Popular marriage

Early mornings on Four have seen a miraculous appearance in the past fortnight with the emergence of the Evan and Nick Show. Not for years has there been a genuine double act on the Today programme; not since Brian Redhead and John Timpson in the 1980s when the Queen tuned in at ten past seven to hear the cross-talk between the genial, emollient Timpson and his combative northern partner, Redhead. Along the way they were joined at different times by Libby Purves and Sue MacGregor, but the programme’s character was defined by Redhead and Timpson’s repartee. (I guess it’s a sign of those different times that they were never thought of as Brian and John.) As Sue MacGregor once remarked, they were like ‘a marriage on air’. They were very different temperamentally and, perhaps more crucially, politically, she’s quoted as saying by the producer Simon Elmes in his celebratory history of Radio Four, but ‘they both said that they both knew what the other was thinking’.