When Today began, 50 years ago today, the Home Service said it would contain “nothing too long for people on the move”. Despite all the changes since, those eight words remain its essence. Everyone is on the move in the early morning – feeding children, dressing, driving, rushing, showering, flossing. Today remains the indispensable soundtrack to all that activity for some 6m people.

News, weather, sport, finance, interviews, the papers, quips, time checks, on and on it swiftly flows. Today is never a boring programme for the simple reason that nothing in it is ever too long, and you always wonder what is coming next. Apart from the 8.10am interview, little on Today is longer than three minutes. From Benazir Bhutto to abortion to supermarket packaging to green councils to Thought for the Day: as Jack Straw says, it forms an essential part of our national life.

Yet that formula, so precisely defined in 1957, is both a weakness and a strength. Not everything can be covered in three minutes. From the premise that it can stems breathlessness, interruption and sometimes incomprehensibility. John Humphrys,primus inter pares of its presenters, acknowledged it the other day when interviewing both a man who had written a book asserting (I think) that the real history of the world was the history of secret societies and, down the line, a professor who disagreed. I had no idea what they were talking about. More importantly, nor, I think, did Humphrys. “This all goes to show that not everything can be done in a few minutes,” he remarked tartly. Many will have cheered.

The other problem with Today is that it is politicians who are most often subjected to aggressive questioning. To be sure, many of them obfuscate and evade, and indeed invite combat in the first place. But they are usually the only people on the programme to have been elected: they have a democratic legitimacy that their interrogators do not. Why are cultural grandees, quango suzerains and others often in receipt of, and spenders of, public money, generally treated with a greater respect than those who have won the support of the electorate? Because politicians want power is the usual answer. True, they do. But there are a lot of other people out there who want influence.

Despite all that, I cannot imagine – unless I am on holiday – starting the day without Today. “I could fill a page with its faults,” the author Monica Ali once said, “and more with its virtues. But neither are really relevant. Like the rising of the sun and the lapping of the waves, the Today programme simply is.”

In October 1957, there were two black-and-white television channels and three radio stations to serve the entire United Kingdom, and that was it. Nobody could have predicted the digital cornucopia of infinite choice on offer today. Similarly, nobody can predict the landscape of 2057. The BBC’s recently announced 1,800 job losses (whose 360 in news have already been publicly condemned by Humphrys and James Naughtie) look certain to have some impact on Today, though it may simply mean less duplication in covering stories. Today is an ever-renewing carousel, and may it go on turning for as long as the world itself does.

paul.donovan@sunday-times.co.uk

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