Evan Davis takes two months to get back to my email request for an interview. When his PA gets in contact, I’m immediately daunted: I had never thought news journalists would have an entourage.
My concerns are further heightened when he texts me later to confirm a venue. In many ways, it encapsulates the laid back but clearly high-powered man I met — he later tells me how he’d “rather not wear a suit and tie if everyone was happy with it, but it is easier to be neutral and fit in by wearing a suit”. He is disinclined to make strong public statements, yet is also now the face of one of the BBC’s biggest brands, Newsnight.
Starting out at the Institute of Fiscal Studies, he made his journalistic name as BBC’s Economics Editor and by fronting Dragons’ Den. It is perhaps unexpected that Davis now finds himself in what, for many, will always be Jeremy Paxman’s seat. Speaking after his first few weeks in the job, Davis tells me it “is still quite new. I’m still bedding in and working out how to structure the new day”.
Davis’ appointment at Newsnight sparked new-found newspaper interest in the 52 year old interviewer. “Can Evan Davis save Newsnight?” and, “What would Paxo think? Newsnight’s tattooed new host steps out in ripped jeans” were two of many choice headlines in response to his appointment.
I wonder if settling into the job is as difficult as the papers suggest. “The first week had that warm glow,” he tells me. “But by the second week there were people starting to say ‘He’s not as good as Paxman’ and grumbling, but it is starting to settle down. You are never going to please everybody, so you should never look for 100 per cent.”
If such comparisons are frustrating, they are nothing new considering the adversarial style of his former co-host of Today, John Humphrys. Davis describes his style as “convivial and friendly” and defends his interviewing techniques as “explaining and trying to understand”.
Describing his own interview style, he said, “Sometimes the interview might be about trying to find out where you’re coming from, or showing the audience something about your character or it might just be about entertainment. I go into most interviews with an open mind in an attempt to give that person a space for them to describe what they are doing, or to give them enough rope with which to hang themselves if they deserve that.”
This perfectly captures Davis’ approach. Welcoming and refraining from judgement, he is in many ways the opposite of the older, more aggressive interviewers, Paxman and Humphrys. “Tough-questioning, adversarial journalism is a great British tradition. I’m a fan of that style of journalism, it scores up a lot of great successes, it is theatrical and engaging and it also keeps people on their toes in a really brilliant way.” However, as might be expected, Davis thinks it has its limitations, “Paxman and Humphrys were so damn good at what they do and lots of other people felt that that was the gold standard of what you had to do, but we are not all Paxman and Humphrys and, more to the point, we shouldn’t try to be.”
Russell Brand’s explicitly anti-establishment position and discussion style in many ways clashes with Newsnight’s trademark tendency to interview the suit-wearing, media-trained politicians of today’s era. Davis, however, shies away from the establishment label. “I have a program on Radio 4 called The Bottom Line, which is ‘the Chief Executive program’ where I am conversational and friendly with Chief executives, but I hope I am not just an establishment figure.
“I hope I would treat radicals like Russell Brand just as I would treat the Chief Executive of Unileaver. I think it would be crazy to think that just because you are polite to people you are in some way complicit with them; to think that would be stupid.”
Even if Davis feels secure in his own burgeoning trademark style, presenting Newsnight in 2015 also means coming into the brand after a series of journalistic scandals, most notably pertaining to the program itself. Newsnight’s decision in 2011 not to broadcast an investigation into accusations of sexual assault against Jimmy Savile rightly hit the headlines.
I ask Davis about reinventing Newsnight. “What do you say about the Jimmy Savile scandal? It obviously wasn’t a great period in Newsnight. It was interesting to me when I was thinking about leaving Today for Newsnight that when I asked people what they thought of Newsnight, no one mentioned it. The Newsnight brand turned out to be stronger and less tarnished than I thought.”
