BBC News economics editor Robert Peston and PM presenter Eddie Mair are teaming up for a late-night radio show on Radio 4 in which they will spring surprise guests on each other.
The Robert Peston Interview Show (with Eddie Mair) is set to run for six episodes from next Monday at 11pm. The show is produced by the team behind PM and the title is understood to be a joke at Mair’s expense.
Peston and Mair will get to choose the interviewees for three episodes each without the other’s knowledge in a bid to shake up the interview format and lead to more unpredictable questioning.
In a promo for the show, Peston described it as a “rather nerve-racking little project”, adding: “The key point about all of these interviews is that the handful [where] I’ve chosen the interviewees, you don’t know who they are and I don’t know the handful that you’ve chosen. One of us is always, in a sense, blind up until the moment of the guest’s arrival.”
Mair adds: “We haven’t even agreed how we would jointly interview someone … The other thing is the way the BBC does interviews is a time-honoured tradition going back from the days before we were born.
“There is a producer; a conversation that takes place. There is normally even on [Mair’s Radio 4 show] PM, a busy news programme, a few moments where there is some preparation, some thought that goes into the process. What we are doing is turning that on its head.”
Reports of an on-air feud between Mair and Peston became public in 2011, with Peston using an appearance on Mair’s Radio 4 show to ask him “why have you cast me into the wilderness?”
However, the two publicly buried the hatchet in 2012 on PM.
They appear in this week’s Radio Times interviewing each other, with Peston discussing how counselling helped him cope with the death of his wife Siân from lung cancer, and Mair describing his start in radio in Dundee and why he was happy not to get the Newsnight presenter’s job ahead of Evan Davies.
