Student Radio Association

Following the success of broadcaster Louis Theroux’s BBC documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church (dubbed the most hated family in America), I decided to try and make contact with their ring leader Shirley Phelps-Roper to try and arrange an interview.

The Westboro Baptist Church are (in)famous for their hardline policy on homosexuality, and they have recently received international media exposure for picketing the funerals of US service men, who had died in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, where they hold “GOD HATES FAGS” banners.

Although I knew the interview was potentially controversial and even offensive to certain listeners, the station gave me full backing to pursue the project, which we hoped would be interesting and entertaining.

After a few tentative emails back and forth Shirley Phelps-Roper grew more receptive to the idea and we were finally able to arrange a date to speak to her by telephone. We were fortunate enough that she agreed to speak to us on the same day as the US presidential elections, which would add another element to the interview.

And so, with the time difference scheduled, my producer and I sat in a deserted studio, at one in the morning and recorded the hour long interview.

We opened the questioning by talking about the elections in which Shirley began spouting incendiary soundbytes from the outset (“God Hates Obama” for example). We then moved on to the painstakingly researched questions. There are hours of footage on the internet which I attempted to dissect and the Westboro Baptist Church’s personal website is full of hateful propaganda and so as a result I felt very prepared for the longest interview I had ever recorded.

As it happens, I needn’t have been so prepared as Shirley repeatedly reacted very angrily and aggressively to my questions about her church and as such she spoke revealingly at length, which was obviously great for the interview but meant I had to remove some of my less pertinent questions.

In terms of production and presentation, the interview was broken into two parts firstly the 10 minute section about the elections was played the following day on RaW’s election coverage news special. The remaining 50 minutes were then severely edited as we tried to get the final product down to 25 minutes. This we achieved by removing other less integral questions, and so we were finally able to broadcast a week later on RaW’s flagship speech show “The Speakeasy” where the 25 minute version was played uninterrupted and the subjects were then debated at length by invited guests (a member of the Christian Union and a member of Warwick Atheists).

The interview was my first serious piece of political journalism and inspired me to do much more during my time at Warwick University radio.