IN A career spent hosting radio talk shows and music programmes, broadcaster Nihal Arthanayake singled out one life-affirming moment.
It was an email from a man who was about to take his own life, but who happened to listen on his car radio to an interview with singer-songwriter Sam Fender on Arthanayake’s daily show on BBC Radio 5 Live.
It said, “by following your gut and bringing to light the unspoken societal issues that plague our souls, you pulled me back from the brink of oblivion. Your words, and Sam’s music made me realise that I have agency.
“By thinking in new ways, I can see the alternatives. I can begin to see, once again, the life is not that to be endured, but to be enjoyed.”
Arthanayake had been talking about Fender’s song Dead Boys, which dealt with male suicide and that conversation changed the course of the man's life, who decided to go back home and seek help.
Since he began hosting his show on Radio 5 Live, Arthanayake has become known for his empathetic interviewing style. He is at ease chatting to both everyday people and celebrities.
His interview with a man who was a victim of human trafficking made for a particularly striking episode. Forced to work in a shop for years without pay and any day off, he was given money only to buy food from the shop he worked in. The moving episode turned out to be a shocking revelation for many listeners who could not believe that such abuses could be taking place under our noses.
"Empathy is the foundation of good communication. It's about understanding and sharing the feelings of another person," Arthanayake says in his book Let’s Talk: How to Have Better Conversations published last August.
Let’s Talk, considered a game-changer by many, is based on his decades-long experience talking to people. In this book, he observes what has happened to public and private discourse over recent years and how Brexit, lockdown, and social media have led to division, monologues, and a lack of in-person discussions.
It has Arthanayake’s conversations with authorities including internationally bestselling author Johann Hari, hostage negotiator John Sutherland, journalist and bestselling author Matthew Syed, professor of social interaction Elizabeth Stokoe, presenter Lorraine Kelly, and many more to find out why good conversation has eroded over time and how it can be fixed.
Arthanayake explores the evolution of dialogue, the science behind stimulating conversation, and its secrets and psychology.
“The whole reason I wanted to write this book was when I came to 5 Live, three months after the EU referendum, it seemed to me that the world was becoming increasingly more polarised and our inability to have good conversations was worrying me. A lot of listeners said I like your interviews because they’re conversations. I never understood or thought about what I was doing and then that made me think, if I can understand it, are they transferrable skills that other people can also learn?” Arthanayake said.
Arthanayake attributes his conversational skills to his mother. In a conversation with Michael Rosen for BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth, he recalls from his book, “my mother was the one who taught me to be really good at conversation because I witnessed her who was a nurse for over 30 years in the NHS, talk to anybody, and everybody.”
Drawing on childhood experiences, he said, “I was conscious of the experiences of others and wanted to try and understand them also, partially it was a survival instinct because i was a little brown boy in a predominantly white school, a state school in the 1980s. And that means there are two strands to this. One is that i was curious, but the other one was that in order to make alliances, that could be for protection. I had to learn to get to know people.”
In Let’s Talk, Arthanayake observes that conversations have become reductive and divisive in recent years.
“I think it's because it's reduced to monologuing thinking that you're dialoguing. I was having a conversation with my then 12-year-old daughter. In fact, she was about to turn 13 The following day, and we were in the car coming back from her kickboxing class. And we got talking and she said, my favourite phrase is, ‘Are you listening to understand? Or are you listening to reply?’ And I found that so profound, because that's the problem. That's the reductive nature of it.
“(In 18th century London) Conversation was at the heart of a social gathering, but also importantly, conversation with politeness and with people that you disagreed with, so that you refined your own beliefs, not based on sticking dogmatically to them, but by having them tested and changing them,” he told to Word of Mouth.
In another conversation with Georgina Godwin, Arthanayake emphasises that we can agree to disagree through the prism of politeness, which he thinks is particularly relevant today for the art of conversation.
Arthanayake is a regular on TV shows and is an ambassador for the British Asian Trust.
The BBC describes Arthanayake as someone who “has been living for music” since he started promoting rap shows in Essex while still doing his A levels.
He cut his teeth in the music industry as a rapper, and still swears allegiance to the hip hop scene. He has played with some of the best-known Asian groups in the 1990s.
Of Sri Lankan descent, he was the first south Asian to have his own show on Radio 1, hosting Asian Beats with Bobby Friction, in 2002. The show won a Sony Radio Award in 2003, achieving gold standard in the Specialist Music Category.
Arthanayake won another Sony Award for Best Speech Programme for his Asian Network show in 2010 and Interview of the Year at the 2019 BBC Radio and Music Awards. He was inducted into the Radio Academy’s Hall of Fame in his 40s.
Nihal has built a platform of 1.2 million listeners a week on BBC Radio 5 Live who regard him as one of the best people of his generation at having public conversations.
He is now among the most-paid Asian personalities on the BBC, earning between £170,000 and £175,000 during the 2019-20 period.
Tottenham Hotspur and music are his two lifelong passions. Arthanayke also performs at festivals across the UK.
