The extremes of British political interviewing are represented by Sir Jimmy Young and Jeremy Paxman. Whereas Paxo famously asked ex-home secretary Michael Howard the same question 12 times, while working through his full repertoire of “Who farted?” faces, Young would have called Howard “Michael”, while making 14 different and courteous inquiries.
The question of which broadcaster revealed more of the politics and personalities of their guests is, though, harder than it looks. Young liked to quote two proverbs – “softly softly catchee monkey” and “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” – that were also invoked by another broadcaster criticised for his soft-sofa approach, Sir David Frost.
And, although the Paxmans and John Humphrys of the schedules provide more of the crackling theatricality that is also a part of good broadcasting, any tally of monkeys and flies caught by their side and Young-Frost would be a close contest.
The biggest question mark over Jimmy’s legacy is that no single interview ever produced a news story or publicity rush to match Paxo’s repetitious encounter with Howard; Neil Kinnock’s 1987 admission to Frost that he would prefer hand-to-hand combat rather than nuclear weapons to deter Russian invasion; or Humphrys’ here’s-your-P45 evisceration of brief BBC director general George Entwistle.
No other British interview has a single-person archive, though, to equal the significance – first journalistic and then historical – of Young’s 14 conversations with Margaret Thatcher. If played end to end, they would capture the vocal, ideological and perhaps eventually psychiatric transitions of her career. For all the apparent chumminess, Young understood the need to raise the growing public and party hostility towards Thatcher (“some people really hate you, Margaret, do you know why?”). Though the answers were generally dismissive, her rejection of the criticisms was revealing of her increasing intransigent isolation. An alternative proverb for soft, gentler interviewers might be that you are more likely to wound a boxer with their guard down than their gloves up.
Young can be seen as a broadcasting equivalent of Ronald Reagan. Just as the politician used an actor’s warmth and timing to play convincingly the role of president, so Young applied the gifts of empathy and vocal modulation from his first career in singing to succeed in a field that was previously the preserve of journalists. Like Reagan, Young was usually working from cue cards (producers provided detailed briefings and question lists), but had the knack of making them seem his own.
Although the two interviewees he seemed most to enjoy meeting were the perfectly BBC-balanced pair of Thatcher and Tony Benn, Young was usually assumed during his broadcasting career to be a Conservative by conviction, and this view seemed to be confirmed by the Sunday Express column he wrote until 2014 after being sacked from his Radio 2 show. However, Paxman has described himself as a “one-nation Tory”, a description that Frost would also almost certainly have accepted.
Intriguingly, this means that three of the most high-impact BBC interviewers in the second half of the 20th century were – despite their very different styles – privately men of the right. The significance of this may be that it helped them to avoid constructing questions from the liberal-left assumptions to which BBC journalists can easily tend.
