Questionable Time #30

Published June 1, 2012 Politics , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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questionable time 30 david dimbleby marie antoinette

Good morning Lemmings and rejoice for I have returned from Berlin, a city rife with vexing contradictions. And what may these contradictions be I hear you ask? Well try this one on for size:

      1. Berliners smoke all the time and everywhere.
      2. Berliners drink all the time and everywhere (including when pregnant).
      3. Berliners eat processed meat all the time and everywhere.
      4. Berliners appear to be ridiculously athletic/healthy all the time and everywhere.

Yeah, I know, makes you sick doesn’t it? Anyhoo I could go on about what a great/strange place it is for hours but that’s not why you turn up to this corner of the internet. No, you come here for Questionable Time and Questionable Time is what you’re damn well getting. Here’s what we learned:

We have a n00b on our hands.

If I was a Labour MP who was due to make their debut on QT then I would be praying that it would occur on a week such as this one. I mean c’mon, the news has just been an unrelenting conveyor belt of horrific things for the government (so much so that I could hear the clangs of policies being fumbled and dropped all the way over in Germany) and I’d have to be a right idiot to walk out of the studio with anything other than a crushing victory under my belt, right? Wrong. You see, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing and unfortunately for Red Team QT Virgin Stella Creasy this abundance of seemingly bountiful news combined with a number of other factors actually conspired against her. Here’s why:

      1. When you’re in such a target rich environment it’s easy to lose your focus and simple start grappling madly at anything that happens to cross your line-of-sight. The main way in which this manifested for Creasy was that it (no doubt combined with first time nerves) made her talkreallyreallyfastallthetimeabouteverything. Now I’m knocking her for this as it’s an entirely human and understandable thing to do but it does put the mockers on the whole Crushing Victory thing a little. Why? Because when I was watching her I felt like I was vicariously sitting an exam: You could just see her brain going like the absolute clappers as it desperately tried to recall what her line on this debacle or that fiasco should be, all of which left me with that sweaty feeling that accompanies the sight of desks in a school gym.
      2. Creasy had a payload to deliver. I’m not sure whether she had fashioned it herself or whether the party had a hand in its creation but she had a definite mission last night: A dawn strike on Tory HQ with a cluster bomb of fresh text messages know to be highly pathogenic to Jeremy Hunt. On paper that sounds pretty straight forward: Locate the target (that’s a doddle as they’re sitting right next to you), come in low and steady, release your munitions and then fly off into the breaking dawn whilst cackling maniacally (the cackling’s technically option but that’s the way I’d play it). The problem in this case was the whole ‘dawn raid’ aspect: In an ideal world Creasy would land her big hitter during the first question thus leaving her unencumbered to mop up any survivors not caught in the initial strike. Since it seemed highly probably that the first question would be one on the Leveson Inquiry the plan seemed solid but alas, QT is rarely so straight forward and she had to make numerous runs at the target (all the while dodging flak put up by the steady handed Alan Duncan) only to find it covered in cloud. As anyone who’s read Catch 22 will know the bombing run is the most terrifying aspect of any mission and the fact that she had to conduct the maneuver three times before the conditions were adequate only served to heighten her jitters. You could see it horribly clearly every time a new question was about to be asked: Creasy, clutching at the joystick for dear life whilst noting that her airspeed is dangerously high… “Don’tbuggerthisupdon’tbuggerthisupBUGGERI’VEBUGGEREDITUP!” Eventually she did get to deploy her ace-in-the-hole but it wasn’t until the fourth question and it scored only a glancing blow that left Duncan intact enough to carry on the fight.
      3. The whole ‘Papa/Nicole’ thing? Had she been a little calmer she might have been able to play it for laughs. Instead she played it for weirds.

So yes, it was all a bit of a pickle but one that I do feel is largely forgivable given the circumstances. My advice, Stella? Maybe spend a little more time in the simulator before your next combat sortie.

The British lose all rationality when doctors are mentioned.

Ask any fellow citizen what their opinions on doctors are and you will doubtlessly hear that they are either a) saintly angelic souls whose hearts pump not blood but liquid compassion or b) venal robber-barons who hypocritically break their Hippocratic Oath. Seriously, can we not countenance a world where there may be doctors from both strains in existence? According to Rugby, clearly not. Still, I was heartened to see that nurses still have the capacity to trounce doctors in the Unconditional Assumption of Goodliness stakes. That’s something that you can always take to the bank: Nurse always beats Doctor in any match of Altruism Top Trumps… Except when Panorama film them shouting at old people. Then it’s a draw.

I have very conflicted feelings about the other panelists.

I’ll keep this brief…

Duncan

For: Has had a genuinely interesting life, first openly gay Tory, isn’t half as mad as most of his peers, seems vaguely competent, did a good turn in damage limitation last night.

Against: Has an untrustworthy and spivvy haircut that is becoming of some rather untrustworthy and spivvy antics.

Oaten

For: Has had a genuinely interesting life, looked great in a hoody on Tower Block of Commons and would look even better in a hoody in the actual House of Commons (see Fig. 1).

Against: Seems to be a walking self-destruct button, head’s a funny shape.

mark oaten scally outfit commons

Fig. 1

Nelson

For: Clearly saner than comparable young right-wing Scots (Douglas Murray, I’m looking at you) and I appear to have grown strangely fond of him.

Against: Editor of The Spectator.

Coren

For: Everyone I know seems to think the sun shines out of her bum, can produce something genuinely funny from time-to-time.

Against: Everyone I know seems to think the sun shines out of her bum, voice cuts through me like a jaunty knife.

Let’s just leave it at that…

Tl;dr

Creasy: (Was in a bit of a) Rush

5/10

Duncan: (Looks) Plush

6/10

Oaten: (Has had many a reason to) Blush (in the past)

5/10

Nelson: (Is becoming the subject of a faintly disturbing man) Crush

6/10

Coren: (Did) Gush (much about doctors)

6/10

The Crowd: (Have) Thrush?

7/10

So there you go, a show where the Tories got away comparatively lightly thanks to some sterling defensive work from Alan Duncan and understandable over-eagerness on the part of Stella Creasy. Now if you’ll excuse me I must get back to enduring the symptoms of wurst withdrawal. Seriously, I’m having trouble adjusting back to a society where you have to walk more than 10 yards before encountering a vendor of sausage based snacks. This country, I tell you…

Next week Lemmings, next week…

Questionable Time #29

Published May 18, 2012 Politics , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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questionable time 29 david dimbleby weasles ripped my flesh

Good morning Lemmings and a slight change of plan today thanks to some unforseen circumstances. You see the thing is that when I usually turn in on a Thursday night there tends to at least be some dull flicker of inspiration lurking in the recess of my mind of what line I’m going to take the next day but last night proved to be an exception to this rule. No, instead I went to bed with a head that was essentially a yawning vacuum of nothingness and 8 hours of sleep has done precisely zero to rectify this situation. I am without opinion, lost in a featureless desert of zilch and unsettled by the creative squalor caused by a poverty of ideas. And why would this be? I reckon that one or more of the following may to blame…

The show was just a bit… meh.

Come on, admit it: Deep down we all know that Question Time is basically panto with a slightly elevated reading age and what does every panto need? Goodies and baddies. Unfortunately there was no clear hero or villain amongst the political panelists (Peter Hain seemed happy to take it a little easy now that he’s resigned from the frontline while Marie Miller wisely decided to stick rigidly to her  brief and Leanne Wood just said Plaidy things that get Plaidy claps in Plaidy Wales) so I was banking on Kelvin MacKenzie and John O’Farrell to fill the Wicked Stepmother/Cinderella roles. Initially this seemed to go to plan as MacKenzie got all sweaty and ranty about this and that but I later found myself actually agreeing with him on the alcohol question and that makes him a rather ineffective Wicked Stepmother. Similarly, O’Farrell got to showcase some good lines but I always find it a little jarring when a 5th panelist has a clear party allegiance. I don’t mind it when they have clear views that may run in concordance with a particular party line but I find it hard to root for Cinderella when Cinderella is a fully paid up member of the Downtrodden Domestic Workers Union. It doesn’t exactly make for underdog status and underdogs are what good panto is all about. So yeah, there wasn’t much to be had from this bunch.

