John Humphrys: A licence to grill

He's the fearless voice of Radio 4's Today programme, the man who eats cabinet ministers at breakfast. So why does John Humphrys say he's 'bloody terrified' by his new job as host of Mastermind? John Walsh puts him under the spotlight

John Humphrys in charge of Mastermind! What'll that be like? Will he keep interrupting the contestants? Will he greet their answers with barely-concealed derision and say, "Oh, come on, you can't expect us to believe that..."? Six years after Mastermind hung up its cut-glass rosebowls, its "Pass" and "I've-started-so-I'll-finish" catchphrases, and Magnus Magnusson took the sweat-stained black-leather interrogation chair home to Scotland with him as a souvenir, the show is back. It's got a new chair, a new set, the same doomy signature tune as before ("Approaching Menace" by Neil Richardson) and a fresh supply of people desperate to air their knowledge of Mesopotamian foreplay or Virgil's Eclogues.

The inquisitor's throne seems a natural seat for the man generally reckoned to be the nation's numero uno asker of awkward questions, a man who doesn't just grill ministers on breakfast radio, but guts, spatchcocks and roasts them, too. More passionate than Jeremy Paxman, more tenacious than John Prescott, more relentless than Rocky Balboa, he is awesomely combative. He's been presenting the Today programme since 1987, and his hectoring Welsh tones are as familiar to Radio 4 listeners as the theme tune to The Archers. He's been extending his empire for some years - doing longer, gentler interviews for BBC1's On the Record, murmuring over confessions of personal folly or tragedy in On the Ropes. In demand as an after-dinner speaker and chair of conferences and debates, this ferocious intellectual is in imminent danger of becoming Mr Showbiz. Why, they even asked him to go on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!

When we met at his roomy house in Shepherd's Bush, where he lives with his partner, Valerie Sanderson, and their three-year-old son, Owen, I expected to meet a beetle-browed, disputatious chap in a suit. Nothing of the sort. Humphrys is a short, thin, white-haired, spring-heeled cove in a green work shirt, jeans and trainers, and he never stops moving. While making coffee (nobody fannies about with cups and cafetieres like Mr H), he dashes here and there like a flyweight boxer. His conversation is a thing of fits and starts. He waves his arms, makes agonised faces, cudgels his brain, stops, thinks, laughs to himself, goes back, contradicts himself, tells himself off for a stray tautology or ambiguity, and generally behaves as if his head is full of angry lexical bees, swooping and swarming around his thoughts. His knitted brows and hooded eyelids, familiar from the TV, give him a passing look of Sam the Eagle in The Muppet Show; For a man of 59, he's exhaustingly boyish.

He is, he says, knackered from a surfeit of Masterminds. "We've done 16 of them, sometimes three shows in one day. I didn't think it would be like this. And of course they want to have meetings, because this is Light Entertainment. Meetings - that's what the BBC's for. You probably thought it was all about broadcasting, but it's not; it's about meetings." Had he been impressed by the contenders? "I marvelled at the breadth of the subjects people chose. Someone did children's books as their special subject. Not "Children's Books from 1990 to Now", but "Children's Books from 1860 to Now". Somebody else chose "The Flora and Fauna of Great Britain". There's a million different bloody insects!" Humphrys admits to never having done a pub quiz in his life, nor seen more than one or two old Masterminds because he never watches TV. ("I prefer a good book.") Nor had he met or spoken to Magnusson or asked his advice. "Above all, I had not to be Magnus. Though, of course, we're quite similar - white-haired old hands. Maybe they should have gone for an 18-year-old with big tits, like The Big Breakfast did."

Had he set out to reassure the contenders or to chill their blood? "As it turned out, it was me whose blood was chilled. I felt more nervous than the quiz-ees, because it's showbiz. I've suddenly shifted from news to showbiz and I thought, I've never set out to entertain someone before. I was conscious of giving a performance."

John, I say, it's only asking questions off bits of paper, it's hardly singing the lead in Götterdämmerung... "Yes, but there are 25 questions per person per round; you have to check them, read them and try to understand the questions - and some of them are so obscure. Sometimes I couldn't tell what the subject was... And it's worse if it's Latin or Greek words; you can make an awful fool of yourself [by mispronouncing them], and all over the land people will say, "I always knew it, of course. Take Humphrys out of Today and expose him to any sort of culture and..." He stops, silenced by a horrible vision of nationwide condescension. "It was bloody terrifying."

As he talks, you're aware of a repeated refrain of self-deprecation, and much insistence that he doesn't "fit in". Central to Humphrys' contrarious pugnacity and genial aggression is the fact that he left school at 15 and never went to university - something he has regretted, seemingly, all his life, despite being a walking advertisement for the fact that you don't need a degree to be brilliant, quick-witted, hyper-articulate and in control of arcane subjects. But he rather revels in his "Outsider" identity. He sometimes represents his Mastermind bosses as if they were a cabal of BBC suits, rejecting his ideas, talking about him behind their hands and behind his back. ("They were most polite, so polite, they're lovely people, and they very gently and calmly explained to me how each of my new ideas was complete crap.")

Why, I ask, do you present yourself as this edgy hoodlum, when you're so obviously embedded in the Establishment?

"What do you mean?" he replies, with a hint of annoyance.

"I mean," I say, "that though you're a rottweiler of debate, you're the BBC's rottweiler, licensed to behave in a certain way - a kind of accredited outlaw. Don't you think you're right at the centre of the media Establishment?"

