Interview: Mark Damazer, Radio 4 (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
With his double-starred Cambridge First and his disconcertingly well-reasoned small-talk, Mark Damazer always risked being pigeonholed as the egghead soaring above life's practical realities. So it was unfortunate that, at the appointed hour of our interview, he suddenly had to dash off panic-stricken to the Passport Office. As an embarrassed press officer was left to explain, Mark had somehow failed to renew his passport in time for his next-day 5.30am holiday departure to Italy.
It was, Damazer stresses apologetically when we later reschedule, simply a bureaucratic cock-up that cacused his papers to end up in Manchester. And, he adds jovially, if anyone thought he had left the country in order to escape the "furore", he had evidence from Ryanair that he booked the trip months before. "So I wasn't planning to do a John Stonehouse," he says mischievously.
That "furore", concerning his controversial decision to drop the UK Theme from Radio 4's early mornings, has been Damazer's greatest test since he became controller 17 months ago. After 33 years, its proposed axing prompted thousands of listener protests, motions in Parliament, criticism from Gordon Brown, even Jeremy Paxman's complaint on Newsnight that he had "no idea what the head of Radio 4's playing at".
Despite the deluge, the theme will, he confirms, "be dropped some time in April". While not surprised that he had prompted opposition, "whether I would have been able precisely to articulate the way it played out is another matter". Still, he says, he takes positive lessons from his recent vilification. "That Radio 4 is able to generate this degree of interest, enthusiasm, passion and criticism - it may make for turbulent seas, but how much better than to be sitting on a shallow pond of water where nothing ever moves?"
Damazer, 50, talks in the considered circumlocutions of a seasoned politician, occasionally drifting into the warm if slightly awkward banter of a Blackadder character - "What can I for you do?" he asks when we meet; "Enter, enter," he calls out to workmen hoping to move furniture around the office. Damazer's own attempt to rearrange his station's furniture, he suggests, have left him exhilarated. "Glory be! Radio 4 matters," he says. He read hundreds of the protest emails and letters sent personally to him, he explains, and while he understands that for some listeners "it's a straightforward loss of something familiar", he rejects as a misunderstanding the view of Radio 4 as "this magnificent static thing that only moves when somebody dies".
It evolves with every editorial judgment, he explains, which is why he wants programme-makers to "keep stretching" and constantly "challenge themselves". "The station attracts 9.3 million-plus people a week, the average is 13.5 hours, so you can be tempted to say it's all fine, as a lot of it is fine," he says. "But we need to be open to new ideas, new formats, new people, without thinking that the 'right' way of doing that is simply knocking over everything that's there."
Such as? "The point about Radio 4 is that you can ask for almost anything. Last year I was genuinely keen that the Pope do Thought for the Day. There was a brief moment where somewhere in the ether I got a glimmer that he might say yes. Anyway, he said no. But why not? We should always be stretching for the most interesting, most fascinating, most entertaining, most diverting, most thoughtful person."
He is "no revolutionary", he stresses. Indeed, throughout his 22-year BBC career, Damazer's hallmark has been his ability to play the internal politics without making too many waves. A friend of Mark Thompson and before him Greg Dyke, he was instrumental in drafting the BBC's response to the Hutton Inquiry and was one of the few senior executives to escape censure. He refuses to talk about Hutton, other than to say that he has learned "to be rather careful about writing emails".
Some colleagues see him as the consummate corporation apparatchik. "I hope people think I have had more to offer than that," he responds, wincing. "But I can't make the judgment."
Damazer, for all his academic achievements, was, with his brother, the first in his family to go to university. His father, a Polish émigré who fought with the British Army in the war, ran a small delicatessen in Temple Fortune, in north-west London; his mother came from Switzerland.
"They worked very hard," he says. "At home, the BBC opened up a million worlds, from Attenborough to Alistair Cooke to Bronowski." The corporation became an early hope for a vocation. Had he considered using his excellent history degree to pursue an academic career? "I wasn't good enough," he says, apparently without false modesty. "I didn't have the diligence or the stamina. I was perfectly good, but got lucky in the exams." Instead, he took a Harvard scholarship and worked for a US senator before joining ITN as a trainee.
