Radio 4
Ian's features and interviews have appeared on many Radio 4 programmes – Front Row, PM, Home Truths, Word of Mouth, All in the Mind, Woman's Hour. He was resident reporter on Radio 4's Afternoon Shift and has appeared alongside Ned Sherrin and Graham Norton as a reporter on Loose Ends.
The Observer
His documentaries mostly cover cultural quirks and scientific oddities. He has presented programmes about (among other things) – revenge, extreme breathing, the iconography of pineapples, neon signs, hothousing, the psychology of typefaces, manic depression, quantum physics, telephone numbers, whistling pygmies and the nature of nothingness.
He uses probing questions, witty asides, accessible scripts and imaginative soundscapes to create intelligent but entertaining radio.
Podcasts
Ian has produced television features for Channel 4 and presented arts reports for BBC television. He is also very much in demand as a presenter of podcasts, for organisations ranging from the Department for Culture to BAA.
The Observer
His approach to broadcasting is to devise situations and events which bring the story alive, rather than just to record interviews. When he was asked to make a feature about the decline of patience in modern Britain, he took a hidden microphone out onto the streets of London and recorded responses when he pushed in at the front of queues and knocked on phonebox windows to speed callers up. He even pretended to drop a contact lens on a zebra crossing and crawled around looking for it, causing a massive traffic snarl-up and many frayed tempers.
Political Moustaches
Ian's programmes often focus, close-up, on the minutiae of life and culture which are often overlooked. He has made features and programmes about: the political codes hidden in moustaches, archive recordings of flies, air kisses in Manhattan, people with ancient Greek names, hesitation noises such as 'um', books which remain unread in libraries, and the notoriously bad dress sense of entomologists.
Photograph on this page from BBC Ariel