JAMES NAUGHTIE: Sparring with Blair, eating squirrel and that Jeremy Hunt slip - why I'll miss the Today programme

At nine o'clock on Wednesday morning, I'll get up from the presenter's chair in the Today studio for the last time, and 21 years of my life will pass away. 

In my mind, I'll see a chorus line of politicians – the mighty, the eccentric and the weak – dancing off the stage. Memories have been flooding back. 

Tony Blair sounding young and without a care, Gordon Brown with too many of them, John Major on the verge of defeat and aware that even the most brilliant balancing act sometimes falls apart, the wrestling matches with John Prescott's syntax, the curse of crashing the pips.

James Naughtie (right) said he'd never exchanged cross words with co-presenter John Humphrys

No other programme has a wider window on the world, nor so much intimacy. Listeners are stirring in their beds – and so are the political classes. They're anxious to get on the air, except when you want them most. But it's a game worth playing, because they know that a good performance on Today sets the tone for everyone.

I used to imagine that when Michael Heseltine, as Deputy Prime Minister, sat in the radio car I could hear the rustle of a silk dressing gown as we waited for the last killer quote that he had always prepared. Like Peter Mandelson, he'd worked out that the best interview slot was just before 8am when we were obliged to go to the weather at three minutes to the hour: the timing meant that they could always get the last word.

Others are more carefree. Kenneth Clarke, Ken Livingstone, William Hague, Paddy Ashdown have always seen the studio as a dancefloor, and in the early days Blair – like David Cameron at the start – would always let something slip, just for fun.

If you tried an off-beat last question, he'd always hit it for six and everyone was happy. That was one of the many contrasts with Brown, who over the years proved by far the most daunting interviewee. It was seldom comfortable, on either side.

And that's why most political figures like to come on to Today. They know it'll be tough – and a good batsman always prefers fast bowling. Those who stay away (memo to Jeremy Corbyn) won't gain from it in the end.

But set-piece confrontations are only part of life on a programme that thrives when it holds a mirror up to listeners' lives. Producers agonise about political interviews, of course, because that's how we often measure ourselves when we huddle after nine o'clock – 'did we nail him?' – and I'm familiar with the anxious face behind the glass at the start of a big interview, because at that point the presenter is off the leash, alone. Anything can happen.

At nine o'clock on Wednesday morning, James Naughtie (pictured) will get up from the presenter's chair in the Today studio for the last time

The trick is remembering it's not always at the big moment that things go wrong. Five years ago this month, I trailed ahead before the pips at eight o'clock and announced, in a manner of speaking, that we would be hearing from then Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. The transposition of two initials meant that within two minutes, in Twitter-time an age, I was an object of national notoriety (and considerable amusement). I can still see the emails and tweets cascading down the screens in the office from listeners who couldn't believe what they'd heard (but mostly hoped they had). My most mortifying moment by a mile.

Fortunately, the generation of elderly Scottish aunts who had schooled me (so they hoped) in proper behaviour were by then congregating in the great tea-room in the sky, so heard nothing. I confess that I was relieved to know it.

I did find light relief later that morning when I delivered, by hand, a letter of apology to my victim at the front desk of his department, saying it had to go straight to Jeremy Hunt's office, and was asked: 'Who's he, then?' Clearly the duty officer wasn't a Today listener. I suppose I was lucky to survive that day, but it was instructive that nobody sensible attached any political motive to my expletive. Everyone knew it for what it was.

Today presenters are always in the firing line from both sides of politics, because when some listeners don't like what they hear coming out of the radio we're the ones who're blamed. Either we haven't shut up an interviewee who's saying something unacceptable, or have interrupted at the wrong moment when they're saying the 'right' thing. But, perversely, the Hunt episode confirmed what I've always believed – that the vast majority of listeners know we're trying to be fair. In adversity, I got the benefit of the doubt. It was appreciated.

After more than two decades of talking to Today listeners (and the World At One's before that) I know that most of them get the point. We leave politics outside the studio door.

I couldn't tell you how a single one of my fellow presenters voted in the General Election in May. I think they'd say the same of me. None of us would ask. And it's a mistake to think of Today as a line-up of political interviews. If it were, our huge audience would wither away. We need to surprise them, and sometimes make them laugh. As a result, the tentacles of the Today programme are long. I was in old East Berlin in 1999 on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, and we had tracked down Markus Wolf, dark master of espionage against the West for 40 years. I wanted to talk about spies. He wanted something else.

We talked, recording everything, and, of course, I learned almost nothing of value. Eventually, as I was about to give up, he reached into his satchel and offered me a book. Was this the moment of revelation? No. He explained he'd written a cookery book – perhaps it might be of interest to listeners?

On his co-presenter John Humphrys, Naughtie said: 'Apart from the noise he makes in consuming a disgustingly healthy bowl of milk and fruit at 5.30am on the dot (and the much greater noise if he can't find his special bowl), he is mostly mellow'

I'm glad to say we were both able to laugh. Although his recipe for Russian soup turned out to be rather good, I remember it as the perfect illustration of why Today has a glitter that never fades. No other show can throw up such strange and delicious moments so unexpectedly and so often. For every political joust with a Cabinet Minister, even the most pleasing ones, where you've produced an unexpected piece of news or that fatal moment of hesitation that tells you everything, there's equal satisfaction in the interview that comes from nowhere and turns into a gem, and in the knowledge that you never know what's round the next corner.

