Every once in a while, something chances along that illuminates our baffling world with sudden clarity. One such something is The Sun King, a six-part podcast by David Dimbleby about the long career of Rupert Murdoch. I listened to it all through once and then again and I recommend that you do, too. In telling the story of the rise of the most powerful media tycoon the world has known, it serves among other things to explain the fertile germ of populism in Britain and the US, a byproduct of the corrosive tone of Murdoch’s tabloids, and outlines the threat to democracy presented by a US president who was a creation of Fox News.

The series gains its authority in the voice of Dimbleby, never less than wry and reasonable, whose career has covered a similar span to Murdoch’s. The pair first met in 1968 when Dimbleby interviewed the Australian – and his second wife Anna (“I don’t like him being called a tycoon”) – after Murdoch arrived in Britain having bought the News of the World. The two men had a few things in common, Dimbleby felt: both had lost their famous fathers in their 20s and both had inherited a newspaper business to run; Murdoch in Melbourne and Adelaide, and Dimbleby, on a smaller scale, in the local papers of south-west London. In the decades since, those journalistic legacies have been exploited in markedly different ways, like some parable of the media talents. Dimbleby has followed in his father’s footsteps to become the most trusted and avuncular of the BBC’s voices over 50 years; Murdoch continues to reshape partisan journalism to suit his own cynical billionaire ends.

Now that both men are in, or approaching, their final acts, it feels like a good moment to tally those stellar careers against each other. We think we know all about the tensions and tenor of Murdoch’s swansong from the compulsive drama of Succession. It has been less clear, since Dimbleby gave up his chair at Question Time and at the helm of elections and state occasions at the end of last year, how gentle, at 81, he would go into semi-retirement. The argument made by The Sun King is, happily, not at all.

Dimbleby is one of those figures in British public life who has loosened up as he has aged. He could seem a priggish presence in his earlier broadcasting career – I can just about remember him as part of the BBC furniture in the 1970s with a version of his father’s received pronunciation and an earnest ambition to prove himself on his own terms, but he has grown more puckish as he – and we – have aged; more himself. He plans to use this new chapter of his broadcasting life to go back to basics, out from behind a studio desk to on-the-road reporting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘You there in the shirt’: Dimbleby presenting Question Time in 2009. Photograph: Shutterstock

His first foray into this braver new world, beside the Murdoch series, was a documentary about Brexit for Panorama, which was broadcast a fortnight ago. As the man who uttered those fateful words at 4.40am on the morning of 24 June 2016: “The British people have spoken and their answer is: we’re out!”, Dimbleby’s film saw him attempt to get behind the “just get it done” soundbites and listen to Brexit-divided families around their dining tables or in front of their gas fires. In something like a comparable spirit, I went to see Dimbleby in his London townhouse last week, in a quiet side road in Pimlico – he also has a farm in East Sussex (the one time he missed Question Time in 25 years he had been knocked unconscious by a bull). His house, around the corner from a street food market, is set between hair salons and delis and, like its occupant, bounding to the door in his corduroy suit, it seems perfectly comfortable in its own skin.

We talked first, while he made coffee, about the progress of the election campaign – there are well-thumbed newspapers scattered across his kitchen table along with stacks of novels and laptops and chargers and cables – the first that he has not been anchoring since Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979. He insists he is not going to miss it, will just be watching like the rest of us. “I’ve done 10 elections,” he says. “And the thing is, all elections, if you are in the studio, are pretty much the same. Doesn’t matter if it’s a landslide or a hung parliament, it’s all about getting the facts straight on the night.”

I begin to suggest that politics now seems more unsettled and unsettling than at any time during those years, but he insists it was probably ever thus. To prove the point, he gallops – with his freakish Attenborough-esque energy – up the stairs that rise out of the kitchen to the first-floor sitting room to grab a copy of Anthony Trollope’s novel Phineas Redux.

