WELL-KNOWN journalist and broadcaster Amol Rajan recently left his role as the BBC’s media editor following a tenure of six years after he landed his latest gig as the new host of University Challenge.
Announcing his decision on Twitter in the first week of January, Rajan sent out a threat of tweets giving “elegiac” tribute to the unsung producers he worked with. He also urged BBC to give more credit to its backroom employees, calling the failure to do so a “moral, editorial, commercial, strategic and reputational missed opportunity”.
Rajan said he was delighted to become only the third host in the show’s 60-year history, following Paxman and the recently deceased Bamber Gascogine who had become synonymous with the programme –and regarded as the preserve of boffins, in street speech.
Rajan has been working with BBC since 2016, when he was appointed as Media Editor. He has been the presenter of its Media Show, a Masterchef critic, and the host of the Big Debate on the Asian Network. He has covered for Zoe Ball and Jeremy Vine on Radio 2, and been a regular stand-in on The One Show.
Through his work, Rajan tends to unabashedly question the class divide in the UK. Most recently, in his latest two-part documentary How to Crack the Class Ceiling, Rajan delves deeper into the issues surrounding the upward mobility of the UK's working-class population in an attempt to unravel the nation's social structure. He explores how class can hold people back in the workplace, raises issues such as classism and the class pay gap, and ultimately asks whether socioeconomic background should be a protected characteristic.
His approach in the documentary was credited as “impressively meticulous” at countering narratives around diversity being prized over talent as he uses case studies, statistics and academic research to present the country’s class system into picture.
Interestingly, Rajan’s own career graph has a steep rise.
Viewers saw him recently on the BBC documentary about Princes William and Harry The Princes and the Press, and in his BBC Two Amol Rajan Interviews series where he has met Sir Ian McKellen, Nile Rodgers, Billie Jean King, Novak Djokovic and Sharon White.
After Rajan landed a job on Today last year, speculations were high on what could be his next spot. The answer came in August last year when he got picked as the next face of University Challenge.
For Radio 4, he has presented The Imperial Inversion of Cricket, Archive on 4: Rivers of Blood, and The Decline of the West. For BBC Two, he presented How To Break Into the Elite in 2019.He has also hosted The Big Debate on the BBC Asian Network.
He is also the host of Rethink, a series of programmes and podcasts about the world after COVID-19 which resulted in a book, published in May 2021.
Rajan has been a regular presenter on Radio 2, including in the Breakfast Show slot. He is a regular presenter of Start the Week, and for four years, he was the presenter of The Media Show on Radio 4.
Rajan started his media career on Channel 5’s The Wright Show, where Simon Kelner, then the editor-in-chief of The Independent and an occasional guest on the show, offered him the job at his media group. At The Independent, Rajan worked his way across several departments before its Russian proprietor, took a shine to him and made him his press adviser.
The 18-month long stint included PR, speech writing and global travel with Evgeny Lebedev and occasionally his father, Alexander, a former KGB agent. After his return to the newsroom, Rajan was elevated to become TheIndependent’s first non-white editor in June 2013, aged just 29. He oversaw the closure of TheIndependent as a physical newspaper in 2016 and in the same year, he was approached by James Harding, then the BBC’s Director of News &Current Affairs, to become its Media Editor.
He, also for several years, has worked as a restaurant critic – leading to occasional appearances on Masterchef– and a column in the London Evening Standard.
Rajan was born in Kolkata, India and raised in Tooting, south London. He was state educated at Graveney School and went on to read English at Downing College, Cambridge. In 2005, the university’s newspaper, Varsity, included Rajan in its “Talent 100” list of ones to watch.At the age of 18, Rajan worked in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) for one year during his gap year.
Apart from spending his days in newsroom and studios, Rajan alsoruns a charity (KEY Sessions) that seeks to aid the career aspirations of inner-city teenagers. He is a father of three who finds time to split parenting duties with his wife, Charlotte Faircloth, an associate professor at University College London.
His first book Twirlymen, released in 2011, is about the history of spin bowling in cricket.
When Rajan joined the BBC, it is said that his critics often questioned his what they call as not-so-perfect Queen’s English accent and insufficient broadcast training. But what even more frequently got associated with him was his excitable, fast-paced delivery.
It is said that during his early days on Radio 4, he would routinely place a handwritten note-to-self on the desk in front of him to remind him to slow down.
His appointment to the University Challenge too has attracted some controversy around the hiring process when Samira Ahmed, a fellow BBC presenter, publicly stated that she was unhappy with the application system.
While BBC seemingly clutching on to one of its leading broadcasters, it was speculated earlier that ITV apparently wanted him to succeed Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain.
Rajan might had to give up his Media Editor role, but today he is said to be one of the BBC’s highest-paid journalists, thanks to his weighty and increasingly growing portfolio.
