Today... 50 today!

Well, strictly speaking it's tomorrow when Britain's most influential radio show marks half-a-century on air. But the party has already started. Tim Luckhurst pays tribute to a great national institution, while Ian Burrell revisits some of Today's most famous yesterdays

The internet is mighty and television formidable but Britain's most influential media outlet remains a 50-year-old radio show transmitted between 6am and 9am on BBC Radio 4. Some said breakfast television would kill the Today programme, others that 24-hour television news would render it irrelevant. Alastair Campbell sought to undermine it long before Andrew Gilligan's allegations incensed him. But Today remains the only news outlet to which British opinion-formers wake up.

Elitist as its critics consider it, Today is the nearest thing to a collective sense of identity that the modern professional class possesses. Its greatest presenter, the late Brian Redhead, categorised it as the place where powerful and interesting people "drop a word in the nation's ear". His colleague, the interrogator-in-chief John Humphrys, calls it "a ringside seat at history". Not to listen is to exclude oneself from the part of the public sphere in which Britain's national agenda is defined.

Granted, it did not start life with the power it now exercises. The show, which made its first appearance before the British public on 28 October 1957, was essentially a "Morning Miscellany" (which nearly became its name), made up of what its inventor called "a collection of brief items, all of which can be said to have a topical interest for the average, intelligent reader of morning newspapers."

The idea came from the then 31-year-old Robin Day, who in 1955 proposed that the BBC replace the blandness of shows such as Lift Up Your Hearts with serious current affairs. He thought it might appeal to "the steadily increasing audience to car radios" and to millions who tuned in for hourly news bulletins.

But Today did not set agendas from the start. Early editions were packed with trivia and painful to the modern ear. The same applies to much from the so-called "golden era" of the presenters Jack de Manio and John Timpson. Today in the 1960s and 1970s was groping towards gravitas but still dominated by what one editor, Stephen Bonarjee, called "broad extrovert human interests and talking points".

The partnership that began to shunt it into the modern era was born in 1975, when Brian Redhead joined John Timpson at the microphone. It took off as a really serious journalistic enterprise under the editorship of Jenny Abramsky, now the BBC's director of radio and music, after her appointment in March 1986. From this point, Today became the most important political platform in the country.

Massive events, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, the horrors in Northern Ireland and the defeat of apartheid in South Africa helped to keep it ahead of its television competitors. But Today's success was self-reinforcing. As radio confirmed its speed, flexibility and power as a news medium, the programme attracted the brightest of the BBC's recruits and formidable presenters such as Humphrys, Sue MacGregor, James Naughtie and Ed Stourton.

Through constant innovation a succession of rigorous editors – including Phil Harding, Rod Liddle and the quietly impressive current incumbent, Ceri Thomas – have made Today essential listening for prime ministers, foreign ambassadors seeking to gauge the national mood in Britain and any citizen who cares about this country's politics and culture.

If Andrew Gilligan had alleged deliberate "sexing-up" of the dodgy dossier on any other show, he might not have provoked a crisis. Such is Today's power that doing it there cost the corporation a chairman and a director general and shaped the parsimonious licence fee settlement with which Mark Thompson is grappling today.

Tim Luckhurst is a professor of journalism at Kent University and the author of This Is Today, A Biography Of The Today Programme.

1968: JACK DE MANIO TELLS IT LIKE IT IS

At the time of the Grosvenor Square protests against the Vietnam War, Jack de Manio greets the audience by saying: "Good morning. And let us begin this morning by raising our hats to the London policemen who once again have had their weekends mucked up by a lot of silly hooligans." De Manio, who presented from 1958-1971, once left the Today audience in silence for two minutes before returning to the microphone with the words: "I'm terribly sorry, I was on the loo."

1978: JOHN TIMPSON ON TEENAGERS

The Conservative MP Joseph Kinsey complains that the energy-saving idea of sharing bathwater "might be all right for the trendy south but we don't want it in Birmingham". When presenter John Timpson asks him if he is in the bath, the MP says "No. I can't get in the bathroom. I've got a teenage daughter." To which Timpson responded: "On her own presumably?" This was considered quite shocking.

1984: THE BRIGHTON BOMB

A special programme begins with the solemn words: "Good morning from John Timpson in Brighton, where, at ten to three this morning, an explosion extensively damaged the Grand Hotel in which the Prime Minister and a number of her cabinet were staying."

1987: REDHEAD v LAWSON

Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson reacts to questioning by presenter Brian Redhead, saying "You've been a supporter of the Labour Party all your life, Brian." Redhead then stuns Lawson by proposing a minute's silence to allow the Chancellor to apologise and in memoriam for his failing monetarist policy. Fellow presenter Sue MacGregor recalls: "It illustrated Brian's unbelievably fast mind. He floored Lawson rather beautifully there. I remember thinking 'What is Brian going to say?' There was just a beat while Brian thought of the perfect response and he came out with two perfectly formed sentences. There's an icy calm in his fury there. He never badgered anyone, just put them in their place. I remember it very well, and I'm sure Nigel Lawson does too."

1988: MARGARET THATCHER PHONES IN

The editor of the time, Phil Harding, was as stunned as the rest of his team. "Everybody on the programme was just absolutely amazed. At first they thought it was a hoax and it was only after they made a couple of checks they realised it really, really was her. Even after they put her through to the studio, John Humphrys, who did the interview, was still convinced it was going to be a hoax. You can almost hear the incredulity in his voice, and then she comes on air and it clearly is her and not Steve Nallon from Spitting Image. She phoned because she wanted people to know that she knew that [Russian premier Mikhail] Gorbachev was not going to be able to make it to London that day because of the Armenian earthquake. It was a really strange thing to phone up about."

