Interview: Jeremy Vine, journalist and author of It’s All News to Me

There’s a story Jeremy Vine likes to tell that perfectly illustrates the vagaries of fame. Sitting on a train toilet, thinking that the illuminated “Locked” sign, out of reach on the far wall, meant what it said, he was perturbed to find that it didn’t. Slowly, the door started to open. He leapt across to press the button as a couple of women passengers sitting next to the toilet tried to pretend they hadn’t seen him. “Wasn’t that,” he overheard her asking her friend, “Jeremy Paxman?”

Ah, the other Jeremy. No matter how many awards Vine wins for broadcasting, no matter how many (six million) tune into his Radio 2 show, no matter how many other programmes the BBC asks him to front (Eggheads, Points of View, the odd Panorama and the old Peter Snow role as election night graphics star) the Newsnight supremo casts a long shadow on his career. Paxman’s insulting private nickname for his younger colleague – “Mini-Me” – is frustratingly difficult to forget.

“It’s one of those things that follow you round, but you rather wish didn’t,” Vine says, as we meet for breakfast in London. “It was quite a hard thing for me at the time because I wasn’t really settled at Newsnight. But he popped into my studio the other day and said hello, so we’re obviously on good terms now. I think it was just a bit of gentle playground stuff.”

He was, he concedes, “scarily ambitious” when he arrived at Newsnight as a presenter in 1999, just as he had been when he became the youngest person to present Radio 4’s Today programme a decade earlier. “Maybe I still am, I don’t know. But I have been lucky enough to find a berth [his Radio 2 show, which he has presented since taking over from Jimmy Young in 2003] that is a perfect fit for me.

“Newsnight was like playing a game of squash – explosive but concentrated. Now, we never have to say ‘Be brief, we have no time’ because as long as you have something interesting to say you can have 20 minutes if you want, and all that happens is that we won’t play the next record. That’s something I’ve never had in broadcasting – to be able to say it’s OK to give something as long as it takes. There’s just no sense of the clock.”

Ironically enough, it’s his Radio 2 show rather than Newsnight or anywhere else he has worked that gave Vine the scoop of his career. His interview with then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who visibly slumped and put his head in his hands when played a tape in which he had called Rochdale pensioner Gillian Duffy “a bigoted woman” made news all the way round the world. It was, as US chat show host Jon Stewart pointed out, “the moment at which a man’s political career leaves his body.”

“A whole load of things intersected with millimetre precision,” he recalls. “I hadn’t heard the Gillian Duffy tape, he hadn’t heard it, I didn’t know that there was a camera on him in the Manchester studio, he didn’t either, and this tape literally popped up as I was speaking to him so we listened to it together. I didn’t know what I was going to hear.”

The story won Vine yet another Sony Radio award for Interview of the Year in last year’s Sony Awards – he also won Speech Broadcaster of the Year, the only broadcaster to win double gold – and it leads off It’s All News To Me, his engaging account of his quarter-century at the BBC.

And what a life it has been. “I have,” he writes, “been shot at, robbed, stalked, threatened with a bombing, mortared, mortified, screamed at by the Prime Minister’s press secretary, been in a car that skidded off the road and over an embankment in Croatia, got bitten by Sudanese mosquitoes, attacked with a plank of wood by a neo-Nazi shopkeeper and had chewing gum placed on my chair by one of Robert Mugabe’s aides.”

Throughout, he doesn’t seem to have lost an ounce of enthusiasm for his job. Other hacks may grow cynical, embittered, disappointed, but at 47 Vine retains an almost Tigger-ish bounce. “I have never asked a single question which has not caused me profound excitement,” he writes in his book. I read that quote back to him and do my best to raise a Paxman-like incredulous eyebrow. Really? Even when he came back from almost being killed in Bosnia to find himself covering a story on sheep racing in Devon for the Today programme?

“I do remember thinking, here I am, 27 years old, and covering sheep racing, and that is a job. But it IS definitely part of the job, and it’s all interesting. Maybe I get excited about too many things, But I think it IS important to have some sort of childlike excitement about the job still, having been doing it for 25 years.”

Yes, he admits, there have been moments of cynicism. “But every time you feel locked into a cycle, just when you think you have bolted down the narrative, something comes along and breaks it. 9/11 is the classic example and so was the Crash.”

In the book, Vine puzzles away intriguingly at the sheer randomness of news itself and the values that drive it. Suppose, he asks, Bin Laden had been killed on the same day as last year’s Royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton. What what would – should – lead the bulletins: a scrupulously organised event in London or a breaking but hugely important story from Pakistan? As he point out, the blanket coverage of Mandela’s long-planned walk to freedom took place at precisely the same time as the genocide in Rwanda. Was that really the right call? He has his doubts.

Vine’s own stint as the BBC’s South Africa correspondent came later. It was there, he says, that he lost his glibness, where he learnt to look behind the more obvious stories to the ones behind them, and where he first became friends with his colleagues. One of them was Paulina, his maid and cook, whose 27-year old son died in a car crash in the three years in which he worked in Johannesburg. When he left to take up the job, he told her how much he would miss her. She said she would too. “You have become my father and my son,” she told him.

As he says, you could live a whole life as a journalist and never write a sentence as monumental as that. In Westminster, where he had worked as a political correspondent, enmeshed in the world of spin, with sharp-elbowed journalist rivals, menacing spinmeisters and mendacious politicians, he had found little sign of such obvious human decencies.

Working on his Radio 2 show, he says, has taught him a lesson he didn’t realise early on: “that the audience has the best stories – better than we do”. On radio – more intimate and familiar than TV with its endless search for impact – finding out those stories, and helping people tell them in their own words is the essence of a good show. Someone like Paulina - ordinary, unimportant, but heartbreakingly honest - would be radio gold.

“What you want is to hear people’s authentic voices,” he says. But what if they are just bigoted? “If people are angry, let’s hear it. It’s not for me to judge people, to take a view. I always get asked how I manage not to. But once I start taking views on things, the whole mechanism stops working. It’s the real life which we are packaging and slicing and that is what matters. As presenters, we are less important, we are just passing it all on.”

In January, he will have been presenting the show for a full decade. Despite the internet, despite the proliferation of digital channels, its audience has actually grown since he took over from Jimmy Young, as has the whole station’s, as has the BBC’s radio listenership. The doomsayers – who predicted that it would have halved by now – have been proved wrong. Why?

“It’s the same reason that book festivals are rising. There is a hunger for thought, intelligence, insight and new ideas. And radio provides something special - maybe even friendship.”

He finishes his breakfast and gets up. Back in the studio, his producers will have seen whether they can stand up those stories they had talked about earlier in the morning. There’s another radio show to prepare. There always is. And he is looking forward to it, as he always does.

• It’s All News to Me by Jeremy Vine is published this week by Simon and Schuster, price £18.99. Jeremy Vine will be talking about it at a sell-out event at the Borders Book Festival on Saturday 16 June.