– or ‘cues’ as we call them. Then I had my breakfast sitting at my desk – a bowl of uncooked porridge oats, banana and yoghurt – while I started to think of the questions I’d be asking my interviewees over the next three hours. So by the time I got into the studio, I had lots of questions written down just waiting to be asked.
In my dreams.
Look, I KNOW it made sense to do just that. I KNOW I should have done what most of my colleagues did, which was read the briefs that had been so painstakingly prepared by the producers the day before and had the structure of the interview written down with some questions just in case the brain went blank at a crucial moment. Something which, I promise you, happened more often than you might think. So why didn’t I do it? God knows. I always ended up finding another dozen things to do that seemed infinitely more important at the time but never were.
It meant that at some point in the programme I would realise that I hadn’t the first idea what vitally important subject it was that I was meant to be addressing with the rather anxious person who had just been brought into the studio. Every morning I promised myself I would be more disciplined in future and every morning I failed. I tried to justify my idiotic behaviour by telling myself that interviews are better if you have no questions written down. After all, we wanted our audience to feel they are listening to a spontaneous conversation rather than to some automaton reading from a list of prepared questions. But there was a balance to be struck and I invariably erred on the side of telling myself it would be alright on the night – even when there was a tiny warning light flashing in my brain telling me I might be about to make a fool of myself.
I remember one torrid morning when everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The radio car broke down en route to the interviewee. The person who was meant to be operating the studio for the guest in some remote local radio station had a ropy alarm clock that had failed to go off so he never turned up. The politician who was meant to be coming into Broadcasting House had changed his mind at the last minute. The stand-by reports prepared for just such an emergency had all been used. We were on our last tape. About the only things that didn’t go wrong were the microphones in the studio, but that wasn’t much consolation because at approximately fourteen minutes to nine we had no one left to interview.
And then, just as I was planning to fall off my chair clutching my chest, thus leaving it to the other presenter to deal with the crisis and being able to blame him if he failed, my producer shrieked into my headphones. There were approximately five seconds to go before the report we were broadcasting reached its end – just time enough for him to tell me: ‘We’ve got the leader of the Indian opposition on the line and—’
And that was all he had time to say because then my microphone was live and I was broadcasting to the nation. In theory. Instead I was left to ponder not only what the name of the Indian opposition leader on the other end of the line might be but what might have happened on the subcontinent to cause my colleagues in the newsroom to set him up for a live interview. In short, I had not the faintest idea who he was nor why I was interviewing him. In the milliseconds available I ran through the options short of staging that mock heart attack.
There were only two. I could play for time and say something like: ‘Good morning sir and many thanks for joining us. May I say what an honour it is that you have given up your valuable time to join us this morning on such an auspicious day for your great country …’
A fairly uncharacteristic approach to a politician on Today I grant you, but the strength of it was that if I said it sufficiently slowly it would give my producer a vital few seconds during which he might just possibly be able to tell me why the hell I was talking to whatever-his-name-was. The weakness of the plan was that maybe nothing auspicious had happened and the mystery guest in New Delhi would decide he was dealing with a raving lunatic in London and hang up.
So I went for the opposite approach, gambled that we tend to interview foreign opposition leaders only when they are out to make trouble for their country’s government, and tried this:
‘Many thanks for joining us … it seems the government is facing a pretty serious crisis eh …?’
And then I prayed. If there was no crisis I was toast. It was a fifty-fifty gamble and luck was with me.
‘Yes indeed …’ he began. And that was enough. The opposition politician who ducks the chance of taking a swipe at his government has yet to be born and he was away. The rest of the interview was child’s play.
That sort of thing happens all the time on Today. Scarcely a day goes by without a presenter having to go off-piste for one reason or another. It comes with the territory and, obviously, any live radio presenter who can’t think on their feet would be much better getting a rather less stressful job. Rudyard Kipling wrote a pretty good job spec for Today in the first verse of his poem ‘If’:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating …
I especially like the line about not dealing in lies – can’t imagine why it puts me in mind of certain politicians – but I’m not so sure about ‘being hated’ and ‘giving way to hating’. It raises the tricky question of how much presenters should worry about the way they are perceived by the listener and takes me back to my search for a ‘radio personality’. Presumably if you are a so-called ‘shock jock’ anchorman of the sort they seem to specialise in on the other side of the Atlantic, being hated by a large chunk of your audience is an essential qualification. Perhaps not so much for a Today presenter. But is the opposite true in the more civilised world of Radio 4? Is it important to be liked by the listener? I’ve never been quite sure about that. I like to think that so long as you’re doing your job reasonably competently you will be tolerated. Well … up to a point. Sometimes you get just a tiny hint that not everyone loves you. I got more than a hint from the broadcasting critic on the Observer one Sunday morning. He wrote that if he ever found himself sitting next to me at a dinner party he would probably drive a fork through my hand.
So I turned to some fan mail to cheer myself up and there was this:
Dear John,
Some people ask me what I live for. Well I tell them that I live for the day when Mother Nature finally takes the old codger that you are out and releases the rest of us of suffering your miserable existence. For the sake of humanity, may you rest in peace, and the sooner the better. When you are finally dead heaven will descend on earth and disease, starvation, inequality and suffering will all be things of the past and there will be much merriment and rejoicing in every corner of the globe.
Thank you
It’s the polite ‘Thank you’ at the end of that letter that I cling on to. And I suppose it’s nice that someone out there thinks I have it in my power to make the world a better place – albeit by dying.
The overriding priority of BBC news is to deliver information and try to analyse what it means – but there’s no point in doing a brilliant interview if nobody is listening. Getting the balance right is never easy compared with, say, a Radio 2 show where entertainment is what matters. Someone like Terry Wogan knew exactly what buttons to press. He presented himself as a loveable old Irishman with an endless
