RADIO 4


CURRENT AFFAIRS     


ANALYSIS  
THE SECRET HISTORY OF ANALYSIS

TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: Michael Blastland
Producer: Linda Pressly
Editor:  Innes Bowen


BBC 
White City
201 Wood Lane
London
W12 7TS

020 8752 7279






Broadcast Date:	25.10.10       2030-2100  
Repeat Date:	31.10.10       2130-2200
CD Number:      	                   
Duration:          	   





Taking part:


George Fischer
Founder editor of Analysis
 
Ian McIntyre
Founder presenter of Analysis, later Controller of Radio 
4
 
Rt Hon Tony Benn
 
Gillian Reynolds
Radio critic, The Daily Telegraph
 
Michael Green
Former Analysis producer, later controller of Radio 4
 
Caroline Thomson
Former Analysis producer, now Chief Operating Officer 
for the BBC
 
Fraser Steel
Former Analysis producer
 
Hugh Chignell, Associate Professor of Broadcasting 
History, Bournemouth University
 
Lord Griffiths




















BLASTLAND: Right here we are on the 4th floor of Broadcasting 
House. So where do we go? 

FISCHER: Straight ahead.

BLASTLAND:  Just step over the drilling (laughs)

FISCHER:  I say!  Ah - gone…

BLASTLAND:  We’re just faced with a white wall. Well, we’ve been 
wandering through Broadcasting House trying to find the old Analysis 
editing haunts and I’m here with George Fischer who was the first 
producer of Analysis – the person who got the whole thing rolling in 
the beginning and we were going to try and find this place but here we 
are – it’s a white brick wall.  There’s nothing here anymore.

FISCHER:  Perhaps we could write on the wall – this is where 
Analysis started.

BLASTLAND:  Ah, well. Come with me instead to the 1970s, where 
the programme began. Here we will find remarkable voices: frank and 
revealing. The Shah of Iran, at the beginning of a then unimagined end 
in Islamic revolution, discussing torture. 

SHAH: If you are thinking that they are accused of torturing people I 
don’t think that this is very true because the new modern system of 
questioning people is in itself a kind of a torture but it’s very refined 
and psychological way of torturing people with your subtle questions.

BLASTLAND:  Mrs Thatcher in opposition. 

THATCHER: I don’t like the idea of going towards an egalitarian 
society. You cannot have equality side by side with equality of 
opportunity. We want equality of opportunity –if you want to have an 
opportunity it must mean, if it means anything, an opportunity to be 
unequal.

BLASTLAND:  The exclusive first interview on his election by Harold 
Wilson. Was his health in decline, even then?

WILSON: I never lie awake at night – the one quality I’ve got for 
being a politician is that I sleep the whole night through – I’ve never 
had a sleeping pill in number 10.  It is true I’ve lost weight – I’m not 
quite sure why – I must be eating less but certainly I’ve lost about a 
stone. 

BLASTLAND:  This programme comes not to praise Analysis, 
necessarily, rather – what else? - to understand it. For it arrived with a 
fanfare, was both hated and adored, and accused at times of being a 
closet right-wing think-tank.  How did a demanding listen with a small 
audience grab the A-list of world leaders? How did it chase down 
trends and ideas - Thatcherism, for example, the fragmentation of 
Yugoslavia, the rise of Chinese economic power - ahead of the pack. 
And a strange, dangerous question: whether it was intellectually 
shaped by one man’s escape from Soviet tanks, across the Cold-War 
frontier, in 1956. So then, the story. Once upon a time there was a 
conversation between Tony Whitby, then controller of Radio 4, and a 
Hungarian émigré and radio producer, George Fischer.    

FISCHER: And he said, “Look I mean is there something we could do 
on Four?” I said, “What do you have in mind?” He said, “Something 
with a very sharp cutting edge and really aimed at people who read the 
quality dailies, the quality periodicals, the journals, that sort of 
audience where you can take quite a lot for granted.” So I said, “Oh 
yes, hmn.” And then I came up with the title Analysis and there we 
were.

