A 'Today' for today

I've never heard an edition of Today quite like this morning's, and it's only been on an hour so far.

Evan Davis has just interviewed an anti-EU, anti-mass immigration right-winger without interrupting him once, and neither of the early press reviews has mentioned The Guardian. Astonishing!

Then a BBC health reporter talked about the latest report into the NHS's failings and dissed - yes dissed - Danny Boyle's Olympic Opening Ceremony fantasy vision about the NHS whilst doing so. (He described it as "a North Korean-style piece of propaganda, minus the high-kicking female soldiers"). I never thought I'd hear that on the BBC! 

Plus Roger Harriban, the BBC's environment analyst, returned, following yesterday's IPCC report into the police's failings over climate change, and quoted Anthony Watts and James Delingpole, saying they had a point and maybe he had been a bit too alarmist in the past. The police aren't that bad after all, he said.

This morning's programme will linger in people's memory though for James Naughtie's latest embarrassing slip of the tongue where, in the middle of quoting a story in The Independent about the BBC, he managed to make exactly the same mistake that he'd made so famously over Jeremy Hunt's surname, this time over the surname of the head of the BBC news room, Mary Hockaday. He immediately stumbled out an apology, but Evan Davis got a fit of the giggles and had to leave the studio. 

I've got to go to work now, so who knows what other strange things will happen over the course of the next two hours of Today, though the Today website's running order suggests that for James Naughtie's 'cultural interview of the day' (he always does one), Jim will be following in Emily Maitlis and Newsnight's footsteps and interviewing the Cookie Monster about his long career in show business, his recent move from America to Britain and, of course, cookies. 

You better tune in to find out.