John Tusa talks interviewing legends in their 90s for new podcast: "In the last 18 months we lost 5 people"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

“We had to move fast. In the last 18 months we lost five people. And who knows how much longer I will be here?” So says Sir John Tusa about his new podcast, The Best Is Yet to Come.

It’s a comment that someone might make about the high turnover of managers at Premier League football clubs, but Tusa is talking about something far more inevitable, the march of time – although his guests, and indeed Tusa himself, have managed to evade it for a very long time. For The Best Is Yet to Come is all about great survivors – people who have reached their 90s.

Some of his first choices didn’t make it. The Times’s former Washington correspondent Fred Emery, who covered Watergate, and the BBC’s veteran India expert Mark Tully died before recording. But talking to people in their 90s turns out to be a far from gloomy exercise.

Listening in to Tusa recording his podcast with architect Nick Thompson – a creator of fine theatre spaces, including Sheffield’s Crucible – is an hour of entertaining conversation full of rich anecdotes and humour. It’s also an hour of listening to a masterclass in journalism. Tusa, who turned 90 on 2 March (the podcast’s launch date), has lost none of the curiosity, attentive listening and charm that made him so compelling as a founding presenter of Newsnight and a Radio 4 interviewer of people in the arts.

He was prompted to create the podcast, he says, after thinking about the extraordinary lives of people he knows in their 90s. His guests include Lord Michael Heseltine, historian Lady Antonia Fraser, economist and happiness guru Sir Richard Layard and novelist Dame Penelope Lively. “These are people who aren’t just existing. They’re finding life can still be exciting. Why stop until you have to?”

He admits, though, that living so long can be hard when people you have known all your life die, such as his wife Ann and their friends from university. But he doesn’t focus on death on the podcast, he says, because he doesn’t feel that he himself has much illuminating to say about it. He sums up his feelings with mention of a Bible reading he gave at a grandchild’s wedding: “Love is strong as death, passion [sic] as fierce as the grave.” “I was reading it for the bride and groom but for myself, too, and my relationship with Ann, who died four years ago.”

There is one major reason why he thought this new podcast could make engrossing listening: “If you’ve lived through, as we have, the Second World War, the Cold War, possibility of nuclear annihilation, huge economic crash, the arrival of the internet, social media and now AI, well, what an incredible journey.”

For him, the most fascinating time as a journalist was during the Cold War. “There was the real prospect of fighting,” he says, “so that had to be analysed and addressed. But because of Marxism-Leninism, there was a constant intellectual argument. Putin’s a gangster. You can’t argue with a gangster. But with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe under Com- munism, there was an argument to be had with them about what they were doing and their way of life.”

What was happening in Eastern Europe was also personal. He was born in Czechoslovakia in 1936, coming to the UK with his parents three years later. After reading history at Cambridge, he joined the BBC External Services at Bush House, then worked across the corporation and in 1986 became managing director of the World Service. He left the BBC in 1993, critical of the managerial style of the then director-general, John Birt. And although he has lived almost all his life in Britain, he still feels an intimate connection with his native country.

“I am British, and my education is British, but then I can have this substratum of being Czech, and I feel I am European. Recently I was flying into Vienna and I looked down at the Danube, winding its way through the fields. I felt incredibly European.”

He found Britain’s departure from the EU deeply upsetting. “It’s an economic disaster but it’s an emotional issue, too, for me, distressing, saying no to Europe for no good reason.”

His view of the BBC, though, is more upbeat, despite uncertainty over funding and charter renewal, greater competition from umpteen streaming companies, the threatened President Trump libel case over Panorama and the subsequent resignation of director-general Tim Davie. “I don’t fear for the BBC’s future, because its roots in society are so strong. When push comes to shove, people will say, ‘Do I want the BBC to continue? Yes.’”

The BBC, says Tusa, has to remind itself and the audiences that its remit is making good programmes: “From that, everything flows.” He is more despondent about BBC Two’s Newsnight, in his day an hour-long mix of reporting, one-on-one interviews and discussions, and now cut to 30 minutes of political talking heads. It is, he says, “an empty shell”. Not that he blames the people making it, but instead points the finger at management. “The failure to say, ‘Let’s now think of something different,’ does seem to me to be an internal failure.”

He remains an avid listener to radio, tuning in to Today, Woman’s Hour and The World at One – programmes, he says, that stay refreshed with their changing cast of presenters. Broadcasting has also changed, from what he calls the “disciplined broadcasting” of his day, when there was a more formal format, to a more casual one.

As to podcasts, he looks sheepish when I ask him to name his favourites; he hasn’t caught the podcasting bug yet. But as well as the company guiding his hand, he has an expert tutor advising him – his godson, Rory Stewart, host of one of the biggest podcasts of all, The Rest Is Politics, who interviews Tusa for the first of his series.

The Best Is Yet to Come is, he says, a highly personal venture. “Let’s call it my selfish pleasure. But I hope it will be a shared pleasure, too.”

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