Replacing John Humphrys won't be an easy task
Last night The Daily Mail broke the story that John Humphrys will be leaving the Today programme. The BBC has now announced that he has “ told programme bosses he intends to leave in the autumn, but has not yet formally resigned”. He will apparently continue to present Mastermind, but judging by an emotional interview on The World at One on Wednesday, he won’t be getting up at 3 am any more.
It will be a huge loss to the BBC, but above all to the Today programme, Radio 4’s flagship morning news programme. Humphrys has been one of the presenters for over thirty years, since 1987. The programme’s editor, Sarah Sands, calls him “Gandalf”: old and omniscient. This will be the third major loss to the programme in recent years. First, Evan Davis, who left for Newsnight (and later PM ) in 2014. He was much younger and less experienced than Humphrys, but his knowledge of economics was a great loss to Today . Jim Naughtie, who was one of the main presenters from 1994 to 2015, left a year later. He is an experienced broadcaster with a broad cultural range, as much at home with literature and classical music as politics. And now Humphrys.
Humphrys is an excellent political interviewer, the best on the show, along with Nick Robinson. A real terrier. Perhaps his most devastating interview was not political. It was his demolition job on the short-lived Director-General, George Entwistle, in 2o12. Not many major public figures have lost their job as a result of a radio interview.
Now 75, his retirement is hardly surprising. The timing, though, could not be worse for the BBC. The Today programme is still reeling, not only from losing Evans and Naughtie, but from the appointment of Sarah Sands in 2017. She had no previous broadcasting experience and her arrival coincided with a sharp fall in ratings. It lost 800,000 listeners in her first year, from 7.66m a week during the second quarter of 2017 to 6.82m a week in April-June 2018. That first year was a time of vigorous political debate, here over Brexit and in the US over Trump. Ratings for Radio 4’s most popular news programme should surely have been rising, not falling.
Humphrys recently came under attack over the gender pay issue, which shook the BBC. In 2017, it was claimed that he earned between £600,000 and £649,999 as a BBC presenter (he has also presented Mastermind since 2003). In January last year he took a voluntary pay cut to £250-300,000, following the gender pay gap controversy. Why should a male presenter earn so much more than his female colleagues, critics demanded?
There has been more than an element of ageism in the attacks on Humphrys. He is one of the last great white male presenters of his era, along with Naughtie (now 67), David Dimbleby (80 when he retired as presenter of Question Time), Jonathan Dimbleby (75 this summer and still presenting Any Questions), Jeremy Paxman (65 when he left Newsnight three years ago) and Andrew Neil (70 this year and still going strong).
The problem, though, is how to replace Humphrys and, more important, how to replace this whole generation of superb TV and radio presenters. When Sarah Montague left Today last year she simply swapped places with Martha Kearney from The World at One. When Eddie Mair left PM, Evan Davis moved over from Newsnight, where he still hasn’t been properly replaced. Replacing Humphrys will be much harder. Replacing this whole generation of top presenters is almost inconceivable. This comes at a time when BBC News is not in great shape and when presenters might be thinking of following Eddie Mair and Chris Evans out of the BBC (and Jeremy Vine now combines a Channel 5 daytime show with presenting his programme on Radio 2) to earn more and receive less public scrutiny over their pay.
The call, of course, is for more women and non-white presenters. This may seem straightforward to critics of the old male dinosaurs. But Emma Barnett on Five Live and Sophy Ridge at Sky are the only new young star political presenters to have emerged in recent years. In 2013 a new study revealed that just 18 per cent of presenters aged over 50 were women. While there are a number of top women presenters elsewhere at the BBC (Jenni Murray, Jane Garvey, Sarah Montague, Emily Maitlis, Fiona Bruce, Kirsty Wark, Naga Munchetty and Victoria Derbyshire among them), they are already presenting leading programmes.
There is an obvious problem with this list. Only Naga Munchetty is not white. Other non-white women presenters who are not currently tied to a mainstream show include Zeinab Badawi, an excellent presenter at HARDtalk and before that at Channel 4 News , and Samira Ahmed, from Front Row and Newswatch , who has worked as a reporter both on Today and Newsnight . News presenters and reporters include the superb newsreader, Reeta Chakrabarti, Ritula Shah, from Radio 4’s The World Tonight, and the up-and-coming news reporter Leila Nathoo.
You can see the problem. Radio 4 currently has fourteen news presenters. Two are non-white and one, Mishal Husain, is already at the Today programme. Finding a new woman presenter to add to the Today team may be hard. Finding a much-needed non-white presenter at Today or indeed to replace one of the other BBC presenters soon to retire will not be so easy. The BBC Executive Committee (one non-white member out of 15) will have their work cut out for them.