Yesterday we had the last edition of From Our Home Correspondent, presented by Mishal Husain, a monthly half-hour of 'dispatches', not from BBC-appointed correspondents and stringers, but people who were presumably known to producer Simon Coates. The contributors were 'correspondents' in the sense that they had written something akin to a letter, and then read it out. It started in May 2016, and brought a decent range of new voices to the air. Sadly the programme title is probably is insufficiently appealing to 'youth' for the modern Radio 4.
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From our Home Correspondent was modelled on From Own Correspondent, or FOOC. It was not a new idea when it launched in 2016. It existed long before that but was called "In Britain Now" and was produced by the same department that produced FOOC. I know this becayse I was a producer there in 1976. I think this attempt failed because it was monthly rather than weekly, because it did not generally use BBC reporters and because it created no profile for itself. In Britain Now achieved several firsts, incluuing several early explanations of the emerging potential of the use of DNA in pathology, forensics and more. There simply wasn't room in news bulletins or even news magazine programmes for the kind of detail required. John Newell of the World Service did several In Brtain Now pieces in 1975 and 1976 that were, I think, the first in any major British news medium to point out the potential of the DNA discoveries
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