It’s a small world, populated primarily by LBC, Talk Radio, Times Radio and GB News (an audio simulcast of the TV channel). These are the radio equivalents of a rolling-news television channel, and are similarly hamstrung by the fact that there simply isn’t enough news to fill 24 hours in a day, especially if you don’t have the BBC’s budget. So, the format is essentially that of comment and discussion, and there’s little variation: you can either have a phone-in with a single host, or a pair of presenters who chat between themselves. In either case, they want your emails, texts, tweets and, in a recent development, WhatsApp voice messages.

The combined listenership of these four stations is, according to the latest Rajar figures, just under 5 million, two-thirds of which is accounted for by LBC. Together, they’re a little way behind BBC Radio 5 Live (on 5.25 million) and nowhere near Radio 4 (9.63 million). Still, 5 million is not to be sniffed at, and the sector is growing. At the time of the last general election, two of those stations — Times and GB News — didn’t exist.

So, what are they saying in this election? Not a great deal, as it happens. The problem is that the campaign isn’t what you’d call exciting. It’s hard to care when the winner is so certain, and when the cast is this dull. Keir Starmer is, as Willie Whitelaw said of Harold Wilson 50 years ago, “going around the country stirring up complacency”.

On Talk’s Sunday morning show, Peter Cardwell (“The Westminster Insider”) started off wanting to discuss the election — “Lots happening politically,” he said, inaccurately — before having to concede that most listeners were far more concerned with the story of a police car deliberately driving into a cow in Staines-upon-Thames. Come Monday afternoon, and Talk’s Jeremy Kyle was still on the cow. “I would move on,” he wailed, “but the calls are obsessed with it.” And on Tuesday morning, Mike Graham, also on Talk, returned to the theme. There was, he said, “a fascinating amount of interest”. The election, on the other hand, not so much.

In the absence of anything more substantial, most of the attention has been on opinion polls. Too much so, according to Andrew Neil on Times. “Another day, another poll,” added Matt Chorley, also on Times: “Should we ban opinion polls?”

And that’s a perfectly decent subject for a phone-in. As are, to take a couple of examples from recent days: “Should pop stars stay out of politics?” (GB News), and “Should we be giving pigeons contraceptives?” (Talk). What do you think? Call us now.

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It’s easy to mock, of course. Not so easy to fill a three-hour programme, when the previous three-hour programme, and the one before that, have also been raiding the same newspapers in search of stories. And definitely not easy when everyone is drawing on such a small pool of guests.

Because if you listen long enough, the same people come round and round again. This is obviously the case with the politicians sent out to do the media; if it’s a day for Wes Streeting to speak for Labour — as it so often seems to be — then you’ll hear him on every station. But it also applies to the pundits. On Monday morning, Lord Hayward (a Tory MP, until he lost his seat in 1992) talked about the likelihood of a low turnout with Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk. An hour or so later he was to be found chatting about Reform UK with Andrew Neil over on Times.

“You present a show on GB News,” Neil said to Tory MP Philip Davies, which isn’t actually true anymore, but does give a flavour of the media carousel. And, of course, Neil himself helped found GB News and was once a (very good) phone-in host on LBC. “I wonder whether we’re going to hear from a wider range of people,” reflected Times’s political editor Kate McCann. It seems unlikely.

The calls are mostly predictable as well. Julia Hartley-Brewer asked listeners to say what the election is all about, and the answer turns out to be immigration. As Bev Turner put it on GB News, asking for comments on yet another silly and self-indulgent stunt by Just Stop Oil: “I think I probably know what you’re going to say about this.”

The one episode that has really stirred the blood thus far was Rishi Sunak’s D-Day snafu, which provoked a torrent of calls, virtually all hostile. And then there’s been the late arrival of Nigel Farage, the one genuine star in contemporary British politics, and very much of this world: he’s had his own shows on LBC and GB News in the past. His intervention has given his sympathisers something to get their teeth into, and, even more, has been a godsend for those who see Brexit as the first step towards fascism.

This latter camp is primarily represented by James O’Brien, a former showbiz reporter on the Daily Express who now does the weekday morning show on LBC and is very important indeed. Not my words, Carol… “According to the Press Gazette, I’m the most influential journalist in the country,” he said on Monday. Then again, he added the next day: “I’ve known everything since 2016.” (He did admit that “It sounds a bit conceited”.)

O’Brien has a tendency to lump together all his hate figures, so that any mention of Farage or Boris Johnson — and there are very many such mentions — is likely to be accompanied by a cry of “Look at Trump”. At times, these word-association asides are decidedly odd. When Farage said that not all Reform candidates went to public school, O’Brien spluttered: “Oswald Mosley went to Winchester, the same school that Sunak went to.” (Full disclosure: O’Brien went to Ampleforth, the same school as David Stirling, founder of wannabe coup-makers Great Britain 75.) “This is a grown-up programme,” he insisted.

