Ceri Thomas, The Guardian

Monday, April 10, 2006

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'Humphrys could see me off too': Ceri Thomas, the latest editor of Radio 4's Today programme, tells James Silver why he believes its star interviewer will renew his contract, what he thinks of the show's women presenters - and why he won't dump Thought For The Day

If the 8.10am interview on the Today programme bore any relation to this encounter with its new editor, listeners would most likely turn off in droves. From the outset, Ceri Thomas, who took over at Today three weeks ago, appears determined not to say anything contentious. Perhaps it is not surprising, given the hot water in which his predecessors found themselves swimming, not to mention the hullabaloo that broke out when the network controller decided to drop an obscure piece of mood-music from the early morning schedule.

What, for example, are his big ideas for Today? "I'll aim for exuberant continuity," he replies. Would he like to shift or dump the 7.50am "God-slot" Thought For The Day, given the chance? "It would be a peculiar time to start removing one of the very few places in the daily schedule where religion gets to speak."

Perhaps it might be better to start with what others have to say about him. The job gave his most recent predecessors, Kevin Marsh, Rod Liddle and Roger Mosey, a high profile - and not always for reasons that they would have liked. Thomas, 43, does not yet enjoy that sort of recognition. And calls to Radio 4 journalists - admittedly not always the most impartial of observers - elicit decidedly mixed opinions about his appointment. One senior staffer says: "Mosey, Liddle and Marsh are absolutely top drawer, among the finest journalists at the BBC. Ceri will be a perfectly decent editor of Today but he's not quite in their league." Another says pointedly: "He did brilliant things with 5 Live Breakfast." Oh dear.

Plainly, Today is a much bigger beast than 5 Live Breakfast. For a start, it finds itself at the front line of current affairs controversy. Shortly before Thomas rejoined the programme (he is a former assistant editor), 200 listeners complained about the "excessive" number of interruptions by Humphrys in his bruising interview with the Tory leader David Cameron. Is it time for Humphrys to tone it down a little? Thomas answers warily.

"I'm not going to rule out the confrontational interview as it is on occasion necessary. Obviously they are the ones that leap out and attract complaints. Having said that, there is a tactic Cameron is employing to appeal over the heads of the interviewer to an audience which he thinks is sympathetic to his idea of ending Punch and Judy politics. Two hundred people out of the roughly two million who were listening at that time complained, but all the evidence we've got shows that the audience is overwhelmingly behind John Humphrys in general and support our right to do those kind of interviews."

Which brings us on to the fraught question of 62-year-old Humphrys' future. "It's not a job for octogenarians so there's a back-stop there somewhere," says Thomas. "He's seen off six Today editors, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I was the seventh." He laughs. "John is trustworthy in nearly every respect but when he talks about his contract I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit! He does it with a twinkle in his eye, but when his contract comes up it is likely he will renegotiate it."

Thomas does not accept that Humphrys is irreplaceable. "I was on the programme when Brian Redhead died and people said that he was irreplaceable. The programme is not purely one presenter. We have a team of five that I like. John is the longest-serving and the highest- profile, but he is not the programme."

In fact, Thomas maintains he is satisfied with his inherited team of presenters - a team that also includes James Naughtie, Sarah Montague, Edward Stourton and Carolyn Quinn. "To be honest, the whole presenter thing - although I knew it would come up from the outside as being one of the key priorities - simply isn't a priority for me because I don't see any great urgency to it."

Others would beg to differ. One senior Radio 4 journalist, who asked not to be named, says the problem is not Humphrys, but the female presenters. "The top priority for the new editor is to find the new [former Today presenter] Sue MacGregor. The 'woman presenter' issue was the one nettle Kevin Marsh didn't grasp and Ceri saying he is happy with the presenter line-up as it stands will go down very badly with his team. They haven't managed to find the full-time replacement for Sue. Sarah Montague isn't rated that highly and Carolyn Quinn is a very good journalist but not in Sue's league [as a presenter]."