I pine for a Grexit…

I’ve found myself in an unhappy predicament over the last four years: I’ve boned up on economics, read a ton of books with complicated titles and have arrived at the inescapable conclusion that something big and nasty has to happen as the current system is just too knackered to stagger on much longer. Naturally I’m not overly keen on big and nasty events but I will say this: A full-on, pant-shitting crisis is looking increasingly preferable to going over the same old ground that we’ve done to death over the last four years. Seriously, I find myself consciously inviting disaster because I’m just so bored of going through the same charade of ‘yes, everything is totally buggered and no, no-one’s got a clue what to do about it’. So just hurry up Greece and do something spectacular because I can’t take the suspense any more. Default and default quickly otherwise Question Time is simply going to continue being Aren’t We All Glad We Didn’t Join The Euro Time and that does not good telly make.

Just what the hell happened to Brian May?

So QT has a shiny new website and this shiny new website has spent the last few days loudly proclaiming that Queen guitarist Brian May was going to be on the show this week (in fact it still does at the time of writing). This was something I was quite looking forward to as Brian May is an oddball of epic proportions and I considered it highly likely that he would say some very weird things about some very weird subject matters. However, the chief reason for my angst is that I spent way too much time on Wednesday night photoshopping his hair on to all the panelists’ heads (see Fig. 1) and I feel cheated by his non-attendance.

brian-may-question-time-hair-gif

Fig. 1

Yeah yeah yeah, I know what you’re thinking – ‘So what? It’s just a stupid .gif that looks like it was put together in a matter of minutes’ – but let me ask you this: Have you seen Brian May’s hair? Have you even the faintest idea of how difficult it is to cut all those absurd little tendrils of wiry craziness out? No? Well it’s a bloody nightmare and one that nearly pushed me over the edge (note to anyone who may be vaguely interested: The Colour Range tool is your friend). Consequently I was in a bad mood from the get go and spent most of the evening chuntering menacingly about how untrustworthy badger loving astrophysicists who collect Victorian stereophotographs are rather than watching the show with an eye to putting together something halfway decent the next day. Basically, it’s all Brian May’s fault.

Tl;dr

Hain: 5/10

Meh…

Miller: 5/10

Bleh…

Wood: 5/10

Feh…

MacKenzie: 5/10

Peh…

O’Farrell: 5/10

Geh…

The Crowd: 5/10

Pleh…

Brian May: 0/10

HAS STUPID HAIR

So there you go, not a great deal of fun to be had there and to add insult to injury there won’t be any Questionable Time next week either. No, I’m afraid that you’ll have to struggle on without me as I’m off to Berlin to see whether a man can survive on a purely wurst based diet for a week. That, and I also plan to indulge in a spot of Eurovision hooliganism. Come on Humperdink! This is our moment! Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of overwrought crooning!

In a couple of weeks Lemmings, in a couple of weeks…

Questionable Time #28

Published May 11, 2012 Politics , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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questionable time 28 david dimbleby nevermind

Good morning Lemmings and thank your lucky stars I’m writing this at all, tempted as I was to slack it off and park myself in front of the Leveson Inquiry all day. Yeah, I know it’s pretty sad that my idea of a good time is to watch in-depth legal proceedings but it’s the closest thing I have to ‘sport’ in my life. Still, let’s make the best we can of it, put on our Friday best and crank up the Questionable Time. Here’s what we learned:

 

Oldham always sets my teeth on edge.

There are some towns that know what they are about and once-upon-a-time this was the case for Oldham: It was about cotton. Sadly, it turned out that cotton is not the most faithful of suitors and since it upped-sticks for more distant shores Oldham has been left scratching its head about where it fits into the scheme of things – a predicament only made worse by the fact that the town in question is built on a series of demographic fault lines. Some of this is down to physical geography: Oldham finds itself caught between the heave of cosmopolitan Manchester to the west and ho of the provincial Pennines to the east but the main problem comes from the fact it contains two very distinct communities who’ve never quite managed to, well, make a proper go of it with each other. That these two entities have been rubbing uncomfortably up against each other is nothing new but it wasn’t so much of a problem when the cracks could be papered over with a plentiful supply of jobs. However the brutal truth is that there aren’t very many jobs in Oldham nor have there been for a very long time. Given the above, what could be more emotionally charged than a question about race and child abuse? I reached for my tin hat…

 

Thankfully it seems that – despite a few tense moments – cooler heads prevailed and rather than a spittle-flecked punch-up we actually saw quite a searching debate from the crowd last night. Sure, I nearly jumped behind the sofa when I heard the dread phrase ‘I’m not a racist but…’ and the incident with the vicar (note to vicars everywhere: Never use the words ‘lust’ and ‘children’ within 500 miles of each other) looked like it could have gone very sideways, very quickly but by and large things remained mostly civil. That’s a pretty good sign given that only three or four years ago you could guarantee to see at least one person making clear their intention to vote for the BNP. So well done Oldham, it’s still not an entirely comfortable thing to watch you guys trying to hash things out but it’s getting there. Keep it up.

 

I’m not entirely sure what Chris Bryant was up to.

I like Chris Bryant. He’s rhetorically athletic, does a good line in sincerity and frequently looks like he’s up to no good, all of which makes him a solid QT performer and out of all the political panelist he put in the best turn last night. However, there were a couple of flies in the ointment, one being that his balance got jiggered in the home straight when an otherwise innocuous looking member of the audience accused him of looking smug, the other being the weird tension between himself and Lord Oakeshott. Now I’m no political strategist but if I had been Bryant my game plan would have been pretty simple: Oakeshott is clearly not on board with this coalition business and it looks increasingly likely that he’s going to go outright rogue in the foreseeable future. Consequently all I have to do is make it easy for him to plant a knife squarely between the shoulders of government, sit back and enjoy the fireworks. As it happens, Oakeshott didn’t need any external encouragement to start getting busy with the sedition and while he merrily poured scorn on his notional partners in government all that Bryant really needed to do was lay down a bit of suppressing fire to aid him in this endeavour. But he didn’t. In fact, rather than lending him assistance towards their shared end Bryant took it upon himself to have a pop at Oakeshott who then retaliated in kind by bringing up the matter of Labour’s economic record. I don’t know, it may be that they just genuinely don’t like each other or that Labour really are hellbent on the humbling of the Lib Dems but I can’t help thinking that this was a bit of a tactical blunder and one which took the sheen off an otherwise polished performance. Still, at least Bryant can take solace in the fact that he’s escaped being photoshopped this week. He just makes it too easy. There’s no challenge when the source material is this good.

 

And the rest of them?

First off, Mary Beard totally gets how to do the 5th panelist thing and it’s not rocket science as to how she does it. It’s based around two key ingredients: Honesty and sticking to what you know. Granted, the honesty component is contingent on having a reasonable outlook on life (try as might I can’t exactly envisage a clamour for more honesty from David Starkey) but providing it looks like you believe what you’re saying, you’re half way there. However, honesty counts for nothing if the audience ever get wind of the fact that you may be trying to blag something you don’t really know about so it’s imperative that you pick your battles. Mary Beard does all of the above (‘I know nothing about economics but neither do you’) and it works brilliantly, especially when political panelists stray into her pet territory of Roman history (what were you doing Oakeshott?! Had you lost your mind?!). That, and looking like a female wizard doesn’t harm the cause either.