BLASTLAND: One Radio 4 Controller described BBC news in the 
1970s, brutally, as the biggest copy re-write agency in the world. By 
which he meant that it said nothing new - an astonishing shock to any 
view of a golden past. Analysis clattered into that context as a 
programme determined to speak its mind. There was also anxiety in 
the 70s that radios 1, 2, 3, and 4 would create four silos, each different 
from the others, but each pouring out its own version of monotone. 
Again, Analysis was intended as a riposte, granted freedom on Radio 4 
to sound as it wished. The first presenter was Ian McIntyre. 

MC INTYRE: The brief was very simple and very fluid: go and make 
some current affairs programmes. Make them good, make them 
challenging, make them interesting, and make them amusing if you 
can. And the format’s up to you. Documentary programmes, 
interviews, discussions. Off you go. So off we went.

MC INTYRE INSERT:  To see ourselves as other see us – Robert 
Burns clearly saw the gift he wanted for us as salutary rather than 
pleasurable. If he has a view of us from the Elysian Fields he must 
have watched the unfolding of recent British history with some relish. 
There was Dean Acheson’s assertion that we’ve lost an empire but not 
yet found a role – it was true but we didn’t like it very much.  There 
was the diplomat from black Africa – impatient of the traditional 
courtesies of his profession who called us a toothless bulldog we didn’t 
think that too funny either (fade). 

REYNOLDS: Hearing Ian McIntyre’s voice with that controlled 
assurance, a very poetic rising and falling voice but always in control, 
made me feel very secure like wearing a new pair of shoes. 

BLASTLAND:  Gillian Reynolds, doyenne of radio critics. Then of 
the Guardian, subsequently - and still - of the Telegraph.

REYNOLDS: I was at home with that voice from the word go.

BLASTLAND:  You look as if you’re listening to it now.

REYNOLDS: I can hear it. I can hear it in my ear. And the great 
difficulty, the great difficulty with hearing Ian McIntyre’s voice in 
your ear - because you do remember it, it’s so distinctive - is that you 
start to talk like it. You start to adapt the rhythms of the quiet, assured 
voice.

BLASTLAND:  As a listen, how was it different?

REYNOLDS: It was different because it presented you with the great 
arguments of the day that weren’t raging that morning, but that were 
over the horizon. So that when things like Reagonomics came into the 
news stream, you already knew quite a lot about it, pro and con. You’d 
heard informed opinion. It stands alone as the programme that respects 
you and respects your intellect and respects your judgment, but 
provides you with the food to enrich it.

MC INTYRE INSERT:...but the Anglophile tradition was never 
extinguished in France (fade)

BLASTLAND:  Ian McIntyre in 1971, from a programme titled: 
Discipline in Liberty. It’s time to look under the Analysis bonnet. First, 
the story of its founders; second, the programme’s self-conscious 
ethos. Who were they, Ian McIntyre, and this refugee from cold-war 
Hungary, George Fischer, and why does it matter?   

FISCHER: You see I was category x. Well it means you are a class 
alien and in some circumstances a class enemy. My parents were you 
know well-to-do middle class people I was therefore you know...from 
a bourgeois family. That’s it. And it would have been very serious if at 
the age of 18 if I would have had to join the Hungarian Army because 
the class aliens were treated separately as labour battalions. But I was 
playing basketball. I played it reasonably well.

BLASTLAND: You were a professional basketball player.

FISCHER: Yes, that’s how I earned my living and my wife indeed.  

BLASTLAND: How did you come out?

FISCHER: It was 1956, Hungarian Revolution, and in November - this 
is after the Russians returned and beat the hell out of us - I decided I’d 
better leave. And then I left.

BLASTLAND: Well it was rather more complicated than you just left. 
(laughs)

FISCHER: Well you know it was you see towards the middle of the 
revolution when there was a sort of armistice, if you like. I left with 
two others. We got you know by train to I would say about 20 or 30 
kilometres from the border, which by then wasn’t mined. And then we 
got through. And then three days later, I arrived in a military airplane 
in Black Bush, you know the military airport.   

