Theoretically, asking Jeremy Paxman to report on the first two decades of Newsnight is a bit like getting Peter Mandelson to assess the first 1,000 days of Labour government. It was not a total surprise that, when Peter Snow on Newsnight at 20 (Saturday, 5.50pm, BBC2) asked Paxman to name his worst moment, our hero plumped for the conceptual folly of conducting a debate about the future of Germany against a huge firework party rather than the moment he asked Matthew Parris to name the "other" gay cabinet minister. This mortifying misjudgement was air-brushed out of Paxman's official history. Snow's low point, when he lied about having read all of an interminable Arthur Scargill speech, was, on the other hand, played in full.
Fortunately, Paxman is no Mandelson and Newsnight, which made this birthday gift to itself, is no Millbank. So, although the programme was a bit keen to quote those who thought it "an essential aid to living in a democracy", it also gave airplay to its critics. Michael Howard, who famously evaded the same question from Paxman 14 times, briefly floored him in a return bout. Paxman's inquisitorial gambits, he suggested, were designed to demolish a politician's case before it had even been made.
But the point Paxman made at the start was the one that mattered. While 20 years is nothing in the life of a newspaper, in television such longevity is a rare accolade. Newsnight arrived on air on 29 January 1980, after some embarrassingly brief flowerings by its predecessors on BBC1, 24 Hours, Midweek and Tonight - a magazine bubbling with stupid ideas such as comedy sketches and letters pages. When Tonight died, Newsnight was consigned to BBC2, where it could do less damage.
Newsnight at 20 did not, however, tax viewers by explaining the programme's original significance, namely that BBC News and BBC Current Affairs were being merged for the first time. The division hitherto had been between a plodding, right-of-centre, but definitive-sounding news service whose bulletins were read by actors and a team of troublesome but gifted film-makers and interviewers at Lime Grove. The internal resistance to merger was aided by the truculence of the studio union, the Association of Broadcasting Staff, who spent four months delaying Newsnight's debut, and pulled the plugs on it - and on that night's Panorama - on the day of its launch.
The ITN-defector Peter Snow, fresh from hair-follicle surgery, welcomed us "finally" to Newsnight on a Tuesday - and I still remember the disappointment. The so-called merger consisted of, on one side, a grizzled set of current-affairs veterans - Snow, John Tusa, Charles Wheeler and Peter Hobday - and then, from miles away "in the newsroom", Fran Morrison reading the news headlines. What happened to Morrison, whose looks the BBC's then head of current affairs admitted were a "major factor" in her selection, is a mystery, but her legacy lives on in a negative kind of way. The reason the 11pm headlines are now read uneasily by the main presenter is for fear of the so-called "Newsnight wife" syndrome.
The old news/current affairs schism is less relevant today. Newsnight is now made wholly within the news division, but it has its own reporters. With its budget cut by 50 per cent over the past ten years, the battle is now to send them on the road rather than rely on overworked news hacks exhausted from filing for News 24. Perhaps, in furtherance of this campaign, Saturday's documentary rightly paid tribute to the Newsnight reporters' tradition of bloody-minded individualism. While the departure of a Wheeler or a Snow always weakens the show, gradually one recognises that their spirit endures: Snow's wide-eyed zeal in Evan Davis, the economics correspondent; Vincent Hannah's wickedness in the wit of Mark Mardell, the political editor.
While the celebration mocked some of the show's past excesses, such as the soccer interview conducted in a studio dug-out, it would have been too much to expect it to touch on the structural weaknesses that still dog it. The Late Show's demise in the mid-1980s leaves it with a critical remit it meets with limited success (news programmes always trivialise the arts). Although the experiment of turning Friday's edition into a Jeremy Paxman Chat Show complete with studio audience, was abandoned after it laughed too loudly one night at Peter Mandelson, there remains a tendency to devote Friday editions to nebulous cultural debate. But the greatest organisational problem, invisible to English audiences, is the Scottish opt-out at 11pm, hated both by critics north of the border and Newsnight staff south of it. "Newsnicht" comes under review in April.
But overall, the flagship is unholed. I was critical of its revamp a year ago under Sian Kevill, but in the past months it has looked healthier than Channel 4 News, which has come up with some truly scrappy editions. Its crespucular new studio, while no work of art, has proved to be more flexible and intimate than I thought and the interaction between correspondents and presenters is becoming more collegiate. Only the junior presenter, Jeremy Vine, fails to look integrated. For his sake - "Newsnight wife" syndrome or not - the practice of having a second presenter on set, abandoned in 1987, should be reintroduced.
But my real fear lies in Greg Dyke's Parthian shot on the documentary that, as power drifts away from national governments, Newsnight must "widen" its range of interviewees. I would have thought that, as the new Labour project begins to falter, a renewed concentration on British politics is exactly what is needed. Interesting though it was to watch a recent attempt by Viacom's Sumner Redstone to flirt with Martha Kearney, Newsnight's first job is to get our own "great and good" on and, to coin a phrase, find out why they are lying to us.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