LBC argues that it doesn’t need to do impartiality within programmes; it can achieve balance across the schedule, with presenters representing different viewpoints. And the station does have its Right-wing stars. Early-evening presenter Iain Dale even tried to become the Conservative candidate for Tunbridge Wells, though it didn’t work out and he was soon back on air. The difference is that, unlike O’Brien, Dale has guests and callers from across the political spectrum; he’ll air his own views, but isn’t snitty about those who don’t share them.

There’s also Nick Ferrari, formerly of Talk and now hosting breakfast on LBC, the most accomplished broadcaster in this whole sector; on the Right but consistently courteous and mostly tolerant of other perspectives. He’s had hour-long phone-ins with both Starmer and Sunak, which were billed as election specials, though they’re nothing new. Ferrari started this format with Nick Clegg, back when the Lib Dem leader was deputy prime minister. Call Clegg was a regular feature for years, followed by Ask Boris and Phone Farage, before Call Keir debuted in 2020. On these shows, Ferrari puts himself on the side of the callers, amplifying and clarifying their points, while also keeping them on-subject.

It works quite well, and Starmer has got better at it over the years, in that he’s learnt how to deflect difficult questions. Asked about single-sex spaces, he says he’s all in favour of them, and that this doesn’t conflict with Labour’s manifesto commitment to “modernise, simplify, and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law” (the one introduced by the last Labour government). He doesn’t explain quite how the potential conflicts will be resolved, and instead veers off onto mixed-sex hospital wards, where the problem, he insists, is not trans but the Tories: “The government’s lost control of our hospitals.”

Sunak isn’t as good, but he does work better in this environment than elsewhere. Even the dumb questions are handled reasonably well. A caller denounced him for saying that he likes chocolate bars and sweets at a time when children’s dental health is so poor. Rather than snorting with derision at the idea that five-year-olds are looking to the prime minister as a role model, he stood by his vices: “I can’t apologise for eating Twixes or Haribos.”

The best angle of all has been to look back, rather than forward. There’s a whole talking-shop of recognisable MPs leaving Parliament, which gives these stations the opportunity of interviewees who are more relaxed and less concerned with toeing the party line. So Andrew Neil had the double-act of Michael Gove and Harriet Harman on to talk about the election, and the result was an intelligent and entertaining discussion, even if it felt like it came from an era that’s fast disappearing. Gove dismissed Reform as a “Potemkin party”, and said that the British electorate preferred “authoritative sensible administrators”.

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Better yet, Matt Chorley has been running an excellent series of Exit Interviews (theme music: “Go Now!” by the Moody Blues), in which he talks with departing MPs. On Monday it was Andrea Leadsom’s turn, giving one-word summaries of the prime ministers she has known: David Cameron (“charming”), Theresa May (“honourable”), Boris Johnson (“optimistic”), Liz Truss (“tough”), Rishi Sunak (“smart”). She still has some odd delusions — “A lot of people say to me, ‘We wish you’d become prime minister’” — but she was superbly vitriolic about the former Speaker, John Bercow, letting loose with end-of-term freedom. “It’s great to be saying this,” she exulted.

Two other adjacent stations should be mentioned. BBC Radio 5 Live (“The Voice of the UK”) continues to straddle, ever more awkwardly, sport and politics, as well as supplying showbiz gossip and chats about what was on telly last night. Its biggest star is Nicky Campbell, who is very good at phone-ins, though not always deployed very well. On Tuesday he was soliciting “Your questions for Adrian Ramsay” — that nice young man who’s the co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.

And then there’s Talk Sport, sister station of Talk Radio and Times Radio, which has a bigger listenership even than LBC. Its presenters have been instructed not to mention the election, a fact that Charlie Baker probably wasn’t supposed to mention live on air. They don’t seem to be too worried by this prohibition, since they have the Euros, the T20 World Cup, the US Open, Royal Ascot, Wimbledon and the Olympics to keep them busy, but it’s still a shame. What remains of political interest is the selection of news headlines that non-obsessives might notice. And that, again, means Farage. On the launch of the Reform manifesto, they opened their bulletin — without introduction — on a clip of his new catchphrase: “Guess who’s back?” There was no time for discussion of the contents.

What do we learn from these stations? Mostly that the election hasn’t caught alight. TV debates have lost their novelty; pledges haven’t been carved in stone; Sir Ed Davey’s habit of falling over and getting wet hasn’t sparked a new version of Cleggmania. For all the talk of this being a seismic moment in political history, bearing comparison with 1906, 1945, 1979 and 1997, the public aren’t much engaged. Times bills itself as “Your Election Station”, but Matt Chorley is probably closer, as he jokingly trails an upcoming report from a hairdressing salon in Rochdale: “We are the election station — and we take the election very seriously.”