BLASTLAND: How many Radio 4 producers were forced to study 
Marx and Lenin at school? George Fischer hated that system, 
remember that. If you believe politics in the UK rubbish, he 
admonished cynical colleagues at the BBC, you have no idea. It’s said 
he was fierce, and I believe it. Put that to him today and his eyes 
sparkle. The presenter, Ian McIntyre who, went on to be a controller of 
Radio 4 and 3, was urbane and charming and still is. His career began 
in radio, then detoured through the Conservative party, as an advisor 
and Parliamentary candidate. Three former producers remembered this 
double-act. Here are Michael Green, later a controller of Radio 4, 
Caroline Thomson, now chief operating officer for the BBC and, first, 
Fraser Steel, now head of BBC editorial complaints.

STEEL: They were an extraordinary team of complementarities: Ian’s 
suave relaxation and George’s sometimes pugilist toughness of mind. 
They were (among other things) completely unbeatable in an 
argument. 

THOMSON: We had, I think every week an editorial meeting in 
George’s office.  It had a painting on the wall behind George of a sort 
of a modern version of ‘Le dejeuner sur l’herbe’ so naked ladies eating 
by the side of the river which always rather amused me.  And George 
was benign but terrifying simultaneously really– his intellectual rigour, 
his absolute determination that you were not to follow modern fads.  In 
the 90s you’d have called it that you weren’t to be politically correct, 
but in the 70s – no one thought of the phrase ‘political correctness’. 
And you know he’d look at you with his beady eye and his Hungarian 
accent and say, “but Caroline… you’ve got to do this…these are the 
people you should look at.” And he very much built a culture of 
excellence and quality but of a sense that we should carry on doing 
what he wanted us to do even if the rest of the BBC didn’t like it much.        

GREEN: It was a bit like wandering into an Oxbridge senior common 
room, I think. Very clever people. George, for example, had a 
mountain of books on his desk. And many people in the BBC had 
mountains of books on their desk, but George was the guy who read 
the books. George knew about things....he read primary sources and I 
think that was the kind of … the guiding spirit of Analysis. I remember 
George saying to me shortly after my arrival, “Michael, we’re not 
interested in what journalists have to say. We want the horse’s mouth.”

BLASTLAND:  Michael Green. The Analysis ethos was contrary, and 
supremely confident. Too confident? The programme wore its 
differences on its sleeve, differences of pace, subject, detail, 
judgement. That style is best heard - and heard about – how else but 
from the horse’s mouth. Finding themselves with four days to kill in 
New York, in 1970, Ian McIntyre suggested they ‘do’ feminism, a 
mysterious – to men at least - and emerging political movement.  

FISCHER: So we rushed out to Barnes, you know the bookshop. And 
it was seven or eight books we could locate. And Ian sat down in the 
hotel room and went through them in about three day… two and a half 
days. 

BLASTLAND:  So you’re there in New York and he probably didn’t 
look out of the window?

FISCHER: No, no. I mean you know we ate in the hotel. I mean it was 
very, very hard reading on his part… and we called the programme 
‘Sisterhood is Powerful’. It even had music in it.  I think it was 
probably the only one with music.

MUSIC UP + FADE

MC INTYRE: Brightest jewel of all perhaps in the crown of new 
feminist literature is Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.  Reading this book 
one reviewer wrote crisply is like sitting with your testicles in a 
nutcracker.  Well nutcrackers haven’t traditionally been a tool in the 
budding revolutionary’s tool-kit (fade) 

FISCHER: We discovered a splendid German woman called Lisa 
something or other who was the boss of a body called Pussycats Inc.  
And this was a body that was opposed to women’s lib

PROGRAMME CLIP: Well I can’t imagine if I may be so frank, how 
any man could want to have sex with a liberation woman because it’s 
almost like going to bed with another man!   Ha ha…

MUSIC UP

PROGRAMME CLIP: The main thing is we want to cook and smell 
good for the men.  And our credo is the lamb chop is mightier than the 
karate chop.

