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Popular marriage

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 30th July 2008

Today (BBC Radio 4); These Are the Times (BBC Radio 4)

Early mornings on Four have seen a miraculous appearance in the past fortnight with the emergence of the Evan and Nick Show. Not for years has there been a genuine double act on the Today programme; not since Brian Redhead and John Timpson in the 1980s when the Queen tuned in at ten past seven to hear the cross-talk between the genial, emollient Timpson and his combative northern partner, Redhead. Along the way they were joined at different times by Libby Purves and Sue MacGregor, but the programme’s character was defined by Redhead and Timpson’s repartee. (I guess it’s a sign of those different times that they were never thought of as Brian and John.) As Sue MacGregor once remarked, they were like ‘a marriage on air’. They were very different temperamentally and, perhaps more crucially, politically, she’s quoted as saying by the producer Simon Elmes in his celebratory history of Radio Four, but ‘they both said that they both knew what the other was thinking’. When Timpson retired in 1987 and John Humphrys was brought in to replace him, the programme changed irrevocably. Humphrys and his colleagues all have their inimitable characters, but there’s no chemistry between them, mainly one suspects because Humphrys as team-leader is essentially a one-off. He’s even admitted that of course the Today presenters are ‘a team’ but in the end ‘they are sole performers’.

Already, though, it’s possible to sense that a new on-air marriage is being forged between the latest addition to the Today team, the former BBC1 economics correspondent Evan Davis, and his temporary sidekick Nick Robinson, on loan to the programme during the summer recess from his job reporting on Westminster. Or perhaps I should refer to them as Nick and his other half Evan, Nick proving to be, somewhat surprisingly given Evan’s cooler-than-cool TV image, the more at ease behind the microphone.

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