“Hello CQ, hello CQ. This is Two Emma Toc, Two-ooo Emma Toc. Writtle calling… Well, I think we’re ready to begin now, and the first thing I’ve got to introduce is a record entitled — Why are records always entitled, why aren’t they just called something? So here it is, a record entitled…”

Four years earlier, Captain Peter Eckersley had been a wireless operator in the Royal Flying Corps. Now, as an engineer with the Marconi Wireless Telegram Company, he was launching Britain’s first weekly radio station, broadcasting under the call sign 2MT (“Two Emma Toc”). Eckersley was a joker, a character, a bit of a card. And every Tuesday, radio enthusiasts across south-eastern England would tune their sets to catch his latest offering: a quiz, perhaps, or a spoof weather forecast.

Eckersley and his pals put on Britain’s first ever radio play, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. They persuaded some of the capital’s most popular singers to trek out to Writtle and perform into the ether. On one memorable occasion the world-famous Danish-American baritone Lauritz Melchior even agreed to trudge across the fields to the Writtle army hut and sing to an audience of… hundreds? Thousands? Who knows?

What happened at Writtle a hundred years ago isn’t just a lovely little tale about the triumph of the amateur spirit. It’s the origin story of one of Britain’s most beloved and controversial institutions, the BBC, which celebrates its centenary this autumn. And since the BBC’s future has never been more contested, with Boris Johnson’s government publicly contemplating the end of the licence fee and a turn towards a subscription model, it’s worth looking back at how it all began.

To its defenders, the BBC represents the collective national good over selfish private interest. But is that really true? If you were feeling cynical, you might argue that it began as a commercial monopoly to promote the interests of the major electronics firms. Its champions celebrate it as modern history’s greatest vehicle for popular cultural uplift. But you could just as well see it as a massive exercise in selling radios.

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To the BBC’s fans that probably sounds like sacrilege, so let’s go back to that man in the hut. Peter Eckersley didn’t just happen to work for Marconi. The fact that he worked for the Marconi Company, one of the most innovative, ruthless and expansionist firms in the land, was absolutely crucial. Since the end of the First World War, Marconi’s engineers had wasted no opportunity to promote the latest wireless technology. It was Marconi, for example, that organised Britain’s first live radio broadcast on 15 June 1920, when the soprano Dame Nellie Melba performed at its Chelmsford factory. This was a landmark in broadcasting history, with people reportedly tuning in from as far away as the Champs-Elysées. These days, though, the BBC makes little of it. Why not? Alas, it was sponsored by the Daily Mail. Quelle horreur!

You can draw a line directly from Dame Nellie’s performance, via Eckersley’s hut, to the formation of the British Broadcasting Company on 18 October 1922, and the Marconi name is there at every turn. In one crucial memo, the firm’s publicity manager, Arthur Burrows, argued that they could make an awful lot of money through the “radiation” of entertainment to the public, rather than by merely selling hardware to the government. So perhaps, in some parallel universe, there’s a Britain in which the Marconi Company really did establish its own private radio service, and where the papers are currently badgering the Marconi streaming giant to cancel Jimmy Carr.

But as we know, things didn’t work out like that. In a world obsessed with the danger of political and cultural disorder, the men who ran the General Post Office were anxious to avoid the “chaos” of the United States, where hundreds of radio start-ups had blossomed in 1921 and 1922. What was more, state control had been legitimised by the experience of total war, covering everything from military conscription to pub opening times. Much better, they thought, to have a single authorised broadcaster, a state-approved consortium: a British Broadcasting Company.

So in the autumn of 1922 the six largest firms, led by Marconi, formed a monopoly, authorised by the General Post Office and funded by a 10-shilling radio licence fee. And everybody won. The BBC set out on the path that would lead to Fawlty Towers, I, Claudius, Blake’s 7 and Eldorado. Arthur Burrows became its first director of programmes. Eckersley became its first chief engineer. And Marconi sold thousands and thousands of radios.

Why isn’t this story better known? The BBC’s centenary website, barely mentions it at all. Its timeline begins in the autumn of 1922, erasing poor Dame Nellie and skipping the Writtle story entirely. The explanation is obvious. The Marconi story just doesn’t fit. The history of the BBC is supposed to be an object lesson in paternalistic liberalism and public service, but the Marconi story is all about private enterprise. Marconi meant novelty; Marconi meant disruption. But today’s BBC is the guardian of continuity, a reassuring comfort blanket in a world of change. How do Dame Nellie and the Daily Mail fit into that?

