A Lone Voice was a radio programme consisting of Glyn Worsnip’s autobiographical account of living with a serious medical condition.
By 1987, the BBC started receiving complaints from listeners who observed that Worsnip’s speech was not as fluent as it ought to be or it used to be.
[2] These speech difficulties which ultimately cost him his career were caused by a rare and progressive condition cerebellar ataxia.
A Lone Voice was the most engaging programme in Radio 4’s history with the BBC taking on extra staff to manage the volume of listeners’ letters.
[4] In subsequent years this ground-breaking format of a respected presenter speaking candidly on serious or terminal illness has been taken up by others including The World at One presenter Nick Clarke whose audio diary Fighting to Be Normal was broadcast in 2006 and journalist Steve Hewlett's conversations on the PM programme in 2016-17.