A radio presenter has spent five years visiting places in the UK at random – literally – and uncovering fascinating, unexpected and moving stories.
Each episode of Polly Weston’s BBC Radio 4 series The Patch starts with a random postcode generator. An actual postcode lottery to decide where she must go.
She has no say in where she ends up, but once there it’s up to her to dig out compelling characters, secrets and stories.
“It’s always really scary, especially if you’ve made no contact at all and then you just walk into a place,” the producer and presenter says.
“There’s a moment where you get somewhere and you think, all right, I’m going to do this. It’s like jumping off the high board at the swimming pool.
“You go in and go, ‘Hi I’m Polly, I’m from the BBC and this is going to sound very odd, but I get given random postcodes and I’ve just been given this one. And so I’m here!
“And then they look at you and go, ‘Right… what do you want to know?’
“And you go, ‘I don’t know!'”
Private jets
These leaps into the unknown become journeys of discovery. It turns out there really are stories everywhere if you scratch beneath the surface. And the stories, like the locations, vary wildly.
So far, her destinations have ranged from the City of London to a remote slice of the Scottish Highlands and a mysterious RAF base in Norfolk.
For the first episode of the new series, which starts on Thursday, the postcode generator plucked out the address of the UK’s only dedicated airport for private jets – in Farnborough, Hampshire.
That led Weston to delve into the realm of private jet charter brokers. “It’s definitely taken me into a world that I knew absolutely nothing about. And it’s very interesting.”