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It’s easy to see why the BBC has forgotten its entrepreneurial prehistory. By the time of its 20th birthday in 1942, it had transcended its buccaneering origins to become a genuinely national institution, the voice of a people standing together against the horrors of Nazism. For the next few decades, it was one of the chief pillars of the social democratic consensus, the broadcasting equivalent of the NHS.

This BBC didn’t just influence the national conversation; it was the national conversation. Famously, the very last show Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise made for the corporation, which went out on Christmas Day 1977, was watched by more than 20 million people. The supporting cast — Elton John, Michael Parkinson, Penelope Keith, Richard Briers, Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Frank Bough, James Hunt, Angela Rippon — was a Who’s Who of the British imagination, every name immediately recognisable. When you walked down the street the next day, almost half of the adults you met had seen it.

In his novel The Rotter’s Club (2001), Jonathan Coe uses that Morecambe and Wise Christmas special as a symbol of national consensus, the teenage hero realising that everybody he knows is watching it too. “It came to him,” writes Coe,

“that he was only one person, and his family was only one family, out of millions of people and millions of families throughout the country, all sitting in front of their television sets… all of them laughing at the same joke, and he felt an incredible sense of… oneness, that was the only word he could think of, a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter.”

There’s an underlying melancholy to that scene, though. By the time Coe wrote The Rotter’s Club, the BBC’s paternalistic monopoly was already under siege. The first blow came in 1955 with the launch of ITV, followed by the advent of Channel Four in 1982. British Satellite Broadcasting arrived in 1986, Sky three years later. We all know the rest: the internet, Amazon, Netflix, Disney. Or to put it another way, change — the kind of technological and cultural innovation previously embodied by the men in that Writtle hut.

It’s change, not Conservative hostility — and certainly not Nadine Dorries — that represents the real threat to the BBC’s survival. In the last few weeks its defenders on social media have circulated a wonderful advert from 1986, in which pub bore John Cleese curses the licence fee and wonders what the BBC “has ever given us for fifty-eight quid”. Up pops a host of famous faces — Sir Michael Hordern, Barry Norman, Alan Whicker, Sir Patrick Moore — to put him right.

It’s heart-warming, nostalgic stuff. But to anybody under the age of 30 it must be completely irrelevant. Most of those people have long since died, retired or been cancelled. They’re relics of a vanished age.

It’s telling, then, that when people try to defend the BBC, they typically point to Strictly Come Dancing and Doctor Who — two shows that, one way or another, could have been watched by Sir Winston Churchill in his dotage. Strictly’s current incarnation dates from 2004, but in its original form, as plain Come Dancing, it dates from 1949. As for Doctor Who, it dates from 1963 and is now attracting its lowest audience since the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. In a bid to revive its fortunes, the BBC have just persuaded its former writer Russell T. Davies, who ran the show more than a decade ago, to return to the helm. You can’t get much more backward-looking than that.

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I take no pleasure in pointing this out. For anybody like me, born in the Seventies or earlier, a world without the BBC seems unimaginable. I have merely to hear the opening bars of Grandstand, a staple of my Saturdays for decades, and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. But Grandstand has been dead for 15 years, rendered obsolete when the BBC’s commercial rivals snapped up all the sports rights. And although Match of the Day endures, it’s easy to imagine a future in which Amazon bags the Premiership highlights. How long before that jaunty theme music vanishes forever? Five years? Ten?

Against that background, talk of the current government’s “attack” on the BBC strikes me as fundamentally inconsequential. Even if Boris Johnson’s successor kneels in penance outside Broadcasting House and promises to preserve the licence fee till the end of time, the basic problem remains: the BBC was designed for radio and television sets, not for mobile phones and iPads. It’s a national institution in a globalised world, a product of the twentieth century struggling to stay afloat in the twenty-first.

A few weeks ago a YouGov poll found that only one in four people aged 18-30 watch the BBC every week. A third of them never watch it at all. No doubt some will graduate to the BBC’s output as they grow older — but surely not all of them. What about today’s primary-school children? Will the Marvel and Mandalorian addicts be watching Newsnight in the year 2040? Will they really still be clinging to Grandad’s comfort blanket?

To some readers, I know, this probably sounds like heresy, a premature obituary for a much-loved institution. But I do like the BBC. (I don’t “love” it, obviously, because I’ve worked for it, and nobody who’s been a victim of its taxi-booking system is ever going to love it.) And because I’m a nostalgic, backward-looking sort of person, I want it to survive. I adore In Our Time, I love The Apprentice (I know, ridiculous) and I still watch Doctor Who, albeit out of a joyless sense of duty.