He comes down the stairs quoting triumphantly a passage that might have been written last week. “‘The country had now reached that period of its life in which rapid decay was inevitable, and… national decrepitude was imminent, and natural death could not long be postponed…’ You see?” he says, delighted, “this was 1870 or whatever.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Just a bit of fun: with Robin Day and Peter Snow on election night in 1987. Photograph: Radio Times/Getty Images

He goes on: “‘Had [Daubeny, the Tory prime minister] been allowed to operate he would have cut the taproots of the national cancer, have introduced fresh blood into the national veins, and resuscitated the national digestion, and he seemed to think that the nation, as a nation, was willing enough to undergo the operation and be treated as he should choose to treat it – but that the incubus of Mr Gresham, backed by an unworthy House of Commons, had prevented, and was preventing, the nation from having its own way… ’

“I sent that passage to Nick Robinson,” Dimbleby says. “Isn’t it perfect?”

He pours us coffee from a cafetiere, which, in the absence of its plunger, he filters ineffectively through a tea strainer.

I wonder how the Murdoch thing came about.

“Did you like it?” Dimbleby asks, with his ever-urgent curiosity. “A producer, Joe Sykes, came to me with the idea just after I had finished Question Time and I absolutely leapt at it. I am really interested in changing the way I broadcast.” He loves the intimacy of the podcast format, the way his words might creep into peoples’ heads and occupy them while they are on trains or riding bikes. “It is quite different even from radio documentaries,” he says. “It is like me talking to you across this table.”

He knew his time at Question Time was up when he started to meet people in their 40s who told him they had watched him on it every Thursday night since their teens. “It was great to do but as a broadcaster it was quite constraining. First, because it was Westminster-politics based. So you have to spend all your time reading the papers. And then the second thing is with the audience, you never got much further than saying, ‘You in the red shirt’. And that became very frustrating.”

Because he could never find out who these angry people were?

“We did have an idea in the last few years of somehow taking people from the audience and telling their stories,” he says, “you know, ‘that nurse we had in Southampton talking about the NHS was really good, why not get her story, or that farmer’s daughter in Lincolnshire who was saying they had to put signs on the gate in Polish…’ But that never worked out. I got very frustrated by it.”

Watching the last couple of years, in which he tried to maintain his interest in the weekly slanging match, I say it often felt like he was eyeing the fire exits along with the rest of the country, wondering if he could make a break for it.

He smiles. “After 2016, it was just Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit.” The film he made for Panorama was an effort to add the kind of depth he had in mind when they had talked about following the stories of the audience. He believes vox pops – the pervasive notion that the voice of the people might authentically be the first thing that comes into the head of a trawlerman in Grimsby when a BBC microphone is thrust in front of him – are not journalism at all.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hosting the EU referendum coverage. ‘After 2016, it was just Brexit, Brexit, Brexit.’ Photograph: BBC

“They wander out into Market Harborough or somewhere and say, ‘What do you think about this complex thing?’ and someone says, ‘I don’t really know’ and that’s presented as news.”

Remembering the golden age of television reporting – Dimbleby once spent a couple of years on and off in South Africa, making a film that tried to get into the heads of Afrikaners and have them account for apartheid – he knows that the longer you spend listening to people, the more likely you are to hear a story. He liked the hairdresser he spoke to in Merthyr Tydfil for his Brexit programme, who told him, honestly: “I like Boris because he is a liar. And he has balls of steel.” He pauses, laughs uproariously at the idea. “Balls of steel indeed!”

The Sun King finds plenty of authentic voices to tell their tales. Vic Giles, Murdoch’s designer at the Sun, is unearthed at his home in London’s Barbican, aged 91, to explain jovially how he came up with the concept of the Page 3 girl. Steve Dunleavy, “Mr Blood and Guts” of the New York Post, spoke (before his death in June) about the way he helped to inject the lowest common denominator sensibility of Murdoch’s British tabloids into the American bloodstream, using crime stories to stoke fear and division. (If you thought the tone of Breitbart and Steve Bannon came out of nowhere, you need to look no further than some of the extremes of Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun) One contributor memorably calls News Corp “a pirate ship”. David Yelland, who was press-ganged into the Sun editor’s chair because, in the years of Tony Blair, he seemed to be the only lefty in Murdoch’s employ, seems to concur. And so does Nick Davies of the Guardian, who broke the story of phone hacking and Milly Dowler.

