Thom Yorke edits Today and loses a story to the lawyers

Thom Yorke guest-edited BBC Radio 4's Today programme on New Year's Eve, the third of the week's five guest editors after Monica Ali and Lord Tebbit and before Gillian Reynolds and Stephen Hawking. A piece on Clear Channel, the biggest radio company in the US, never reached the air, because Radio 4's legal department feared the company would come down on them. Clear Channel are notoriously litigious and we talked about doing a piece but it didn't really work out³, he told the BBC, and it will keep for another day.

His first thought on being asked, Yorke says, was that they must be crazy, but he listens to Today every morning and saw a chance to get said what wasn't being said. He gave the reporters six stories. Oil and its hold on American and British foreign policy, which he told James Naughtie had been rattling about in my head for a year¹, was argued out between George Monbiot and Robert Ebel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The others were the 28 pages cut from the US Congress report on the 11 September attacks, said to concern Saudi Arabia; plans to make RAF Fylingdales in North Yorkshire part of America's “Star Wars” missile defence; the world trade talks, stuck since Cancun; new computer techniques in music; and hangovers.

The hangover item brought in Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler, and Salim Khoury, head barman at the Savoy, whose cure, the Corpse Reviver, is Fernet Branca, white crème de menthe and brandy, shaken. The BBC's page shows Yorke taking a sip. John Sutherland, in his Guardian column of 5 January, says the announcement that Yorke would join the item brought a row off mike and an apology mid-programme, telling listeners he did not associate himself with heavy drinking.

Sutherland reads the whole edition as a sign that bands who sell around the world now carry real political weight.

Yorke ended the programme with his verdict on the day, and has offered to come back. He enjoyed the mayhem of the studio, where you've got five or six conversations all happening at once at the same volume in the room, and only one of them is the programme³.