I ask Thomas why women presenters on Today have, at best, tended to jockey for the third spot, behind Humphrys and Naughtie? Acutely aware that the issue is a minefield, Thomas treads, even by his standards, gingerly. "I don't actually look at them [women presenters] in that way . . ." Would he dispute that Humphrys and Naughtie are the numbers one and two respectively? A slight pause. "I look at them honestly as a team of five presenters and my job is to get the best out of that team of five."

So there is no pecking order among Today talent? "There isn't in my head a pecking order, no, there isn't." Why then, on the whole, will the big political interview at 8.10 go to Humphrys or Naughtie? "Well you are going to have to wait and see what I do, rather than throwing some pecking order at me."

Thomas made his name editing the 5 Live Breakfast programme from 1998 to 2001, where he was widely considered to have done an outstanding job by creating a show that was sharp and newsy, while moving it away from Westminster politics. He was promoted to head of news at 5 Live, a post he remained in for three years. Next, he took a year away from the corporation as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, before returning to the BBC as radio newsgathering editor. He took up his current post - which comes with an £80,000-a-year salary - last month.

Andrew Gilligan, the Today journalist whose report on the "sexing up" of the government's Iraq dossier ultimately led to the Hutton inquiry, was recently publicly critical of his former programme. He argued that the investigative reporting that had flourished under Rod Liddle's editorship had "atrophied" since, and that the programme under Thomas's predecessor, Kevin Marsh, had "taken a new interest in such key questions as the fate of the garden mole". Former Today political reporter John Kampfner, now editor of the New Statesman, attacked the programme in a similar vein, arguing that Today, post-Hutton, had "deliberately avoided giving offence to the government".

I put their comments to Thomas. "I think if you are going to make those kind of accusations, you have to have some view on their plausibility," he responds. "If the allegation is that the Today programme has castrated itself, then there's a team of very experienced journalists on the programme all of whom would be quite willing to pick up the phone to MediaGuardian if they felt that was being done. And they don't seem to have noticed. There is also a team of independent-minded presenters and if they were being told to soft-pedal, they have access to the media and they don't seem to have noticed. The only people who do seem to have noticed are two reporters who used to work on the programme and don't any more."

So is this just sour grapes from Gilligan? "I think there's a particular perspective. After what he went through on the programme, I don't blame him for that particularly."

Gilligan also pointed to the reduction in the number of reporters directly employed by Today. "When I made my last broadcast, in July 2003," he wrote in the Evening Standard, "Today had 17 reporters. Now it has nine."

Another very well-placed source made a similar point to MediaGuardian: "Today's still a magnificent programme, unrivalled really, but it needs to return to journalism a bit. Which means it needs reporters. There have been massive reductions in the numbers of dedicated reporters since Rod Liddle's time. Certainly when you listen to the programme, they rarely do investigations and they don't break stories any more."

Thomas maintains that the precise number of reporters employed directly by the programme is a red herring. "I believe in reporting," he says. "I believe reporting in all manner of ways is essential to the Today programme. But I don't think it is essential that I line-manage every single reporter. The BBC is stacked full of reporters, many of them brilliant and a tiny percentage of them currently working for Today.

"One of the advantages I bring to this job is that I have good links to reporters outside Today - and actually many of them the audience would regard as key BBC reporters like Mark Mardell, Jeremy Bowen, Mark Easton and Nick Robinson. Today doesn't need dozens of reporters of its own."

Many on Today would like to see Thought For The Day dumped or shifted to a lower-profile slot. Indeed, it was an open secret that Rod Liddle was no fan of it when he ruled the roost. He recently described it as "one of those reservoirs of pointlessness and boredom" on Radio 4. So what are Thomas's plans for TFTD, I ask, knowing full well that the slot is all but set in stone? What if he had a free rein and could move it any where that he wanted?

"What an idea! It is where it is and it will stay where it is. It's a hypothetical question and it's just not worth getting into." And on this occasion, it's hard to disagree with him.

(The Guardian, April 10th 2006)

Posted by James Silver - On Monday, April 10, 2006

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