John Major and Mick Jagger together – 'Remember that helluva night we had in Singapore, John,' Jagger said. They'd been watching cricket together in their hotel until dawn, apparently. Barack Obama in 2004, hardly known in Illinois, let alone anywhere else, street canvassing for his own Senate election in Chicago and having to do the interview outside the church where we met because he couldn't go for five minutes without a smoke.

Nicolas Sarkozy apologising after an interview in the Élysée that he had forgotten to give us the big news – what his wife was going to be wearing at the State dinner at Buckingham Palace. The time our car was marooned in the Japanese mountains with earthquakes not far away because someone had forgotten to refill it with natural gas.

These aren't frivolities but the real colour of life on the programme, the texture that lets it breathe.

Listeners need to feel a pulse that isn't disturbing for the sake of it, but gives them confidence. That's why, at a moment of tragedy, natural disaster or war, they do trust the programme to get it right: clearing the decks on the morning after the Paris shootings, hearing the voices of people in trouble, giving over time when someone needs to be heard.

It brings the listeners close, but there is an advantage, of course, in keeping studio life a little mysterious. Before the arrival of a camera for online purposes, I could be happy that no one knew just what a mess I tend to make of the desk every morning, with stray papers sloshing around in spilt tea, spare glasses held together with Sellotape, perhaps last night's dinner stains still on my shirt, the whole scene redolent with Mishal Husain's supplies of raw cardamom. People ask, all the time of course, about the habits of John Humphrys, rather as they would before taking the children to a new exhibition at the Natural History Museum.

The long-time presenter said: 'I won't miss the alarm going off at 2.59am. But I confess that I'll sometimes long for the camaraderie of the studio, where you never know what will happen next'

Apart from the noise he makes in consuming a disgustingly healthy bowl of milk and fruit at 5.30am on the dot (and the much greater noise if he can't find his special bowl), he is mostly mellow. Perhaps it wasn't always so, but John epitomises robustly the spirit of the programme in his utter devotion to its quality, his gimlet eye for a story, and in the competitiveness that it thrives upon. Without that, believe me, it would be a bore.

I still find it extraordinary that in all the years we've sat together, we've never exchanged cross words. I've sometimes smouldered at an interview I would rather have done; I've heard him struggling to suppress his envy at the sound of an American election going on around me at a convention or some Midwest rodeo. No doubt we've each barked to ourselves about the other after a show that's gone wrong. Sitting beside someone before dawn is a good basis for friendship.

There's so much that it would be good to say on air. I don't mean the daft moments – I've eaten squirrel in garlic and dry-roasted locusts in the studio, stroked a tarantula and watched a scorpion crawling towards me on the desk – but the unscripted ones. A newsreader like the much lamented dear Peter Donaldson having to suppress a fountain of giggles, or the Russian visitor years ago who spoke no English but was shown by mistake into the studio where he was subjected to an interview in the belief that he was representing the British Dental Association.

I wish I could have described to listeners properly the scene in the foyer of the Imperial Hotel, Blackpool, during a Labour conference in the Blair years when our guest at the end of the programme was Peter Mandelson, not yet ennobled. In the course of a live interview, in full view of a growing crowd of onlookers, he managed to remove his jeans and put on a suit, with the help of a young male assistant. Fortunately I was asking the questions and looking him in the eye, or I wouldn't have known where to look.

So I decided as the programme closed that I should say something, but no sooner had I announced that Mr Mandelson had removed his jeans during the interview than I was overtaken by the pips. The curse of all presenters. I often wonder what the listeners thought, and wish I hadn't started.

It comes back to the words, every time. The speech, the phrase, the touching description. Radio breathes on words. Being in a darkened ante-room with Dame Judi Dench at a Diamond Jubilee gathering, I asked her if she'd give us a Shakespeare sonnet, and she spoke two from memory on the spot, so beautifully I can hear them now. Sometimes even the best political interview isn't so satisfying, nor lasts so long.

You're aware that it could be bad. As in Paris last month, where I was working from a laptop near the Bataclan theatre where 90 people had been killed. I was meant to read the headlines, but a technical glitch meant they didn't show up on my screen in time and an expletive came from my lips just before the pips at seven o'clock. On a normal day, I would have made a joke yet this was a scene of carnage and no time for levity. But we got through.

I won't miss the alarm going off at 2.59am. But I confess that I'll sometimes long for the camaraderie of the studio, where you never know what will happen next.

Now I need to get through Wednesday. Maybe something will arrive to amuse us all. If I had to wish what it might be, I'd like to hear a bit of familiar news from home and announce it on air as I've enjoyed doing every year. 'We've heard it's being snowing in north-east Scotland. Here's the news you've been waiting for. The A939 Cockbridge to Tomintoul is blocked…'

That would be the traditional way to go. And I promise not to crash the pips.