Land of her Father

The Glasgow-born broadcaster, writer and BBC Scotland anchorwoman is not taking the proverbial, rather she's doing what she does best, effortlessly juggling half a dozen projects, including helming the BBC's outside broadcast coverage of the Papal visit to Scotland, while signing off her latest book and researching various radio programmes.

Oh, and in between all that she presents Reporting Scotland every Thursday and Friday. With her other hand, so to speak, she's also preparing to deliver the fourth Magnusson Lecture at the Wigtown Book Festival, in memory of her late father, Magnus Magnusson, a task that both daunts and delights her.

OK, Superwoman, how do you do it? She snorts with derisive laughter. "I'm a freelance so it's either a feast or a famine; I just get on with it and muddle through."

Therefore, today she tells me she's on her way back home to Glasgow from London, where she has been attending a family funeral. She's about to interview Susan Boyle, but is making a detour "via the basement of an art shop where I went to see some pigment made from the urine of mango-eating cows for a Radio 4 programme, The Secret Science of Pee."

When I finally catch up with this eternally youthful-looking 54-year-old, she's soaking up the September sunshine on the veranda of the comfortable, sprawling farmhouse on the north-west fringes of Glasgow, which she shares with her husband, award-winning film director Norman Stone, with whom she has five children, whose ages range from 24 to 15. Only her youngest son – she has four boys and one daughter – is still at home.

Even on a balmy Saturday afternoon, Magnusson is still working: checking the proofs of her book, the subject matter of which will doubtless surprise some people since, despite her multi-faceted career as an author, investigative journalist, programme maker and newsreader, Magnusson is often seen as primarily a religious broadcaster, after becoming a Songs of Praise presenter in 1984.

This is far from the case since, in addition to making some hard-hitting, award-winning TV documentaries, about the crisis in care for the elderly and bullying, for instance, she's written some eight books, ranging from an acclaimed biography of Olympic athlete Eric Liddell, Flying Scotsman, to Dreaming of Iceland: The Lure of a Family Legend, a family history-cum-travel journal-cum-memoir-cum-detective story.

Which you could call her "Magnus opus" since it tells of a journey she made to Iceland with her father before his death in 2007 at the age of 77.

It's from this book – truly a voyage around her father and his beloved homeland – that Magnusson will quote in her Wigtown lecture, "Iceland: Cash, Ash and My Father", which she promises will be "a loving and sympathetic portrait of what Icelanders have been through over the last couple of years."

Wigtown, she points out, was her father's favourite book festival, therefore it's an enormous privilege to be delivering the 2010 lecture in his honour. "He was a wonderful lecturer himself," she recalls of Magnus, a much-loved broadcaster, writer and translator of sagacious sagas.

Some of his old speeches remain on Magnusson's laptop. "I still open them up regularly just to sort of bask in the way he expressed himself."

Her father was born in Iceland in 1929, but left at the age of eight months when his parents moved to Edinburgh, where his father was Iceland's consul. Magnus regarded himself as having come from a country built on words. He always called himself a stoical Viking at heart and never lost his passion for the country – a sparsely populated volcanic island south of the Arctic Circle, which is home to just 317,000 people – and its stories within stories within stories. He was a stickler for correct usage in either English, or mellifluous Icelandic, a notoriously tricky tongue, in which he was fluent. Sally is the eldest of the five children Magnus fathered with his wife – the legendary Scottish journalist Mamie Baird.

Sally spent the summer months in Iceland in 2008 brushing up her own Icelandic. "Yes, I went back to school – everyone else was about 20," she laughs. "It's such a difficult language but so beautiful." Magnus was so fastidious about grammar that when she journeyed around with him in 2000, while researching Dreaming in Iceland, "it was like hanging out with Dr Johnson".

She'll tell her Wigtown audience how some of his happiest times were spent poring over dictionaries and how he would insist on going through what she had written with a toothcomb to hunt down any syntactical infelicities or journalistic slang. "It's important to get it right. Always," was his mantra. After all, he'd spent a quarter of a century grilling Mastermind contestants for correct answers.

It is, says Magnusson, her most abiding grief that in losing the best, most loving and just occasionally most exasperating father a girl could have, she has also lost her intellectual mentor and her most rigorous critic.

In her lecture, she plans to tell how she has also lost her most direct link to Iceland – "the man who taught me to value that heritage and love that country, who could tell its stories and articulate its aspirations better than anyone, who understood its ways intimately (if not uncritically), who felt himself bound, soul-deep, to every inch of its earth and the sea that girds it."

She sighs: "Where are you now, Dad, when I need you?"

Magnusson has said or thought that just about every day since her father died. "But rarely more often or more urgently than during the financial crisis which engulfed Iceland in 2008, shattering the reputation he had done so much to nurture and leaving his country in a torment of self-inflicted agony."

"What," she wonders, "would he have thought of the fatal hubris of the cowboy Icelandic entrepreneurs whose debts stripped their country bare? The cosy clique of bankers and politicians who let it happen? The listing in this country by Her Majesty's Treasury of his country, in the select company of al-Qaeda, the Taleban, Burma, Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe, as an organsation with assets frozen by the British government?

"What would he have made of the 'pots and pans revolution', as it was called, that brought the government down in 2009? Or the sight of Icelanders queuing for charity food parcels? Or, indeed, the feisty picking-up of the broken pieces of national pride as Iceland has inched its way back towards the recovery of its old values?"

And then, she continues, on top of all that, there was the eruption of Eyjafjallajkull in April, grounding Europe's airlines for days, prompting one tipsy Scottish traveller to burst into a Sky News interview at Glasgow Airport with the immortal words "I hate Iceland."

The neatest joke going the rounds, she adds, wryly linked the Icesave debt owed to Britain with the prodigious quantities of volcanic dust being wafted this way instead: "'Hey,' the line ran, 'I thought we said, send cash'."

Her dad would have enjoyed that one, she believes, although she finds it interesting that in the three-and-a-half years since Magnus's death, Icelandic jokes have changed. "There's an edge to the jokes lately on both sides," she says.

She will, however, have some incisive things to say in her lecture about both cash and ash. She'll ask how on earth the economic crash happened, and explain why Scotland should care about this small nation created by aeons of explosive activity. But will Magnusson land herself in hot water as she examines Iceland's convulsive recent history? When she wrote a letter to a newspaper earlier this year, saying the UK had imposed "crippling" interest rates on the money owed after the near-collapse of the banking system, it was reported that she had infringed BBC guidelines prohibiting staff from becoming involved in political debate.

Her boss at BBC Scotland has already read her Wigtown speech. "He says he found it fascinating, learned a lot and that I am delivering it with his blessing."

Finally, though, she's more sad than she can say that her father hasn't been around to muse over Iceland's monumental story of the last couple of years – "surely a story to rival the most dramatic of its ancient sagas. But I think he would be just a little bit proud of the way his countrymen and women have in the end – through cash catastrophe and ash crisis – just got on with it, painfully but stoically working out their priorities and their values all over again as a nation."

• The Magnusson Lecture, "Iceland: Cash, Ash and My Father", with Sally Magnusson, is at the Wigtown Book Festival, 2 October.

• The Secret Science of Pee, Radio 4, 9pm, 5 October.

• Life of Pee: The Story of How Urine Got Everywhere, by Sally Magnusson (Aurum Press) is published on 21 October.