Food for thought

Thought for the Day remains a staple of Radio 4's Today programme, but the BBC is determined to 'refresh' it. Tim Luckhurst wonders if the latest shake-up will merely delay its inevitable demise

To that substantial majority of Britons who get along without recourse to religious observance, it will resemble a sunami in an egg cup. For a few, the stakes are as big as they get. Radio 4's Thought for the Day is to be shaken-up. The BBC's Manchester-based religious broadcasting department, which is wholly responsible for those minutes of unmediated spiritual reflection that interrupt the Today programme at 7.50 each morning, has drafted in a new producer, Christine Morgan, to give Thought an adrenalin shot. Officially, she has been asked to "refresh" it.

The revamping is being kept deliberately low-profile. The official version is that contributors will be "worked with" in an attempt to "see whether it can be refreshed". That is unlikely to be a calm process, certainly not if it involves the dismissal of established Thought presenters. When veterans such as Dr Donald English, Canon Philip Crowe and Fr Oliver McTernan were compulsorily "rested" in April 1996, the controversy spread like smallpox through Britain's religious communities.

To religious leaders, Thought for the Day represents the crown jewels of religious broadcasting. The Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, one of the few intellectually challenging contributors to this unique mass-audience relic of universal piety, credits it with "performing a unique service". In his opinion, the slot has "preserved Britain's character as a tolerant society".

Christina Odone, the deputy editor of the New Statesman and the other Thought contributor who is obviously equipped to make her case in the world of secular news and current affairs, agrees. For her, Thought provides a crucial counter-balance to the anti-religious "north London, liberal-thinking, left-wingish community" that dictates every other item in the Today programme's running order.

Thought matters to the God squad. For different reasons, it provokes debate among the journalists who make Today, too. Small wonder. In a programme listened to by seven million people each week and, since the fragmentation of television audiences, more important than it has ever been in 45 years as the forum for our national conversation, Thought is the only item over which Today staff have no editorial control.

It is unmediated religious opinion, often acutely banal, slap-bang in the middle of the most listened to half-hour of intelligent radio broadcasting we possess. Today editors have long yearned to dump it. None has dared, or been permitted to.

As Today's editor in the Eighties, Jenny Abramsky, now head of BBC Radio, pondered abolition. She was soon convinced that Thought had powerful friends and chose to just abbreviate and refocus it instead. At the beginning of his period at the helm, the former Director-General, John Birt, made it plain that he disliked the slot. Birt, too, was persuaded to preserve it.

The current Today boss, Rod Liddle, is publicly sceptical about "Thought" and privately derisory. Like most of his staff, he is adamant that Thought is a terrible waste of a valuable slot and routinely fails to fulfil its stated purpose: "To reflect from a perspective of religious faith on the sorts of issues, topics and people with which the Today programme deals."

For Liddle, Thought is folksy and whimsical, entirely inappropriate for its place in an agenda-setting news programme. He told me: "It is too often just meandering and anecdotal. A few contributors can do anecdotes well; Lionel Blue sometimes does. Most can't."

That critique is endorsed by those who support the idea of Thought for the Day. Thus The Daily Telegraph recently described the slot as "an infuriating parody of faith with a goldfish outlook on the world". This apparent consensus that the problem with Thought for the Day is that it is rarely any good and hardly even religious suggests that reform of the type planned by the BBC's religious affairs team may do the trick. It is a substantial delusion. Thought is, in fact, the surviving legacy of broadcasts such as Lift Up Your Hearts with which BBC Radio's Home Service once invited post-war audiences to reaffirm their loyalty to church, Queen and country. It is an anachronism that survives because the BBC has relegated all other religious broadcasting to the status of unwanted appendage and has roughly thrust it into the least popular slots in the schedule.

The attraction of this latest attempt to inject rigour and vigour into a transmission that is really nothing more than the last morsel of the detritus of religion in a country where it matters not at all is that it may, finally, provoke a sensible debate about Thought for the Day.

There are occasions when a spiritual perspective feels appropriate in mainstream broadcasting. Thought has occasionally felt relevant after events like 11 September, the Omagh bombing or the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. When such tragedies occur, Today may still reach for a priest, rabbi or imam; to assert that it should do so every day is surely less plausible than to contend that political leaders deserve to be offered three minutes of uncontested propaganda broadcasting each morning.

A time is imminent when the re-focusing of Thought for the Day will look like a last desperate attempt to defend the indefensible. Declining religious observance is a fact. To many, that reflects the onward march of reason. The charming and otherwise sensible Jonathan Sacks calls Thought for the Day "a daily reminder of eternity". To many listeners, it is an unwanted immersion in the interminable.

A few adherents long for a new and rigorous Thought for the Day in which religion is presented with blunt honesty, raw, uncompromising and complete with the judgement and condemnation without which it means nothing. That might be fun, useful even. But the BBC will not permit the substitution of rigorous theology for bland homily. Every revision of the slot has been rooted in the unreason that hopes religious teaching can, somehow, be sufficiently eviscerated to appeal to those who do not accept absolutes.

That process is beginning to render Thought for the Day risible even to the devout. In its modern, increasingly God-free form, it is less valuable than in the days when Richard Stilgoe parodied Today as a programme still "young and green" that "went out in two editions with a vicar in between". The truth is dawning that if Thought can no longer afford to be properly religious – and that is what the latest review implies – then it has no future at all. The remaining question is whether, when the inevitable happens, audiences will notice, except in the unreverential sense that we will need a new prompt to remind us that it is 7.50am and time to have a shower, wake the children or brush the teeth.

Tim Luckhurst is the author of 'This is Today', a biography of the 'Today' programme. Aurum Press, £16.99