The good things in life

Listening to The Archive Hour: Down Your Way Revisited on Radio Four (Saturday) made me wonder why the network got rid of the programme in 1995. It had been running since 1946, with a simple formula of interviews and music, the idea of a producer called Leslie Perowne. It visited towns and villages across the country, and in its heyday attracted an audience of ten million a week. It avoided controversy and looked for the good in people and places, and while some thought it bland and cosy, most liked it. It occurred to me that when the awful Home Truths on Saturday mornings is eventually replaced, Radio Four could do worse than reviving it.

Down Your Way was fortunate in its choice of presenters over the years: Stewart MacPherson, Richard Dimbleby, Franklin Engleman and Brian Johnston, with various stand-ins. They all liked and were interested in people and they sounded it. They were also naturally polite. Arthur Phillips, one of its producers in the 1980s, said that in his experience Dimbleby always left a good impression on the people he’d just interviewed. Dimbleby himself explained, ‘You can’t be a good interviewer if you’re bored with what the other person is saying, if you don’t want to know what they want to tell you and if you’re just asking questions for the sake of asking questions. You also need to control an interview without it being apparent to the other person that you’re doing so.’ One of Engleman’s producers, Phyllis Robertson, recalled that people didn’t know what he looked like but the voice was instantly recognisable, even abroad. The so-called ordinary people that he interviewed thought he was interested in them and would tell him what he needed to know.