The intolerable complacency of the “Today” program.

Having recently turned 65, Today we were told the program was in trouble. Once an agenda-setting morning news briefing, the BBC Radio 4 show has been rapidly losing listeners, around 600,000 in the past year according to ratings service Rajar. Meanwhile, the station’s commercial rivals, and particularly LBC, have been growing steadily (albeit from a much smaller base) in audience and profile with their livelier, more biased and outspoken style.

Some unconvincing explanations have been given: from the post-Covid summer holiday exodus to the decline in event saturation since 2017, when TodayThe audience peaked at 7.5 million. It’s as if we haven’t yet reckoned with the Brexit wars, the Trump presidency, the Grenfell fire and all the rest of that time, along with the war in Europe, the cost of living crisis and the atmosphere of a failed state in Westminster. There’s a reason permacrisis was just named word of the year.

But as someone who prefers to start the day, if I have to, with black coffee and a blast of music, it’s clear to me where the program’s problems begin: in the acoustics, the stunning, airless silence. On Radio 4, everything sounds flat and close, but muffled. Without musical beds, the program exists in a sonic space where nothing reverberates.

If Today it sounds like a hermetically sealed world, its hosts speak accordingly – as if all the problems are happening somewhere far away and are just grumbling fodder in the seniors’ room. Nick Robinson directs with a tone of vague, disjointed banter, whether he’s delivering an apocalyptic report on global warming or indulging in weak BBC-powered banter with his co-host Mishal Hussain and proto-Partridge sports reporter Gary Richardson.

The leads – Robinson, Hussain, Amol Rajan, Justin Webb – are eminently capable and well paid, yet not invited to stretch themselves compared to the demands placed on former colleagues elsewhere. In podcasting, The news agents Emily Maitlis and company must be interesting enough for people to seek them out among endless choices; on LBC, the A new statesmanAndrew Marr should manage news and public relations.

Today nor can it claim superiority in inventory reporting. Its newsletters are written in the same strained magazine language and clichés you’d find elsewhere, except that the newsletter’s readers recite those apparently timeless phrases—”fueled speculation,” “scored a landslide victory,” “economic gridlock”—with extraordinary fluffy accents. While other voices are present, mainly thanks to the number of Scots in the political team, RP and the very soft Estuary are the constant root notes. Regional English accents are most likely to appear in sports bulletins.

The format is both too wide and too rigid. The articles are dragged – they go through the headlines of the newspapers; friendly conversations with correspondents; interviews with guests. Unless a story goes live, reporters aren’t convinced of urgency. Some, like political correspondent Nick Eardley, are able to generate it themselves, but others are allowed to roam at their leisure.

Interviewees also get an easy ride. In recent broadcasts, James Comer, the US congressman from Kentucky, and Nicholas Lyons, the new Lord Mayor of the City of London, have been asked only polite questions with barely a hint of challenge and intent, rather than being pressed into the Republican embrace of a conspiracy, say, or the City’s offshore dependencies.

Any aggression is reserved for domestic political interviews, but they have lost their edge and sting. Frankly, there is no doubt that the quality of the political entity has deteriorated. Already 20 years ago Today the presenters might have been up against Tony Blair, William Hague, Mo Mowlam – men of substance and mental agility, ready to lend the odd sparkle to their personalities. These days, if not avoiding interviews altogether (a.k.a. the Johnson manoeuvre), most ministers, such as Michelle Donnellan and James Cleverley, are simply too well versed in defensive tactics – dodging, ducking, delaying – to be caught. Cleverly, the foreign secretary was recently allowed to ignore Hussein’s most telling question about the new migrant deal with France.

And there are those who are so hopeless that there is no need to force the mistake. Take distress accent specialist Chris Philp, who crawled out of the smoldering wreckage of the post-mini-budget treasury only to plunge straight into the moral sewers of the Home Office. Here’s someone who is just as, if not more, likely to make headlines later on the morning show after being toned down by previous encounters. Phil has recently been turned into a hideous horror by this famous soul reaper, BBC BreakfastCharlie State, who asks what his credentials are to be Police Minister. At the time he reached Times Radio, Philp said it was “a bit cheeky” for asylum seekers at the Manston processing center to expect scabies-free living conditions in 21st-century Britain.

It’s also astonishing how our most recently departed Prime Minister was so expertly dismantled by a succession of local BBC radio presenters – now threatened with redundancy – that they wrongly assumed this would be a softer option than continuing Today.

Away from the tiresome matter of today, there is much looking back and inward. An interview with the BBC’s former chief political correspondent John Sergeant recalled the late psychologist David Butler, whose innovations, including the swingometer, are still a staple of the BBC’s election night coverage; there was another one for the BBC centenary with Ian Lavender from Dad’s Armycomplete with an extended meditation on “Don’t Tell Him Pike” (Del Boy falls over the bar in Only fools and horses is for another day, presumably).

although Today program and presenters such as Brian Redhead, did much to end the excessive deference to politicians in the 1970s and 1980s, it still seems a relic of a more patrician era, exemplified by the continued presence of Thought for the day. Today is current as a liturgy, with the same kind of lengthiness, of amelioration of tedium and the awkward mingling of the parochial and the profound. Listening to it in 2022, you feel like you’re stuck on the first page of a mid-century novel.

If there was ever a post-war era of benevolent paternalism, a time when Britain was more secure in its self-image and had a greater sense of common purpose, with the BBC at the heart of it, it is now over. Elsewhere, anchors with views ranging across the political spectrum, from Ian Dale to James O’Brien, prove that it is possible to inject their own perspective into news analysis and interviews without fatally compromising balance and rigor.

Current affairs coverage must reflect a time when everything is at stake – the way we live, work and consume; the existence of the United Kingdom; our liberal democracy – and everything is contested, even the reality of global warming. If the BBC can’t allow its high-profile presenters the political freedom of its rivals – which it can’t – then more of them will move on. To stay valuable Today, or whatever comes after it, must have its journalists fighting for the facts to do their best for the basic truths and realities that define our age. It’s time to leave the airlock and enter the fray.

[See also: High Low with EmRata review: Emily Ratajkowski’s new podcast is a painful listen]