ALAN SPEAKS!
Alan, welcome back! For the uninitiated, what can you tell us about This Time?
It’s what’s known as a magazine show, bottling all of the magic of magazine reading and translating that into 30 minutes of TV. Some people sneer at magazines. But imagine a world without magazines, with readers having to make do with books, newspapers and letters. A chilling prospect. This Time manages to be all your favourite magazines rolled into one. As informative as the Reader’s Digest, as sassy as Bunty, as entertaining as Private Eye pre-hislop, as debonaire as Condé Nast Traveler, as fair-minded as The Spectator. Our goal? To deliver telly people talk about – what BBC execs still refer to as watercooler TV, even when you point out everyone works from home these days, so office water coolers are just stagnant receptacles going mouldy round the nozzle.
What kind of subjects does the show cover?
What doesn’t it cover?
But what does it cover?
Well, we’ll cover current affairs, hot-button topics, global issues, everyday niggles, some very light politics – pitched at or below GCSE level – all held together with good old-fashioned chat, which by the way is baked into the format. We underfill the show by about 30 per cent to allow for nattering. So, over the half hour, expect around 20 minutes of content. And the rest of it is left slack to keep the show fresh.
What’s it like presenting alongside such a popular presenter as Jennie Gresham?
A keen tennis player and childless, Jennie likes nothing more than catching up on the soaps, reading The Guardian newspaper or shopping for the latest ipads. She’s modern, sassy and wants it all! It’s fair to say we approach our roles as co-anchors slightly differently. One of us can be seen presenting umpteen other BBC shows from Walking The Lakes With Jennie Gresham to The Unexplored Brontës With Jennie Gresham to Inside John Lewis With Jennie Gresham to Jennie Gresham’s NHS Heroes. The other one prefers to dedicate him – or her– self exclusively to This Time because he/she happens to think the show and our viewers deserve that, but each to their own.
How would you describe your working relationship?
We’ve had our ups and downs – it’s like a marriage. Very like a marriage, in that we sit next to each other on a sofa, we don’t face each other when we talk, and there’s no sex or suggestion of sex. Are we friends? Well, are Ant and Dec friends? Are Holly and Phil? Are Richard and Judy? No, of course not. But we dovetail. At least, I do.