Fifty years on

It will be not so much Friends Reunited as Old Rivals Reconvened in the august surroundings of the Council Chamber of Broadcasting House in London next Monday. Panorama, BBC TV's current-affairs flagship programme, will celebrate its 50th birthday next year. Producers and editors from throughout that half-century will gather to discuss concerns such as its Sunday-night graveyard slot, which is driving the programme's friends to despair.

Richard Lindley, a reporter on the programme for 15 years from 1973, says: "BBC bosses say they have put Panorama in its present late-night slot to 'protect it'. But while it stays there I think it's more likely to be a question of 'wither' rather than 'whither' – it's like putting a patient in a side ward and forgetting about them."

Shelley Jofre, on the team for just two years, is not so sure: "Reports of our death were greatly exaggerated. I've been pleasantly surprised how the audience has held up on Sunday nights. My last investigation into flaws in the fingerprinting systems got four million viewers."

Sir Paul Fox, editor from 1961 to 1963, is in the "glass half-empty" school: "Unless the BBC improves its slot and increases its rate of strike, it would be better to put the old warhorse down."

Fox says that the holy grail lost since the programme's heyday is not that difficult to re-discover – it's simply a lack of prominent and trusted reporters: "I inherited an outstanding reporting team: Dimbleby, Day, Kee, Kennedy and James Mossman. Without an established reporting team, Panorama is nothing." For him, the reporter- as-star has worked for Sixty Minutes in the USA for decades. So too on a Sunday-night slot, but Sixty Minutes is a prime-time one. Today, he says, John Ware is the only current Panorama reporter worth watching.

The multi-award-winning Ware is, unsurprisingly, more upbeat. "Panorama's future remains secure," he says. "Panorama is a bit like a battle cruiser in high seas. It seems always to hold its course." Ware has won his many awards for pioneering and brave journalism. It's his masterly and careful work on Northern Ireland that has gained the programme and him most plaudits in recent years. Colleagues, old and new, salute this. John Penycate, reporter and producer from 1976 to 1995, says: "John Ware's exposé of the Omagh bombers was as good a piece of journalism as Panorama has ever done," and Lindley: "Some programmes today – such as Ware's 'Who Bombed Omagh?' – still make a real impact." Such an impact that the Real IRA set off a bomb outside BBC TV Centre in March 2001 allegedly in retaliation for a programme that it clearly found uncomfortable.

But even Ware sometimes despairs of a lack of courage. His revelations about the gerrymandering of Dame Shirley Porter and Westminster Council to stay in power led to them both being surcharged millions of pounds, but not before the BBC had pulled the programme from its original slot so as not to offend the Conservative government before some local elections. "While securing the licence renewal was vitally important, it was very wrong for the corporation to compromise its principles in such a fearful way," says Ware.

Today's guardians of the journalistic flame feel the weight of tradition and the need to reinvent it. Jofre says: "Hard-hitting investigations are Panorama's calling-card. We've had some great ones recently, but we've also worked hard at telling the stories imaginatively. But I am glad the series I joined is less snooty and more relevant than the one I remember as a teenager."

Panorama, though, is dependent on support from the top management. Some feel this was distinctly lacking in John Birt's era. Programme strands such as Correspondent and Public Eye were created to cramp its agenda and keep it focused on policy and issues. But there were still films with real impact, such as the exposé of Robert Maxwell, brave enough to call him a "crook", and Diana's "confessional".

For the first 30 years of life, Panorama was a fixture of Monday evening's prime time on BBC 1 at 8.10pm. Then, in 1982, it slipped to a slot after the Nine O'Clock News, with 10 minutes lopped off and not before the staff, including a youthful film reporter called Jeremy Paxman, hailed that as the death knell. Then finally it was confined two years ago to the Sunday night "side-ward", a decision made by Lorraine Heggessey, the controller of BBC 1 and a former Panorama producer. There it is at least helped by its proximity to the Ten O'Clock News and being puffed within it.

To the old guard, Panorama has lost its distinctiveness. Lindley says: "It is now more like a collection of individual documentaries than a continuing regular series with a consistent style and approach."

But, graveyard slot or not, there's little serious competition from other channels. "Where are World in Action, This Week, Man Alive, or any competitors? No one else is even trying," says Penycate.

John Mair is producing the Media Society debate 'Whither Panorama?'.

'Panorama: fifty years of pride and paranoia' by Richard Lindley, Politico's Publishing, £18.99