Melvyn Bragg’s first ever intro to In Our Time in 1998 clocked in at 21 seconds. Misha Glenny, meanwhile, took one minute and four seconds to get through his. The initial public reaction to Glenny taking over from Bragg was positive. The prevailing sentiment was ‘thank Christ it isn’t Stephen Fry’. But now you felt as though you could hear two million people shouting ‘Get on with it!!’ at the radio as he stressed and elongated virtually every syllable. John Stuart Mill and his wife had been labouring over ‘On Liberty together for soooome yeeaarrss’. Then we were away. And he’s all right, thank God.

With In Our Time, there is no upper bound on how haughty and arrogant a presenter should be

I emphasise ‘all right’, though, because there were definitely problems. But, as Melvyn would have said, we’ll get to those in a minute. First, let’s work out why replacing Bragg is so hard. The analogy often used is with Alex Ferguson. His replacement as Manchester United manager was David Moyes, who ended up patronising his new club. Moyes said that Manchester City were ‘at the level we aspire to’. He said that Liverpool were the........

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