The recent history of the BBC is a tale of two Dimblebies. David, the elder, enjoyed the higher profile on television, but at a terrible price: his latter years at Question Time saw him acting as ringmaster for a programme that had become a ‘show’, a three-ring circus of shallow anger and offence.
Now Jonathan, the younger, is retiring from Any Questions?, the Radio Four programme that served as a weekly reminder of what the BBC can be when it remembers its real purpose and stops worrying about being popular.
For a generation – 32 years, to be exact – Jonathan has spent Friday nights in town halls, schools and scout huts, chairing with acerbic asperity a serious conversation between serious people about serious things. If it was David’s fate to oversee the decline of British political culture into vitriol and Twitter, Jonathan was the angel of our better nature.
A glance at the list of AQ shows in the last year offers a reminder that this was a programme that was looking far beyond the comfortable liberal metropolis long before London started sipping lattes and the political class fixated on the quiet and (in the best way) provincial folk who live far from the capital and ultimately decide the outcomes of elections and referendums.
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