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WHEN DIGGING FOR ANSWERS IS SIMPLY A MATTER OF STYLE

JOHN HUMPHREYS: Can provoke a heated response

Sunday May 4,2008

By Jimmy Young

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STRANGE though it may seem for a long-time radio broadcaster, I have never been a devoted wireless listener.

So I was not best placed to help a good friend who phoned me the other day in a state of high dudgeon.

The reason for his indignation was that he had heard the highly respected presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme, John Humphrys, savage another victim. (The unfortunate interviewee, he told me, was David Cameron.)

What, he wondered, did I make of this type of interviewing technique?

I made a point of not commenting on other broadcasters during my 53 years of broadcasting and I’m not about to start now.

However, that doesn’t mean that I have no opinion about interviewing styles. Basically my view is that it’s very much a case of horses for courses.

I could ask the sort of questions that gave programme guests enough time, and rope, with which to hang themselves.

John Humphrys is certainly an extremely robust interviewer and I can well understand that some listeners would consider him rude.

Much also depends on the time available for the interview. Most broadcasters, especially on television, are allotted a very limited time in which to conduct an interview.

On my two-hour radio programme I had few such restraints. This allowed me to adopt a more relaxed approach and meant that, in conversational rather than in interview mode, I could ask the sort of questions that gave programme guests enough time, and rope, with which to hang themselves.

The coverage on radio and television news and in newspapers that often followed proved that it worked.

That doesn’t mean that I never had a John Humphrys moment. After an important interview in my final year on Radio 2, I received a message from my Controller that read, “May I send my congratulations to you on an excellent interview. You were at your most rumbustious. Well done.” Controllers hire and fire, so if rumbustiousness is what is required then rumbustiousness is what you supply.

There’s no single correct style of interviewing, it’s simply a matter of which approach best suits the interviewer. And in getting my friend, the Today programme listener, so heated that he hurried to telephone me, I would say
Mr Humphrys hit his target dead centre.

I’m going to be slightly self-indulgent today and wish my Auntie Ev a very happy birthday. (Formally Evelyn, she is known affectionately as Ev.)

You may wonder why Auntie Ev is so special. Well, for a start she’s getting on a bit. She’s 10 years older than the Sunday Express. She’s outlived Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII and George VI, and she’s still going strong 56 years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

She’s a delightful lady – lively, animated, charming and bright as a button. She still lives in the Forest of Dean in my native Gloucestershire. She will be 100 years old on Thursday and I, and all the family, wish her the most wonderfully happy birthday.

E-mail Jimmy at jimmy.young@express.co.uk