The Big Interview: Evan Davis

The BBC presenter lives above London’s Northern line extension, grew up with the disruption of the M25 being built and is a frequent traveller to France via the Channel Tunnel. In APM’s 50th anniversary year, Emma De Vita asks Davis for the outside view on all things project, not least how they have the power to transform the social, economic and cultural life of a country.

On Zoom, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Evan Davis (of the BBC’s Newsnight and Radio 4 Today programme) should somehow be interviewing me, even though he’s at home and I’m the one who’s doing the interviewing. The current presenter of BBC Radio 4’s daily news programme PM is also well known as the presenter of BBC One’s business reality show Dragons’ Den and Radio 4’s weekly business discussion programme The Bottom Line. Davis does not come from the Jeremy Paxman school of broadcasting. He’s simply the nicest, most enthusiastic, twinkliest-eyed person – a cockapoo to Paxman’s Rottweiler.

Davis has been interviewing the movers and shakers of business, politics and economics since he joined the BBC in 1993 as Economics Correspondent, so who better to give the big picture on the importance of projects? He’s been in the thick of it for the past couple of decades and witness to the transformative power of projects at a personal level, too – not least because he lives above TfL’s Northern line extension work in south London. “It’s about three floors down under this house, but we do hear a very, very faint rumble,” he says with a chuckle.

His experience of megaprojects came at an early age. “The M25 had a big presence in my childhood because it came through my village, Ashstead, in Surrey. It was an enormous debating point when I was a kid, and I think what it shows is how difficult it is before the event to imagine how transformative it will be after the event. It seemed to many in the community like the most horrendous idea… and how, once it’s bedded in, and the generation have got used to it, that immediately it just seems like the state of nature. If you said to people, take it away, they would be horrified,” he says.

The M25 was a “game-changing” project for London, says Davis. “One has to wonder whether London could have done what it has done over the past 30 years if there hadn’t been a way of organising traffic around and outside it,” he reflects. He’s also the user of another game-changing project: the Channel Tunnel. His partner is French, so they visit France a lot. “The Channel Tunnel genuinely excites me still. I’m one of those people who looks out the window when I’m in the tunnel hoping to see that they’ve left the gates open and I can grab a glimpse of the other line, or ideally a train coming the other way,” he says, laughing again. He never has, though (and later on he reveals that going through the service tunnel would be a dream come true. Any Project reader who can help with that?).

Davis believes the Channel Tunnel changed the UK’s relationship with the Continent, making possible the expansion in trade of the past decades, and helping make the world feel smaller to us. It was also a “fairly stupendous piece of engineering”, he says. “Being an observer of both these projects [the M25 and the Channel Tunnel], you see the economic transformation and the psychological transformation,” he says. He’s a big fan of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum (although admits he’s “one of those people who was much more interested in the building than its contents”), but doesn’t think other towns trying to replicate its regenerative effect have always been successful. “There are places that thought that if they plonked an art gallery there, they would suddenly have this bohemian ideopolis, but it takes a little bit more than buildings,” he says. Davis was left impressed by Frank Gehry’s new Luma art complex in Arles: “It’s this stupendous, cathedral-sized, crinkly silver paper building that you can see from miles away.”

At the moment, Davis is involved with an important cultural regeneration project: the relocation of the Museum of London (of which he is a trustee) from its current site on London Wall to a redeveloped area of Spitalfields meat market. It’s given him a direct window onto the work of project professionals. “It’s an interesting and massive project and just watching that I realised how difficult and complex it is to make everything align. It has made me in awe of the whole project management thing.”

Back in 2012, Davis made the BBC TV series Built in Britain, which looked at the construction of infrastructure projects. “I was wearing a hard hat and high-vis before it was so popular with politicians,” he quips. He was chuffed to go into the Crossrail tunnel while it was being bored, and to climb atop the Forth Bridge. “It was a really, really wonderful opportunity to clamber around things,” he says. “One of the things I said in that series was that we don’t have to be scared of these projects because we’re much better at delivering and building them that we used to be… We said Crossrail is going to be delivered better than anything. I went into the Crossrail tunnel and Sir John Armitt explained to me that the use of a particular contract – the NEC 3 – had improved [project delivery] enormously.

“I now look back at that series and my contention that we can do this stuff better, and I feel sort of embarrassed having said ‘isn’t it great that we can do this better’, and then Crossrail is basically four years late. Maybe your readers will put me right on this, but I think part of Crossrail has actually been a great success. I think a lot of what has gone wrong with Crossrail has been in the very late-stage stuff; it’s not been in the stuff that might have once caused enormous headaches – boring the ground and concreting the tunnels. It’s been around the complex final stuff: the signalling and rolling stock, and the like. I would like to believe we did the difficult stuff easily, and the stuff that was meant to be easy with great difficulty.”

“I have a view about how communication and public perception works, I even wrote a book on this (Post‑Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It). Broadly speaking, professions get the reputation they deserve, so my advice is work on that assumption.” Davis keenly presses the point that he doesn’t think project managers have a bad image. Actually, he doesn’t think they have much of an image at all within the popular psyche. “I don’t think the public have a very clear idea about project managers. I think what happens is the public hates it when these things go wrong. They get annoyed when they see Crossrail was meant to open in 2018 and is opening in 2022.

“That’s the negative, but the truth is the public swoon over some of the great achievements that project managers do, and they love it when projects go right. What you really see out there is a kind of a complex amalgam of different feelings: ‘we hate it when they’re being built, and we love it when we walk through the fancy new railway stations’. It’s a complicated love-hate relationship, and I think it’s probably deserved. The public are entitled to say: ‘you said this would be delivered and it wasn’t, and we were a bit fed up with that’. I wouldn’t blame the public for their views,” he says.

The problem that irks him more is what he calls ‘the politician’s dilemma’, which is about the overselling of projects that politicians are forced into to gain voter support, and then the inevitable sense of disappointment after it has been delivered, even if it’s a great thing that has been achieved. “That is the kind of area where I think it’s difficult for project managers… Look back at the Channel Tunnel and I don’t think anyone really thinks we shouldn’t have built it. I look back at the exaggerated promises of the number of passengers on the Eurostar at the time, trying to justify it. You see it was a good idea, but it wasn’t as good an idea as Alastair Morton [CEO of Eurostar at the time] and his team promised. But they really felt, I think, that you had to look on the upside, you have to see the glass is half full all the way through, otherwise we wouldn’t have a Channel Tunnel.”

I ask him if he’s an optimist. “I’m an optimist by nature. And, by the way, Crossrail will open and everyone will be wowed by it. Everyone will say in a year’s time, ‘isn’t it marvellous?’”

CV: Evan Davis

2018 to present: Presenter, BBC Radio 4’s PM programme

2014–2018: Presenter, BBC Two’s Newsnight

2008–2014: Presenter, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme

2005 to present: Presenter of BBC One’s Dragons’ Den

2001: BBC’s Economics Editor

1997–2001: Economics Editor, BBC Two’s Newsnight programme

1993: Joins the BBC as Economics Correspondent

1988–1993: Economist at London Business School and the Institute for Fiscal Studies

1986–1988: Studied at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

1981–1984: A First in PPE at St John’s College, Oxford

• Listen to Emma’s interview with Evan for the APM Podcast
• APM’s 50 Projects For a Better Future can be found here

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE Summer 2022 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.