Abstract
The death of Brian Walden prompted a wave of nostalgia from the British political and journalistic classes and widespread incomprehension among those under the age of 40. He was a Labour MP who became a television interviewer renowned, through the 1980s and early 1990s, for long, penetrating interviews with politicians. They were broadcast shortly before Sunday lunch for the education of households with an interest in current affairs.
Audiences for Weekend World, The Walden Interview and Walden were not big, but the programmes were believed to be required viewing for the important and influential. The examination of senior figures tended to set the news agenda for the coming week. Today we find adults who were so transfixed in their infant years by the drama of these televised confrontations that they became politicians. Others report being so deeply, traumatically bored that they have never uttered a word about politics since.
By one of those quirks of timing that newspapers confuse with irony, Walden's death was announced just about the time the BBC's Andrew Marr – current incumbent of one of the Sunday TV politics slots – was talking to Nigel Farage, formerly of Ukip and now the leader of the recently-formed Brexit Party. This was neither a meeting of minds nor the forensic cross-examination that we recall – possibly in our imaginations – as the weekly output of Walden.
Marr sought to ask Farage a lot of questions about things he had said in the past. Farage said the questioning was a disgrace and that the BBC was biased. Marr looked vaguely queasy – he doesn't appear to relish close quarters fighting - but stuck to the sheet of questions his producer had prepared for him. Farage made a lot of noise. Supporters of Marr said he exposed the Brexit Party leader. Supporters of Farage said he exposed the BBC.
There was a similar divergence of opinion about the winner of an earlier BBC bout – studio to studio, rather than face to face – that pitted the veteran British grappler Andrew Neil against the young American conservative pretender Ben Shapiro. This one climaxed with Shapiro halting the interview. He later acknowledged that he had not prepared properly, giving fight fans good reason to score in favour of Neil. However, this being an age when few are receptive to views that are not their own, many of the 2.4 million viewers who watched it back on YouTube took a different view.
So did the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, now the principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, who fled to Twitter: “After the @afneil/Shapiro encounter and the Farage/Marr meltdown I hope the BBC is urgently thinking about how to handle demagogues who refuse to submit to journalistic questioning. Normal rules not working.”
If there ever were rules, they were written in an age that predated social media, when video content was the preserve of professional broadcasters and television held the power. Politicians seeking a large audience needed TV. Today many calculate that they do not – or not, at least, on television's terms. Walden lasted almost an hour: today the Neil and Marr interviews feel long on YouTube at just a quarter of that. Perhaps the BBC will create an Andrew Neil Hour, but which politicians will submit to meticulously researched questioning, with other media promoting the most disobliging line, when they can talk on an easier show about subjects that flatter them? Who will answer questions obediently rather than confect a dramatic spat for social media? Why go on someone else's channel, now that you can make your own?
The notion that the system is broken comes in exceptionally disputatious times. For many, of course, it is an outrage that Nigel Farage is even allowed on television, no matter the public support he is gaining in a democratic election. Quite apart from the question of free speech, have they never noticed the capital a demagogue makes from being barred by mainstream channels?
The broadcasters should keep their nerve. Some interviews work better than others. Some always have. Interviewers have exposed all parties and players in the Brexit debate: it is not their job to force viewers with fixed beliefs to change their minds. And let us always question golden ages. Here are the words of a Brian Walden critic, in an online comment under the broadcaster's Times obituary: “I couldn't bear him. It's all well and good to say that he knifed Thatcher at the end, but his sycophantic interviews of her before that were infuriating.”