 

The same can’t really be said for Caroline Spelman who is unfortunately hobbled by her innate jauntiness (her picture on the pre-election Tory website is a masterclass in jaunt. See Fig. 1). Now I don’t have a problem with jaunt per se (in fact I’d go so far as to declare myself a fan of jaunt) but Spelman’s jaunt is a weird form of jaunt. It’s more muted than regular jaunt and seems to be a cover for the fact that she’s actually not sure of what to do in any given situation – like the chairperson of a village fête trying to explain away the rain. Still, at least she actually appeared to be awake unlike Peter Oborne who spent the first half of the show doing that scrunched-up eyes thing and taking us round the houses as he slowly spluttered into life. The word ‘Europe’ seemed to jolt him violently back into consciousness later on but his whole performance had this sort of juddering quality to it that I found to be quite unsettling. Oh, and the bit where Dimbers accused Spelman of being racist after she made fun of his tie? Yeah, that was nice.

caroline-spelman-projected-expectations-gif

Fig. 1

 

Tl;dr

Spelman: 4/10

(Likes the word) ‘Thrift’

 

Bryant: 6/10

(Looked a) Gift (horse in the mouth)

 

Oakeshott: 5/10

(Seemed rather) Miffed

 

Oborne: 5/10

Adrift

 

Beard: 7/10

Swift(ly carried the day)

 

The Crowd: 7/10

(Did much to up)Lift (me).

 

Aaaaaaaaand that’s that. As is intermittently customary here’s a quick reminder that you can follow Questionable Time on both Twitter and Facebook should ever feel inclined to do so. Now if you’ll excuse me I really must get down to some Levesoning. I know, I know… How can one man lead a life so packed with action and adventure? Well somehow he does.

 

Next week Lemmings, next week…

 

PS: Bonus photoshop! I made a card for Clintons (see Fig. 2)!

clintons cards sorry you've gone into administration

Fig. 2

Questionable Time #27

Published May 4, 2012 Politics , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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questionable time 27 david dimbleby che

Good morning Lemmings and pardon my yawns – I stayed up well beyond my bedtime last night, suckered in as I was by the local elections. Just in case you were wondering it wasn’t really the politics I was interested in (although watching Warsi stick her foot in it was pretty entertaining) as a trouncing for the coalition seemed like a foregone conclusion. No, instead it was graphs that did for me – or more precisely the combination of graphs and maps. It’s my kryptonite. Anyhoo, that’s about the long and short of that and you don’t come here to learn about my weird little psephological fetishes – at least I don’t think you do – so let’s get on with some Questionable Timing. Here’s what we learned.

Iain Duncan Smith’s face is incapable of lying.

I’ve noted in the past how IDS has this strange innocence about him but I don’t think I realised just how incapable he is of bluffing until last night. It’s his face: Those sad, sad eyes crowned as they are by those funny little demi-eyebrows. They’re like a direct line to whatever is going on inside that perplexing head of his. Now this in itself isn’t that remarkable as all politicians have certain tells (like that regal shade of crimson that David Cameron turns when he’s jolly angry about some jumped-up little chap on the opposite benches or that Cheshire Cat-like grin that Ed Balls does when he’s lying his face off) but the emotions that IDS’s face cannot but help to broadcast are remarkable because they give us a clue about how his mind operates. And how would that be? Well, from the evidence on display last night I can only conclude that he’s a man with an emotional repertoire that belongs to a different age or if we’re being more precise, the 1950′s.

Allow me to explain: When I was watching IDS last night his face did things that most faces do but the sentiments it conveyed were unique to the man in question. For example, he spent most of the first half of the show with his ‘eyebrows’ cocked down at the edges and up in the centre while his lips sucked in on themselves. If I saw this look on a generic face I would say that the person in question was ‘anxious’ or ‘apprehensive’. However, when IDS does it the word that pops into my head is ‘squiffy’. Similarly, when someone’s eyebrows reverse their polarity from their above state (so sides out, middle in) and their mouth sets into a scowl I tend to think that their owner is ‘angry’ or ‘pissed off’. Not with Duncan Smith, uh-uh… He looks ‘cross’.The list goes on: Regular person looks ‘happy’, IDS looks ‘gay’ (in the old-fashioned ‘My, isn’t this workhouse full of toiling urchins a gay sight to behold’). Regular person looks ‘odd’, IDS looks ‘skew-whiff’. Regular person looks ‘excited’, IDS looks ‘all aflutter’. You get the picture.

Anyway, the long and short of all this is that I can’t really give you an objective analysis of anything that he actually said because I was simply too entranced by watching the spirit of a Macmillan-era verger being channelled through the body of a 21st century cabinet minister. In fact, I’d like to go one further than that: I will never be able to give IDS an objective score because he’s just too bloody fascinating. As a consequence, he will no longer receive a numerical mark at the end of each report and will instead be assigned the punctuation mark that I think best describes the experience of watching him. Now here’s a .gif I made of him playing with an imaginary cube (see Fig. 1).

iain-duncan-smith-cube-gif

Fig. 1

I’ve finally realised that I don’t actually know what Harriet Harman does.

Have you ever had one of those weird moments when you’re thinking about someone you’ve known for years and realise that you don’t actually know what they do for a living? Well I had one of those with Harriet Harman last night. It’s not that she doesn’t do anything – she’s been a central figure in the Labour party for as long as I can remember and is regularly on our TV screens – but if push-came-to-shove and I was forced to cite an example of some specific action she was responsible for I’d be completely flummoxed. Given this startling realisation I took it upon myself to have a quick read up on her past appointments and with the exception of some rather solid pre-’97 shadow roles (as well as a brief period as Secretary of State for Social Security) all of her jobs in government have been a little, well, wanky. Take for example some of the following: Lord Privy Seal, Solicitor General and Labour Party Chair. All of these are roles which are undoubtedly important and have impressive sounding titles but they give us no clue as to what such a job actually entails. Similarly, when she’s found herself in positions with titles that let us know what they are actually about I still find that they are the ones that people really care don’t much for (lets face it, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport sounds about as profound as Minister for Interior Design, except when said minister may or may not have been up to his neck in shenanigans).

None of the above means to say that I have anything against Harman as I generally think she’s a pretty able performer and the fact that she inspires such loathing from the Daily Mail means that she must be doing something right, but I still can’t get past the fact that I’m unable to identify her purpose (an affliction also suffered by Frances Maude and John Prescott). Still, she’s not quite as bewildering as IDS so Harman can remain on the numerical scoring system… For now…

The Tories are rattled on the economy.

And well they may be given the events of the last two weeks. However, the really telling thing is not how they try to explain their approach to all matters fiscal but how they try to frame Labour’s. Over the past two years this has involved the relentless drum beat of ‘all you guys want to do is spend, spend, spend like lunatics’ but last night saw the emergence of a new line: Labour are ‘deficit controllers’. As to why they’re taking this line is a mystery to me as ‘deficit controller’ doesn’t actually sound that bad-a-thing (it’s hardly ‘J’accuse!’) but the fact that they’ve had to bin what was up until now a pretty successful stick to beat the Red Team with is interesting. I don’t know, maybe it was just that IDS was on some lone mission but I suspect it runs deeper than that. Watch this space Lemmings.

And the rest of ‘em?

Ok, I’ll be honest, I couldn’t really get behind this episode. In its defence, the crowd were pretty sparky (I loved the grammar school boy of yore who had been sent 30 years into the future to defend the rights of ‘hard working people in the financial sector’) and the last 20 minutes on the economy had some decent stuff in but the following put the dampeners on it for me:

1: I grow weary of entrepreneurs equating every single problem in this world to the fact that the world is not friendly enough to entrepreneurs. Yeah, I get it… You guys think that making money is a pretty big deal but while I don’t know a lot of firemen, I’m pretty sure that they don’t equate every problem in this world to the existence of fire. Having said that, I’m inclined to let Theo Paphitis off the hook a little as he appears to be congenitally mischievous.