MC INTYRE “We prefer the lamb chop to the karate chop.” (laughs) 
She was about twelve feet tall, this woman, and she wore a pink coat 
and I thought she was going to eat George.
  
FISCHER: I think she was keen on everybody. I mean any male 
wearing a pair of trousers, yes. (laughs) It’s true actually. 

MUSIC FADES

BLASTLAND:  George survived. If you think the programme sounds 
a little patriarchal, well, they got plenty right: the tensions that 
emerged in feminism, from black criticism that it was a preoccupation 
of prosperous whites, to its uneasy relationship with the left. All are 
there. Another example. Imagine an almost un-mediated conversation 
of 45 minutes between the two most prominent ideological thinkers of 
left and right. References would include Karl Marx and the theory of 
surplus value; the 18th century economists David Ricardo and Adam 
Smith; the 19th century writer on the constitution, Walter Bagehot; and 
the Bible. Here are Sir Keith Joseph and Tony Benn, chaired by 
George Fitch, in 1977.  

PROGRAMME CLIP

JOSEPH: The trouble with Tony’s picture is that it involves massive 
politicisation of almost every economic decision. You see, I picture a 
society in which consumers and producers will be left to make as many 
decisions as possible for themselves. Tony’s picture is of one as with 
the nationalised industries, or as with his picture of shop stewards on 
boards linked up with the TUC, linked up with the national executive 
committee of the Labour party – an enormous system of committees.

FITCH: Tony Benn – I’d like to pick you up on something you said 
earlier that life under Sir Keith Joseph’s system would result in great 
upheaval and presumably social unrest.  Now why do you believe that 
would be so?

BENN:  Because I think that the logic of his philosophy, and he hasn’t 
told us and I won’t press him as it’s not a party political programme in 
the ordinary sense, but I think his philosophy would involve tearing the 
welfare state up by the roots, I think.

BENN: It was a civilised programme – I didn’t feel under any attack.  I 
knew what Joseph thought he knew what I thought.  
He did represent of course the right wing of the Conservative Party, 
and his views came out very, very clearly, and anyone listening to his 
argument would understand Mrs Thatcher – it was a couple of years 
before she came to power - but he anticipated in some ways what she 
did when she got there

BLASTLAND:  Tony Benn, a Cabinet minister in the 1970s. But 
here’s the thorny question we promised, and it relates to Analysis’ 
prescience. Yes, it delved into what became Thatcherism years earlier. 
But was this from determination to be different, or was this difference 
also politically congenial? Was Analysis alert to Thatcherism and other 
upheavals in the post-war order, in other words, because the former 
Conservative party worker and the refugee from Communism liked 
them? This is dangerous ground. Fraser Steel.

STEEL: There was certainly a purpose to go beyond the bien pensant 
agenda. The default position was post-war consensus, but there were 
other pressures going on at the time and the class of 68 (by the time I 
came on board) had made its way through the education system and 
into the … into positions in the media and in academe. For a time, it 
seemed that there was no such thing as Conservative thought.  There 
was a time when any critique of received ideas or established ideas 
which wasn’t from an explicitly Marxist perspective was in danger of 
being suspected of being Right Wing. I don’t know whether the 
founders of Analysis set out intentionally to correct that, but they 
certainly never bought into it. 

BLASTLAND:  Fraser Steel.  That difference invited criticism. Within 
the BBC, detractors spied a right-wing think-tank. Gerald Kaufman, 
MP, alleged as much in Parliament, naming Ian McIntyre – along with 
David Dimbleby – as presenters from whose “political interference” 
the public needed protection. Hugh Chignell, lecturer at Bournemouth 
University, specialises in media history, and has made a study of the 
programme.    

CHIGNELL: Yes they were right-wingers but they were also very 
professional.  They believed passionately that it was important that 
news and current affairs should be impartial.  However I think with the 
benefit of hindsight, if we listen to programmes from that time, we can 
detect the Right leaning nature of the programme and in particular a 
sympathy for the ideas which were subsequently known as 
Thatcherism.

