The dynasty that tuned Britain into history as it happened
As the last Dimbleby quits the BBC, ROBERT HARDMAN says that, from Belsen to Brexit, they were unmatched as...
At LONG last it would seem Jeremy Paxman’s sardonic observation about British broadcasting has run its course.
‘It is part of the constitution of this country that all major events have to be presented by a Dimbleby,’ he remarked ahead of the 1997 General Election.
the tower of London has its ravens, Gibraltar has its apes and the BBC has its Dimblebys.
Certainly, since the dawn of broadcasting time, it is hard to find a significant moment when there has not been member of the family in the thick of it.
From the Desert Rats duelling with Rommel through the Blitz to the Fall of Berlin, the Cold War, Watergate, Reaganism, thatcherism, Blairism and Brexit — plus every royal event from the Coronation to the Golden Jubilee — there has always been a Dimbleby to chaperone the news.
So yesterday’s announcement that Jonathan Dimbleby, 74, is to step down as the host of BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions in June — after 32 years in that particular chair — is a milestone.
‘It will be a wrench to leave. But the time feels right,’ said Jonathan.
Following on from the recent retirement of older brother, David, 80, after his own record-breaking stint at the helm of BBC1’s Question time, there is a genuine end-of-an-era feel.
Coinciding with the impending departure of John Humphrys from Radio 4’s today programme and Andrew Neil from BBC1’s this Week, it is hard not to sense a shifting of the tectonic plates beneath New Broadcasting House.
In three years, the BBC will be marking its centenary. And one family has been part of the story for most of its existence — since 1936, to be precise.
Some caustic commentators will say that it is about time, too; that the Dimbleby clan have enjoyed hereditary preferment for quite long enough.
Most, though, will point to the fact that members of this family endured because they are extremely good at the job.
Between them, the brothers have been a duopoly in current affairs for decades, exercising a calm yet assured hand on the gavel of much of our national debate. WHILE
others tweet and shout, theirs has been an understated approach, leavened with self-deprecation. Occasionally, they come a cropper. Witness David’s exchange with Jacob Rees-Mogg in 2015 during a Question time debate on Heathrow flight noise.
the tory MP noted he had once lived ‘not a million miles from Slough’.
‘Eton, is that?’ asked David, wryly. ReesMogg let the applause die down before his riposte: ‘I was at school with your son.’ the audience guffawed, though none laughed louder than Dimbleby himself.
Both have a hinterland, too, actively engaged in history, science and the arts. Jonathan, who once had ambitions to be a farmer, became one regardless in tandem with his broadcasting career. He would go on to be president of, among others, the Soil Association, RSPB and Campaign to Protect Rural England while finding time to write Prince Charles’s official biography.
Media watchers ruefully recall what happened at one state occasion at which the BBC decided to dispense with a Dimbleby.
the coverage of the Queen’s thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant in 2012 — featuring gormless C-list celebrities clowning in the rain while the Dunkirk Little Ships sailed on virtually unnoticed — was a low point in the Corporation’s coverage of set-piece events.
Never again. the Dimblebys are moving on — though David will continue to present Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph — but the Dimbleby template remains.
the Queen was still a child when Richard Dimbleby started his career on the family paper, the Richmond & twickenham times. Having advocated a fresh, more dynamic approach to news-gathering on the wireless, Richard was hired as a BBC reporter in 1936.
Bizarre though it may seem, he was the only BBC journalist sent to cover the early days of World War II in France.
Back then, the Corporation preferred to base its coverage on official handouts.
Not yet 30, he was the first reporter to cover the Desert War and, in January 1943, the first correspondent to fly with Bomber Command. Dimbleby joined a ‘One thousand Bomber’ raid over Berlin where he observed the effect of incendiary bombs dropped from his Lancaster. ‘On the dark face of the German capital, these great incandescent flower-beds spread themselves,’ he reported.
Given that nearly half of those Bomber Command crews would not survive the conflict, this was intrepid reporting at its best. Richard was in good hands that night — his pilot was Guy Gibson, later the VC-winning hero of the Dambuster Raids.
In 1944, Richard was the mainstay of the BBC’s D-Day coverage. By now, the reporting team had expanded to 25 — still less than the number the Beeb might now routinely despatch to an inconsequential by-election.
It was, again, a broadcasting landmark. But it was Richard’s coverage of the liberation of Bergen- Belsen concentration camp that had the deepest impact. Some of his reporting was so unsettling that, at first, his bosses refused to broadcast the despatch, until he threatened to resign.
Years later, Jonathan would write movingly of his feelings revisiting some of these historic despatches:
‘For myself as his son, I can never erase the thought that at the same moment I was in my mother’s womb, soon to be born into safety and security thanks to the heroism of British men and women who fought to liberate Europe from the tyranny that perpetrated such crimes.’
In the postwar years, Richard was quick to embrace the new medium of television.
He was enshrined in history as the voice of the Queen’s Coronation in 1953, though his coverage of the funerals of George VI, John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill remained equally statesmanlike.
In between these landmarks, he was the anchor of such BBC stalwarts as Down Your Way (on radio) and Panorama (on the telly).
And come the big set- piece moments, like General Elections, he would run the BBC show. At one point, during the 1964 Election, the programme cut to a report from a promising young reporter who had joined the BBC’s Bristol operation from Oxford. ‘thanks, son,’ said Richard as young David handed back to the studio.
A year later, having covered Churchill’s funeral while suffering from cancer, Richard passed away. But David was soon starting to fill his very substantial boots with hard-hitting documentaries.
By 1974, he was anchoring Panorama, just like his father, and, by 1979, he was at the helm of the BBC’s election coverage as Mrs thatcher came to office.
He would do the same at every election thereafter, up to and including theresa May’s 2017 nonvictory. And to many, he will be forever associated with his dawn pronouncement after the 2016 EU referendum: ‘the British people have spoken — we are out.’
And in October 1971 it was David who presided over Britain’s entry into the Common Market when he presented a 24 Hours special — the Great Decision — marking Westminster’s decisive vote.
By then, Jonathan had already joined the family business, starting at the BBC before moving to ItV’s flagship current affairs programme, this Week.
His coverage of the 1973 famine in Ethiopia won him tV’s prestigious Richard Dimbleby Award.
During a career which saw him regularly hop between ItV and the BBC, he would often end up broadcasting against his big brother — be it at General Elections or the Queen Mother’s funeral.
that no one seriously took umbrage at the Dimbleby stranglehold over so many great occasions was down to the fact that they have all been masters of the subtle but fiendishly difficult art of being a broadcasting ringmaster.
Whether chairing a panel discussion in Skegness or covering events that changed the world, it can truly be said that the Dimblebys were never lost for words.