Evan sent

Evan Davis’s series on business life, The Bottom Line (made in conjunction with the Open University), has become one of those Radio 4 staples, something that’s just there in the schedule and all too easily taken for granted. Productivity, contracts and contacts, the new appreneurs (creators and sellers of apps) are not subjects I feel the need to know very much about and the business pages of the newspaper usually get sent straight out for recycling. But Evan always draws me in and keeps me listening because of his enthusiasm, his ability to make even the mundane aspects of manufacturing sound fascinating, and his skill at drawing people out, employing very different techniques from those used in his news interviews, much less abrasive, more about using his guests’ skills and knowledge to tell a story, make a point.

The format is incredibly simple, as is always the case with programmes that run and run. Evan just chooses a topic and invites three guests to discuss it. You could say it’s In Our Time for the business world. But somehow it’s usually more alive, more practical than that because Evan’s guests are always not just at the top of their game but are carefully chosen to reflect every dimension of the topic under discussion. Take this week when Evan and his guests were talking about that buzzword ‘outsourcing’. His guests were the chief executive of Northamptonshire County Council, who was brought in five years ago to cut the workforce from 12,000 to 4,000. His aim now is to get it down to 150 — by contracting out virtually all of the work on roads, hospitals, libraries, social care to privately run organisations. (As Davis neatly pointed out, Northamptonshire just happens to be a Conservative-led council.)