OBITUARY: SIR ROBIN Day

OBITUARY: SIR ROBIN Day, who died in London (in August) at the age of 76, was by common consent British television's foremost political interviewer. He was the Grand Inquisitor, a formidable national figure in a familiar bow tie, heavy spectacles and a full shock of hair. His mastery of detail came with a sound grasp of the whole; hence, his method of tackling the subject before him became a standard for those who have followed him in television or radio. He believed it was the democratic right of every citizen to know about matters, great and small, in the public domain and that it was the duty of every politician, ministers especially, to reveal and not conceal the truth. Sir Robin had studied law at Oxford but decided early on that the bar was not for him. Television was taking off as the new mass communications medium in the mid and late 1950s and it was then that he started off into largely uncharted seas as an interviewer. The tried and tested legal profession was never short of aspiring talent but television had yet to come of age. Sir Robin Day brought to this medium the forensic gift of a high class barrister, moulding this with others in an appropriate blend that made television presentation natural and credible to the public. He interviewed the mightiest figures in the land but was never in awe of their power or reputation. He was, therefore, relentless in the pursuit of answers, returning time and again to elisions and evasions and dissembling circumlocution with the persistence of a wasp and with the wasp's ability to sting. Possessed of an abundance of wit and humour, often with a twinkle in his eye, unfailingly courteous, as those whom he had once harried were quick to acknowledge, leavening his audiences, over a whole generation and more, with a healthier appreciation of democracy and the democratic spirit, he educated them in the self-confident belief that the politically empowered were at all times accountable to the people who elected them. The Day legacy was recently in evidence. When Jeremy Paxman, now the country's foremost interviewer, asked Henry Kissinger by what moral right he had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize when it was his policy that had resulted in Cambodia being bombed into the stone age, the former UN national security adviser and, subsequently, secretary of state, walked out of the studio in high dudgeon. The good doctor, humble in the presence of Chairman Mao's "raw power", in the manner of Moses before the burning bush, was outraged by this perceived loss of dignity, the insult that would question his mummified probity and expose it to fresh air and possible disintegration in full public view. This clearly comes from what the late US Senator J. William Fulbright called the "arrogance of power" - American power, as it happens, against which he warned his people with the ripe wisdom and learning of the true legislator. Human diversity and the future well-being of humankind require surely a multipolar and not a unipolar world. Yet, it is a unipolar world that US leaders are now hell bent on constructing. In such a global hothouse, monologue will prevail over dialogue; all men are equal, it will be intoned, but some men, in practic e, will be more equal than others. Copyright © Asia Intelligence Wire