Life and times

Sleeplessness, the joy of friends and the benefits of a cold climate give the Today editor pause for thought

Today editor Sarah Sands has a rare lie in

I AM STAYING IN A Dutch-style cottage in a field of lavender in Franschhoek, South Africa. The temperature is about 35C. You can see the attraction. Each year I have the same wistful notion of living here. I have just had drinks with a couple of hotshot London lawyers who have bought a house, taken a career break and are helping to fund and teach at a local school. The sun sets across their terrace, changing the colours in the rock amphitheatre around this wine town. Half the population of Franschhoek seem to be international folk seeking their utopia.

I love my job as editor of the Today programme, but can always imagine other lives. I realise late in life that I would really like to have been a botanist. Geographies are mapped, but there is still a wealth of discovery to be made about plants.

Alternative existences in foreign idylls are a drastic option, however. If you are in your 50s, you are likely to have parents who are starting to need care, even as your own children are becoming independent. Longevity brings obligations. There are also all the friends I hardly see but like to know are there. Part of me subscribes to David Cameron’s complacent rule that the best pals are those you have had for 30 years. Also, lasting good weather can become as much of a curse as British grey sky. Cape Town is in the middle of a serious drought. Locals are envious of our rain. The grass is greener on our side.

WHAT IS STRAIGHTFORWARDLY wonderful is sleep. Today is really a prestigious boot camp. Friends always ask about the hours, under the assumption that everyone starts and finishes early. The answer is that mine are not as horrible as the presenters’ (which start at 4am) but they go on longer and include a late-night call that makes it impossible to get more than six and a half hours’ sleep (that half feels very important). It is much, much worse for the night team, who are on 14-hour shifts.

I don’t know if the remarkable professionalism I have found on this programme is because of the lack of sleep or despite it. It certainly used to be part of Sandhurst training. A young recruit I knew still has the capacity to sleep standing up. Some endurance cyclists say they can nap while cycling. Lack of sleep in the line of duty can produce a kind of crazed resolve and resourcefulness. Alas, it is also said to spark Alzheimer’s, so you win some, you lose some.

MY FRIEND JAY HUNT left the BBC to become chief creative officer at Channel 4 and, in tune with the times, has now joined Apple. She told me when I joined Today that I would never quite get used to the power of the BBC brand – how wherever you are in the world, people will feel goodwill towards it. That is an extraordinary responsibility. The domestic scrutiny by which an error at the BBC is immediately magnified and politicised is the price you pay for the privilege of working for this institution.

Given its global reach, the BBC also needs to reflect back to the UK how it is perceived abroad. Before I joined, I had an argument with the actor Simon Russell Beale at a dinner party in Italy. We were talking about cuts to the World Service, and I said, with a private-sector insouciance, that maybe the programmes needed to be more commercially driven. Russell Beale was furious. The World Service, to him, was the voice of idealised British values, full of propriety, modesty, civility, legality. Reithian, in other words. I have been working to redeem myself in Simon’s eyes ever since. I hope public service will eventually run through my veins.

Part of me subscribes to David Cameron’s rule that the best pals are those you’ve had for 30 years