2 : Ming Campbell is still doing that thing where he looks really surprised to be on Question Time, almost as if he was supposed to be doing something else but got lost and just wandered into the studio.

3: Inclined as I am to agree with much of what Mark Serwotka has to say I just can’t help thinking that he sounds a little, well, smug.

All of which adds up to this:

Tl;dr

IDS: ~

(By) Jingo (he’s an odd puppy)

Harman: 5/10

(Would make quite a convincing) Flamingo (if spray painted pink and covered in feather).

Campbell: 5/10

(Is looking like the Lib Dems’) Ringo

Prophitis: 6/10

(Speaks the) Lingo (of money)

Serwotka: 5/10

(Probably likes to) Tingo

(Supplemental brackets: If you’ve never come across the word ‘Tingo’, please, please click the link… It’s possibly my favourite word ever, closely followed by this one)

The Crowd: 7/10

(May have had their babies stolen by) Dingo(s)?

So there you go, a so-so affair that was the start of a very long evening for poor old Dimbers. That’s it from me, I’m off to do the washing up and wonder why my better half has used an exclamation mark on the calendar where it says ‘Green Bin Day!’. I mean c’mon, I realise Green Bin Day doesn’t come around that often but is it really that exciting? I must get to the bottom of this.

Next week Lemmings, next week…

Questionable Time #26

Published April 27, 2012 Politics , Uncategorized 1 Comment
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questionable time 26 david dimbleby wonderbra

Good morning Lemmings and welcome to a somewhat more straight-forward instalment of Questionable Time than last week’s rather narcissistic little jaunt. Yes that’s right, I’m back in the cheap seats and in some ways I’m glad: Thrilling as last week was I’m just not sure that I was built to sustain the levels of excitement/terror that come with being a part of the audience. Anyway, here we are and there’s a lot to get through so let’s crack on. Here’s what we learned:

The news is back and this time it means business.

One of my biggest beefs with being in the audience of Question Time last week was that it occurred on a week when pretty much nothing of any import happened and the news appeared to have beached itself on the Sandbank of Uneventfuness. Sure, there was the whole Abu Qatada vs. the Gregorian Calendar affair and the preliminary stages of the Omnishambles, but lets face it, a couple of soggy sky rockets does not a fireworks display make. This week however stands apart from its immediate ancestor in that wherever you turn something spectacular is happening and from whatever angle you view it one can only conclude that all of these spectacular things are spectacularly bad for the coalition government, particularly the Tories. Here’s the jist of it:

      1. The economy has basically given up and called it a day.
      2. The Murdoch clan have put on their own production of Gotterdammerung and invited the entire world to attend.
      3. Having a name that lends itself to accidental profanities is now the least of the Culture Secretary’s worries.
      4. Nadine Dories.

Clearly this wasn’t going to be a week laden with promise for the Blue Team but as is the way of the world, someone was going to have to cop for it. And just who would that lucky soul be? Ladies and Gentlemen, please put your hands together for Minister of State at the Department of Work and Pensions, the Rt Honourable Chris Grayling MP! Whoop-whoop!

Now I actually think that Grayling did quite well last night and the reason he did quite well was that he was totally unremarkable: No heroics, no soaring oratory, no impassioned call to arms, just plain old ‘unremarkable’ and in my book that’s quite alright. Why? Well because despite outward appearances the very last thing you need in a situation like this is a hero. Heroes are great when you need that last bit of umph to really carry the fight to your enemies or to stage a decisive counter attack but they are not cut out for situations where there is simply no prospect of a win’ No, what you need at times like that is someone who can simply endure, hack off a pound of their own flesh and present it to the assembled mob with silent ambivalence. Granted, there’s not much glory to be had in being a human punch bag and Grayling did end up resembling a washing-up sponge that’s seen better days but at least he left things in a state that wasn’t that much worse than they were an hour before. In the grand scheme of things I’d be happy with that outcome.

The other person who had the most to lose last night was Simon Hughes and I must say that I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of him being on. It’s not that I don’t like the man (in fact I’d go so far as to say that I have somewhat of a soft spot for him) it’s just that there’s only so much lip-biting, hand-wringing and self-flagellation I can witness before I start feeling sad. And that’s what Hughes has been like over the last couple of years, a tortured soul who rationally knows that he’s committing mad acts in response to a mad world but somehow can’t convince his soul that this is the case. Happily though, he seemed much more at peace last night and actually appeared to be a proper human being as opposed to a totemic whipping boy for the Lib Dems’ collective self-loathing. The way in which this manifested was that he was much better at picking his fights and managed to suppress the urge to dive on grenades that were clearly intended for the Tories, something which has been a problem in the past. Instead he stuck to the things he knew and cared about – like housing – whilst also making quiet overtures to the Red Team (“It wasn’t all Labours fault”), all of which was a refreshing change to being the principal apologiser for his party’s self-harming tendencies. I guess the big question is ‘does this mean that he thinks that coalition is toast?’, the answer to which only he knows but it’s certainly nice to seem him looking a little less spiritually broken.

The people with the most to gain didn’t gain that much.

By rights this should have been an episode in which both Diane Abbott and Polly Toynbee cleared up – what with all the fruit hanging so low – but somehow it didn’t quite turn out like that. I guess the main reason for this is that Romford voted very strongly for the Tories in 2010 (they had a clear 26.5% lead over Labour) so there’s clearly some loyalty there but it’s also down to the fact that while the Left’s critique of the current government is pretty robust, its alternative solution just doesn’t hang together as well as it should. Apart from that it was business as usual for these guys, what with Toynbee talking ever-so-seriously about ever-so-serious things and Abbott doing that ‘Dear Sir, imagine my concern’ face that she is wont to do. Both got some solid applause but neither really managed to find that killer angle of attack without exposing their own flanks. Had this been up t’North or a few miles to the west then things could have turned out very differently but as it stands they emerged much like their counterparts: In no better nor worse a situation than they started.

So no revelations there, but hang on, aren’t we missing something here? Damn straight we are! Nigel, Nigel, where for art thou Nigel?

Nigel Farage is still my favourite prat.

Yes! After what seems like an eternity (it’s actually only been five months) he’s back and if the papers are to be believed, he should have been soaring like an eagle last night. And soar he did as he socked it to the government for being a bunch of “college kids” and eulogised sole-traders as “heroes of the nation”. The crowd roared their approval as he seemed to levitate out of the studio. Fly Nigel, fly! Go on son, slip these earthly shackles! And upwards he went, propelling himself by cackling at the IMF loan, high into the night sky from where he rained down thunderbolts on Jeremy Hunt. But wait! What’s this? He seems to be stalling! What’s that he just said? ‘Immigration’? No Nigel, no! His rate of climb slows and then suddenly reverses. Oh god, he’s saying he’s spoken to “several people” and what they’ve told him is that it’s just too ruddy easy for Jonny Ruddy Foreigner to get a ruddy council house in this sceptred isle. Missiles are unleashed from the crowd and one from a housing worker who appears to know what he’s talking about scores a direct hit. BOOM! He’s falling now, falling fast! The crowd look on aghast as certain death looms and then CRACK! His fall is broken by a freak question about teen sex! Battered and bruised, he picks himself and limps off to lick his wounds. Nigel, you flew too high. You tried to touch the sun only to be dashed to earth like the mortal you are. Bad luck. You’re still my favourite prat though. Here’s a little something I made for you (see Fig. 1).

nigel farage hope poster absurdity

Fig. 1

Vince Cable still has a fan.

And not just any old fan but a super-fan by the looks of it. So well done Mr. Yellow T-Shirt And Suit Jacket, well done for being supremely unfashionable in every sense of the word! A cheer for Mr Yellow T-Shirt and Suit Jacket!

