No one in broadcasting has more poise than Kirsty Young. She was the first television presenter to perch on the edge of a desk, a perpendicular skill that would never have been mastered by her forebears Reggie Bosanquet and Alastair Burnet. But they didn’t have a personal trainer who taught Young to balance on a bouncy ball while swinging weights.

Of late the 37-year-old has developed a distinct wobble as the new presenter of Desert Island Discs. Five weeks into the job she has provoked a media chorus of bitching about her interviewing style.

There has been no such caterwauling since Daniel Craig was signed as the new James Bond. It is said Young is overbearing, lectures her guests, seems nervous and lacks the killer instinct of Sue Lawley. One tabloid critic observed cruelly: “Young still sounds like a holiday replacement.” There have been dire predictions she would be cut adrift.

Desert Island Discs is no ordinary chat show. An invitation to appear is the ultimate accolade, and presenting it is regarded as the most prestigious job in radio.

The charge that Young is not hitting her marks has been put most forcibly by a previous admirer. Gillian Reynolds, the veteran critic of The Daily Telegraph, wrote recently: “She asks questions with the answers already built in, cuts across what the interviewees are saying, doesn’t pick up what’s being said, seems to attach no significance at all to the choice of records.”

Reynolds had not finished: “She gabbles on, as if to demonstrate she’s done the homework. When the interviewee corrects a misapprehension, it seems to throw her, make her even more nervous and gabblesome.”

Young was given the benefit of the doubt in her first shaky innings, facing Quentin Blake. The interview began to go downhill in the first five minutes when the children’s book illustrator started talking about his pens. Blake was, everyone agreed, irredeemably dull.

The murmurs grew when the actress Jane Horrocks revealed nothing more interesting than her insight that the key to imitating Marilyn Monroe was the realisation the star presented her breasts to the public. With her third castaway, the foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, Young was accused of not wielding the scalpel to “skewer his pomposity” and failing to extract more about his three interviews with Osama Bin Laden. Last week she was accused of colluding in product placement when the chef Heston Blumenthal started banging on about his BMW while collaborating with the car maker.

What is it about Young that brings out the red mist? On paper, she is a worthy successor to Roy Plomley, who ran the show for 43 years, Michael Parkinson, who lasted for two, and Lawley, who made the programme her own over 18 years. She is the embodiment of professionalism and has transcended early accusations of being an airhead. She proved she can swear with the best of them when she hosted Have I Got News For You recently.

She has perfect teeth, perfect hair, a perfect butterscotch complexion and a voice that one (male) interviewer described as a “honeyed, languorous, soft burr that seems to hover like a hummingbird”.

The voice, of course, is Scots, and it’s one too many for those who agree with Jeremy Paxman that Britain is living under the rule of “a Scottish Raj”. As a child, she revealed recently, she was thrilled by the novelty of hearing a Scottish voice on “English” television — a joy not as rationed as it once was.

Whereas Lawley dropped her Midlands accent long ago, Young sees no reason to follow suit. “I think it counts in your favour to have a Scottish voice,” she said. “It can be melodic and it is hard to place class-wise.”

It’s a cool voice that can seem glacial at times, leading to the suspicion that Young lacks interest in her interviewees.