"Authoritative, efficient, concise" ... Nick Clarke. Photograph: BBC
I get uneasy when a fellow journalist dies and affectionate colleagues turn out adjectives about their professional skills and personal qualities that are never less than superlative. We rarely do it for other people. Should we routinely do it for one of our own?
That said, Nick Clarke, presenter of Radio 4's The World This Weekend and much else, who died early today, was a good bloke who did his difficult job very well. In my dealings with him he was usually smiling, a tall man with a high domed forehead, lots of energy and enthusiasm. "Authoritative, efficient, concise - a proper journalist unafraid to roll his sleeves up," as a mutual friend said this afternoon.
Of course, he also had one of those lovely, distinctive voices that are so valuable to broadcasters - "a magnificent instrument,'' as another chum put it today. You could always recognise Nick Clarke, in the same warm way you could the subject of his best-selling biography, fellow-broadcaster Alistair Cooke.
It was typical of a journalist that when Clarke was diagnosed with cancer at the end of last year and had a leg amputated within six weeks his instinct was to write and broadcast about it. Even in mid-car crash one thinks: "This will make a good piece.'' Radio 4 listeners were later much moved by his audio-diary, but hopeful, as he was, that he would pull through. The late John Diamond's Times columns about his own cancer trod a similar harrowing path, with a similar eventual outcome. When cancer is one of our society's deepest fears this is a brave but also useful - to others, too - means of fighting the disease and keeping going.
I knew Clarke a little from occasional appearances on Wato - as The World at One is known in the trade - and when he was doing Any Questions. You were always in safe hands with him. No daft questions that ignored the last answer, no straying off the point.
One BBC friend today explained to me the essence of his exceptionally consistent ability: a combination of knowledge and intelligence, an ability to produce good spoken English (a different skill from the written word that Clarke also did well) and an unfailing courtesy. "He could be relentless but was also imperturbably polite without veering into blandness." It made it hard for those he was interviewing to try being rude: Clarke's civility would absorb it all. That made him different from some fellow practitioners, the Paxos and Humpos who are naturally more aggressive. But there is no single good way to do this job and give audiences what they need. Clarke was true to his own nature.
Cancer is a monstrous disease but friends hoped he would pull through last summer. He was thinner and balder, but the voice remained good. "It was absolutely the same, his manner much as if nothing untoward had happened. But the heroic struggle to move from one place to another, to sit comfortably, was humbling to watch," said one rival journalist who worked with him then.
The disease came back in late August. There was treatment, but problems. His hopes to go to the autumn party conferences were disappointed. But it was not clear to friends until near the end - the past week - that Nick Clarke was losing it. A good bloke.