Much of what the BBC does, it does brilliantly. I’ll be sorry, then, when it goes. But it will go, eventually. Or rather, it’ll probably fragment into its constituent parts, some of which will charge for subscriptions. No doubt it’ll be a gradual process, and many people will barely notice. On Twitter, the BBC’s champions will lament the death of a common national culture. But our common national culture has been fragmenting for decades, which is why Jonathan Coe lamented its passing more than 20 years ago.

Cultural moments come and go. Institutions are born and they die. In fact, everything dies; that’s how history works. The future belongs to the ambitious, the disruptive, the change-makers — people like the engineers in that hut. But these days, people like that don’t work for the BBC. They work for Amazon.

For the first time, O’Brien’s listenership has overtaken Ferrari’s. And for those of us who love phone-in programmes, it’s a symbolic moment in the evolution of the format.

I should acknowledge, incidentally, that it’s terribly unfair to bring up Sawyer’s joke. It dates back to 2006, when O’Brien was still struggling to make the transition from showbiz hack to grown-up broadcaster. In those days, you were as likely to find him interviewing Dick and Dom as Ken Clarke. And he wasn’t above a bit of old-fashioned union-bashing; during a 2007 tube strike, he suggested that Londoners retaliate by boycotting the leader of the RMT: “If Bob Crow turns up at your shop, pub, cafe or minicab firm, don’t serve him.” 

His biggest story came in 2009 when he joined in the tabloid baiting of Frank Lampard over his treatment of his ex-girlfriend, only to find the footballer, somewhat enraged, calling in. Lampard gave rather better than he got, though it is possible that he didn’t quite grasp the nature of the phone-in. “Sometimes you should think about things before you speak about them,” he said, which isn’t really how it works.

But O’Brien is more serious than that nowadays. Certainly that’s the view of his bosses. We know this because there’s a simple measure of how a radio station sees its presenters: the calibre of the person chosen to sit in for them when they’re away. In 2004, O’Brien’s cover on Easter Monday was James Hewitt, famous for having committed adultery with Princess Diana; fifteen years later, it was Labour MP Jess Phillips. Much more serious, you see.

The critical moment in his transformation came during the 2014 election campaign for the European Parliament, when he got a chance to interview Nigel Farage, a man he clearly loathed. The Ukip leader had recently remarked that he’d be concerned if a group of Romanian men moved in next door, and O’Brien demanded an explanation. What’s the difference between that situation and a group of German children moving in next door? he asked, and Farage was nonplussed. “You know what the difference is,” he replied, but O’Brien denied any such thing: “I honestly don’t.”

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He did know. Obviously. Everyone listening knew what Farage was nudging towards. A leader column in the Sun spelt it out: “This is racism, pure and simple: Romanians, he is suggesting, are criminals to be feared.” Indeed he was, and he might reasonably have expected the Sun to be onside, given some of its previous headlines: “Our crime wave is good news for Romania”, “Beasts from the East”, “Capital hit by 28,000 Romanian criminals”.

For the purposes of the interview, it didn’t really matter whether Romanian men were more likely to be criminals than were German children. The point was not to explore the issue, but simply to display open hostility to Farage, and maybe even trap him into saying something overtly racist.

The incident followed in the wake of a celebrated television encounter the previous year, when Eddie Mair (now the host of LBC’s drivetime show) said to Boris Johnson: “You’re a nasty bit of work, aren’t you?” And it was equally effective. Just as Johnson’s career wasn’t arrested by Mair’s rudeness, so Farage — despite claims in the Left-wing newspapers that he’d been “hamstrung”, “skewered”, “humiliated” by O’Brien — went on to lead Ukip to a stunning victory in the Euro-elections.

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Since then, O’Brien’s stock has continued to rise, largely because he’s very good at his job. He has a range of tones, from sympathy for callers with tales of suffering, through to patronising sarcasm for those who don’t agree with him. Most common is a shrugging, brow-furrowed resignation about the state of the nation. It’s the result, perhaps, of having been on the losing side of every national vote since his run-in with Frank Lampard, and because it’s not possible to sustain three hours of anger every day. “We are where we are” — that’s his world-weary catchphrase. Or alternatively, after he’s run through the charge-sheet yet again on how the country has let itself down: “And that’s why we are where we are.”

He reserves a good deal of his scorn for the “cap-doffing, forelock-tugging” types who aren’t as articulate as him. But he is at least aware of his own humble place in the pantheon of polite society: “When did you realise you were clever?” he fawningly asked the fox-killing, kimono-wearing celebrity tax-lawyer Jolyon Maugham. He often comes across as sanctimonious, superior and smug, of course, but that’s part of the schtick, integral to his appeal. Because while the tone of more-in-sorrow-than-anger piety may irritate some, it provides a self-righteous safety-blanket for others.

