Radio should engage with the breadth of opinion in our national newspapers
The Archive Hour: The Editors Radio 4
In curiously muted fashion, Today has celebrated its 50th birthday. We were born in the same year and I have a long, jealous memory of the programme and the changes it has been through. I wouldn't want Eileen Fowler's daily exercises back, of course, nor Fred Streeter's Saturday gardening tips, but I do miss the full-blooded review of the papers that used to be read at both 7.40am and 8.40am.
These days the final summary is barely two minutes long, and it is divvied up between the presenters of the day, who are free to interject even more of their own opinion. It used to be read by a newsreader. To innovate in this way seems a downgrading of the item, though I am told the change was actually made because they get more words that way, newsreaders going at a stately three words a second.
The summary is important because, for all its excellence, BBC News, as it is now so heavily branded, is a monolith with an agenda that varies little across its outlets. Under the mass sacking initiative by Mark Thompson, the director general, it will become even more uniform. Discussing the front pages lets in not only a different point of view, but a different mindset. At the moment, radio's news magazine programmes are happy to interview Fleet Street pundits as commentators, but they discuss the stories their own papers are pursuing less often if these are not also on the BBC news list. An exception would be 5 Live's regular chats with news editors about their next day's editions.
The BBC also seems to take for granted that listeners know what the tabloids are hollering about. The Daily Mail's campaign against supercasinos, for example, seems a clear-cut case of the fourth estate changing government policy, and it was well worth the discussion by Steve Hewlett on Inside Stories (20 November, 9am).
That newspapers remain important is acknowledged by Radio 4's season on the press, one of the themes that the controller, Mark Damazer, is imposing in his schedules. It has been far better than the embarrassing sex season a few months ago, and has managed to think laterally about its subject. In Tintin's Guide to Journalism (17 November, 10.30am), Mark Lawson considered the influence of the scarce-bearded reporter in enthusing children into entering the profession, and concluded that Tintin wasn't a real journalist at all. He was never seen filing a story and he not once got drunk.
The new season has, however, treated newspaper folk as an endangered species. The answer to Kim Fletcher's Can Newspapers Survive? (5-7 November, 11am) echoed back loudly: not with their present content and not in their current, printed form. But it wasn't pessimistic about non-broadcast journalism. Indeed, the Guardian's former editor Peter Preston said the opportunities were so exciting that he wished he were beginning his career all over again.
Preston, unfairly perhaps, wasn't among the great editors Andrew Neil exhumed for The Archive Hour (17 November, 8pm). His choice ran to Hugh Cudlipp, editor of the Mirror's Sunday Pictorial at the age of 24, but who got out at 60, "not because I was old and decrepit, but before I became like some of the others - marginally certifiable"; the Express's Arthur Christiansen, who played himself (very badly) in the film The Day the Earth Caught Fire; C P Scott, the besandalled, bearded editor of the Manchester Guardian; and Harry Evans, a recent predecessor of Neil's on the Sunday Times to whom he was extremely generous. The more recent giants were Larry Lamb, first editor of the Murdoch Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie his genius-lout successor, and Derek Jameson, who out-nippled them both on the Star. Lowering over the show was the only editor of genuinely gigantean proportions today: the Daily Mail's Paul Dacre, whom I'd forgotten had given a candid, scary interview to Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs.
The Archive Hour is always a good listen, but on the Saturday, as so often, it did not bother to tell us from when and from what programme the excerpts hailed. I recognised one voice, however, as that of George Scott, who used to run The Editors on Sunday nights. Long gone from television, it struck me as a programme and a title that Radio 4 could usefully revive weekly - and why not with Andrew Neil as chairman?
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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