Tl;dr

Grayling: 5/10

Soaked (it up)

Abbott: 5/10

Poked (at Grayling)

Hughes: 6/10

(Seems pretty) Stoked

Toynbee: 6/10

Provoked (a few claps)

Farage: 6/10

Joked (about this and that)

The Crowd: 7/10

(Should have been) Revoked (since I wasn’t in it).

So there we go: A pretty solid episode where everyone except Farage ended up pretty much where they had started. Now, if you’ll excuse me I must get back to my busy schedule of not being recognised on the street and my phone not ringing off the hook. Ah, the perils of QT fame…

Next week Lemmings, next week…

Questionable Time #25

Published April 20, 2012 Politics Leave a Comment
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questionable time 25 david dimbleby jimmy savil

Good morning Lemmings and welcome to a very non-standard Questionable Time. Non-standard why? Well, I usually have a pretty set process for covering QT that involves settling down on the sofa at half-10 with a note pad in the hope of garnering enough material to cobble together something vaguely informative for the next day. This week though I have no such notes. And why don’t I have any notes? Well dear Lemmings, I have no notes because this time I was physically there. Yup, Operation-Blag-My-Way-Into-The Audience actually came good. Here’s what I learned:

The prospect of being on Question Time can seriously mess with your week.

Seeing how Operation-Blag-My-Way-Into-The-Audience has fallen flat on its face many-a-time in the past I decided to ditch the usual approach of going through the official channels and took it upon myself (with some able aiding and abetting from my brother) to get in touch with the production team itself. After a slightly nerve-wracking conversation with a producer I managed to secure a ticket and for a split second there I experienced the thrill of triumph. ‘Yes!’ thought I, ‘My hour has come! I’ve bloody won!’. However, that intoxicating whiff of victory was quickly dispelled as a new and ominous truth began to make itself known. ‘Oh Jesus, that means I’ve got to ask something’. That’s when things started going sideways.

The Question Time application process works like this: You apply and if you’re lucky enough to get through you will receive an invitation which states that you have to email the production team a question tout suite. The problem in this case was that despite being something of a news junkie, I could not think of a single issue in the last two weeks that has aroused even the faintest flicker of interest in me. I mean seriously, it was as if the news had simply decided not to bother turning up to work and editors across the nation were reduced to covering the sinking of the Titanic for the ten billionth time. Anyway, this complete and utter dearth of workable material combined with the fact that two years of covering QT has made me a little irrational about appearing on the show led me to get my knickers in a right old twist. I had to find something – anything – in the news that week (and the producers are quite insistent that your question must relate to an event that’s very fresh) that I had even a smidgen of an opinion on in order to have a shot at a question… Yet for the life of me I couldn’t find one.

So it was that my week was pretty much one of being glued to my phone and praying that the Spanish economy would collapse in the most spectacular of fashions, taking with it the entire Eurozone and plunging the world into a dark new epoch of chaos and woe. As it happens, that didn’t quite to come to pass and nor did my efforts to feign interest in the Abu Qatada (Qatada-Shmada!) case bear much fruit. I was stuck and for some reason being stuck really steamed my bean. Eventually Thursday arrived and I dejectedly handed in a question relating to something that happened three weeks ago. Defeat had been cruelly snatched from the jaws of victory. Loudribs had been vanquished by the news cycle. Irrelevance had become me. Or had it?

If the Question Time team had been manning the Titanic, the evacuation would have been slick as you like.

The upside of flunking the question test was that for the first time all day I stopped feeling nervous and could actually enjoy watching how an episode is put together. In many ways it’s like a well-heeled version of Gladiators as a room full of self-evidently confident and opinionated people are expertly herded through a logistical obstacle course. First there’s the security check, then the brief lull as everyone arrives before you have a warm up with Dimbers (who in real life comes across very much like an Uncle Bulgaria who’s developed a taste for brandy) and are corralled into the studio. Anthropologists would have a field day at that point as the spectacle of a mass of overly polite people all trying to scramble their way to the front of the line is truly something to behold. Yet somehow it all works and it’s to the production team’s credit that the whole process seems so effortless. That however is just a taster as the really bizarre bit is about to happen: The dummy panel.

In order to get the sound, lighting and cameras all sorted out they ask for members of the audience to volunteer to sit on the panel and to have a debate with the crowd. You thought politicians were odd on the show? Yeah, well audience members can out-odd them by a considerable margin, particularly if they have views on the fringes of the political spectrum as one gentlemen did. Another guy who wasn’t on the panel but put in his two-penneth worth anyway provoked some very sharp intakes of breath as he opined on “the gays” and “the things they get up to in the bedroom”. Anyhoo, that rather surreal turn of events went on for quite some time before a producer arrived and read out the names of the people who would be asking the questions. At that point my new-found aura of serenity evaporated in the blink of eye.

‘Oh shit. They just called my name’.

I’d love to tell you what actually happened on the show but I was too busy clutching a piece of paper in a sweaty death grip to take any notice.

Once your name is called out you have to stand up for a minute so that the cameras can find you and then you are taken backstage for the briefest of briefings. The long and short of it is thus: The very first question will not be filmed but will serve to warm up the panel and the audience. After that it will go straight into recording and when Dimbers calls your name you read out your question in a prompt manner whilst preparing for him to come back to you at the end of the topic.

At that point you are returned to your seat, the panel arrive and things get under way. It is also the point at which your whole world becomes exclusively focused on the printout of your question.

‘Oh crap oh crap oh crap is the Bradford Spring an unseasonable OH MY GOD WHAT ARE THESE WORDS I DON’T EVEN!’

Yeah, that’s sort of what was going through my head and for all I know they could have been debating whether fish have the right to get married for the first 15 minutes. Happily though the words did manage to leave my mouth in reasonably good order when my name was called but that was by no means the end of my silent meltdown. Oh no, then you have another desperate 10 minutes of trying to figure out just what in the hell you’re going to say next. As it happens, Dimbers never did come back to me, the danger passed and I spent the next 40 minutes feeling like my jammies had been rustled in the most profound way – which led to another weird phenomenon…

It matters who you are sitting next to.

My immediate neighbour on the night was a very jaunty and engaging guy named Jonathan who had an absolutely infectious enthusiasm for what was occurring in front of us. Given my somewhat shell-shocked state and the fact that I was no longer capable of independent thought I found myself becoming nothing less than a human extension of Jonathan’s will. If he clapped, I clapped. If he grinned and nodded, I grinned and nodded. Whatever he said, I agreed with wholeheartedly. Luckily for me, Jonathan doesn’t appear to be a howling mad extremist and to the best of my knowledge I didn’t give my involuntary endorsement to bringing back the birch/sending Qatada to the Moon/replacing the Cabinet with a Facebook group.

If you think being on the show is weird watching it back an hour later AND following the #bbcqt feed will blow your head clean off.

So I survived the show and then scurried home in a somewhat agitated, hungry and dehydrated state (the dehydration was my fault. Fear of needing a wee in the middle of the show had led me to forgo fluids for a frankly ludicrous period of time). Given how late the recording had gone on I literally got through the door just as it was about to start and never really got a second to collect my thoughts. So there we were, myself and my better half, the show starts and there I am! My phone starts making all sorts of noises as friends start texting. Then I ask my question and the camera cuts back to me for a response shot and all I can think is ‘JESUS CHRIST WHY DO I KEEP LICKING MY LIPS SO MUCH? I LOOK LIKE A TONGUE PERVERT!’. Then my phone goes absolutely mental and I check Twitter to see what’s going on. People, it turns out, have opinions about my beard and quite diverse opinions at that. And then I realise what I’m doing: I’m sitting in my front room, watching me an hour ago whilst simultaneously watching what a bunch of strangers think about my beard. It was at that point that my brain gave in and conceded that I had in fact become stuck in the Matrix.

And the show itself?