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Similarly, Davis thinks that the Leveson Inquiry, which followed the 2011 phone hacking scandal, “hasn’t changed the way journalism is done at the BBC, but the BBC doesn’t do the kind of journalism to which Leveson was really oriented so I wouldn’t have expected it to. Nor do I think that it has done as much to change the newspapers’ behaviour as the phone hacking convictions.” He points out, “There is a heck of a lot going on in the life of newspapers at the moment, and worrying about Leveson and press regulation is not at the top of their list: the commercial imperatives and their loss of revenue is a much bigger worry.”
If newspapers are under threat due to dropping circulation figures and diminishing revenue, the BBC has also seen its lifeblood license fee cut in real terms over the last few years. Although Davis tells me, “all these issues are way over my pay-grade,” he has an obviously astute and clearly thought through approach to the discussion. “I see the BBC not as some Leviathan organisation that serves itself – maybe some of the people that work in it think that way, but I don’t. It’s not the BBC’s BBC, it should be seen and treated as an agent of the public. We are an agent, we are not an empire.”
Even without budget cuts, the mainstream media is challenged in the Twenty-First Century by the growth of social media. I ask Davis how he thinks journalists should react to the prevalence of sites such as Twitter. “Twitter is important, we all read it and we look at it and we all take a certain sense from it. You have to contain yourself from putting too much weight on it as it is not a representative sample. Twitter is not a mirror of the population at large, it is slightly skewed to a certain portion.”
Moreover, Davis accepts that, and as is his trademark, analyses the decline of mainstream providers in economic terms, “With the explosion in social media, independent blogs, you would expect a different role from what might be termed ‘old media’ and you would expect it to shrink a bit. That’s an economic phenomenon, just as big supermarkets replace little grocers and little grocers replace market stalls. It’s always a painful stage but it’s expected.”
Davis himself doesn’t tweet regularly – “partly because I find that I have to think too hard in order to know what to say, so that I don’t get a slew of people responding telling me that I’m not meant to have an opinion because I’m at the BBC”.
I ask him about a specific tweet that caught my interest: in July 2014, in light of the Australian swimmer, Ian Thorpe, coming out as gay, Davis tweeted, “Well done ‪@IanThorpe. Your life is about to get a whole lot easier.” He tells me, “That tweet came from a very personal perspective.”
Although he finds it “curious that people take an interest in my homosexuality,” he tells me, “if people want to comment it is not for me to tell them what should or shouldn’t be interesting. If you asked me whether I was interested in whether a random celebrity was gay or not, I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t.”
As the interview draws to a close, I ask Davis about his own experience of coming out. He explains, “I wasn’t fully out at Oxford at all. I came out in my second year of university in the States. Being gay at Oxford at the time was still a bit of a feature. I remember doing an interview with a guy who was running the gay society and the interview was very much about his homosexuality. It was more of a feature than it is now but Oxford was still a tolerant and liberal place.
“If I were going back to Oxford again, I would say come out as soon as you can, you just make your life so much easier, which is why I said that to Ian Thorpe.” He tells me, “I realised I was gay before University. I was clear about it before college and keeping it a secret is a thing that kind of builds up and not being open about it horrendously complicates your life and becomes really annoying. It’s not a little thing, it is quite a great difference between you and a lot of other people if you are dating guys.”
Having not come out during his time at Oxford, Davis explains, “There are two phases in coming out: the first phase is self-acceptance, which is quite a big step, and a lot of people take a very long time to get there, and you are not going to be out to other people before you come out to yourself. The second step of telling people generally was much harder. I found it very hard to tell other people before I told my family, although that is perhaps not the same for everyone.”
I am struck by how honest Davis is about his own experiences and by how open and conversational he is in discussing his Newsnight role, as well as heavier topics such as Leveson or the license fee. He is as friendly and modest as his interviewing persona suggests, which I suppose is why he was chosen to fill Paxman’s shoes in the first place.
As he tells me, “I was never tempted by tabloid journalism. You look at someone like Robert Peston and he gets stories every week. For me, journalism was never about talking to Deep Throat and getting a story – I’ve never got a story in my life”.
