This is Today--: A Biography of the Today ProgrammeIt is what millions of people in Britain wake up to every morning: the radio programme that starts their day, and sends them off to the office or to take the children to school infuriated, amused, exasperated, eniightened - but above ail informed. Though you might frown at the blood sport of John Humphreys interrogating a hapless cabinet minister, or wince at the homespun philosophising of 'Thought for the Day', Today could no more be dispensed with than the first cup of coffee. It is listened to in Downing Street, in far-flung British embassies, and by foreign ambassadors to the UK seeking to gauge the national mood. So how have these three hours of radio, from six till nine, come to assume such a central part of British political, cultural - and indeed everyday - life? Now, Tim Lucknurst, himself once a producer of the programme, has written the most authoritative anatomy of the phenomenon that is Today. He reveals how what we nowadays value for its hard news exposes and political interrogations began life as an undistinguished miscellany of light news under the avuncular Jack DeManio. He traces Today's move to the political centre-stage back to the Thatcherite eighties, when rad |
Contents
TWO Todays Golden Years | 17 |
THREE The Best Job in Journalism | 35 |
FOUR The Magic of Radio | 54 |
Copyright | |
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