Business is my business

Treating finance like sport is the secret of Adrian Chiles's cult BBC2 lunchtime show, he tells Clare Dwyer Hogg

Adrian Chiles finds it hard to grasp why Working Lunch, the lunchtime business show he presents on BBC2, is such a hit. "What is a programme like this doing in the middle of the day? Who are the audience? People off work sick? There is actually no rhyme or reason to it." But the show has generated a cult following.

Chiles has a theory about that. "I found from an early stage that there was a need for a translation service with business," he says. "You can put business into English if you talk about it like you talk about sport." Sport is his other love, as anyone who tunes in to his Saturday-morning show on Radio 5 Live, Chiles on Saturday, can attest. Ten years ago, neither subject looked a likely career for the young Brummie.

Chiles, 35, studied English at the University of London and admits that he had no interest in business. "When I read newspapers, I'd always read the sports section first, then go to the front and read all the way through until I got to the business pages. I wouldn't read them."

He had planned, after university, to go to Zagreb, his mother's home city, to teach English. But after breaking his leg in a football match, he was in plaster for six months, so he had to turn the job down and move back in with his parents. "At that time," he recalls, "I just sat around watching the Gulf War and Neighbours, the only two things that seemed to be on TV."

When the television-watching ended, Chiles's father persuaded him to do a journalism course. He ended up covering sports for a news agency; his copy often appeared in the News of the World. "Writing 400 words at a rugby match, while you're freezing to death, and phoning it in by the final whistle – that's the toughest journalism I've ever done," he says.

Just when he had secured a staff position on The Birmingham Post, his career changed direction. He did three weeks' work experience in London at the BBC's Business Breakfast, and never left. "I fell in love with the place. In the end, I didn't go to The Birmingham Post. I stayed as a low-paid researcher." That is where the strange marriage of sport and business took place.

After a stint of presenting business news for the World Service, he moved on to The Financial World Tonight on Radio 4. That was in October 1993. When 5 Live launched, in 1995, Chiles was given the job of presenting its early-morning business news. When his boss there put him forward for Working Lunch, everyone – not least Chiles – was surprised. "Everyone said he was mad," he recalls. "I would have said he was mad as well, but in the end they gave me the job."

That was almost nine years ago now, and Working Lunch – an unusual mix of business affairs for the professional and amateur – is still going strong. "The graph that shows people tuning in is an absolute dream," Chiles laughs. "Low all morning, until there is a big, satisfying peak at 12; and then, at 1pm, it goes straight back down again."

Up to 700,000 people watch the show, a sizeable achievement. But how does Chiles, a one-time business ignoramus, survive the questions from viewers about business and finance? "It's about having the confidence to say I don't understand something. Nine times out of 10, there's a very simple answer. And I have people there who help me and understand it a lot better."

The hardest decision is where to pitch the discussion. "If you explain a complex financial issue, you're being patronising to people who understand it; but if you don't explain it, you may be leaving people behind. In general, we err on the patronising side." The greatest satisfaction comes when people send in e-mails to say that their opinion on business or money has been changed. Chiles grins. "It's just a question of subverting the formula a bit."

He is an unlikely revolutionary. If it hadn't been for that broken leg more than a decade ago, business might still be a mystery to millions.