I ask Dimbleby about that original connection he felt with Murdoch, his fellow newspaper proprietor (the Dimbleby “empire” was based on local weekly papers around Richmond upon Thames. David bought sole ownership of the business from his family in 1983 and eventually sold for a reported £12m to the American group Newsquest in 2001).

“The difference is I took on the newspaper with a certain reluctance and ran it like a family grocery business for 30 years or whatever it was,” he says, “while Murdoch is a newspaper man through and through. What I liked about him from when I first met him was this romantic idea that he had of it all. I knew that during a journalists’ strike in Sydney he had put the paper to bed [overseen production of it] himself, for example.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Dimbleby as a student at Oxford, where he was editor of the student newspaper Isis. Photograph: ANL/Shutterstock

The question of what motivates his subject beyond that romance is the starting point of Dimbleby’s inquiry. His conclusion is unequivocal. “News is just profit to Murdoch,” he says. “I don’t believe he is a great political operator, who wants to push a particular set of ideas. Look at his relationships with Thatcher, with Blair, with Trump – who he calls ‘a fucking idiot’. The only line you can trace through everything is money.”

Dimbleby interviewed Murdoch once more for the BBC in the 1980s and met him on a couple of other occasions, once, memorably, when Dimbleby was deputed by a number of journalists at the Times to see if Murdoch would sell them the paper. They had a surreal breakfast. “I sat down and said, ‘I’d like to buy the Times off you,’” Dimbleby recalls with a chuckle. “Murdoch listened politely and then told me it was not for sale.” The other occasion was at a memorial service for the historian Asa Briggs, who had taught Murdoch at Oxford. Dimbleby came across Murdoch standing on his own, cradling a sherry, afterwards. “I just went and had a chat with him. He is not pompous at all. But then his approach to everything is: how can I hijack this for my own ends?”

One of the things that makes Dimbleby’s approach to that megalomania compelling is that he is never censorious or judgmental. Sometimes, in the episode about the print unions and Wapping, you sense Dimbleby’s qualified admiration for Murdoch’s irresistible energy (Dimbleby had his well-publicised battles with union leaders at his own titles, for which he is unrepentant). You sense, too, a regard for the mischief-making, outlaw quality of some of Murdoch’s journalism, as if Dimbleby was sometimes of the devil’s party without knowing it.

I ask him about the untold story in his investigation, the way that the no-holds-barred populism of Murdoch’s tabloids infected the finer aspirations of all British media. How it made balance and accuracy seem dull, put gossip on the front page and suggested personal privacy and journalistic ethics were the stuff of liberal elitism. How did Murdoch’s “giving the people what they want” destabilise the certainties of the BBC?

He considers the question as if for the first time. “I tried to be director general of the BBC once,” he says, “and chairman of it twice, so I am always a little diffident about making criticisms of it – but that sounds like I have an agenda.” He pauses. “I’ll say this, I know why they do it, but I think that there is a little too much populism in the BBC news, in the selections of stories and the way they are presented. I do think that. Question Time was accused of doing that as well of course. Which I don’t think it did.”

Was there never a pressure to ramp up divisions, drive up viewing figures?

He is not convinced that there was. “The language of politics has always been full of energy,” he says. “If you look back to that Trollope quote, the brutality of it was there. I think perhaps there have been times when we thought politics should be a more polite, gentle thing – with Macmillan and Eden, say, and Brown and Blair. Thatcher upped the ante and we have that again. But it’s a raw thing, politics. The fact is, parliament has always been shouting and waving, but we never saw it. It is about power. They are all mini-Murdochs really.”

He has lived through a good many apocalyptic political moments: is he not fearful at all for what we are seeing now?

“Not really,” he says. “I think we are in a lot of turmoil around the decision and 48% and 52%. I think a lot of the stuff around whether we will be richer or poorer is often surmise – you never really know. I would have thought five years from now, people won’t still be talking about the EU and referendums. I’m not a seer. I do think the issues that were opened up about identity are very profound.”

