When he retired from Radio 4’s Today programme last month, John Humphrys might have been expected to take the opportunity to have a lie-in after 32 years of early morning starts.
Instead, he has already announced his return to the radio with a stint filling in as host of Classic FM’s breakfast show, swapping heated interviews with leading politicians for a job introducing pieces of calming classical music.
Humphrys will present the programme for a week from Monday 28 October between 6am and 9am, filling in for usual presenter Tim Lihoreau.
He said: “I’m struggling to think of a greater contrast with my old job: the bliss of Beethoven and Brahms instead of Brexit and backstops! Maybe there really is another world out there!”
Classic FM remains by far the biggest classical station in the UK with more than 5m listeners a week, well ahead of BBC Radio 3 and new entrant Scala Radio.
Humphrys recently released his memoir, A Day Like Today, which contained his views on the “institutional liberal bias” at the BBC and said executives struggled to come to terms with the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum.
Earlier this month, he told the Observer that he had decided to quit the Today programme, which had seen its audience slip slightly in Humphrys’ final three months as presenter, because the show “totally dominates you”.
“It isn’t just the getting up at half past three in the morning and having to go to bed at half past eight at night. It’s all the other stuff. You’ve got to read all the newspapers, or try to. You’ve got to keep in touch with everything that’s happening all the time. And that dominates your life. And I’ve had enough of that.”
