Peter Hobday
Long-serving presenter of the Today programme whose amiable style endeared him to listeners
PETER HOBDAY, who has died aged 82, was unceremoniously sacked from Radio 4’s Today programme in 1996, having presented the network’s flagship current affairs programme for 14 years and become one of its longest-serving anchormen. The reason – not that he was ever given one – for the abrupt non-renewal of his contract seems to have been that the amiable-sounding Hobday refused to behave like an attack dog on air. Hobday himself was wounded by his dismissal, but remained philosophical. “A fat, middle-aged hack like me,” he noted ruefully, “didn’t really square with the mean, lean interview machine. [I] wasn’t invasive and I didn’t feel the need to scream and shout.”
Even so, later in life he felt proud of have been part of such a successful programme.
Although when Hobday joined Today in 1982 there was a general consensus that all the presenters were equal, it soon became evident that his old-fashioned gentlemanly style marked him out as the third man in a triumvirate led by the jousting duo of the avuncular John Timpson and the gritty northerner Brian Redhead, a presenting alliance that, as one critic put it, “takes the nation gently by its early-morning ear and urges it to consciousness with incisive interviews and amiable urbanities”.
“They were the partnership,” Hobday later agreed, “that gave this programme its special tone, its special place in the nation’s affairs.”
As the 1980s wore on, Hobday took much critical flak for Today’s waning fortunes, in particular its perceived failure to set the political agenda for the day. By 1988 The Daily Telegraph’s Gillian Reynolds was castigating him for his lengthy questions and tendency to lose his thread. Russell Twisk, in The Sunday Telegraph, agreed that his questions were “usually twice as long as the answers evoked”.
A low-water mark came in 1992 when, throughout a tetchy interview with a former Tory prime minister, Sir Edward Heath, Hobday mistakenly called him Mr Heath. A couple of years later, during an interview with David Hunt, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Hobday introduced him as the Chancellor of the “Ducky” of Lancaster. At this point his co-presenter, James Naughtie, stood up and slowly poured a glass of water over the still-talking Hobday’s head.
In March 1996 Today’s then editor, Roger Mosey, fired him. “There are very few ways in which an editor can make a mark on a programme,” reflected Hobday’s copresenter John Humphrys, “and the easiest way is to change the presenters, bring in a new one, or get rid of one who’s been around for a long time.”
Twenty minutes before the end of his last shift Hobday quietly asked Humphrys if he would finish the programme on his own. Humphrys agreed and Hobday slipped out.
“That was it,” another regular presenter, Sue Macgregor, recalled. “He had spared himself, and the rest of the team, the embarrassment of his finishing without any kind of final flourish. No vote of thanks had been arranged, and there was no telephone call from his editor.”
A Save Peter Hobday campaign was launched, with demands that every other Today presenter be dismissed instead, but to no avail.
“Out in listener land,” noted Hugo Gurdon in The Daily Telegraph, “they like his jokes, they like him, they even like his frequent bulletins on the health of his camellias in the garden of his Kensington home.” As the radio critic Paul Donovan recorded in his history of the programme, the 18-stone Hobday was not above making jokes about his girth, and nor were his colleagues: once, after a travel item about an abnormal load on the A40, John Timpson jested that it must be Peter Hobday.
There was no doubt that beneath the easy charm Hobday could be a sharp inquisitor. He once interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev during a tour promoting the Russian leader’s memoirs, annoying Gorbachev so much with probing questions that he refused to sign a copy of the book, and only relented when pressed by his wife Raisa.
Peter James Hobday was born on February 16 1937 in Wolverhampton, the son of Arthur Hobday, a civil servant who died when Peter was quite young, and Dorothy (née Lewis), a teacher.
Educated at St Chad’s College, Peter went on to read Modern Languages at Leicester University, but failed a classics module in his first year and left without a degree.
He undertook his National Service at Nato headquarters in Paris where he met his first wife, Tamara Batcharnikoff, the daughter of Russian émigrés, and became fluent in both French and Russian. Back in Britain, he worked as a song plugger for three weeks before joining the Wolverhampton Express and Star in 1960 as its showbusiness editor.
He soon moved to London, working in public relations for GEC, and as a journalist for Business magazine (1960-61) and The Director (1961-74) before joining the BBC World Service in 1970.
In 1974 he moved from Bush House to join The Financial World Tonight on Radio 4, the first daily financial programme on British radio, and after a spell on Money Box (1977-80) moved over to television in The Money Programme (1979–80). He spent two years on Newsnight before returning to radio to join the Today programme in 1982.
No official reason for Hobday’s abrupt departure was ever forthcoming, but some insiders questioned his commitment to the programme and claimed that he had a tendency to ignore production briefs.
Hobday himself accepted that he did take on other projects, but pointed out that he was obliged to, because he was not used on Today as much as the other presenters. In his last full year on the programme, he was hired for 50 editions.
His confrère John Timpson believed Hobday to have been gravely underrated, however, and that he had fallen from favour because he was not part of “the aggressive knock ’em down and kick ’em brigade”. Timpson added that, in his view, Hobday had been the programme’s “last breath of sanity”.
Following his removal from Today, Hobday resurfaced on Radio 3 as one of three regular presenters of Morning Collection.
In March 1987, Hobday noticed an article in The Daily Telegraph about properties available cheaply in Umbria and Tuscany, and shortly thereafter bought a ruined farmhouse near Città della Pieve. He recounted its five-year restoration in one of his several books, In the Valley of the Fireflies (1995).
His others included Saudi Arabia Today (1974); Managing the Message (2000); and The Girl in Rose: Haydn’s last love (2004). In retirement, Hobday listed his recreation as “growing olives in Italy”.
Peter Hobday married Tamara Batcharnikoff in 1959. The marriage produced a son and a daughter, and she died in 1984. He married secondly, in 1996, Victoria Fenwick.
Peter Hobday, born February 16 1937, died January 18 2020