He is, in short, a master of the new media world, one in which opinion and tribal values count for more than a pursuit of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In the social-media age, he is one of the finest practitioners of Radio Twitter. Instead of it just being the callers who are opinionated, partisan and given to repetition — as always on a phone-in — the host now adopts the same approach.

And consequently he embodies many of the flaws found on social media.

His political analysis is broad-brush, to put it politely. He has told us so often that Boris Johnson is Britain’s Donald Trump, that the two have eventually blurred into one, and a diatribe against the former is invariably laced with references to the latter. Meanwhile, pretty much everything comes back to Brexit in the end, even ball-tampering in cricket.

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​​In common with many Twitter users, he likes to use hypotheticals against hypocrisy in a can-you-imagine-if-that-were-a-Labour-MP way. It’s a form of whataboutery that sits on the fence — we seldom learn if the response to X’s comments is correct; only that it’d be different if Y had said that — but it does provide an opportunity to attack the newspapers.

And if there’s one thing guaranteed to rile social media it’s the old media on which it still depends entirely. O’Brien has an animus against the Sun, the Daily Telegraph and, particularly, the Daily Mail — though he is quieter about the Express, where he once edited the paper’s gossip column. His anger can lead him into strange territory: critics of the Leveson Report get dismissed as people “bleating about how the government shouldn’t control the press”.

All of this works equally well from the opposite political position, of course. So although he’s the best at it, O’Brien’s not the only one on this tack. Among his rivals, the most convincing for a while was, ironically, Nigel Farage, who had his own show on LBC for three years and who proved — like George Galloway on TalkSport — to be genuinely interested in having an argument with dissenting callers. (After Farage’s departure in 2020, O’Brien tweeted in triumph: “We got our station back.”)

Others have fallen by the wayside. Katie Hopkins in 2017 and Maajid Nawaz this year both lost their LBC shows for Twitter offences. She called for a “final solution” to the problem of terrorism, while he spoke against the Covid vaccine and railed against the “network of fascists who seek a New World Order”. The latter comment seemed to be straying into conspiracist territory, a sometimes unclear but always present danger on social media.

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“I don’t do conspiracies,” says O’Brien. “I just don’t.” But he is happy to suggest that democracy is dictated by a small group of press barons — “the non-dom billionaires who installed Boris Johnson in Downing Street” — and even to allude to “the one at the back of the room, pulling all the strings”. Most notoriously, he indulged the patently absurd lies told by Carl “Nick” Beech about VIP paedophile-rings, a conspiracy theory that hurt actual people.

Unless your life was horribly affected by Beech’s fantasies, this is mostly good knockabout fun. But it does lose sight of what used to be the central value of the phone-in show: the way it served as a mass focus-group. O’Brien long since drove away most of those who might not share his views on such subjects as Trump, Johnson, and Brexit, and his show resembles a familiar social media echo chamber.

But there’s no doubt that this is the future of the format in a fractured and partisan world. LBC has decided that the requirement for balance in broadcasting can be made right across the schedule, rather than within any one show, so that each presenter is allowed, indeed encouraged, to be one-sided. This requires a different attitude, which is why O’Brien never really made the grade when presenting Newsnight. It’s also why LBC has — with the exceptions of Eddie Mair and Shelagh Fogarty — not poached presenters from the BBC.

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If you want the old-fashioned version of the phone-in, where you find out what people are thinking and how public opinion is shifting, then you have to go to the man who was LBC’s number one until last week. Nick Ferrari is just as opinionated — if less predictable in those opinions — yet he allows a far greater diversity among those who get put on air. And he remains courteous to all but the most extreme, giving the impression that he means it when he says, “I want to hear your calls”. But last week’s listening figures suggested a changing of the guard.

Personally, I’m a little saddened by this development, because I do want the old-fashioned version. I’ve been addicted to the phone-in for forty years, ever since I first heard the magnificently irascible Brian Hayes in what is now O’Brien’s slot. But even then there were naysayers. 

“The more I hear commercial radio the more repellent I find it,” the comedian Kenneth Williams noted in his diary, back in 1973, the year LBC became Britain’s first legally approved independent radio station. “The din created by the half-baked talking to the half-educated is horrible.”

His was a record of smooth, unequalled majesty. Until 2018, when Gyles Brandreth stepped in for a couple of episodes while the Doyen recuperated from a brief illness, he hadn’t missed a single recording. He was, at that time, 94 years of age, and still had a few months in him yet, his diaphragmatically modulated manner as suave and indulgent as ever.

The only other figure who has tracked my footprints in the sand for so long – other than our Lord and Saviour, of course – has been the Queen. It is only fair to note that Her Majesty has never had to worry that her next season might be her last, at least not on the whim of some new Controller, Focus Group or Social Media faux pas. But either way, they have both projected, above all else, ineffable calm.

