A DAY LIKE TODAY
Humphreys is a ‘flawed, curmudgeonly Welsh superhero’
JOHN HUMPHRYS
William Collins, 400pp, £20
John Humphrys, one of the most trusted and respected journalists of our age, has produced his memoir at the age of 76 and after 60 years in the trade. He admits that, ‘I don’t like being defined or told what to do, whoever is in charge’. Grilling politicians, and ‘taking the powerful to task, whether prime ministers or his former employers at the BBC, is in his blood’, said Fiona Sturges in the Guardian. In her view, his memoir ‘mixes engaging snapshots of his early career and analysis of the evolution of broadcasting with diatribes and petty score-settling’. But his ‘old-man-yells-at-cloud shtick gets wearying’.
Melanie Reid, in the Times, shared Sturges’s view; Humphrys is a ‘flawed, curmudgeonly Welsh superhero’. The superhero has been ‘relentless in pursuit of baddies, those dissembling politicians, those wielders of power. He has led a strikingly ascetic life, rising at 3.30 am for decades, self-denying worldly pleasures; a life in service to facts.’ But in his memoir Humphrys can be ‘spectacularly grumpy. His hates pepper the book.’ Still, she conceded, ‘behind the fluff and grumbles, this is an unparalleled record of contemporary politics at the jaggy end’.
Michael Buerk, reviewing in the Critic, described Humphrys as one of the ‘most wicked and engaging of friends’. So, ‘it would have been fun to see how his passion for the declared truth dealt with some of the gamier episodes of a hyperactive alpha male’s rise to media fame and fortune’. But he admired how Humphrys gave the BBC ‘one-and-ahalf barrels as he closes the studio door behind him’.