Amol Rajan is leaving BBC Radio 4’s Today programme after five years – a development that is somehow both surprising and predictable. If it feels jarring that Rajan’s tenure has been so short in a job where people usually stay for longer than the average marriage, go back and listen to any recent episode and you’ll see all the signs are there.
The fact is that Rajan has always been too cool – or, perhaps, felt too cool – for Today, and his personality too big. In a statement, he has said he’s “extremely excited to jump into the great digital Narnia of the creator economy” – OK, Kendall Roy – and that “it’s time to unleash my inner entrepreneur”. In other words: Brand Amol is go.
Since joining in 2021, Rajan’s career has soared, helped on by his appointment in 2023 as the quizmaster of University Challenge, where he has become the benevolent sports coach to Jeremy Paxman’s stern headmaster. He has also launched the podcast Radical (in collaboration with the Today programme), where he interviews innovators and pioneers, and the Today Programme Podcast, which he co-hosts with Nick Robinson. Having become the youngest newspaper editor at age 29 when he was appointed to the top role at The Independent, now, at just 41, he appears to have used Today as a springboard.
Rajan joined University Challenge two years after he started at Today (Photo: BBC/Lifted Entertainment, Part of ITV Studios/Ric Lowe)This is surprising, when it has historically seemed prestigious enough to be the final destination. Yet the relationship – between one of the BBC’s flagship programmes and a hot young thing with a silver neck chain – was designed to be mutually beneficial, and, we might speculate, never intended to be permanent.
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Rajan’s appointment marked an identity shift for the programme two years after the departure of its stalwart host Jon Humphrys in 2019. Where Humphrys had made appearing on Today such a gruelling political task that Michael Gove ill-advisedly described it as like “going into Harvey Weinstein’s bedroom”, Rajan’s style has proved altogether warmer and more relatable.
Among his co-presenters, former BBC political editor Nick Robinson and north America editor Justin Webb – and, until December 2024, the prodigious BBC broadcaster Mishal Husain – Rajan has sounded casual and occasionally overfamiliar, with friendly chat with guests, mentions of his personal life and – mon dieu – more than a few dropped “T”s.
As much as this might have riled longtime fans, it was clearly a conscious effort on the part of the BBC, which now compete not only with other breakfast radio programmes but chummy podcasts like The Rest is Politics and The News Agents, pre-records beamed directly into earbuds that feel a lot closer to home for listeners than the incessant threat of the beeps. But the strategy hasn’t worked: Today lost 800,000 listeners in 2023; following a peak of 7.5m listeners in 2017, it now sits somewhere around 5.6m.
Rajan interviewing Rachel Reeves (Photo: BBC News)Of course, this is not Rajan’s fault. Yet any sense of incongruity between his slightly looser style and Today’s traditional stiff upper lip could only ever have been overcome by one of them changing. The BBC’s lack of success with the initial pivot seemed a clear sign that listeners would still almost always choose serious politics over vague attempts at pop cultural relevancy. Today wasn’t going to become something completely different – and, more to the point, nor was Rajan.
He is without doubt a serious political journalist, but he is also a personality, a star, a brand in his own right – and that’s just not what Today is for. On University Challenge he can chastise naïve 18-year-olds for not knowing Motown songs (and who could forget that infamous line: “I can’t accept drum and bass, we need jungle, I’m afraid”); it’s more difficult to have banter with a frazzled MP at 6.30 in the morning.
The reality is that Today always needed Rajan more than he needed it. The question now is how each of them will fare without the other.
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