It was bloody good. Tim Farron is now totally my favourite person in the whole wide world, the venom between Galloway and Aaronovitch was both very real and very visceral, Warsi wasn’t bad and I am now forced to admit that yes, I do have a weird and slightly uncomfortable crush on the Labour Party’s Appropriate Adult, Yvette Cooper (I think it’s her long neck. See Fig. 1). In some ways it was a shame that I was too distracted to really pick up on any of the real substance but if you were in the market for political theatre last night, you got it in spades.

yvette-cooper-david-dimbleby-long-neck-gif

So there you go, that’s how my little adventure into the real-life world of Question Time went and I must say that it was a pretty grand experience. No scores this week as my head’s just a little too mangled to spend half an hour searching an online rhyming dictionary but rest assured that no-one would have scored below 6, such was the calibre of the panel. Anyway, thanks for reading and normal service will resume next week.

Next week Lemmings, next week…

Questionable Time #24

Published March 30, 2012 Politics , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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questionable time 24 david dimbleby nelson

Good morning Lemmings (or should I say ‘Ahoy there Sea Lemmings’) and welcome to a city that should hold a very dear place in your hearts, purely because it is the place of my birth. That’s right, you owe Portsmouth a big one because without it, what would you be doing right now? Well I’ll tell you one thing for sure, you wouldn’t be sitting here getting a hefty dose of post-Question Time nonsense and in all likelihood you’d actually be engaged in some sort panic buying, be it petrol, stamps or Steak Bakes. So three cheers for Pompey, that majestic beacon of brutalist architecture and warlike things that was kind enough to bring me into the world. Speaking of which, let’s also hear it for the very early onset of Silly Season this year as this has been the most ludicrously fun week in politics I can remember for some time and that’s even before we take into account Gorgeous George’s stunning little coup in the North. I heard him refer to it as the ‘the Bradford Spring’ this morning. Dammit George, you may be a self-aggrandising, cat-imitating, cranky-despot-in-the-making but boy are you value for money. Anyway, I digress… On to some Questionable Timing. Here’s what we learned last night:

1. Labour really need to get their act together, tout suite…

As I just mentioned, this week has been one of those magical moments in politics where absurdity reigns supreme and seeing how the Tories appear to be main purveyors of preposterousness, the chief beneficiaries of this febrile atmosphere should be none other than the Labour party, right? Well judging by last night’s show, maybe not. Why? Well, I’d hazard a guess at the following:

  • Douglas Alexander was not the man for the job last night.

I’ve got nothing against Wee Dougie. He seems a nice (if somewhat bland) little chap who appears vaguely competent and tends to play things on the duller side of inoffensive. That’s all perfectly acceptable in my book as I have an innate respect for the mediocre and I also appreciate that as a defensive player, he can be rather canny. However, what Alexander is not is a balls-out, pedal-to-the-metal political hooligan and what was the one thing Labour needed last night? A balls-out, pedal-to-the-metal political hooligan. Seriously, I actually found it a little upsetting last night as there was so much potential for mischief from the Red Team yet Alexander simply didn’t have the pace, the instinct or the gumption to make any real hay from it. Ed Balls? As fatally compromised as he may be, he would have at least been able to harness those baser urges of his and would mostly likely have produced more hay than a Massey-Ferguson convention but no, instead we got a politician who although adept at identifying threats is simply not cut out to exploit opportunities. To shame Labour, to shame…

  • By contrast, Anna Soubry was very much up for it.

Come on let’s face it, we were all secretly hoping that the Blue Team were going to send Francis Maude on last night. It would have been the crowning glory to a week of self-inflicted nonsense but alas, wiser heads prevailed at Conservative HQ and what we got instead was Anna Soubry, a politician whose stock has just gone up in my book. So why was she a good choice? Well for one, she is very much her own person who has no problem with taking positions that run contrary to the party line. Considering how the party line this week has been something along the lines of ‘whoopsie-titting-bollocks’, that can only be a good thing. The other key asset that Soubry has is that she doesn’t appear to be posh (a case in point being her stance on grammar schools) and considering how the whiff of privilege is fast becoming one of the most toxic odours emanating from the Tory party, this was also a thing of much goodness. So yes, in contrast to Wee Dougie, Soubry was the right person for the job and the Blue Team owe her big time for successfully navigating their rickety old sloop through such choppy waters.

  • Labour are still incapable of making the political weather.

With the exception of Pastygate which seems to largely be the progeny of one very enterprising Labour MP, all of the open goals that have been presented to the Red Team this week have been entirely a result of the Conservatives own ineptitude and even then, Labour still find themselves vulnerable to counter-attacks (largely over the unions). Considering just how unpopular many of the measures this current government are taking are and just how much of a tin ear they have when it comes to communicating with people we would expect Labour to be heavily in the ascendant right now but they’re not. Why? Because aside from minor tinkering they still can’t articulate a plausible narrative as to what they would do differently and until they do we will continue to see them struggling to gain the initiative. Sort it out, Red Team.

 

2. Something horrible seems to have happened to Sarah Teather.

If I cast my mind back to the simpler times before the election I seem to recall that I actually grew rather fond of Sarah Teather. Ok, so I took the piss a bit when I insinuated that she was in fact made of interlocking circles but she did have a good line on the hopey-changey stuff and put in some very solid QT performances. However, it appears that all good things must come to an end and the Sarah Teather we got last night was a very different one from that of two years hence, one that appears to have been mentally ravaged by the experience of government. Take that awful moment in the first question when she failed to pick up on the actually quite funny joke made by an audience member about setting your house ablaze during a fire brigade strike. Now I’m a little torn as to whether she genuinely didn’t get it or was just being wilfully aloof but the result was terrible and made her come across like a really uptight school mistress who does not, repeat NOT, find the rudimentary schoolboy drawings of willies on the toilet walls to be funny. Admittedly things did pick up for her a little later on but I was constantly getting the impression that being in government is really hard for Teather and that it requires a considerable amount of self-censorship on her part. That in itself isn’t entirely unusual (in fact, lip biting appears to be the pastime of choice for left learning Lib Dems these days) but the way it manifests with Teather is because she appears to be troubled by an imaginary wagging finger that scolds her every time a non-government endorsed notion pops into her head. That’s a real pity because her appeal used to lay in the fact that she could be quite passionate when she was emotionally invested in a particular issue but now she just seems to have actively repressed her own beliefs to the point that she’s lost a part of herself and that’s a sad thing to witness. Maybe a pasty would cheer her up.

 

3. The Civilian Panelist were so-so.

Is it just me or could Alexei Sayle simply not be arsed with being on Question Time last night? Maybe it was the rambling answers (‘I don’t care’ → ‘Something about the North’ → ‘Capitalists and that’), maybe it was the fact that he looked like he had a raging hangover (nothing says ‘Oh God, just make it stop’ like sitting with your head in your hands for an hour) but yes, he didn’t exactly look like he had a song in his heart or a spring in his step. By contrast, Simon Jenkins was much more game but he never really got the opportunity to do what he does best: Be difficult for the sake of it. Ok, so he looked like he might get a little cantankerous on the matter of the Falklands and he had the odd moment of wit on the petrol crisis but there was nothing for him to get his teeth really stuck into. However, I am pleased to announce that I have finally obtained conclusive evidence that his face is in fact made of sandstone. Behold Fig. 1 (and really behold it because it is far and away the most technically mind bending thing I’ve ever done in Photoshop).

 

simon jenkins rock face rockchops

Fig. 1

 

Tl;dr:

Alexander: 4/10

(Was as hushed as the Mary) Celeste

Soubry: 6/10

Impressed

Teather: 4/10

Repressed

Sayle: 4/10

Depressed

Jenkins: 5/10

Suppressed (the urge to go absolutely batshit crazy)

The Crowd: 6/10

(Didn’t get) Undressed

So that’s, that… A good episode that could have been great had Labour put up someone with a little more vim, not to mention the luckiest of escapes for the Tories. Anyhoo, that’s enough from me until after Easter but I shall see you three weeks hence when Question Time will be coming to my home of the last 10 years, Leeds. Operation Try And Blag My Way Into The Audience is go! Let’s just hope it’s a little more successfully than the last two times I gave this little maneuver a whirl.

