Sally traffic takes over. I used to do those live traffic and travel bullets.
00:08:28
Speaker
early in the mornings and at weekends for the BBC local radio stations. And I just kind of hustled my way into those things. Tell me about that hustling your way into it, like what was the journey like?
Volunteering and Radio Beginnings
00:08:42
Speaker
Actually the journey was and I bought a magazine, I don't know whether it was, I don't know what it was, it might have been smash hits or something like that.
00:08:50
Speaker
And it explained like his journey, what he did. And he said he started out on radio. He did hospital radio. So there's me, like Bob goes, bing, I wanted this hospital radio in Birmingham. And there was at the Children's Hospital at the time. And there still is, I believe, called Radio Lollipop. So there's a network around the world of radio lollipops.
00:09:10
Speaker
and the station would broadcast music throughout the day for anyone who wanted to click in and listen, any patient who wanted to click in and listen, and they would play requests. So I applied to be a volunteer and it was really good for my social skills as well because as a volunteer, even though you might want to work on the radio station, your first job is
00:09:30
Speaker
You take a pen and paper around the wards and you visit sick children and you chat to them and just get to know them. You know, some of them are there long term stays with sometimes with terminal illnesses and you become their friend and you would go around and you would ask, do you want a request playing on the radio?
00:09:49
Speaker
So that's what I did for several months. And then you'd really get to know everybody. You'd get to know all the other volunteers. It was a great set of people. Stuart and Bev, I still know today. And then an opportunity came up, a show. So I said, oh, can I have a go at doing a show? It's got this little studio in a porter cabin, you know.
00:10:13
Speaker
So this was 1993, I think probably the year I graduated. I started with hospital radio.