A Day Like Today: Memoirs. John Humphrys

been guilty of it – but not often. In my own defence I can think of only a tiny number of occasions when it’s happened and I regret it enormously – not least because it really does upset the audience. One of the biggest postbags I’ve ever had (in the days before email which shows you how long ago it happened) was for an interview in which I really did lose my temper. The audience ripped me apart afterwards and they were quite right to do so. If we invite people onto the programme we have to treat them in a civilised manner.

      JH: So we’ve established that you’re not some saintly figure who always occupies the moral high ground. I suppose that’s a concession of sorts. But what I’m accusing you of goes much wider than that. Of course you have a responsibility to the audience and to the interviewee but you also have a wider responsibility. Let me suggest that when people like you treat politicians with contempt you invite us, the listeners, to do the same. And that’s bad for the whole democratic process.

      JH: Once again, I agree with you. Not that we treat them with contempt, but that programmes like Today might contribute to the growing cynicism society has for politicians and the whole political process. But which would you prefer: a society in which politicians are regarded with awe and deference, or a society in which they are publicly held to account for their actions by people like me who question them when things go wrong or when we suspect they might be misleading us?

      JH: Not for me to say: I’m the one who’s asking the questions this time remember! But what I’m asking you to deal with is a rather different accusation. If people like you, who’ve never been elected to so much as a seat on the local parish council, don’t show any respect to the people the nation has elected to run the country … why should anyone else?

JH: But that’s not what I’m saying. Quite the opposite. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I have huge respect for the men and women who choose to go into politics. I hate the idea that for so many people politics has become a dirty word. Henry Kissinger once said ninety per cent of politicians give the other ten per cent a bad reputation. The wonderful American comedian Lily Tomlin put it like this: ‘Ninety-eight per cent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two per cent who get all the publicity. But then – we elected them.’ Yes, that’s funny, but it’s wrong. One of the greatest broadcasters of the last century, Edward R. Murrow, got closer to it when he chastised politicians who complained that broadcasters had turned politics into a circus. He said the circus was already there and all the broadcasters had done was show the people that not all the performers were well trained.

      JH: In other words you regard political interviewing as a branch of showbiz rather than your high-flown pretension to be serving democracy!

      JH: Look, I’m not going to pretend that we don’t want our listeners to keep listening and if that means we want to make the interviews entertaining as well as informative I’m not going to apologise for that. After all, the BBC’s founder Lord Reith said nearly a century ago that its purpose was to ‘inform, educate and entertain’. But you’ll note that he made ‘entertain’ the last in that list. Ask yourself: what’s the point of doing long, worthy and boring interviews if nobody is listening?

      JH: Ah … so now we get to the nub of it don’t we? It’s all about ratings!

      JH: Of course it’s not ‘all about ratings’ but obviously they matter …

      JH: … because the higher they are the more you can get away with charging the BBC a king’s ransom to present the programme!

      JH: Ah … I wondered how long it would take you to get onto this because—

      JH: I trust you’re not going to deny that you’ve been paid outrageous sums of money over the years for sitting in a comfy studio asking a few questions when somebody else has probably briefed you up to the eyeballs anyway?

JH: That’s not entirely fair is it? You know perfectly well I spent years as a reporter and foreign correspondent in some very dangerous parts of the world. And anyway are you really saying the amount a presenter gets paid shouldn’t be related to the size of his or her audience? That’s rubbish!

      JH: Ooh … touchy aren’t we when it comes to your own greed! Have you forgotten it’s the licence payer who foots the bill and the vast majority of them earn a tiny percentage of what you take home?

      JH: Yes, I am a bit touchy on this subject and that’s partly because for various reasons I got a bit of a bum rap when BBC salaries were first disclosed back in the summer of 2017. And anyway I volunteered several pay cuts as you well know …

      JH: Yes yes yes … we all know you’re a saint but I’m afraid we’ve run out of time. John Humphrys … thank you.

      JH: And thank you too. And now I’m going to tell my own story without all those impertinent questions …

PART 1

Yesterday and Today

1

       A childhood of smells

      By the time I joined Today in 1987 I had been a journalist of one sort or another for thirty years and I’d been exposed to pretty much everything our trade had to offer. I had been a magazine editor at the age of fourteen – though whether the (free) Trinity Youth Club Monthly Journal with its circulation reaching into the dozens properly qualifies as a magazine is, I’d be the first to admit, debatable. I’d had the most menial job a tiny local weekly newspaper could throw at a pimply fifteen-year-old – and that’s not just the bottom rung of the ladder: it’s subterranean.

      At the other end of the scale I had written the main comment column for the Sunday Times, the biggest-selling ‘quality’ newspaper in the land, for nearly five years. I’d had the glamour of reporting from all over the world as a BBC foreign correspondent – not that it seems very glamorous when you’re actually doing it. I’d had the even greater (perceived) glamour of being the newsreader on the BBC’s most prestigious television news programme.

      And I had reported on many of the biggest stories in the world: from wars to earthquakes to famines. I’d seen the president of the United States forced out of office and the ultimate collapse of apartheid. I’d seen the birth of new nations and the destruction of old ones. So on the face of it I had done it all. But, of course, none of it properly equipped me for the biggest challenge in broadcast journalism: the Today programme.

Presenting a live radio news programme for three hours a day, day in and day out, is bound to test any journalist’s basic skills, not to mention their stamina. You need to know enough about what’s going on in the world to write decent links and ask sensible questions. You need enough confidence to be able to deal with unexpected crises.

      You need the stamina to get up in the middle of the night and be at your best when people doing normal jobs are just finishing their breakfast and wondering what the day holds in store. And you need to be able to do all that with the minimum of preparation. Sometimes no preparation at all.

      But thirty-odd years of trying to do it tells me you need something else. You need to know who you are and what you can offer to a vast audience that’s better than – or at least different from – your many rivals. My problem when I started was that I had no idea what I was offering. I had done so many different things I wasn’t at all sure who or what I was.

      Was I a reporter?

      I’d like to think so. Reporting is, by a mile, the most important job in journalism. Without detached and honest reporting there is no news – just gossip. At the heart of any democracy is access to information. If people don’t know what is happening they cannot reach an informed decision. I like to think I did the job well enough. I had plenty of lucky breaks