 

 

After Easter Lemmings, after Easter…

 

Questionable Time #23

Published March 23, 2012 Politics , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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questionable time 23 jack ruby david dimbleby

Good morning Lemmings and praise be, spring is here. How do we know this? Well, the lack of near perpetual darkness is one give away but I prefer to use Mother Nature’s most reliable of yardsticks to herald the end of winter: The sudden appearance of a genuinely zesty episode of Question Time. Here’s what we learned last night.

1. The budget was crazy… Crazy like a fox.

So this was the budget episode and traditionally, these tend to be slightly more rambunctious affairs than your more run-of-the-mill shows. However, this year we get an added twist as this was probably the craftiest budget I’ve seen for quite a while and one that’s caught me (and everyone else) slightly on the hoof. And why was it crafty? Well, for one it came with numerous health warnings well ahead of time and almost invited people to get their anger in good order by trailing the 50p cut so heavily prior to the day. With this in mind it was reasonable to expect the post-budget debate to be a fairly straightforward ‘the Tories helping out their well-heeled chums’ knockabout where the focus would be on the traditional battle ground of Monocle and Dickie Bow Wearers vs. Everyone Else. For the most part this seemed to be the case – that is until it emerged that buried in the fine print was an audacious little raid on pensioners. At face value this seems like madness as Rule Number One of politics is that you don’t piss off people’s grandparents as they have an alarming habit of actually voting and it allows you to be painted as the most villainous of villains. Similarly, our brains’ seem to do weird things when asked to process information pertaining to the finances of our elders: Every figure seems to get automatically multiplied by a factor of around 100. For example, if Osborne would have announced that working age taxpayers stand to lose £200 a year, people would rightly grumble and chunter that losing £200 a year isn’t really a desirable thing and then go back about their business. However, should he say that pensioners are in line for a £200 a year squeeze then you end up in a much more serious mess: “Pensioners stand to lose £20’000 a year?! Darling, hand me my pitchfork!”. It’s not our fault, it’s just how we’re wired.

With this in mind I was pretty sure that the harrying of those of more advanced years would be an absolute invitation to tragedy but after watching last night’s show I’m beginning to think that it might actually have been a minor stroke of genius. Why? Because it’s a Sedan Moment – the point where you realise that the Panzers aren’t actually going to come tearing through Belgium where you’ve stacked all your crack units and are in fact emerging from the Ardennes – and if Chuka Umunna’s performance is anything to go by, it worked a treat.

Here’s where things went wrong for Umunna: Certain of the fact that the 50p cut is where the decisive battle would take place he marshalled all of his firepower into that sector and did manage to score some minor tactical victories. However, this meant that he had precious little in reserve to exploit what was actually the issue that wound people up the most and simply couldn’t get any traction on the squeezing of pensioners (in fact, he didn’t even directly address it when it came up, preferring instead to carry on with his frontal assault against the top rate tax). Add into that some shilly-shallying over what Labour would do in 2015 and he comes out of what should have been a very easy fight looking quite badly mauled. And that, dear Lemmings, is why this was a crafty budget.

2. Watching Vince Cable next to David Davis was like watching a ‘here’s what you could have won’ moment on Bullseye.

Whisper it lest either man takes umbrage with me but I suspect that Vince Cable and David Davis probably have more in common with each other than they would care to admit. After all, they are both figureheads for a certain section of their respective parties (Cable with the left leaning, more economically interventionist end of the Lib Dems, Davis with the wing of the Tory party who care about civil liberties), both have a pretty good USP (Cable as the guy who saw the crash coming, Davis as the council-estate-lad-turned-stone-cold-killer) and the pair of them are long enough in the tooth to command a certain level of gravitas. However, the chief difference is that despite the fact that they are both evenly matched in both reach, mischievous intent and ability, one is a cabinet minister while the other is a backbencher. On the basis of last night’s outing it certainly seems that Davis got the sweeter deal. Why? Because Davis was having a whale of a time, being able as he was to duck out of most of Pensionergate whilst simultaneously making loopy unilateral pronouncements about halving the cost of petrol. Cable by contrast had to sit there and suck it all up whilst getting nothing in return for his pains. No crowd love, no mansion tax, no nothing. Ok, so he got to be a little rebellious later on when he poured not quite cold but at least tepid water on regional pay scales but for the most part he looked like a man who had just been forced to drink a pint of brine. So here you go Vince, here’s what you could have won: A similar level of influence without the need to rend your very soul to shreds every time you’re put in front of camera and having to look on impotently as every suggestion you make is quietly taken out the back and shot.

3. The supporting cast was solid.

I have no idea who Melissa Kite is (and neither will I as she doesn’t have a wikipedia article… Three cheers for laziness!), nor am I more than tentatively familiar with Marina Lewycka but truth be told, this matters not a jot as I have nothing in the way of bones to pick with them. Both of them seemed pretty reasonable, both made some good points and neither of them said anything stupid. However, I find myself slightly more inclined towards Lewycka, purely because she seems like the sort of person it would be fun to get drunk with. Similarly with the crowd, I have no complaints as they seemed an amiable enough bunch who could go any-which-way come the next election and there also appeared to be a refreshing absence of flat-out stupidity in this episode. Oh, and there was a guy with a beard so big that it could probably count towards next years GDP figures. Extra points for majestic beards.

4. That whole NHS thing? You probably dreamt it…

I seem to recall that at some point earlier in the week one of the most controversial and potentially risky pieces of legislation in recent history somehow managed to blag its way in to law. At least I think I did as it seems that the QT production team are either unaware of this development or are genuinely more concerned with royalty, ransom and roads. Seriously, wtf?

Tl;dr

Cable: 5/10

Drained

Umunna: 5/10

Sprained (something in his head).

Davis: 7/10

Rained (on Umunna’s parade)

Kite: 6/10

(Seems quite) Sane

Lewycka: 7/10

Gained (my respect)

The Crowd: 7/10

(Contained a man with a glorious) Mane

So there we go, an enjoyable little spring jaunt that kept me entertained for an hour. Nowt wrong with that. Before I go there’s just enough time to squeeze in a quick pshop. This came about when I discovered that there is in fact another David Davis at large, famous only for being arrested with half a haircut. I have tried to simulate the consequences of a chance encounter between the two David Davis’ (see Fig. 1).

david-davis-david-davis-gif

Fig. 1

Next week Lemmings, next week…

Questionable Time #22

Published March 16, 2012 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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questionable time 22 david dimbleby audry hepburn

Good morning Lemmings and welcome to Questionable Time which this week is brought to you from my death-bed. Ok, so ‘death bed’ might be a slight exaggeration as it’s more like my ‘moderately hungover and groggy bed’ but there is a commonality between the two phrases in that they both contain beds and that these beds contain me. So, why am I hungover? Well, I’ll level with you, I just couldn’t quite bear the thought of approaching a Scottish episode involving Janet Street-Porter, a bunch of no-name Caledonian politicos and a clutch of issues pertaining to our northern cousins without something to take the edge off it. In fact, the only thing that kept me from unilaterally declaring this week a holiday was the prospect of Charles Kennedy being there (he’s like my secret QT hip flask… Even with the most God-awful panels he somehow manages to make my insides feel all warm and fuzzy) so upon receiving the news that he had ‘missed his flight’ I thought ‘Cobblers to it, I’m getting sauced’. As a result, this likely to be a short and less-than-accurate account.

