Evan Davis: poster boy for the Noughties

July 6, 2008 – The Sunday Times

With his breezy BBC delivery he made economics fun and now he is the new boy on Today, so what’s all this about pierced nipples?

Does anyone remember how economics was done on the television before the advent of Evan Davis? Dare we mention the name of Peter Jay, whose patrician tones, tailored suits and tortuous analyses made the subject a national switch-off? The rumour was that Jay would record his soundtrack and depart, leaving the job of painting in the pictures to the editors on the bulletins. And then Davis took over as BBC economics editor, making Jay seem as archaic as the three-day week or striking miners.

Davis, with his lanky intelligence, buzzed hair and status as a gay icon seemed to spring from nowhere, a fully formed television natural, bursting with excitement to impart understandable explanations about the economy – just as the economy was getting rather exciting itself.

As the economy boomed, and then waned, Davis seemed to be on our screens almost every night, marching down some suburban street in funky pinstripe trousers, Cuban-heeled boots and open-necked shirts, revealing a chunky chain around his neck but – alas! – little else.

“Well, Huw, the economy could go this way. Or it could go that way,” he’d say, waving his arms exuberantly and heavens above, smiling! And the watching millions nodded their heads, for at last we understood. In the bejewelled hands of Davis, we grasped everything from equity down to sub-prime. And as the effervescent presenter of the cult investment programme Dragons’ Den, Davis even made entrepreneur-speak understandable.

As the economic storm clouds gathered, and Gordon Brown’s brow darkened progressively, here was Davis, bright and chatty, wearing his learning lightly and never once reaching for a staple format. Even more excitingly, there were the rumours of tattoos, of pierced nipples, even of a Prince Albert (a particularly intimate piercing). The Sun murmured that like Gollum, Davis was “a slave to the ring”. Such a moment cannot last, of course. Three months ago Davis was poached by the Today programme. He celebrated the move by having a Mohican haircut.

Although Davis is openly gay (and lives with his French boyfriend Guillaume Baltz, a landscape architect) and tops this year’s Pink List of the most influential gay and lesbian people in the UK, he has a sort of Every-man hinterland. The son of South African immigrants, he was born and bred in the London dormitory of Ashstead, Surrey, and went to the local grammar school, Ash-combe (he failed his 11-plus and got in on an interview). He read PPE at Oxford and did a master’s at Harvard.

Then he worked as a proper economist (at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and London Business School) before joining the BBC in 1993 as economics correspondent and then moving to Newsnight as its economics editor, where Jeremy Paxman likened him to Tigger. The analogy is unfair: Evans might be bouncy, but he is not daft.

He not only has the demeanour of a man who knows exactly what he wants to say, but he also politely corrects your questions as he goes along. Now that the economics of the nation have got really sticky, does he not wish he was in some advisory role, rather than jousting with John Humphrys and Jim Naughtie in the Today studio?

“What my skill is, Rosie, and you should understand this, is that I am not a great economist. What you like about me is that I can marshal the issue in a way which can be made comprehensible.”

All right, then, will you please marshal the issue of the current economic climate? Davis leans forward on the sofa, grinning as if I have just offered him a plate of iced buns. He has just come off three hours of live radio broadcasting, but the invitation to explain is clearly irresistible.

“We are in for a lacklustre few years,” he explains. “And that’s because there is a pretty big adjustment which has to be made. We need to go back to where we were 10 years ago, saving 8-10% of our disposable income. In the past three months, the amount we save was down to 1%. It has got to go back up; the country can’t survive on a 1% savings ratio, and it’s hard to envisage it going from 1% to 8% without that leading to a period of relatively slow growth in areas like retail spending.”

You see? It all seems so simple in Evan-speak. Perhaps he’s wasted on Today, telling the time and chatting to Gary on the sports desk. Why don’t you return to our screens and just give us a giant series explaining economics?

Davis smiles knowingly. “That’s very kind of you, and if I thought Today was only about telling the time, I would rather be explaining economics. But being a presenter on the Today programme doesn’t feel like too humble a job for Evan Davis.”

Indeed, it hasn’t been a complete breeze. Humphrys and Naughtie make it sound easy, but fronting Today – with its thunderous roll call of pips, its distinguished guests and its never-ending time checks – is akin to being strapped to the front of a speeding train.

