Wednesday, April 08, 2009
For Evan Davis 2
I am pretty sure Evan Davis is the best broadcast journalist around at the moment. Yesterday on Today he said 'I never knew that' about some story or other. Today he ended a piece about chaplains in hospitals by saying it had been too short but very interesting and it wasn't a debate he'd heard before. Davis doesn't spray attitude at every story, as so many do, but he isn't impersonal either. In both those examples he simply defined himself as a curious observer, a fair-minded surrogate for the listeners. Of course, with Brown he came close to losing it, such was his incredulity. Some things are just too much even for the curious observer.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
And he is a biker with a Prince Albert, and he has and will be crossing picket lines at the blessed beeb.
ReplyDeleteIf only the beeb had another 2 or 3 or him, instead we get comment dressed up as news.
The Chinese have a saying, "a good teacher protects his or her pupils from their own influence" I think this applies to journalists as well (which our hosts seems to exhibits in spades)
China's influence on the coming century will not be something to fear I promise you. Socrates is not known as the Buddha of the West for nothing.
He shows up Naughtie as a pompous windbag, Humphries as Victor Meldrew in disguise and Sarah Montague as inept. His gentle, smart curiosity allows him to get more information from his guests, which I understood to be the point of the exercise.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't he do the apprentice? No, it's dragons' den! He can be the best but he's far from perfect, then. I agree with everything else, including the comments apart from stapling his dick. he may well have done but only to draw attention away from his face.
ReplyDeleteHe is the best, but of a very bad bunch. I fell in with some World Service journalists the other day and they were all remarking on the fact that Jeff Randall, who correctly forecast the debt bubble and its crash, was eased out, whilst Davies, who said it was all fine and hunky-dory, gets promoted further.
ReplyDeleteI agree. They need to retire Humphrys.
ReplyDeleteYes, Randall was never going to fit in the BBC, Recusant - instead we have endless bloody Peston. Evan Davis is indeed very good at the Today gig - and made a refreshing double act with Nick Robinson when the usual deadbeats were away. Eddie Mair's also very good, in a similar way to Davis. As for Broon, I've just come across this quote, from 2007 when he was still (just) Chancellor and praised the bankers for their 'ingenuity and creativity' during his tenure - 'an era [and I quote] that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age of the city of London'. There's prophecy - there's a grasp of history...
ReplyDeleteEddie Mair, Nige? Are you sure? I find there's a strange undercurrent of flippancy and occasional pique with his broadcasts.
ReplyDeleteEvan Davis "the best broadcast journalist around"? Give me a break! The other morning he was interviewing someone from that clinic in Switzerland 'Dignitas' where people go to kill themselves.
ReplyDeleteAll he did was ask "nice" questions. That's all he ever does, because he's so "nice".
He failed to ask the obvious question which was "Are you happy to assist anyone to kill themselves, regardless of whether they have a terminal illness?" Or "What if someone is just depressed - will you still give them the medicine?"
He's just so bloody nice.
Give me Humphreys every time - he may be a rotweiller, but he's a bloody intelligent rotweiller...