The parting echoes of a friendly voice: David Lister joins the ceremony at St Paul's to bid farewell to the journalist Brian Redhead

JOURNALISTS and broadcasters, despite persistent efforts, do not on the whole inspire great affection. What set Brian Redhead apart was that he did, and did so effortlessly. At his memorial service at St Paul's Cathedral in London yesterday the word 'friend' was used repeatedly, a friend not just to those who knew him, but to millions who did not even know what he looked like.

Appropriately the shape of the memorial service itself showed the eclectic nature of the Today programme presenter, which was a key factor in his rapport with his listeners, some of whom were among the packed congregation.

He was a Renaissance man, said his colleague and friend of 37 years John Cole, in his address.

And the service, arranged by his widow, Jenni, included not just tributes from broadcasting and journalistic colleagues, but Benny Goodman jazz and a Brahms clarinet quintet; the soprano Susan Bullock, battling with the echoing acoustics beneath the dome to sing the traditional Come you not from Newcastle; references to his own late embrace of Christianity following the death of his son in a road accident; a reading from his writings on Christianity by his local vicar in his beloved Macclesfield; and from his writings on the Lakes, the national parks and Northumbria by colleagues from the BBC.

But like Redhead himself the service was always quick to puncture any threatened note of pomposity or pretension. His championing of the north of England was achieved not so much in worthy writings but in the off-the-cuff remarks between political interviews on Today.

John Cole recalled how one morning Redhead received the brief 7.30am weather forecast seconds before it had to be read on air. A wide-eyed editor heard him say: 'The weather: dull in the South, bright in the North, just like the people really.'

Cole paid tribute to Redhead's newspaper career, editor of the Manchester Evening News and the first features editor of the Guardian, and to his career as a broadcaster where he was 'incisive in questioning politicians, often insistent, yet he was rarely hectoring. Yes, you could detect his impatience with someone who came to the studio just to score points, and to dodge the question that everybody wanted asked. He felt his listeners deserved better than that, and he could be stern and unrelenting. But if a politician displayed a wish to engage in serious discussion, whatever his opinions, Brian knew his own role was to enhance that seriousness, to help the interviewee get ideas across . . . I believe that, at bottom, Brian Redhead saw himself, in his work at Today, as a humble tribune of democracy.'

Redhead, who would have been retiring from Today this month, had in the past spoken of plans to go into the priesthood. He had an eclectic grasp of new ideas, new subjects, new enthusiasms, said Cole, and his last great enthusiasm was religion. After the death of his son, Will, Redhead told the Rev Leslie Lewis, vicar of Holy Trinity, Rainow, Macclesfield, where Will is commemorated in a garden the family have planted, 'I've been all over the world, but I've never stopped to think.'

His great grief, said Cole, 'brought him to face, with his own scalding honesty, the question of what he believed'.

(Photograph omitted)