The hill I will die on: Radio 4’s Today programme has become really annoying since I left | John Humphrys

With its gushing interviewees and weird (y’know) ways of talking, the BBC news flagship show I used to present now has me harrumphing at the radio It’s seven years since I stopped presenting the Today programme and started listening to Radio 3 instead. Or at least, that was the plan. On the first day it lasted for almost an hour. By the second day I’d given up on it. I suppose it was inevitable. You can’t spend 61 years as a news hack – more than half of it presenting the same programme – and then just erase it from your memory and start a new life. What you can do in my own case – or, rather, can’t help doing – is mutate into a “new” listener. How to describe this “new” listener? I suppose if I were Today’s editor, the phrase “pain in the arse” might come to mind. Having been the one on the radio informing (and possibly sometimes annoying) the listeners for 33 years, I’m now the man shouting at his radio about how irritating the programme has become. It’s not so much the really important stuff that gets the harrumphing going – the three main presenters remain as good as they come – it’s the stuff that challenges the meaning of IQ. In my ne