I was two years old when Just a Minute first broadcast. Parsons has been asking guests to speak on a given subject within certain parameters for 60 seconds since before I could speak at all. And the voices of Derek Nimmo, Clement Freud, Peter Jones and Kenneth Williams were as much a part of my childhood kitchen memories as Bejam sacks, whistling kettles and chip pan fires.

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So, how has a Host, a mere persona really, who was I imagine, a little outdated when he first accepted a challenge for Repetition, survived perhaps the most tumultuous decades of cultural revolution the Nation has known since the Civil War, and to bow out at the final curtain without having so much as rolled up the sleeves of his boating blazer?

The answer is of course – because of his refusal to change. Parsons saw off The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and The Prodigy, The Dot Com Boom and Crash, The Walkman, the fax machine and the digital watch, without so much as a gesture towards modernity. The World Trade Center rose and fell — as did the careers of Jimmy Young, Terry Wogan and of course J**** S*****. Sir Nicholas gave not one inch.

I wonder if some of our other much loved institutions could learn from this. The Crown has long understood the benefits of longevity, and with Her Majesty poised to glide pass Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil himself, in another five years or so – it is clearly beyond reproach on this matter. The House of Lords, meanwhile, does not appear to be in a hurry to affect more than the most superficial of mollifications. Though it is always best when a genial, familiar old curmudgeon or two are dominating the benches of the Supreme Court. And I miss Denning.

But what of the Church of England. It is forever entangled in footling debates about political concerns and personnel matters — matters that have relatively little to do with the timeless anxieties of the human soul, to which it was surely established to minister. The trendy vicar trope almost precedes Just a Minute — indeed, Derek Nimmo knew how to satirise it well — but the Church gives the impression of anxious trend chasing to this day. Meanwhile, congregations dwindle and moral authority is ceded to the John Lewis Christmas Ad.

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Is it too much to suggest that staff turnover is part of the problem? Six archbishops have shared the title in the span allotted to Old Nick, and none of them were young men when they first stepped up. It has been perhaps less hectic than the comings and goings of Prime Ministers in that time (Wilson/Heath/Wilson/Callaghan/Thatcher/Major/Blair/
Brown/Cameron/May/Johnson) but still, compares poorly with the Papacy. Imagine how we would feel about the Church if there had been but one kindly but stern figure who had always been there admonishing us in our deviations and counselling against hesitation, throughout our little lives?

It might be a stretch to advise the Church to appoint a fashionable, smartly dressed Archbishop in his early forties and let the parish grow old with him, just because it worked for Just a Minute. And yet…

I remember making a parody of Troubleshooter for Radio Four years ago, which cross fertilised the wisdom of two different professions. So, to help advise a priest I visited a shepherd and found that one of the key learnings of that trade is the during lambing season, the fellow must get himself well and truly dowsed in the “juices” of the birthing process. The ewes and the lambs both respond to the familiar aroma he will thus have and will intuitively trust him as a result.

I’m not suggesting that a modern church man or woman literally steep themselves in their parishioners’ birth fluids to earn their trust. But the longer someone is on the throne — ideally through a few generations — the more familiar they seem to us in all our senses.

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This theme is touched upon in the excellent Netflix drama, Two Popes, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce. It is a superbly acted and tastefully shot tale, partly fictionalised but I think well within range, of the peculiar arrangement arrived at between the two present incumbents of that, traditionally singular, role. The younger of the two makes the point that the power of the position derives in large part from the understanding that its occupant will bear their cross “unto death” – that they are in that relatively trivial regard at least, like Christ himself.

A non-Catholic, I spent much of my life regarding certain aspects of that Church as vaguely absurd, if not actually sinister. The gradual decline of the great John Paul II was a case in point – the poor chap had Parkinson’s and yet was unable to relinquish his duties and see out his days in peace. Yet now, I wonder. There was, in hindsight, something rather magnificent about this once exemplary physical specimen. He hiked, played football and even pursued weight training as a young Cardinal and was elevated, at 58, in perhaps the best condition of any new Pope in history. Yet our abiding memory is of a man being determined to exhaust every last fibre of his being on the field of battle. He too, had but one Death.

The world, it goes without saying perhaps, has changed far too much for my liking. That is pretty much a given when you are 54. The great Eastern tradition of Vipassana meditation teaches the principle of universal change — Anicca — and the necessity of accepting it if one is to have anything approaching peace on this Earth. No doubt there is wisdom in that.

But I remain enormously grateful to the familiar faces, familiar voices, familiar names that have walked beside me thus far. Even those whose views and allegiances I once detested, have to come to be — yes — familiar. Like Larkin’s Toad, I am glad to take their arm as we walk together down Cemetery Road.

