With a tin ear and no television in my life, I walked into the BBCist crowd assembled for the 50th birthday of "Today" the morning radio news-show (a bit like NPR's "Morning Edition", or the French "Les Matin de France Culture") knowing there would be neither familiar faces nor voices around me. Until John Humphrys, who has been presenting the show for most of my adult life, took to the microphone, again. Here is a voice that has woken me up more often than my wife or daughters, who has come in and out of my morning dreams. It is the archetypal voice of the ordinary Englishman---pragmatic, impatient of obfuscation, a little enamoured of pomp.
Mostly, he told jokes about his colleagues' huge salaries, but he reserved the necessary moments of piety to Today's role: "we speak Truth to Power" (in the Quaker formulation), and, as we do it, the presenters of the program become mystically at one with the audience of 6.7 million listeners: "we become the audience, the audience becomes us. They change. We change".
This was the language of a national religious institution: the Today program binds educated, middle class Britain through daily ritual, and when Humphrys as priest "speaks Truth to Power" he does so not as a representative of his audience, but completely at one with his audience.
Alexis de Tocqueville describes the role of the newspaper like this:
"A newspaper [...] takes up the notion or the feeling that
had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them [members of a group]. All are
then immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering
minds, which had long sought each other in darkness, at length meet
and unite. The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is
still necessary to keep them united."
The last clause emphasises just this notion of the creation and maintenance of a unity in the audience. That is what Brother John is doing every morning, and partly explains the "personality cults" of media celeb culture that leads to the huge salaries John joked about.
But he also sees the danger of this role: it is that the funciton is recognised, at which point the institution becomes a "National Treasure". Humphrys was clear: "don't make us that!". This is the spirit-sapping status that befalls occasional minor royalty, Tony Benn, and other pieces of the heritage industry. A nation hungry for symbols that will bind it through uncertain times will descend on the institution that is working like busloads of visitors into a Cotswold village.
What funding crisis will it take for the BBC to play the "National Treasure" card on Today?
