Amollification

It will be an odd week ahead in the Today programme production area, with questions about who said what to Rosamund Urwin, Media Editor at The Sunday Times, about Amol Rajan.  Let me fillet the quotes for you... 

 “He has changed the tone of the programme and made it his own,” says a Today insider. “Everyone else — except Justin [Webb], who always had that mischievous charm — sounds stiff and old-fashioned by comparison. Amol has brought his personality to it. So when Mishal Husain interviewed the cricketer Azeem Rafiq about the racism he suffered, Amol said afterwards, ‘I’ve gone to pieces listening to that’ — and that is just unprecedented.”

“There’s a mixed view of him at the BBC, but he has plenty of supporters, and I reckon he can get Nick [Robinson] off the programme to [replace Andrew] Marr and have it as the Amol Rajan show within a couple of years,” said a Today source.

He always praises his production team too, saying they are the ones who create the magic, though one critic says: “It’s quite off-putting, it’s a weird humble-brag and a phoney deference.”

And the only fully-attributed bit: “Amol is one of the best: a first-class journalist and exceptional modern broadcaster,” said Owenna Griffiths, the editor of the Today programme. “He combines great intellectual curiosity with a laser-like sharpness in interviews.”