The Tory svengali Dominic Cummings may think the Today programme is no longer required listening for the political class, and others may deride Humphrys as a dinosaur, politically incorrect and overly hectoring of guests. But I have always found him charming and fair — even when I was on the receiving end of one of his kickings.

We debated religion a lot, both on the radio and around his kitchen table. He even wrote a book about it: In God We Doubt: Confessions of a Failed Atheist – the subtitle, as he acknowledges, he lifted from me.

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But it was his interview with Rowan Williams that I will remember the most. It followed the Beslan massacre in 2004. Chechen militants had taken over a school and massacred a great many of its children. Humphrys’ opening question to the Archbishop was a classic: “Where was God in that schoolroom?” Deceptively simple, direct, short, devastating. It was also the question of a man who was the first reporter on the scene after a mountain of coal debris had collapsed upon a primary school in south Wales in 1966, killing 116 children and 28 adults. And you could hear that in his voice.

The archbishop didn’t answer straight away. He paused for what seemed like an eternity, some might say unable to answer. I would say: he was giving that impossible question, and the deaths of so many children, the respect it deserved. It wasn’t a cheap question and it didn’t receive a cheap reply. In one moment of electrifying radio, the so-called problem of evil – something debated by philosophers since time immemorial – came alive. “That interview led to … the biggest reaction by far to any programme I have done for the BBC in more than 40 years of broadcasting,” Humphrys later wrote.

It may not be this for which he is remembered. He skewered Tony Blair, in 1997, on the political TV show On the Record for accepting a donation to the Labour party of £1m from Bernie Ecclestone. Labour, which had just come to power, soon after exempted Formula One racing from a tobacco advertising ban. “I think most people who have dealt with me think I am a pretty straight sort of guy, and I am,” said Blair in the interview. A quote that hung over the rest of his political career.

Humphrys’ destruction of his then boss, George Entwistle, for his failure to stop a Newsnight programme that mistakenly implicated a Tory peer in allegations of sexual abuse – the so-called “dead man walking interview” — was an example of speaking truth to power of the highest order. Entwistle resigned as director-general of the BBC 12 hours later.

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Humphrys’ passing feels like the end of an era. Paxman, with his similarly pugnacious approach, went fishing years ago. Perhaps it points to what Cummings said, about how these set pieces and titanic clashes of male egos on the mainstream media no longer have any effect on voters. Interviews only matter when they can be culled for 20 second ‘gotcha’ moments perfect for social media. But such clips don’t change people’s minds about anything by way of reasoned argument – they are little more than digital hand grenades bounced around on Twitter.

So is the political interview past its sell by date, now no more than old fashioned gladiatorial combat for a handful of political anoraks? I hope not.

I have, with Confessions, begun to appreciate much more what is involved in making an interview work. I know, for instance, that I have a fatal weakness as an interviewer: a desire for conviviality. This makes me hesitate to ask a question that may introduce a little too much tension in the exchange. What Humphrys manages to do – and others who have become masters of their art – is robustly to challenge their guests without boorishness, yet also recognising that s/he is an agent of the listener to whom politicians are accountable and who don’t tune in for a party broadcast.

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Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

Politicians have become adept at not answering questions. Their strategy is commonly: acknowledge, bridge, comment. Responding to a line of inquiry they do not like, they first nod to the question being asked, as if this was to answer the question, then bridge to the thing they really want to talk about – something like, “but the most important thing here is…” – then comment on that, with long sentences and few full stops, thus not allowing the interviewer the opportunity to return to the question. The best interviewer is able to disrupt the way interviewees have come to ‘manage’ conversations.

And at this, Humphrys is the master. He doesn’t care too much about being liked. And so he often isn’t. But he is right when he once said that the key quality for a good interviewer is curiosity. And that’s precisely the problem with the social media use of interview clips – they have substituted curiosity for the gotcha moment and a re-enforcement of our own prejudices. And with this, the world becomes a smaller and a far less interesting place.

Which is why the Humphryses of this world are now more necessary than ever. And why we should be grateful that Andrew Neil has been given a new show. In a political climate saturated with bullshit – or post-truth, as some like to call it – old school professional sceptics help us all to stay connected with the truth in a world of constant and increasingly sophisticated deception.

There is something singleminded, uncomplicated even, about the determination not to be side-tracked by fancy explanations or charming presentations. Not “why is this lying bastard lying to me” – that is too cynical and disrespectful. But stay focused, come prepared, be persistent, listen hard, remain curious, and keep things simple – there is often evasiveness in complexity. These were the threads Humphrys followed to great effect.

Who will miss John Humphrys?

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