Newsnight is stale and in urgent need of a revamp, says its former presenter

Though I’m a BBC man through and through, I think BBC2’s flagship news and current affairs programme, Newsnight – which I co-presented from 1980-86 – is too formulaic and lacks its old sparkle. Any show that’s been going for nearly 40 years needs an occasional revamp and I don’t think the need for one has really been addressed since Jeremy Paxman left in 2014.

When Newsnight started in 1980, a lot of people in the BBC news department saw it as a superfluous upstart and would have liked to see it strangled at birth. But the show’s team – I was one of the original presenters along with Peter Snow and the late Donald MacCormick – were determined to make it a success, despite the fact we were treated badly by the BBC in the early days. For instance, there was no fixed start time and I remember Denis Healey once coming on at 11.15pm and angrily saying, ‘Only drunks and junkies listen at this time of night!’

We saw ourselves as rule-breaking marauders competing with the BBC1 nightly news bulletin, and if we led on the same story as they did, we regarded that as a defeat. We always tried to surprise people, and our more in-depth approach to the news won round viewers. By the mid-80s we had over a million of them, far more than today’s audience of around 600,000.

For all the success of the Paxman years – nobody is going to question Jeremy’s ability or presence – Newsnight became a one-man show during his tenure (1989-2014). It’s like having a dominating batsman in a cricket team. You’re jolly lucky, but what do you do when he’s out?

So I think the time’s come to reinvent Newsnight. I’d try to tear it away from being part of the BBC news machine – which, for all its qualities, tends to produce the same old stuff – and regain that element of surprise. The programme-makers should ask, ‘Are we saying something original?’

Part of the show’s success in my day was down to its team approach and the fact that we all thought of ourselves as journalists rather than celebrities. I wonder whether that’s changed. Another thing: where are the maverick reporters like Vincent Hanna or Michael Crick, who were once so integral to the show’s appeal?

Unless the powers-that-be at the BBC can define what the Newsnight of the future is going to look like, I fear viewers will increasingly ask, ‘Do we really need the show any more?’ I hope they act before it’s too late.

Making A Noise by John Tusa is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 22 February, priced £25, but can be pre-ordered at bookshops.