Janice Forsyth on a lifetime in arts broadcasting and why she's smiling after her Alzheimer's diagnosis

One of Scotland’s most beloved broadcasters, Janice Forsyth recently shared her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. She tells longtime friend Joyce McMillan she still has an awful lot to live for. Pictures: John Devlin

Janice Forsyth is perched on a sofa at the Glasgow office of The Big Light, the podcast company she co-founded five years ago with her friend and colleague Fiona White; and as ever, she is talking 19 to the dozen about her memories of the last 45 years of Scotland’s cultural life, and the role she has been able to play in it.

The Pacific Quay building where the office sits is itself something of an inspiration. Built in the 1890s as a pumping-station for Glasgow’s dry dock, in the 1980s – as the Four Winds Pavilion – it became one of the centrepieces of the Glasgow Garden Festival; and today, it makes an office space as cool and post-modern as Janice herself has always been, throughout her career. First, as a young and brilliant arts press officer in the early 1980s, then as a much-loved broadcaster and interviewer, mostly on BBC radio programmes ranging from her own Saturday morning Janice Forsyth Show – which ran from 1994 to 2012 – to the more recent Afternoon Show, and latterly as a successful podcast producer. Her favourite Big Light projects have included Trumped, the company’s acclaimed podcast about Donald Trump’s notorious Aberdeenshire golf course project; and Old School, a superb memoir by the late, great Citizens Theatre actress Ida Schuster, recorded when Ida was 101 years old.

“That really was a magical time to be around the arts in Glasgow,” she says, looking back to the early 1980s, when she and her then professional partner Alison Forsyth ran the press office for the early years of Mayfest, Glasgow’s much-missed international festival of popular theatre and music. “There was so much energy, so many terrific bands emerging, great things happening in the theatre at the Citizens and all across Glasgow; I was just so lucky – ‘privileged’ is the word I keep coming back to – to be part of it.”

Janice Forsyth with friend and The Big Light co-founder Fiona White, above and right (Picture: John Devlin)

Janice is here today, though, to talk not only about good times past, but also about the huge challenge she is facing in the present. Just two weeks ago – after more than a year away from work, dealing with an increasingly worrying and baffling range of symptoms – she issued a statement announcing that at the age of 65, she has had a firm diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s Disease; with all that that means for Janice, and for more than 50,000 other Alzheimer’s sufferers across Scotland.

“I think it was around 2022 that I first began to experience this deep anxiety, and to find some tasks, particularly navigation, extremely difficult,” says Janice, whose most obvious symptom is still a profound sense of physical disorientation, and difficulty in navigating without help, even from room to room. “We thought at first it might just be exhaustion, after a long, hard-working freelance life, or a reaction to the loss of our mum, Patricia, the previous year.

“Eventually, though, we had the firm diagnosis. It was a huge blow; but there was also a real sense of relief, in finally knowing what was going on, and the reason for it all. And as I said in my statement, there is this feeling now of finally being able to live in the moment, and enjoy the moment, more than ever before. I’ve always loved all of the music and film and theatre and art that I’ve experienced through my work, but I’ve also always been under the cosh of the deadlines, and the need to make a programme or an interview out of it.

“Now, though, I’m finding I can experience and enjoy these things purely for my own pleasure, which is lovely. I’m rediscovering my DVD sets – my Almodovar collection, among other things, and I’ve been listening to a lot of music – a kind of salve, I think, in this situation.

“And of course, I’ve been absolutely blown away by the reaction to my announcement – this huge outpouring of love and support, and lovely compliments about my work. When you’re freelance, and always busy getting on with the next thing, you never have time to sit around thinking, ‘well that was great, what I just did.’ So it’s lovely, to have all this appreciation; very gratifying, and very unexpected.”

The sheer scale of the reaction to Janice’s statement has been exceptional, with coverage across Scottish and UK media, and many moving comments about how much Janice’s voice and presence has meant to listeners and colleagues over the years. Louise Thornton of BBC Scotland wrote of her outstanding skill as a presenter on radio and television, her warmth, her relaxed interviewing style, and her peerless knowledge of arts, music, and culture in Scotland and beyond. The actor Gavin Mitchell – best known as Barman Boaby in Still Game, and a long-time friend and colleague – described her as “clever, curious, insightful, funny, enthusiastic, positive, supportive, determined, generous, warm and bolshie – a fantastic broadcaster and woman, always a joy”, and sent love and strength.

Ashley Storrie expressed deep gratitude for Janice’s role in offering her and her late mum Janey Godley a chance to do a “wee segment” on the radio, back in the early years of Janey’s performing career. “I’ve always tried to be supportive to women in the business,” says Janice. “C’mon the women; I’ve always been in favour of that.” And her fellow broadcaster on BBC Radio Scotland’s Afternoon Show, Nicola Meighan, added to the online chorus, describing Janice’s diagnosis as “heartbreaking”, but expressing huge appreciation for “an absolute legend – none more sharp, smart, funny, supportive, curious and lovely.”

The strength of the response, though – not only from friends and colleagues but from viewers and listeners all over Scotland and beyond – is only a measure of the huge success of Janice Forsyth’s long career in broadcasting and the arts, and of her special gift for building a relationship with the audience through sheer hard work, serious research and the powerful positive energy of her voice and presence.

Born in Glasgow in 1959, she grew up in super-respectable working-class Knightswood; her father was a television engineer, in the sense that he installed and repaired televisions, but there was no other hint of the careers in the media that awaited Janice and her brother, the sports journalist Roddy Forsyth.

