Three cheers for John Humphrys
about whom I know nothing beyond that he gave a me an interview at the old Talk Radio (briefly a radio station), encouraged me at one of the few industry do’s I could be persuaded to attend and spoke with unexpected candour to me at Radio 4, in the bowels of the BBC, long before its present convulsions. (see the owl in last week’s annalog – personal experience of him, myself as witness.)
Accurately quoted temperate and even appropriate criticism of the BBC (for whom he worked 30 years and more) from his latest book (2019) took him he writes “from hero to zero in the BBC.” And therein lies the problem – corporate defensiveness is his description. I call it bad management.
And of course Donald Trump
is going to pursue charges against the BBC: he is famously litigious, he has several actions outstanding in the US including against The Wall Street Journal. He can afford it, and he hopes it will keep the mind off Epstein, his involvement with whom in the US still has a way to run and fallout that can’t be estimated. What we used call “trouble at the mill.”
If it is a mark of appreciation to continue to be interested in somebody when they get it wrong, I’d think of Michelle Obama
(new book The Look, about dressing for every kind of eye, and why, and how.)
Having read her autobiography Becoming, I was agreeably surprised. But then she appeared for Kamala Harris’s ill fated campaign and for my money got it all wrong. She looked wrong, wearing black (very difficult on tv camera), too much jewellery, fake plaits and she had (as is common now) her speech on autocue. And it was wrong – too long, too much agreed hagiography – ill judged. I wanted to shout “Throw it away and speak!”
Those were the days …
But I like her and she carries with great grace being 6 feet tall, Afro-American, good looking, intelligent and successful. And it’s hard. Easier to criticize her arms than listen to what she is trying to do.
I think of Shabana Mahmood, the only front ranking Labour government appointee I have seen, unequivocally praised in print by political rivals.
She works, she’s bright, she’s trying to do something on which it is too easy to pour scorn – and be herself, a British born Asian (parents from the Pakistani side of Kashmir) making difficult decisions in public. She appears less in the press that a President’s consort so we haven’t got round to sniping about her sartorial taste yet but just wait till she makes a misstep – and you will hear all about her flat hairdo and the length of her skirt.
I don’t want to write about the BBC, I don’t know nearly enough but you can rely on JH’s experience of “you’re either on the bus” ie blanket endorsement “or off the bus” ie dare to have an independent thought and the doors close.
This is an illness of radio in general. One minute you are doing it to apparent praise and certainly appreciation and the next minute, you end the programme on Friday – and you’re gone -somewhere else, gardening, extended plastic surgery – gone.
But it is kind of shocking to see it, in measured tones, in print, years after the event – and I did wonder. Senior political reporter treated just like little me – till I could find another raft and scull to something else. Public life means you treasure your real friends and you learn to roll with the curious, the disapproving, the unfriendly. Reinvention may be just as profoundly considered but less talked about and quite different.
Would I consider another radio show? Yes, if I could work out the logistics of it, through fatigue to a quiet mind. But nobody is offering. I had a wonderful innings. Nothing lasts forever. There are second acts in public life but we only call them second acts because they involve the same progenitor: what is done is almost without exception very different. Like marriage – for better or worse.
Annalog 