He agrees, nodding vigorously. “Yes, it is, sometimes,” he admits. Mastering all the politics, for example. “I know where you’re coming from, Rosie, but the politics you are thinking of is actually policy,” he admonishes.

“I’m not a Westminster village person, but at least I know a little bit about Gordon Brown,” he continues, laughing. Of course he does. But now that he’s on Today, his affable stream of words can at times become slightly knotted up. The morning we meet, for example, during an interview about house prices.

“Ha ha!” Davis chortles. “If there’s anything an economics correspondent should feel comfortable on, it’s house prices.” Right you are.

How does he cope with the early starts? “I have a technique to cope with that, which is called going to bed very early,” he says, explaining that he uses hypnosis tapes to help him get to sleep.

“The tape is just some sort of bloke saying, ‘Go to sleep’,” he says, in sonorous cod-hypnosis tones. “It fills your brain with a soft mush, which stops it filling with stimulating thought, so you go to sleep.”

Is there anything that he finds hard? “There are some policy issues on which I feel a bit naked,” he admits. Criminal justice, for example. And stories from obscure parts of the world.

Does he ever feel out of his depth with an interview? “Oh no, no, no. You approach an interview knowing your comfort zone, with a pretty good idea of where the audience is coming from on that issue, and you get quite a bit of help [from the editor].”

And if you have a “low level” of knowledge on a story, he adds, you can always do a “quick refresher course” on it, thanks to the famously forensic BBC cuttings service. Newspaper cuttings, though, cannot always provide a safety net. Recently, Davis was criticised for his interview with the mother of Victoria Climbié , who spent several minutes admonishing the British social services for neglecting her daughter – who had died after appalling abuse at the hands of relatives. Not once did he think to ask whether she herself had been negligent in packing the little girl off from her home in Ivory Coast to Britain in the first place.

“Victoria Climbié’s mum was a big mistake, yeah,” he says soberly. “Not only did I get that wrong, but I knew I had got it wrong between the time that I had recorded the interview and the time it was broadcast. It wasn’t a story I had followed.”

Not a hard story to understand, surely? “No, [but] when one does that quick refresher [with cuttings], one goes over the ground that has been most trodden, and misses the gaping other part which has not been written about nearly as much,” Davis says.

“I did what everyone else did, and I thought afterwards I should have asked that question, and it should have been a significant chunk of the interview.” Did he get into trouble? “There were comments,” he says. “Do you know, Rosie, the most painful criticisms are the ones that you entirely agree with.” Now that he has only the Today microphone, how does he get his famous “pair-of-jeans” ethos across on radio? Do you try to use a chatty voice? “No,” says Davis, severely. “I do not ‘try’ anything. It wasn’t a calculated thing, to be as I am. There is nothing calculated about having short hair.”

What? The chunky necklace, the cropped hair, the jewelled fingers and – er – all the rest: are you saying that’s accidental? Davis pauses for an instant. “I know that I come across as a little bit unconventional in some respects,” he grants. “And people thought I had quite short hair. The only issue was whether I should force myself into some other mould – and, on the whole, I thought: why? Put the seriousness into the piece, but not the presentation. It’s hard to do when it gets sombre, and that is the issue about the Evan Davis style,” he says, moving celebrity-style into the third person (always a rather worrying trait in my book). “Evan Davis can do serious, but can he do sombre?”

Well, I don’t know, so I decide to ask him whether he is indeed the Lord of the Ring? Davis jumps around the sofa, laughing. “If I confirm it, it’s nobody’s business. And if I deny it, it’s nobody’s business. The only correct way to deal with it is to say: no comment. You can probably go off and find people who know me, and surreptitiously wine and dine them, but this is a public debate on which I choose to have no comment.” (Actually, I am low enough to ask a mate of his about it, and he gives me a confirmation.) Does it annoy Davis that we grubby hacks are always going on about it? “Not particularly.” Does he care that it will doubtless feature in his obituary? “Not particularly. It probably annoys my mother more than it annoys me.”

With his skinny, wide-eyed, slightly jug-eared persona, he is an unlikely television pin-up, and his specialist area is not obviously popular; but thanks to broadcasting alchemy, Evan and economics are a grip-ping combination. Add to that a sprinkling of shock value in his curious jewellery choices and you have a ratings winner. Now he is on Today he is becoming a national treasure for the Noughties.