Who is the world’s most famous news and current affairs interviewer? Christiane Amanpour? Katie Couric? Anderson Cooper? Piers Morgan? Let me suggest another contender for the title: Stephen Sackur, the gangly, deep-voiced host of the BBC’s television and radio programme HARDtalk, which the BBC announced it was axing this week.
He is hardly a household name in Britain, where HARDtalk is screened only in the small hours of the morning, but he certainly is across the rest of the planet. “If you went abroad with Stephen he’d be stopped everywhere,” said Carey Clark, a former HARDtalk editor. “It didn’t matter where you went, he’d be mobbed.”
His thrice-weekly interviews with world leaders and power-brokers are broadcast three times a day, five days a week, on the international feed of BBC News, reaching some 70 million viewers in nearly 200 countries at peak hours in every major time zone. They are also broadcast three days a week on BBC World Service radio, whose English language service reaches more than 80 million listeners a week, and in podcast form.
For 27 years Sackur and his predecessor, Tim Sebastian, have interviewed not just Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela, but a slew of distinctly unsavoury figures – the African dictator Robert Mugabe, the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin regime officials, leaders of Israel’s far right. Viewers can watch Meles Zenawi, the former Ethiopian leader, challenged about his repressive regime; Teodoro Obiang, Equatorial Guinea’s veteran dictator, about his family’s egregious corruption.
Interviews are unleavened by gimmick or humour or soundbites, and Sackur poses questions that these leaders can avoid in their cowed domestic media, and that their fellow citizens are astonished to hear them asked.
HARDtalk is, in short, a British brand almost as well-known globally as Manchester United or the royal family, and it is produced by a team of barely half a dozen people on a shoestring budget of scarcely £1m a year. That is a drop in the ocean for an organisation whose annual income exceeds £5bn – albeit one desperately short of funds.
What makes the BBC’s decision to end HARDtalk even more baffling is that Tuesday’s announcement came just one day after Tim Davie, its director-general, delivered a speech to the Future Resilience Forum in which he warned that the shrinkage of the World Service due to funding cuts meant Britain was struggling to counter the rise in “pure propaganda” being broadcast by Russia and China.
“Free and fair reporting has never been more essential – for global democracy and for audiences of most need around the world,” he argued. But “we can see clear evidence of the fact that when the World Service retreats, state-funded media operators move in to take advantage”.
The World Service used to be funded almost entirely by the government, but the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office now pays only £104m of an annual budget around £360m, with the BBC providing the rest. In 2022 it ceased broadcasting in ten languages and cut 380 jobs. HARDtalk is being axed as the cash-strapped BBC seeks a net reduction of 130 news jobs in a £24m cost-cutting drive.
Sackur is scarcely bothered to conceal his dismay at the demise of one of the BBC’s flagship current affairs programmes. “It’s depressing news for the BBC and all who believe in the importance of independent, rigorous, deeply-researched journalism,” he wrote on X.
“At a time when disinformation and media manipulation are poisoning public discourse HARDtalk is unique – a long-form interview show with only one mission: to hold to account those who all too often avoid accountability in their own countries.”
It was being axed, he added pointedly, “just as BBC DG Tim Davie is trying to persuade the British Govt [sic] that the journalism of the BBC World Service is such a vital expression of democratic soft power that the taxpayer must fund it.”
Hard talk, indeed.
[See also: The Alex Salmond I knew]
