John Humphrys leaves Radio 4’s Today programme: A colleague recalls his friend’s tenacity

John Humphrys

John Humphrys always sat on the right in the studio (Image: Getty)

SHORTLY after Radio 4 replaced the wartime-era Home Service in the late Sixties, its controller Tony Whitby declared: “In the realm of ideas, radio operates with uncluttered lucidity”, “in the realm of the imagination it soars where other media limp”. This country has a unique radio culture, Radio 4 is at the heart of it, and John Humphrys has been at the heart of Radio 4 so long he defines the brand. The Today programme celebrated its 60th anniversary a couple of years ago and, when John hangs up his headphones later this week aged 76 after interviewing former Prime Minister David Cameron, he’ll have been presenting it for more than half its lifetime. 

The programme was finally launched on October 28, 1957, as radio began to feel the pinch of competition from commercial television. 

When I was researching for the official Today book, which has just been published, I came across a BBC internal report from earlier that year identifying “the hours between 7am and 9am” as the slot when radio could best resist television. 

Seven decades later, thanks in great part to John’s broadcasting, that remains the case with some seven million weekly listeners and an unrivalled reach.

His style has been a perfect fit with the programme’s traditions; John has his passions – organic food and farming, grammatical orthodoxy – and his quirks can be alarming for new presenters.

But he has set standards by which other interviewers are judged. 

John Humphrys with Tony Blair

John Humphrys with Tony Blair as Alastair Campbell hovers in the background (Image: Jeff Overs/BBC News & Current Affairs via Getty )

The idea of a Today-like programme was first floated by the late journalist and broadcaster Robin Day, who was a BBC producer in the mid-1950s. 

He argued: “As television advances, sound radio will find more and more that early morning programmes command its biggest audiences”, and suggested a show called Morning Review which would aim for “an-up-to-date quality – overnight comment on things people may not have read about in their morning papers”. 

When I worked alongside him in the old Today studio in Television Centre he always sat in the right-hand chair – like a doubles tennis player who always plays the forehand court.

And he insisted on Bakelite headphones rather than the squishy – and therefore more comfortable – modern ones. 

I had arrived from television news reading where I had been in the habit of chucking scripts on to the studio floor at the end of each story as the most efficient means of managing the paper flow in the fast-moving and sometimes chaotic environment. 

I was very quickly instructed that this sort of scruffy behaviour was unacceptable in the Today world. 

But it is his interviewing that really marks him out. 

Sir Robin Day

Sir Robin Day had the idea for the Today programme (Image: Dmitri Kasterine/Radio Times/Getty)

Any presenter who has sat next to John has to be impressed by the way he launches into a lengthy interrogation of a senior politician without so much as a scrap of a note on what questions he plans to ask. 

When presenters arrive in the Today office at 4am they are given a pile of memos – a bit like lawyer’s briefs – to provide background on the planned interviews. 

John has a formidable ability to master a brief and then plan an interview in his head.

His freedom from a list of written questions holds the key to his skill as an interviewer.

He is famous for interrogating interviewees in a way that many listeners judge to be aggressive, interrupting them if he believes they are straying from the point and pursuing a line of questioning with terrier-like tenacity. 

But after watching him at close quarters over a decade I concluded that his real gift is not the way he frames his questions, it is the intensity with which he listens to the answers – nothing gets past him, and he is always prepared to take the interview down an unexpected alley. 

Because he is liberated from a written interview plan, John also picks up on mood and tone.

He had a long reporting career before he joined the Today team. 

He left his Cardiff grammar school to join the Penarth Times aged 15, worked his way up through local television and, famously, was one of the first reporters on the scene after the Aberfan disaster in 1966, when a colliery spoil tip slid down a hillside and buried the local school, killing 116 children and 28 villagers. 

As a BBC foreign correspondent, he was posted to the US and South Africa, and his reporting background showed whenever he went on the road for Today. 

John Humphrys

John Humphrys prepares for the Today show (Image: BBC)

He did not much like being moved out of his forehand seat in the studio, but when he did present from location he brought his stories alive in a way very few of us can do – as his trips to the Iraqi city of Basra in 2006 and 2008 vividly brought home. 

While editing the Today book, I asked current and former presenters to name their stand-out interviews; several cited John’s dramatic destruction of one of his own bosses, the BBC director-general George Entwistle, in 2012. 

The interview followed the broadcast of a Newsnight report which wrongly accused the Tory peer Lord McAlpine of being involved in abuse at children’s homes in North Wales. 

The mistake was revealed by a newspaper and, since it came soon after the row over the BBC’s mishandling of the allegations of abuse against Sir Jimmy Savile, it caused a sulphurous row about the corporation’s editorial procedures. 

George Entwistle made the mistake of sounding complacent when quizzed in the Today studio. John sounded more and more indignant as the interview went on.

It is still gripping listening.

Here is a flavour: 

Humphrys: “Did you see The Guardian yesterday morning? Did you read The Guardian’s front page yesterday morning?” 

Entwistle: “No, John, I was giving a speech yesterday morning early on…” 

Humphrys: “Aren’t some things rather more important than others? I mean, do you not have to have a different set of priorities?” 

Entwistle: “But you have to prepare for speeches you have to make, John.” 

Humphrys: “The Guardian yesterday carried a front-page story, which we now know was right, that cast doubt, serious doubt, on the BBC’s Newsnight programme – a flagship news programme for the BBC. You didn’t know that actually happened?” 

Entwistle: “No, I’m afraid I didn’t.” 

Jimmy Savile

Jimmy Savile scandal wrecked the career of the BBC Director-General (Image: BBC)

And so it continued – relentlessly – for nearly 10 minutes.

By the end of that day Entwistle had resigned, becoming the shortest-serving director-general in the BBC’s history. 

Yet despite John’s fearsome reputation, I always found him a generous on-air partner.

There is bound to be a bit of rivalry between presenters on a programme like Today, and everyone who has presented the show knows what it is like to watch your presenting partner eat up airtime you had hoped to have for your own big interview. 

John did not need to play games like that.

He dominated simply because he was so good. 

Today will, of course, continue to flourish, just as it has done following the departure of previous presenters like Brian Redhead – who died in harness – Sue MacGregor and James Naughtie. 

But all the programme’s long-standing stars have left their imprint on the show, and John’s is likely to be more enduring that most. 

Before writing this article I dropped John an email to say that I would be paying tribute to him as a “national treasure”.

He responded that the description made him sound like “Victoria’s commode”. 

A royal chamber pot he most certainly is not, but a treasure he most certainly is.

Today: A History Of Our World Through 60 Years Of Conversations & Controversies by Edward Stourton (Cassell Illustrated, £25). For free UK delivery, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310, or send a cheque/PO payable to Express Bookshop: Today Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or visit expressbookshop.co.uk 

source: express.co.uk