That modesty extends to a reluctance unusual among channel controllers to take credit for the talent he nurtured along the way. He will only talk in general about "good signings who made a difference" when he was "driving the agenda up" when editing the Nine O'Clock News. Nor will he specify his impact on the schedules. "I'm choreographer-in-chief," he says. "A lot of the good ideas don't come from the people like me."
This could, in part, be a factor of his limited radio experience before taking this job (he was previously number two at news). He brushes off any suggestions that he lacks commitment to radio. "I've been a heavy Radio 4 listener for a very long time," he says. "The news job involved tons of radio."
What is next for the Damazer axe? "I'm not trying to come with a whole new set of answers, plonk it down and say: 'That's my agenda, look how clever I am,'" he says. "I am trying to work with the grain, but also encourage programme-makers, in long established programmes, to feel there's enough room for change, fresh approaches, originality, new voices."
Veg Talk, we know, is being uprooted. What of You & Yours, often maligned by the critics as unfocused? "I told them after the latest burst of minor publicity [about the programme's future] that they were perfectly safe in my hands. For good reason: the audience has grown." Midweek? "You can't expect any massive upheaval there." Woman's Hour? "Discarding programmes which have big histories, brand names, is quite a tricky thing to do, especially if a programme is able to evolve." Which, he says, Woman's Hour is.
As for Today, it remains "a magnificent beast" that works. He rejects suggestions that its interview style sometimes veers towards the cynical: "I know John [Humphrys] and Jim [Naughtie] and Sarah [Montague] well enough to say they absolutely understand the difference between knocking an argument about to see how robust it is, and a 'politicians are all lying bastards' approach. None of them holds to that maxim." Has he found John Humphrys's eventual successor? His retirement "is not on the horizon to speculate about".
Overall, Damazer wants to reassure his audience that Radio 4 will continue sailing by as undisturbed as possible. You can't run a lively station, he says, without some people inevitably accusing the BBC of doing the wrong thing. "So you need to keep a sense of magnetic north about what you think you should be doing," he says.
Even if occasionally that means deftly steering away from a storm.
(Evening Standard, February 22 2006)
With his double-starred Cambridge First and his disconcertingly well-reasoned small-talk, Mark Damazer always risked being pigeonholed as the egghead soaring above life's practical realities. So it was unfortunate that, at the appointed hour of our interview, he suddenly had to dash off panic-stricken to the Passport Office. As an embarrassed press officer was left to explain, Mark had somehow failed to renew his passport in time for his next-day 5.30am holiday departure to Italy.
It was, Damazer stresses apologetically when we later reschedule, simply a bureaucratic cock-up that cacused his papers to end up in Manchester. And, he adds jovially, if anyone thought he had left the country in order to escape the "furore", he had evidence from Ryanair that he booked the trip months before. "So I wasn't planning to do a John Stonehouse," he says mischievously.
That "furore", concerning his controversial decision to drop the UK Theme from Radio 4's early mornings, has been Damazer's greatest test since he became controller 17 months ago. After 33 years, its proposed axing prompted thousands of listener protests, motions in Parliament, criticism from Gordon Brown, even Jeremy Paxman's complaint on Newsnight that he had "no idea what the head of Radio 4's playing at".
Despite the deluge, the theme will, he confirms, "be dropped some time in April". While not surprised that he had prompted opposition, "whether I would have been able precisely to articulate the way it played out is another matter". Still, he says, he takes positive lessons from his recent vilification. "That Radio 4 is able to generate this degree of interest, enthusiasm, passion and criticism - it may make for turbulent seas, but how much better than to be sitting on a shallow pond of water where nothing ever moves?"
Damazer, 50, talks in the considered circumlocutions of a seasoned politician, occasionally drifting into the warm if slightly awkward banter of a Blackadder character - "What can I for you do?" he asks when we meet; "Enter, enter," he calls out to workmen hoping to move furniture around the office. Damazer's own attempt to rearrange his station's furniture, he suggests, have left him exhilarated. "Glory be! Radio 4 matters," he says. He read hundreds of the protest emails and letters sent personally to him, he explains, and while he understands that for some listeners "it's a straightforward loss of something familiar", he rejects as a misunderstanding the view of Radio 4 as "this magnificent static thing that only moves when somebody dies".