1991: SUE MacGREGOR FALLS ASLEEP

MacGregor was interviewing Lord McGregor, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, at the time. "He had just been appointed and I was asking him about what his role was and what powers he had and I just went off into a stumble, a terribly extenuated one. I remember waking up in the middle of this stumble and thinking, 'I've actually been asleep for about two seconds.' This was not during his answer but in the middle of one of my own questions. I had completely lost the thread of what I was saying and could barely remember who he was but when you get up at 3am on a regular basis it's amazing it doesn't happen more often. I think I saw the whites of his eyes for a second but he picked up the thread and we continued as normal. It was a horrible moment."

1995: HUMPHRYS INTERRUPTS CLARKE

Former Conservative minister Jonathan Aitken accuses Humphrys of interrupting then Chancellor Kenneth Clarke 32 times in one five-minute interview. The next time Humphrys interviews Clarke, Humphrys hands him a calculator saying he "might want to keep count of the number of interruptions".

1996: BRIAN MAWHINNEY BLOWS HIS TOP WITH SUE MacGREGOR

The Tory chairman accuses Sue MacGregor of asking "the kind of smeary question by Today programme presenters which so annoys people who listen to this programme up and down the country". "Brian Mawhinney lost his rag when the Tories were very low in the polls and I said that they were going to have to do something really drastic. I reminded him that the Tories had done something really drastic years earlier by getting rid of Margaret Thatcher. He flew at me, verbally. I said I'm not suggesting you 'dump John Major' but just do something drastic to claw your way back up the polls. He called me 'smeary' and 'outrageous'. I just let him rant on, thinking that if I kept my cool then the listeners, however they voted, might end up on my side. We did get quite a lot of letters and they were three to one in my favour."

1997: CHARLOTTE GREEN AND THE CAPTAIN JACK TUAT INCIDENT

Newsreader Charlotte Green collapses into giggles after delivering an item about newly-installed Papua New Guinea chief of staff Jack Tuat (pronounced "twat"). "I really had no idea Jack Tuat was coming up," she says. "I do have a Rabelaisian sense of humour and must confess the name appealed to me immensely."

1997: HUMPHRYS v HARMAN

Humphrys destroys Harriet Harman in an interview over single mothers' benefits – and the presenter's erstwhile supporters in New Labour turn on him. A letter arrives from the new Government with the opening words: "Something must be done about the John Humphrys problem..." According to the presenter's recollection today: "After the Aitken thing I was defended to the hilt by the Labour Party as a figure of unchallengeable probity. Then within a few months of the election I had become the John Humphrys problem. It didn't take long to go from a position of near sainthood to someone who must be sacked. People say I destroyed Harriet Harman; I honestly don't know. It was just another interview as far as I was concerned. I got the impression during the interview that she was not as well briefed as she might have been. It's for other people to judge the interview not me. But I was taken aback by the ferocity of the response. They were on the blower instantly, and the letter arrived sent by hand as I recall."

1998: TONY BENN AND THE MONGOLIAN THROAT SINGER

Veteran Labour MP Tony Benn is asked to speak about US missile strikes – but what the listeners actually get is a Mongolian throat singer. Then editor Rod Liddle remembers: "That was the biggest mistake during my time, a pre-recorded interview with Tony Benn. It was introduced with 'And earlier today Tony Benn had this to say...' and then someone somehow pressed the wrong button and it was Mongolian throat warblers. What you heard was 'Wa-wa-hoo, wa-wa-hoo.' Needless to say, Benn thought it was 'a conspirashy to make me look stupid'."

2003: THE ANDREW GILLIGAN AFFAIR

Andrew Gilligan's ill-fated report on the veracity of government claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction – in a live phone interview at 6.07am – sets off a chain of events that ends in the Hutton inquiry and throws the whole BBC into crisis. "It wouldn't have happened on my watch," insists Liddle, who had by then left Today, and says he listened in to the programme with surprise. "If you've got a story in which you are saying that Alastair Campbell has deliberately lied to the country, they (the Government) had misappropriated secret service information, the 45-minute claim is all bollocks and they know it, then that strikes me as something that should probably be your lead story of the day. So we would have been leading on it, it would have been pre-recorded and watertight. But that's not what happened."

2006: A JOHN PRESCOTT MOMENT

Humphrys questions Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott over his affair with secretary Tracey Temple. "I can't recall that [Prescott] made a fuss at the time and I don't think he made a fuss full stop," says Humphrys. "Some people thought I shouldn't have raised the question at all. But I thought it would be deeply, deeply bizarre, given the circumstances of the time, not to have asked him." The Deputy Prime Minister, asked if he had had any other affairs, responded: "I watched Newsnight last night and the press, as you know – most people don't – and it's called, I think it's called the internet, isn't it, or blogs or something, I've only just got used to letters, John, I haven't got into all this new technology, but I watched the guy on television last night who does that, saying I have no evidence for these allegations I have made."

2007: HUMPHRYS v PAXMAN

The BBC's tough guys of political presenting, Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, clash on air over the possible impact of impending cuts to the corporation's news machine. "I was defending my turf," says Humphrys. "And he was defending his. They (BBC television news) get more money to do their job than we get to do ours and that is a simple observable fact."