One of the things that the referendum split seems to have jeopardised in our identity, I say, is that shared sense of British self-deprecation and decency that the media were so good at reflecting. (I find myself mentioning Test Match Special and Down Your Way – “That was my dad’s programme,” Dimbleby says, a little wistfully.) Does he not think a coarser, nastier idea of the national character is in the ascendancy?

“I am not sure it is in the ascendancy. It is just more visible because of social media.” Dimbleby does not do Twitter. “And I think social media is a far smaller world than people pretend. The ghastliness of the insults and the death threats; I bet if you added up the number who do that, it would be a very small number indeed, but it is amplified.”

How does he feel about the fact that Question Time under his watch was routinely pilloried for giving Nigel Farage a platform greater than his stridency perhaps merited?

“That wasn’t an editorial choice by Question Time, but by the BBC,” he says. “It was laid down that after Ukip got the seats in the European parliament, we had to have them on a certain number of times a year. I think probably the mistake was that it was nearly always Farage – but the problem was that there didn’t seem to be anyone else from Ukip who could string two words together.”

He concedes that the booking system for the Question Time audience also favoured those people prepared to shout loudest. “We want people with something to say. [So] it’s a contrivance, it inevitably plays to people with strong views. But outside Question Time I don’t think people are so angry – they have many more important things on their minds. And that encourages me to think that we are not falling apart.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hosting coverage of the UK’s first European referendum in 1975. Photograph: BBC

In his farewell interview on the Today programme, Dimbleby got miffed when John Humphrys had the temerity to describe him as “posh”. “I’m about as posh as you are,” Dimbleby said. Humphrys, the son of a french polisher from Cardiff, who dropped out of school at 15, pointed to the family connections that had got Dimbleby and brother, Jonathan, a start at the BBC, but then backed down, affably. He could, by rights, have also mentioned Dimbleby’s Charterhouse schooling, the fact that he was a member of the Bullingdon club at Oxford, the fact his second wife, Belinda Giles, is the granddaughter of an earl, the fact he sent his son Henry, the food entrepreneur, to Eton – but perhaps his hesitation was just.

No doubt you can make a case that Dimbleby’s is the voice of an elite that refuses to recognise itself as such – the target of Murdoch-style populist disruption – but if so, in his case, it also clearly represents values that we would miss if they were lost. There is no reason beyond ingrained fair play for him, in his Audible podcast, not to editorialise against Murdoch, to express a personal view, but old habits die hard. While some of his interviewees hold the view that Murdoch has been a “force of evil in the world” or retain the hope that [Murdoch’s fourth wife] Jerry Hall will “shag him to death”, Dimbleby keeps his counsel. Wasn’t he tempted to put the boot in?

“I wasn’t. I mean, what you choose to use, what you choose to say, all those things are editorialising. But the blunt question of Murdoch good or bad? No, I certainly wouldn’t want to opine on that.”

We talk some more about Succession, of which he and his wife are late adopters and now avid fans. “Their life seems like something you would run a million miles from, doesn’t it?” he says. “I think the life of the rich and famous is always the most depressing sight.” He says this in the confident belief that it is a million miles from his own existence. “The life of the super-rich is not one to be envied, whizzing round in those horrid little jet planes all the time.”

If there is a moral to Dimbleby’s story, and perhaps even to Murdoch’s, it is never to let success or money elevate you above the things you care about.

“I feel liberated,” Dimbleby says before I leave, with the voice that has proved as serviceable in describing royal nuptials as natural disasters. “Going back to reporting, it is what life is about really, isn’t it? I could make documentaries about quantitative easing, I guess, and go around the world talking to political leaders about globalisation. But the reality of all that is the guy like the one in our Brexit film in Cannock who makes plastic widgets for a Japanese car that is assembled in Slovakia or wherever, and how it affects his life.” He grins his haphazard grin. “There is masses to do!” he says. “And all you have to do is just listen, keep listening. I love that!”

The Sun King is available at audible.co.uk