SAD NEWS: Adrian Chiles breaks down in tears live on air over three ‘harrowing’ words
The radio journalist reflected on the one interview in over 30 years that left him sobbing.
Adrian Chiles has opened up about his chat with Katriona O’Sullivan (Image: Getty)
According to Adrian Chiles, in over 30 years of broadcasting, the radio presenter has only ever “sobbed” once on air, and it happened last week. Writing for The Guardian, Adrian recalled what happened when he met with psychology professor, Katriona O’Sullivan, to discuss her life story and award-winning memoir, Poor (2023).
A synopsis for the book reads: “Like young girls everywhere, Katriona O’Sullivan grew up bright, enthusiastic, curious. But she was also surrounded by abject poverty and chaos, and after she became pregnant and homeless at 15, what followed was five years of barely surviving. Yet today Katriona is an award-winning academic whose work explores barriers to education for girls like her.”
The radio presenter became emotional while discussing the academic’s impoverished childhood (Image: Getty)
Writing about their recent meeting on the radio, Chiles, who was born in Birmingham, revealed that he’d become particularly emotional while discussing O’Sullivan’s impoverished childhood in nearby Coventry. “As for the bit that had me choking up on live radio, it was talking about three words that jumped out of a sentence in her book describing her love, her need, for school dinners,” the journalist reflected.
“It’s not her reference to the food that got me – it’s how, almost as an aside, she refers to her classmates: ‘Other kids, the loved ones, they sometimes complained, but I didn’t give a s**t what was served. I’d have eaten anything.’ The loved ones. What it must be like to think that everyone but you is loved.”B
After reading Chiles’ latest article, O’Sullivan responded to his heartfelt admission in an Instagram post. “What a lovely thing to wake up to,” she began. “A lovely article about me and my story by the lovely Adrian Chiles @guardian. The end line got me. I know my story so well but I sometimes forget that I was not loved. And how I knew that from as early as I can remember. Not in the way other kids are loved.
“Maybe that is really what poverty is, it is the feeling that we are not loved because of being poor and hurt.”
