Evan Davies is SO not Jeremy Paxman (thank God)

It’s unusual for somebody promoting his own television programme to tell you not to watch it, but that’s what Evan Davis has been doing. At least, he has asked us not to watch Newsnight during his first week as its chief presenter — the week that is now drawing to its close — because it probably wouldn’t be any good until he’d had a bit more experience. And even then it might turn out to be no good, he’s said: we probably would know by Christmas if it was a disaster. As it happens, I am writing this just before his first appearance on the late-night news programme, but I wonder whether he will have cried on air. In interviews, he has talked a lot about his crying. ‘I cry a lot. All the time,’ he told the Times. And the particular thing that made him cry most often was ‘people trying to maintain dignity in the face of adversity’.

Such people are exemplified by many of the politicians he will be required to interview, so tears might easily flow. The idea of an interviewer crying is a novel one: if anyone were to cry, one would expect it to be the interviewee (as the late Gilbert Harding did in 1960 during his famous Face to Face interview with John Freeman). But Davis is not ashamed of being a sensitive sort of chap. As an openly gay man, with a tattoo and rumours of hidden body piercings, he seems rather proud of not being an ‘Alpha Male’. ‘I am SO not Jeremy Paxman,’ he told the Daily Telegraph, with evident satisfaction.
For he is eager to make clear, in the politest possible way, that the adversarial approach to interviews, for which Paxman and John Humphrys are celebrated, is not in his view the only — or, indeed, the best — one.