BLASTLAND: Can you give us some examples?  

CHIGNELL: I think there are three main areas where Analysis got the 
bit between its teeth and wanted to pursue a more Neo-Liberal, free 
market Cold War agenda. They are the threat of the Soviet power, the 
danger of trade unionism, and social security scroungers - those three.

MC INTYRE: I think it’s rubbish quite honestly. I think it’s rubbish – 
I’ve read his thing. It’s true that I worked for the Tory Party.  George 
had never done such thing. But it’s also true that somebody who 
worked in the BBC as a producer, you know it was actually an 
insulting thing to say. The suggestion that you weren’t able to put 
personal views aside and do a professional job was actually rather 
insulting.

STEEL: Well if it was ever a Right Wing think tank, it was rather a 
funny Right Wing think tank in my time where one of my colleagues 
who then succeeded as Editor had been Chief Assistant to James 
Callaghan and the producer whose space I occupied was the daughter 
of a cabinet minister in Harold Wilson’s government. That’s a funny 
old Right Wing think tank. No, it was a free fire zone for ideas. And 
Ian McIntyre had a nice term, which he applied to the discussion of 
ideas: Republican.  Position doesn’t give you any entitlements, status 
doesn’t give you any entitlements. You’re as good as your arguments.

BLASTLAND:  The word lurking here is bias. I suspect nothing so 
crude.  Ian McIntyre, the favourite interviewer let’s remember of that 
great conspiracy-theorist and Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, 
was, whatever his background, considered a consummate Reithian. 

The point is more subtle: that our curiosity, our sense of where to look, 
grows in our biography, in who we are, our hinterland. Put aside the 
judgements we arrive at, for a moment, and ask why we find territory 
interesting in the first place. George Fischer also rejects the accusation 
of conscious bias, but perhaps, he says, perhaps.   

FISCHER: It was a combination of things. You see when I came here 
and heard Macmillan talking about planning, my hair stood on end. I 
said, “My god, doesn’t he know it won’t work?” I mean this is really 
caricaturing; it wasn’t quite like that. But there was that. Also there 
was Ian’s distaste for economics. (laughing) I mean whenever he had 
to tackle economic subjects, he groaned. He said, “Not economics 
again!”  But then he got down to it. And I think it helped that he hadn’t 
been “indoctrinated”, so he had an open mind.

BLASTLAND: And indoctrinated - you mean by the consensus at that 
time?

FISCHER: Received opinion. You see we tried to avoid received 
opinion like the plague. We tried to keep it as far from us as possible. 

BLASTLAND: And received opinion then was very much in favour of 
planning.

FISCHER: Absolutely - industrial plans and all that.

BLASTLAND:  George Fischer.  Was there a connection, between 
hinterland and curiosity? Michael Green.  

GREEN: Very much so. I think, I think that if you were to describe in 
a thumbnail the kind of ethos of the BBC at that time, it would be sort 
of Liberal Progressive. That I think we were not very good or the BBC 
was not very good at spotting what was going on out there.  So 
thinkers of the Right were relatively hidden. They didn’t appear much 
in broadcasting. And I think one of Analysis’s strengths was actually 
to touch that political domain and start to tease it out. As you say, 
ahead of the curve. And I think it was very perceptive in that. Now that 
may have derived from the sort of perspective that certainly Ian and 
George had of the world but, nonetheless, it was worth doing because 
nobody else was doing it.

BLASTLAND:  And if you were nurturing young talent now, what 
would you say about subjectivity? Would you tell people to use it, that 
it can be constructive? Or would you tell them to keep it out?

GREEN: I would … I would tell them to use it. I mean there’s no such 
thing as an objective programme. All programme making is subjective. 
That’s the nature of it. It’s someone sitting at the microphone, saying 
I’ve been out, I’ve talked to a lot of people, and this is my assessment 
of the evidence that I can bring before you. You make your own 
judgments, but this is what I think. That’s subjective, isn’t it?

