It’s seven years since I stopped presenting the Today programme and started listening to Radio 3 instead. Or at least, that was the plan. On the first day it lasted for almost an hour. By the second day I’d given up on it. I suppose it was inevitable. You can’t spend 61 years as a news hack – more than half of it presenting the same programme – and then just erase it from your memory and start a new life.
What you can do in my own case – or, rather, can’t help doing – is mutate into a “new” listener. How to describe this “new” listener? I suppose if I were Today’s editor, the phrase “pain in the arse” might come to mind. Having been the one on the radio informing (and possibly sometimes annoying) the listeners for 33 years, I’m now the man shouting at his radio about how irritating the programme has become.
It’s not so much the really important stuff that gets the harrumphing going – the three main presenters remain as good as they come – it’s the stuff that challenges the meaning of IQ. In my new listener mode, IQ stands for “irritation quotient”, and it’s largely to do with the way the presenters communicate.
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A prime example would be Amol Rajan’s insistence on emphasising, without fail, the definite and indefinite articles in any given sentence. In his world, “A” bomb has exploded in “THE” palace of Westminster. My apologies to you, dear reader, if you’ve never spotted it, but if you hadn’t, I bet you will now.
You will most certainly have spotted the gratuitous gratitude expressed by host and guest to each other. Increasingly rare is the guest who doesn’t feel the need to curry favour with his interviewer. “Thank you SO much for inviting me on!” has become standard. To which the correct response should be: “On the contrary. Without someone to interview there’d be no programme.” Instead there’s a gushing contest between host and guest. Again, some presenters are more guilty than others.
And what are we meant to make of the presenters occasionally having a little chat with each other about the significance (or otherwise) of an interview one of them has just completed? As the discerning listener may have noticed, even some of the presenters appear to find this deeply uncomfortable. But not half as much as those of us who take the view that Today listeners are perfectly capable of reaching their own conclusions. That’s why they’re Today listeners.
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AndI mean … y’know … it’s become the most successful news programme in the history of radio broadcasting for a very good reason, y’know? What I do know is that you, discerning Guardian reader, may well feel your teeth grinding when the contributor or, God forbid, even the occasional presenter or correspondent will find it a real challenge to get through an interview without … “y’know …” probably followed by “I mean …”
Otiose? Almost always. Irritating? Profoundly. But would I really die on this hill? Possibly not. Then again … y’know?
And if the big bosses persist in cutting its budget so it sometimes has to use last night’s TV news report and becomes less “Today” and more “Yesterday” – then Radio 3, here I come!
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But it’s survived (more or less) the BBC cuts, so let’s hope. I mean regular listeners might struggle without it. Y’know … ?
PS Grammar pedant that I am, this is not the hill I will die on; it is the hill on which I will die.
