David Sexton Humphrys is a radio genius. Keep him on the air long after Today

THE Today programme has long been the best thing on Radio 4 and therefore in broadcasting altogether.

Everybody with any interest in the news listens frequently to Today.

It’s still a common experience, almost a national event, in a way that few other forms of media can claim to be any more.

There’s a purity to it still. In its live interviews, there’s no hiding. You can hear for yourself if the interviewee is failing to answer the questions, if he or she is blustering or evasive, or simply not being lucid. There’s no possibility of distorting their views. The fact it is speech only, without images, makes our listening so much more concentrated too.

These agons are all the more thrilling because of course the interviewer is exposed as well as the interviewee. Performing under these circumstances, however, is the speciality of the interviewers, there on our behalf. You might think Cabinet ministers or chief execs would have enough presence and articulacy to look after themselves well enough. They rarely do. Nobody who, in 2012, heard the then BBC director-general, George Entwistle, lose his job live on air under the pressure of John Humphrys’s questions, has forgotten it.

Humphrys, 75, announced last week he would retire from Today, after 32 years, this autumn.

He has been the maestro of the show. He is often credited with Rottweilerish aggression and tenacity in his questioning but he is also an incredible vocal performer, using changes in the speed, pitch and rhythm of his speech, wordless but expressive noises, interruptions and pauses, to challenge and expose his subjects. Little of this survives in transcripts but it is as much what has made him remarkable as the content of his questions. It may be a negative, necessarily antagonistic art — when Humphrys puts forward his own ideas, talking of his favourite music or grammar, he turns dull — but it has been one of the great treats of broadcasting for decades.

Must this stop? Humphrys used also to present a marvellous Radio 4 show called On The Ropes, in which those deeply in trouble tried to justify themselves. Just what we need now. A revival, please? Making any current politician first guest.