Next week’s Face the Facts on Radio 4 will be the last. It will be no more, a dead parrot after over 30 years. It succeeded Roger Cook’s Checkpoint, which always seemed to end with the burly antipodean being beaten up on microphone.
It is not ending because the world has got less wicked but because Radio 4 is having to cut costs.
Some of the other investigative series are paid for by BBC News, but Face the Facts comes directly out of the Network’s budget.
Studio discussions and phone-ins are relatively inexpensive, investigative programmes are not. They are labour intensive and require a great deal of legal help before and after transmission. But at their best they put into the public arena information which some people would like to keep hidden but which all of us should know about.
There is a temptation for broadcasting bosses to say that they will find the resources if one of their journalists finds a big story, but how will he or she find those important stories no one knows about? They are unlikely to do so if they are stuck in a newsroom locked onto a computer, processing information, instead of in the field finding things out.
I recently sat on a Royal Television Society jury for television current affairs. We gave our award to a Panorama programme by John Ware which had taken two years of original research and a lifetime’s experience of the Troubles to bring to the screen.
John talked to former members of an “off the books” British army unit which shot first and asked questions afterwards. They did indeed shoot to kill. It must have cost thousands and thousands to make but it was definitive.
The programme underlined the importance of reporters having time to find original stories rather than examples to support the less well informed views of their Editors back at base. (I was one such).
John’s fellow Panorama reporter Peter Taylor was, and remains, assiduous about keeping his contacts warm and regularly flying over to the province. As a result he has consistently found out things which no one else knew of, and brought fresh stories to successive Editors. However the growing tendency is to fund such visits only if a commissioner knows what the story is and can guarantee its delivery.
As a result I believe that investigative reporting is likely to diminish. Important stories will remain uncovered.
The Feedback audience will certainly miss Face the Facts, whose last edition goes out next week.
We could not let the occasion pass without talking to its presenter, the man with the golden voice, John Waite. You can hear our interview and the rest of this week's programme here.
Next week on Feedback I will be talking to the outgoing Commissioning Editor for Comedy on radio 4, Caroline Raphael.
Do let me know what you would like me to ask her.
Roger Bolton