How I’ll miss the Dimbleby gravitas that recalled an era when the Beeb did speak for the nation

DAVID Dimbleby’s forthcoming departure as chairman of BBC1’s Question Time calls to mind a great Norma Desmond adage.

In Sunset Boulevard, silent movie legend Norma is confronted by a man who says: ‘Hey, you used to be big in pictures.’ Norma inhales magisterially and declares: ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’

Aged 79, David Dimbleby is still remarkably fit and lucid. He remains the most honeyed of British broadcasting’s presenters, and is seldom less than on top of his brief.

He has the handsome looks and hairline of a man 20 years his junior. Born in 1938, but still pulling off that boyish charm! And yet he is stepping down from what is supposed to be BBC Television’s flagship current affairs show. Why?

In 2010, declaring his intention to remain at Question Time, he said: ‘ I shall be dragged kicking and screaming from the chair.’

Inquisitor

Eight years on, the BBC has issued a respectful announcement that its grand inquisitor is calling it a day at the end of the year — though he will continue to work as a roving reporter, his ‘first love’. There is no kicking and screaming.

But when you heard the news that his quarter of a century running the Thursday night politics programme was ending, did you think, ‘Poor old Dimbleby, packed off to the glue factory’? Or did you think, ‘Good grief, that’s bad news for Question Time’? Many of us surely inclined to the latter.

Dimbleby deserves a rest. He has had an amazing innings and would not be human if he didn’t feel relief that he will no longer be schlepping up and down the kingdom on Thursdays. The logistics of Question Time are exhausting.

But has the programme itself not become distinctly patchy? As a result of its late hour and increasingly shrieky audience participation, it is no longer a must- watch event and no longer remotely elevating.

The thing has become a lowgrade shouting match — and for months, Dimbleby has looked out of place amid all the caterwauling and grandstanding. It was the programme that got small, as Norma Desmond might have said.

Dimbleby was only the third Question Time chairman, following Sir Robin Day and Peter Sissons.

Bow-tied, big-spectacled Sir Robin was a vainglorious old boy, plainly considering himself several cuts above the ‘ here today, gone tomorrow politicians’, as he called then Defence Secretary John Nott in an interview. Sissons was more the low-profile journeyman news presenter.

Dimbleby combined the merits of both men, adding a layer of good-humoured, lightly patrician tolerance.

Before he took over Question Time in 1994, the BBC wanted a woman to do the job — doesn’t it always? — but the idea of appointing Sue Lawley came to nothing.

The other candidate was Jeremy Paxman, who was felt to be a little disdainful, his salty scepticism verging on cynicism. The more positively engaged, classically balanced Dimbleby got the job.

The BBC sets, or used to set, great store by balance, which had nothing to do with your voice levels, though Dimbleby’s mellifluous tones are a large part of his TV appeal.

Nor is balance merely a question of party- political loyalties and avoiding them. That was always thought essential, at least until Andrew Marr, who was clearly a New Labour supporter, was made the BBC’s political editor at the height of Blairism in 2000.

Balance, for the old BBC, meant balance of temperament, of expression and of attitude to everything, from what you thought about judges to what you thought about the Royal Family and fashion. In all those things — with one exception — Dimbleby projected a convincing equanimity.

The exception was sport. He cannot abide it! ‘I hate all sport with an absolute passion,’ he once told a newspaper. ‘When the football season starts in August, I feel physically sick.’

His attitude to games was scarred by experiences as a schoolboy. In addition to the usual terror that some boys have of hard cricket balls and crunching rugby tackles, he was forced to play hockey, ‘which is a terrible game’.

He recounted: ‘I had to play in goal, which is extremely perilous, particularly if you are a man. They came at you with these great sticks held at crotch height.’

The Dimbleby crown jewels, happily, survived their encounter with the Charterhouse hockey pitches and Dimbleby has married twice — the first time to Josceline, who became a cookery writer, then to Belinda, a TV producer. With Josceline, Dimbleby has three adult children (Liza, Henry and Kate) and with Belinda he has a younger son, Fred.

It would certainly be fair to say there is a twinkle in Dimbleby’s eye. He is not quite suave, but he is certainly smoothly dashing. He has a hint of the bohemian, too — he recently had a scorpion tattoo inked on his shoulder.

Talent

After Charterhouse he went to Oxford University, also studying in Paris and Perugia in Italy, before joining the BBC in Bristol in the early Sixties.

Did he land his first job because he was the son of Richard Dimbleby, perhaps the most popular broadcaster of the immediate post-war years? Probably. But it would be quite wrong to suggest that David or his brother Jonathan, also a BBC presenter, owe their careers to nepotism.

They would not have been so successful if they had lacked talent, and David would not have been entrusted with commentating on events such as Princess Diana’s funeral and election night broadcasts.

For years, David — the eldest child — had to endure being described as Richard Dimbleby’s son, long after many viewers had forgotten Dimbleby Sr (who died in 1965).

So far as I know, David never resented that. In fact, he has been a proud defender of his father’s memory. Perhaps the old man taught him something of his effortless ease around politicians.

There have been memorable moments already this year on Question Time, including his recent ejection of a Left-wing member of the public who was making a nuisance of himself. This won cheers and it should, one hopes, be a caution to QT producers not to try to whip their audiences into a frenzy.

A production assistant once confessed to me that QT selects audience members for the vehemence of their views, as the shouting is ‘good telly’. Dimbleby may have taken a more mature view that it just made the show look oafish.

Tease

Then there was the time he tried lightly to tease Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg for being pukka, and Rees-Mogg replied that he had been at Eton with one of Dimbleby’s sons. Dimbleby took the riposte well. He could laugh at himself.

Some Brexiteers and some Labour supporters claimed Dimbleby was a wet Tory. But it is hard to make a convincing charge of bias against him from what he said in the studio.

For someone who spent so many hours in front of a live camera, he managed to keep his personal views remarkably quiet. And when he announced the result of the EU referendum in 2016, it wasn’t possible to tell what he felt about it. His performance was spotless.

Dignified, professional, reassuringly avuncular, he has been a steadying presence at our great national occasions and through some years of tempestuous politics. The BBC will miss him badly.

The nation should, too, for he is one of the last of the generation of broadcasters of genuine stature who reassure us that we are celebrating or mourning together.

That kind of presence is sometimes only appreciated when it is absent, as with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee river pageant in 2012, almost spoiled by the inanity of much younger BBC presenters. And if there is one thing David Dimbleby has never been, it’s inane.