New Marr is very much the same as the old Marr: LBC’s Tonight With Andrew Marr reviewed

Andrew Marr got his voice back this week. That may come as a bit of a surprise to everybody who’s been watching and listening to him on the BBC for the past 22 years but it’s the reason he gave when he announced last year that he was leaving. On Monday we heard the new voice. Marr made his debut on LBC. He’s presenting a 6 p.m. show four days a week in an hour nicked off Eddie Mair.

Maybe ‘new’ voice is wrong. Not so much new, perhaps, as the old pre-BBC voice. The one he’d been forced to suppress. He called it ‘entirely my own voice’.

After my own 51 years as a BBC journalist, I think I know what he means. If I sound a little hesitant it’s because in all those years nobody explicitly told me what to say or how to say it. On the occasions when I lost my cool with a particularly dense or defensive politician on Today (vanishingly rare, of course) the editor might whisper in my headphones: ‘Back off a bit…’ But it was a suggestion rather than an order. And I was never instructed to take a particular line or adopt a particular tone. I’d happily bet my BBC pension that Andrew wasn’t either.

I would discuss the broad shape of my interviews with the editor and a producer would prepare a brief. But that was supposed to provide background facts rather than suggest questions. Let alone the tone. I can confidently assert that no producer or editor ordered Nick Robinson to tell Boris Johnson to shut up when he finally got the chance to interview him on Today.

Yet there were areas where only the most reckless BBC hack would dare tread.