Yesterday's edition of The House I Grew Up in (Radio 4) showed the full potential of the programme's format. Some others haven't worked quite so well, because the relationship between the individual and house hasn't seemed especially rich. But with poet Jackie Kay going back to her parents' house in a Glasgow suburb there was no mistaking the ways in which it shaped the woman, and writer, she became.
It was a tender portrait of growing up in a family that was, said presenter Wendy Robbins, "the talk of the town". Kay's leftwing father would drive around town with "Vote Communist" slogans on his car, and he also had a numberplate that ended in the letters KGB. Kay spoke movingly about growing up as an adopted and black child in a white working-class neighbourhood - "Your daughter's awful tanned. Is she that colour every day?" her mother was once asked - but mostly the impression of her childhood abode was one of great energy, passion and laughter. "It's a very special house," she said of the architecturally ordinary 1950s home, "we had such fun in it."
