Woman of Today: An Autobiography
Sue MacGregor
288pp, Headline, £20
Working on Today is, at times, an unremittingly grisly experience. Night shifts; soggy toast and lukewarm coffee; temperamental computers; spin doctors yammering away on the phone; and one of the pesky presenters throwing a wobbly in the corner because they don't like the running order and can't see why we've fixed such a daft interview. And the briefing - well, it's the worst briefing they've ever read, and thank goodness they're there to rescue the programme from the mess everyone else has made of it.
At 5am it is genuinely difficult to offer thanks for the opportunity to be working with some of the greats of contemporary broadcasting. But for the millions of people who tune in from 6am, that is what the presenters are: trusted guides through a waking, ever more complex world. It is incontrovertible that Sue MacGregor is one of the very best in the business: the voice is just perfect, the questioning utterly professional, polite and impartial, and the personality warm, with radio's ability to leave enough mystery for the imagination to roam.
This autobiography strips away much of the mystery. Sue's on-air demeanour has Englishness stamped through it like letters in rock, despite Scottish parents, but she spent much of her childhood in South Africa. I was reminded of a colleague who travelled there with her and phoned the office, sounding slightly spooked, to say that there were scores of white women in Cape Town who were "exactly like Sue". But she never took South African citizenship, was an admirer of Helen Suzman, and wrote "I could not pretend I was sorry" when the racist prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated.
That's pretty much as close as we get to any sense of Sue's politics, which is as it should be. Unfortunately, we get rather deeper into her private life. I had supper with her around the time she'd signed the deal to do this book and I know I wasn't alone in suggesting that she should avoid the blandishments to spill the beans about her relationships. For a start, there was the danger that she'd become better known as "Bonking Sue" than as the supreme broadcasting professional she is. It also didn't seem in the best possible taste to alert a widow to her husband's dalliances through a Daily Mail serialisation and a putative bestseller. It was a bad idea then, a bad idea now - and the private letter she sent to the widow before publication doesn't make it much better.
Sue is more conspicuously fighting a good fight in her views on the role of women in general, though there's surprisingly little evidence of her own career being blighted by sexism. Even in the BBC of the 1960s, she starts off with a male editor who "went out of his way to employ equal numbers of men and women reporters". In 1979 the male managing director of BBC radio "decided that Today needed a permanent woman's voice", and it was Sue's female manager who prevented her moving straight away. Her male boss in the 1980s "enjoyed working with women and was keen to promote them". By 1986 Today had a woman editor, and in the 1990s there were women in senior positions right across the team - as well as the arrival of the notably unsuppressed Anna Ford as a presenter.
There are, of course, counter-indicators, including a splendidly bizarre quote from a head of presentation in the 1970s about why women could never achieve the required mix of authority, consistency and reliability. And I should declare an interest here. Sue cites my arrival as editor of Today as the point at which her share of the key political interviews "declined substantially", and it clearly rankles that John and Jim still, to this day, are more likely to be the people who interview the prime minister. Sue tends to see this as a function of a male preference for "aggression" in interviews or a residual belief that men's voices have more authority.
The answer is, I think, simpler than that. In John Humphrys in the 1990s, Today had the consummate political interviewer of his generation - a superlative questioner who could spot a weaselly nuanced answer at 50 paces. The man met his times as the Conservative government helpfully fell apart live on Today 's airwaves; and, without any intervention from BBC bosses or any evident sexism, the programme's night editors would almost always choose John for the latest joust at 10 past eight. It didn't mean any lack of respect for Sue: indeed, she comments on her substantial engagements at the time with other public figures, from Nelson Mandela to the Duchess of York, and omits rather good interviews with John Major and other European leaders from the Copenhagen summit. But the market made its decisions on Today presenters and their encounters with politicians, and I'm not sure I can think of many occasions where I wish we'd sidelined John in Sue's favour. The big picture, in any case, is that it doesn't seem to have damaged Sue's reputation in the eyes of the public that she didn't always get a chance to bash the chancellor.
There is a further reference to our time together that can be more happily resolved. She rightly spots an ambivalence in our relationship at the time we started working together - which I can now reveal was caused by a degree of pressure from elsewhere in BBC News, bizarre in retrospect, that she should be phased out as a presenter. Whatever my faults, and leaving aside an enduring respect for Sue's abilities, I had a fairly shrewd appreciation of the Radio 4 audience and a total determination not to be lynched by the people of the home counties. I never had the slightest intention of getting rid of her, and it's a small matter of pride that I played a part in resisting the whim of the time and preserving her for the nation.
So it will be a sad day when she hangs up her Today headphones at the end of the month. I can't imagine that my colleagues in radio will let her disappear for good from the BBC's airwaves, because there is no more sustained achievement by a woman in 20th-century broadcasting, either in range or in quality. This is, for the most part, a respectable book that records what she did and why. What it lacks is the accompanying CD or tape that would capture the real triumph.
· Roger Mosey is head of BBC Television News.