BLASTLAND:  Michael Green. And the particular subjectivity of an 
outsider? Analysis, remember, relished being outsiders, even within 
the BBC.  Brian Griffiths, now Lord Griffiths, was Mrs Thatcher’s 
advisor for six years, and appeared on the programme several times in 
the 1970s.  

GRIFFITHS: It had a very, very high reputation. Some people on the 
left considered it on the right and some people on the right considered 
it on the left. George Fischer was somebody who was widely regarded 
as Hungarian, intellectual background - as a result saw the issues in 
this country almost as a visitor but could step outside society.  He was 
widely respected by friends of mine who were academics and he was 
prepared to go wherever the road led.  And because there was a sign 
that said danger – he wouldn’t keep out of that, he’d just go in.

BLASTLAND: Analysis’ past makes the case for difference, and as 
diverse a curiosity as possible. And if fashioned in our own personal 
past, even on the fringes, why not? Find it where you can, I say. For 
what’s the alternative? You never know when the fringe might move 
towards the centre. Of course, there’ve been criticisms. The direction 
of Analysis curiosity was rare at the time, but was that curiosity 
sufficiently diverse, or did it bang the same drum too often? Adjectives 
about the programme weren’t always kind, either: like boring, 
arrogant, incomprehensible, high-table. There’ve been failures too. 
Then and now. A programme about terrorism that talked about 
Oklahoma but missed violent Islamism sticks in my mind. I presented 
it. So the beginning is a long time ago. But questions then remain 
relevant. How do you ensure that your antennae are switched on in all 
directions, familiar and new? When does the slant of curiosity and 
judgement become dangerously partisan? “Oh, is all that hard to do?”, 
says Ian McIntyre. 

MC INTYRE: It was very unfussy and simple and easy really. No 
complications. We didn’t have to consult anybody. We just did what 
seemed good to do.

BLASTLAND: And if you wanted Harold Wilson, you just phoned up 
Harold Wilson’s office and said, “Come on”?

MC INTYRE: That’s what George did, yeah … yes.

BLASTLAND: And people said yes?

MC INTYRE: People did, yuh.

BLASTLAND: Why did they say yes?

MC INTYRE: I suppose because they trusted the programme. 

REYNOLDS: Oh golly, isn’t it strange when you look at your old 
cuttings how certain you were. 

BLASTLAND:  Radio critic Gillian Reynolds. 

REYNOLDS: This is December 1971. ‘Ian McIntyre is one of radio’s 
ablest practitioners.’ What condescension! ‘His scripts have verbal 
elegance and polish, matched to perfection by his delivery. He is never 
frantic.  He has an apt way with quotations from Georgian and 
Victorian literature’. And this was talking about the present states of 
the Conservative and Labour parties. And then I said, ‘What bothers 
me is that I remember more about Mr McIntyre in the programmes 
than anything about the parties he was discussing.’

BLASTLAND:  Do I hear a bit of a crush there, Gillian?

REYNOLDS: No, it wasn’t a crush. It was just a very different 
approach to the news.

BLASTLAND:  Gillian Reynolds.  And finally, Michael Green. 

GREEN: I think it was a programme of ambition. It went after things 
that others weren’t dealing with. It wanted to put a flag down and say 
there is room in radio for something that’s tough and demanding, that 
is not a casual listen.  It’s a programme that demands attention.

BLASTLAND:  And still does, I’d say. Though it’s changed, 
necessarily. These days, political leaders prefer ten minutes’ exposure 
at ten past eight on the Today programme with the biggest available 
audience. Analysis now offers conflicting judgements from many 
different presenters. It tackles a wider range of subjects. One long-
serving editor describes it as ‘more humble’.  And subjectivity today? 
When the BBC frets that it lacks sufficient young voices, or people 
from ethnic minorities, it’s because, partly, that it fears it doesn’t know 
what kinds of curiosity it is missing. And if that’s true for 
demographics, why not for politics? You never know what you don’t 
know. In 40 years time, with luck, Analysis will still be trying to find 
out. 












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