It evolves with every editorial judgment, he explains, which is why he wants programme-makers to "keep stretching" and constantly "challenge themselves". "The station attracts 9.3 million-plus people a week, the average is 13.5 hours, so you can be tempted to say it's all fine, as a lot of it is fine," he says. "But we need to be open to new ideas, new formats, new people, without thinking that the 'right' way of doing that is simply knocking over everything that's there."
Such as? "The point about Radio 4 is that you can ask for almost anything. Last year I was genuinely keen that the Pope do Thought for the Day. There was a brief moment where somewhere in the ether I got a glimmer that he might say yes. Anyway, he said no. But why not? We should always be stretching for the most interesting, most fascinating, most entertaining, most diverting, most thoughtful person."
He is "no revolutionary", he stresses. Indeed, throughout his 22-year BBC career, Damazer's hallmark has been his ability to play the internal politics without making too many waves. A friend of Mark Thompson and before him Greg Dyke, he was instrumental in drafting the BBC's response to the Hutton Inquiry and was one of the few senior executives to escape censure. He refuses to talk about Hutton, other than to say that he has learned "to be rather careful about writing emails".
Some colleagues see him as the consummate corporation apparatchik. "I hope people think I have had more to offer than that," he responds, wincing. "But I can't make the judgment."
Damazer, for all his academic achievements, was, with his brother, the first in his family to go to university. His father, a Polish émigré who fought with the British Army in the war, ran a small delicatessen in Temple Fortune, in north-west London; his mother came from Switzerland.
"They worked very hard," he says. "At home, the BBC opened up a million worlds, from Attenborough to Alistair Cooke to Bronowski." The corporation became an early hope for a vocation. Had he considered using his excellent history degree to pursue an academic career? "I wasn't good enough," he says, apparently without false modesty. "I didn't have the diligence or the stamina. I was perfectly good, but got lucky in the exams." Instead, he took a Harvard scholarship and worked for a US senator before joining ITN as a trainee.
That modesty extends to a reluctance unusual among channel controllers to take credit for the talent he nurtured along the way. He will only talk in general about "good signings who made a difference" when he was "driving the agenda up" when editing the Nine O'Clock News. Nor will he specify his impact on the schedules. "I'm choreographer-in-chief," he says. "A lot of the good ideas don't come from the people like me."
This could, in part, be a factor of his limited radio experience before taking this job (he was previously number two at news). He brushes off any suggestions that he lacks commitment to radio. "I've been a heavy Radio 4 listener for a very long time," he says. "The news job involved tons of radio."
What is next for the Damazer axe? "I'm not trying to come with a whole new set of answers, plonk it down and say: 'That's my agenda, look how clever I am,'" he says. "I am trying to work with the grain, but also encourage programme-makers, in long established programmes, to feel there's enough room for change, fresh approaches, originality, new voices."
Veg Talk, we know, is being uprooted. What of You & Yours, often maligned by the critics as unfocused? "I told them after the latest burst of minor publicity [about the programme's future] that they were perfectly safe in my hands. For good reason: the audience has grown." Midweek? "You can't expect any massive upheaval there." Woman's Hour? "Discarding programmes which have big histories, brand names, is quite a tricky thing to do, especially if a programme is able to evolve." Which, he says, Woman's Hour is.
As for Today, it remains "a magnificent beast" that works. He rejects suggestions that its interview style sometimes veers towards the cynical: "I know John [Humphrys] and Jim [Naughtie] and Sarah [Montague] well enough to say they absolutely understand the difference between knocking an argument about to see how robust it is, and a 'politicians are all lying bastards' approach. None of them holds to that maxim." Has he found John Humphrys's eventual successor? His retirement "is not on the horizon to speculate about".
Overall, Damazer wants to reassure his audience that Radio 4 will continue sailing by as undisturbed as possible. You can't run a lively station, he says, without some people inevitably accusing the BBC of doing the wrong thing. "So you need to keep a sense of magnetic north about what you think you should be doing," he says.
Even if occasionally that means deftly steering away from a storm.
(Evening Standard, February 22 2006)
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