The BBC has every right, of course, to make its employees retire at 60 (and is also, as Donaldson alludes to, trying to cut more than 3,000 posts). That is its policy. However, it does from time to time make exceptions:James Moir, for example, was allowed to carry on as controller of Radio 2 until he was 62. Plenty of other luminaries are on freelance contracts, among them John Simpson and John Humphrys, and so have been allowed to continue beyond 60 because the retirement age that is mandatory for staffers does not apply to them.
Moir, though, was a company man through and through, loyal to the BBC in every respect. Donaldson is much more irreverent. Indeed, he was so disenchanted with his bosses in 2003 that he wrote to the BBC’s in-house journal, Ariel, to reveal that he had thrown Greg Dyke’s latest mission statement in the wastepaper bin, hardly the most diplomatic move that Radio 4’s then chief announcer (he relinquished that role eight months later) could have made. “As an old colonial — born in Egypt and living abroad until I was 14 — I’ve never been PC, and the Beeb is trying to become ever more so,” he says. “But I don’t want to knock it. I’ve had a great time here with a very good bunch of people.”
It would be a mistake if the BBC were to punish him for his occasional disrespectful remark and never let him darken its doors again. He is the grit in the corporate oyster, the equivalent of the Labour rebel at Westminster who loves his party, but despairs of those now leading it — and those people are often held up to be heroes. In any case, irrespective of his views on the corporation, he is a wonderful announcer, and Radio 4 would be mad to cast him aside. His voice is not the sepulchral mahogany of Brian Perkins (the one lampooned by Dead Ringers) or the full dairy milk of Charlotte Green. It is a polished and fragrant rosewood, with elegant cadences and a certain good-humoured humanity.
He admits, because he is just as critical of himself as his bosses, that he does sometimes stumble over the words. On the Today programme, he once called The Daily Telegraph the “Daily Torygraph”. “It was my slip, not a typo. I also said ‘In the Shitty — City — share prices have plummeted’, and referred to Bill Clinton meeting Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the lawn not of the White House, but the White Horse, because that’s my local pub.”
Donaldson should write his memoirs: with his knowledge of Radio 4 and the BBC generally, and his wit, they would sell well. And, just as Perkins is still being heard as a freelance, two years after he too had to retire, let us hope that avenue will also be open to Donaldson. The disappearance of his voice would impoverish the airwaves.