"That's a good question. I suppose at the back of my mind there's a worry, because, yes, I want to feel genuinely subversive; I want to be the bloke at the back of the theatre who chucks the bottles. I don't want to feel I've been coerced into it, however subtly. But if you do it for long enough, two things can happen. One is that you become so conscious of your role, you do it because you've got a reputation to maintain, and that's stupid. Or else you don't realise that in fact you're entirely harmless, you're just a little diversion for the nation. But I don't think that's the case yet."

Judging by the corporation's recent row with the Government, Humphrys doesn't seem harmless - quite the reverse. Millions of listeners woke last week to hear a blistering, bad-tempered row between Humphrys and Ben Bradshaw, an Environment minister, who attacked the BBC for relying on only one source in claiming that the second Iraqi dossier was "sexed up". Humphrys smartly pointed out that the Government had taken the country into war by relying on "just one source". Bradshaw, nonplussed, claimed that "many senior BBC journalists" were "deeply unhappy at the way the BBC has handled this" - and Humphrys hit the roof.

"The point at which I lost my temper was when he attacked my editor, Kevin Marsh, who is a man of absolute and complete integrity. [Bradshaw] had the gall to suggest, or at least to imply, that my editor was rowing away from the story. It was a lie and I lost my temper. Perhaps I should have approached it more calmly and rationally, but..." You can, I'm happy to confirm, hear Humphrys still grinding his teeth over the incident.

Did he think an order had gone out from No 10, to try to win the argument about weapons of mass destruction by attacking the BBC? "Yes I did," says Humphrys shortly. "There isn't any doubt about that."

Is the debate about BBC bias going to go away? Will politicians keep bringing it up all the time? "They don't all," says Humphrys. "I had Jack Straw on last week, and I said, 'Look. I really don't want to go down the BBC road yet again,' and he said, 'I'm happy with that, I want to talk about the bigger picture.'"

Does that imply that lots of politicians insist on talking about BBC bias? (I ask). I've heard that some cabinet ministers will only go on Today provided they can bring it up in the discussion. Is that true?

"Erm," says Humphrys.

"A straight yes or no will suffice," I rasp.

"You'd have to ask my editor. I don't get involved in these negotiations."

"If I may press you on this, Mr Humphrys," I grate, "You said Jack Straw was an exceptional case..."

But he can't be drawn. Blast these professional stonewallers who won't answer a straight question.

This quintessential Welshman was born in a working-class district of Cardiff, named Splott. His father George was a French polisher, his mother Winifred a hairdresser. One of five children, John displayed a religious bent. "I read the Bible from cover to cover. I even wrote a prayer book when I was a kid." What kind of prayers? Prayers for times of stress? Prayers to be said while being interviewed? "They were selfless prayers. I was frightfully selfless. I think I must have been a sanctimonious little shit." He attended Cardiff High School, the local grammar, but "I think I made no impact on the school whatsoever." He recalls his headmaster trying to write a reference letter for future employers and asking, embarrassedly, "Is there anything you've done here? Sport?" to which Humphrys replied, "I did a bit of cross-country running." It was true, inasmuch as Humphrys couldn't hit a ball, or bowl one or kick one, and running was the only remaining option. Mention duly went into the letter that Humphrys, J was a whizz at long-distance running. It impressed John Harris, editor of The Penarth Times, "So I got my first job under false pretences."

The 15-year-old cub reporter moved to The Western Mail, and joined the BBC as Northern Industrial Correspondent in 1966, when he was only 23. Spotting his articulate ferocity, the BBC made him their youngest-ever foreign correspondent. He reported from Belfast (where he and his crew were chased by an angry mob), from Soweto and the Los Angeles ghettos, and Miami Beach (where he had his lungs filled with tear gas). Listening to the coverage of the Iraqi war, did he feel nostalgic for the "warco" days?

"Every day," says Humphrys, with feeling, "I offer a little prayer because I am not there any more. Seriously. I've had it written into my contract that I don't go anywhere. I just got to hate it. I always had this fear - it goes back to schooldays and the university thing - of going on a story and finding someone doing it better." He sighs. "I had a cracking story once, a real scoop. It was when Ronnie Biggs was arrested in Brazil, and I got to him first. Everyone was looking for him in the big hotels, and I got a tip that he was in this grubby little hotel. I went and found an unbelievably foul little place in the backstreets, where he was sharing a room with Detective Sergeant Slipper. I hung around the lobby, and eventually Slipper came down and invited me upstairs, and gave me this wonderful interview. But I wasn't celebrating. I was cursing, because I hadn't got to Biggs. That's how I am. Whatever story I was on, I'd be cursing that I didn't get something better. My career was fuelled by fear and enormous insecurity - I was the most insecure correspondent I've ever met."

Pugnacious and self-deprecating, morally rigorous but fearful of sanctimony, dizzyingly clever but quick to point out the gaps in his learning, Humphrys is a mass of contradictions. I wouldn't be surprised if it secretly horrifies him that he's the grand vizier of Mastermind while not being able to answer most of the questions. He's a man who's always arguing with himself, confronting his own demons of intellectual inadequacy, in order to be utterly confident when taking on the powerful, and persuading them to confess their half-truths and duplicities. "And look, John," I say, in conclusion, "how long are you going to spend, I mean just how long are you going to go on regretting that you never went on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here?" Humphrys explodes with laughter. "I actually said I would go on it, you know. But only on one condition. I said I'd do it if Tony Blair was prepared to as well."

What a thought. Imagine both Humphrys and the PM on the show. Just think of the endless argy-bargy about which of them was supposed to be minding the logs...

'Mastermind' returns tonight at 8pm on BBC2