“There were always loads of books in the house, though,” says Janice, “and although he left school at 15, my Dad was a very intelligent man, interested in everything.” After school, Janice headed to Glasgow University, where she graduated in 1982 with a degree in English Literature and drama. By that time, her interest and involvement in the arts was well established, carrying her to the Edinburgh Fringe, where she and a group of friends staged a show at the Annandale Street bus depot, 100 Uses Of A Dead Male. “We were just idiots in those days,” reflects Janice, “and I remember we arrived late for the show, with this huge queue of people waiting” – and then into a series of press and public relations roles with Glasgow arts companies.

“I started out at the Citizens’ Theatre,” says Janice, “in what what was really a bit of a golden age for the theatre, around the early Eighties – although I almost don’t like saying that, because I hope there’s another golden age coming now, with the theatre reopening later this year.

“I was doing a bit of PR, but also lots of other jobs around the place – printing out tickets on this funny wee machine they had, that kind of thing. And I do think that’s very important, to get that kind of early experience of every aspect of the business. It was a fabulous time – I particularly remember the Citizens’ production of A Waste Of Time, the Proust adaptation, and seeing a very young Gary Oldman step on stage for the first time, and realising this young geezer we’d all been hanging out with at the stage door or in the pub really was a terrific actor.”

Janice also worked at the Theatre Royal – where she met jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie – and at Mayfest, where the bright, funny, super-cool and efficient pass office team, based at Partick Burgh Hall, seemed like the very embodiment of the new Glasgow that was said to be emerging from the post-industrial ashes. And in the mid-Eighties, she became press officer for Tom Fleming’s Scottish Theatre Company, an early attempt at a Scottish national theatre which, in 1986, took Sir David Lindsay’s great Satire Of The Three Estates to an international theatre meeting in Warsaw, where it attracted the rhythmic slow-handclap ovation that is a Polish audience’s highest praise – although Janice recalls that it briefly sent Tom Fleming into a panic, as he rushed up crying “They hate us, Janice!”

By that time, though, Janice’s destiny as a broadcaster was beginning to call; and she pays full tribute to Radio Forth presenter and producer Colin Somerville, whom she describes as a vital mentor and supporter in her transition into broadcasting. Together, they hosted a Radio Forth show, Out To Lunch With Colin and Janice, which featured a dazzling range of interviewees; her first ever interview was with Ian Dury, who kindly pointed out that since this was radio, it might be a good idea to close the studio window, which was above a noisy street.

Janice began to work in TV, appearing in the late Eighties and Nineties on STV arts strands NB and Don’t Look Down, and working on a Channel 4 film programme that took her to the Cannes Film Festival and a whole range of thrilling star interviews; but it was the Saturday morning Janice Forsyth Show on BBC Radio Scotland that really established her as something of a national treasure, building up a huge and loyal listening public over 18 years of good music combined with brilliant interviews that helped reflect the fast-changing vitality of Scottish life in those years, as well as ranging far beyond Scotland.

“I think that is the thing I’m most proud of, in all the work I’ve done,” says Janice. “Building that online community, and that wonderful relationship with the audience. Radio is such an intimate medium, and people really feel they know you.” So much so that when when her ex-partner PJ Moore, of the band Blue Nile, first told his radio-loving mother about their relationship, she replied, “What, Janice Forsyth? Off the radio? I know her better than you do!”

So when the show was suddenly axed, in 2012 – for what Janice now frankly describes as “some idiotic reason” – it’s hardly surprising that there was a huge public outcry, led by figures as eminent as Sir Ian Rankin and the then deputy first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. Janice, though, maintained a diplomatic silence, and later re-emerged as the presenter of new weekday BBC Radio Scotland afternoon show Culture Cafe, which gradually morphed into today’s Afternoon Show. “I don’t know why arts-related shows are often so short lived, or seem to get the chop when they’re actually doing quite well,” says Janice, reflecting on the sometimes traumatic ups and downs off her freelance career. “I think it’s often to do with changes at the top, and people feeling they have to make their mark in some way, however daft.

“Overall, though, I do feel it’s been an incredible privilege to have done what I’ve done, met the amazing people I’ve met, and had a chance to interview them and get inside their heads.” And she launches into a series of funny and telling stories about her many star interviewees, from Billy Connolly and Alan Cumming to global superstars including Kris Kristofferson (whom she discovered living in Glasgow, and sending his kids to local schools), and the mighty David Bowie, who, she says, only wanted to talk about the genius of the artist Tracy Emin –“although I managed to divert him back, onto talking about himself.”

Despite the intensity of her long career, though, Janice is not a woman without personal hinterland. In 1999 she and PJ had a son, Jamie, now – to her vast pride – a theoretical physicist. And although she and PJ are no longer a couple, he is supporting her in her current crisis with infinite care and a wealth of shared memories, prompting her through the occasional moments when a name or a word escapes her, or when she loses her way in the middle of a sentence and looks lost; until some little reminder puts her back on track, and restores the full flow of her still wonderful wit and enthusiasm.

She has decided, with regret, to leave the world of live broadcasting behind, although with the support of her team of colleagues at The Big Light she hopes to continue to work as a producer and occasional broadcaster there. And she continues, with the sheer creative energy that has characterised her whole fascinating career, to work out her own ways of dealing with this new and strange phase of life; coming to terms with the shock of the diagnosis, and also maintaining the powerful sense of humour, and the wonderful laugh, that has always been part of her persona.

“I remember years ago,” she says, “I was doing a talk about the Saturday morning show for a group of people with dementia – I have Alzheimer’s, which is different, but they had dementia. My absolute instinct was to get them laughing; so I started to tell them a load of funny, ridiculous stories about what went on behind the scenes at the Saturday morning show, and they all began to laugh, and we ended up having a great time.

“So I think humour is key, in all this. And of course, I’m just overwhelmed by all the love and appreciation I’ve had, over the past few days. I didn’t expect that at all; and I just feel – well, I think been very lucky. Very lucky indeed.”