Right, where to start? How about with the SNP’s Humza Yousaf, a jaunty fellow who’s got a good line in prattling enthused claptrap about all things Scottish and independent? Initially I was quite taken with him because he seems to have quite the talent for rabble rousing but as time went on the penny started dropping that there wasn’t a great deal of substance in it all and that he may just be the latest honours student from the Alex Salmond School of Jiggery-Pokery. Then he said something that suddenly joined all the dots together in one fell swoop: “I was 16 when we went into Afghanistan”. ‘Come again? 16? And you’re a… politician? No wonder you’re a little rash and over-exuberant! 22 year-olds are rash and over-exuberant by their very nature!’. Then another penny dropped: ‘Wait a second, if you were 16 in 2001, that means you’re now 26 which in turn means we’ve been in Afghanistan for over 10 years!’. Now, don’t get me wrong, I already knew this to be true in the semantic sense but it’s only at times like this that a fact creeps up on you takes you off guard that it really begins to sink in. 10 years. We’re going head-to-head with Vietnam for the accolade of Most Long-Winded Tragedy of Modern Times here and that’s not the sort of accolade you proudly display on your mantelpiece. Anyhoo, where does all this leave young(ish) Humza? Well neither here-nor-there really. On the one hand, he should be old enough to realise that operating on pure bluster will only get you so far but on the other hand I do find his lean and hungry disposition to be rather fun to watch and he does possess more than a smidgen of charisma. In light of this, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt…. For now.

Talking of charisma, lets say hello to our other Scottish panelists – the Conservative’s Ruth Davidson and the Lib Dems last-minute stand-in Willie Rennie - as this seems to be a department in which they are both lacking. In the case of Davidson I think this stems from the fact that she looks like the third Krankie who somehow managed to escape and is now doing her level best to lead a relatively ordinary life, even if this involves constantly repressing the brutal memories of being forced to dress as a little boy in the name of ‘comedy’. As a result she just seems a little nervous, a little wary and despite not messing anything up too spectacularly, I must confess that I was left feeling a little nonplussed. Similarly, Rennie also failed to set the night ablaze and that’s because he seems like a nice, reasonable man who enjoys outdoorsy things and would just like everyone to get along. Is that a bad thing? Not particularly. Does it make for good QT-ing? Again, not particularly.

So that’s the natives dealt with, now we come on to the one person who did fully hold my attention for the entire show, Frank Field. Now, Field’s a funny character, sort of like a weird mash-up between Eeyore and Dr. Strangelove (an observation rendered doubly valid by his outpouring of love for nuclear power at the end of the show) who exists only to cause sullen trouble for his nominal party from time-to-time and that makes him fascinating to watch. True to form, Field spent the best part of last night lining up sacred lefty cows before unceremoniously massacring them one by one. Youth unemployment? The kids need a clip around the ear. Wind turbines? The greatest swindle in history. The audience? “Scrubbing about on the floor”. Now, at face value that sounds like the sort of pugnacious hucksterism that we’d expect from the likes of Melanie Phillips but somehow Field manages to deliver these sentiments in a way that doesn’t make my skin crawl. It’s not the fact that he clearly believes these things to be true as I’m pretty sure that Phillips also fully believes in whatever she’s ranting about it, it’s the fact that these things make him so self-evidently sad and sadness is a very human quality. So yes, well done Frank. I can’t say I agree with much of what you say but I do admire the fact that you voluntarily live in thicket of ideological brambles. Good stuff.

And Janet Street-Porter? Yeah, still like sticking scrunched up balls of sandpaper into your ears and vigorously rotating them back and forth…

Tl;dr

Yousaf: 6/10

Wiley

Davidson: 5/10

Shyly

Rennie: 5/10

Highly (unremarkable)

Field: 7/10

(Un)Smiley

Street-Porter: 4/10

(Jesus Christ) O’Reilly

The Crowd: 6/10

Stylee?

Aaaaaaaand we’re done. Nearly. The one thing I forgot to mention was the lack of topical photoshops in this week’s Questionable Time. Well, I had a great Charles Kennedy one all set up and ready to go but ‘he missed his plane’ so that will just have to bide its time in the holding pattern. However, as luck would have it my brother Tom has sent me this little gem: Behold, a God-awful painting of David Dimbleby as an Eastern European peasant woman.

david dimbleby peasant woman

Next week Lemmings, next week…

Questionable Time #21

Published March 9, 2012 Politics Leave a Comment
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questionable time 21 david dimbleby john lennon yoko ono

Good morning Lemmings and before we get under way I would just like to take a minute to relate a rather bizarre story that unfolded exactly a week ago today. Having just literally pressed the ‘Post’ button on last week’s Questionable Time I got a knock on the door and found myself confronted by two smartly turned out representatives of the local Labour party. Sensing an opportunity for some gentle mischief I then spent the next five minutes explaining how my ‘Never Vote For An Incumbent’ rule leaves them with an outside chance that I might put a tick in their box at the next election but they had better not count on it because I have a long memory and still can’t quite forgive New Labour for this, that and the other. Rightly sensing that much tastier and lower hanging fruit may lie further down the street (it turns out bearded men in dirty tracky bottoms aren’t the core demographic they are after), they politely took their leave and moved on to pastures afresh. So far, so ‘meh’. Anyhoo, off I went to the kitchen to crack on with the washing up and as I was gazing listlessly out of the window when I caught sight of a small figure moving purposefully down the street. Then something started stuttering in my brain. “Hmmmmm….” I thought as I ran the hot water “why is this seemingly innocuous scene giving me the jibblies? Is the Matrix glitching again?”. Squinting a little as I tried to seek out the cause of this weird sensation I was suddenly deafened by the sound of a thousand pennies dropping. “That’s not…. It can’t be…Wait… No… IS THAT RACHEL BLOODY REEVES?!?!”

Within seconds my mind had gone into complete meltdown: “But… But you were only on my telly a few hours ago and I’ve just spent the whole day writing about you! I must have gone too far. I must have blogged too hard and am now hallucinating about members of the Shadow Cabinet stalking me. Oh my God, this is how it starts! This is how people end up inside Secure Units!” At this point I stopped making conscious decisions and felt the hand of compulsion grab me firmly by the scruff of the neck. Out I went, out into the street and before any of my usual social circuit breakers could kick in there I was, barefoot and hollering “RACHEL REEVES I JUST GAVE YOU FIVE OUT OF TEN!”. The figure stopped in her tracks and turned to face the source of all the commotion. “Bloody hell, that is Rachel Reeves! And bloody hell, she’s coming over here!”

As to what happened next, well that will probably never be known as I was no longer even slightly in command of my faculties but I do remember her saying “Five out of ten?” to which I responded with “Something something Questionable Time! Something something you were just on my telly and now you’re on the internet! Something something something!”. To her credit, she took it in her stride and allowed me to babble on (although I do remember a big neon light saying “SHE’S BLAGGING” pinging on in my fevered brain as she neither confirmed nor denied that she had any idea as to what ‘Questionable Time’ may be) before slowly withdrawing and making good her escape. And there I stood, bemused, dishevelled and not even remotely interested in doing the washing up any more. I gathered myself just enough to put together a garbled tweet and minutes later my phone pings to tell me that Rachel Reeves is now following me on Twitter. Was that the whiff of burning plastic I could smell emanating from cranium? I think it might have been.

Anyway, I’m bringing this up for three reasons:

  1. It’s was really, really weird and I feel compelled to share the weirdness.
  2. I would very much like to take this opportunity to tell all future panelists of Question Time that they best not be getting any ideas and trying this out for themselves. It is not ok to go swanning passed my house on the day that I’m straining every inch of my brain to poke fun at them. It’s not right and there are probably laws against it. Rachel Reeves I can forgive: She’s my local MP and as a consequence she has a hall pass but the rest of you guys? No. It’s not on.
  3. Recounting this tale has eaten up a good 700 words and that’s just dandy in my book because I was having real trouble making anything out of this episode.

And why would that be? Well, I guess part of it is because I had entirely the wrong attitude when it came to last night’s show. I was looking for a damn good hating and both Eric Pickles and Will Self have very good track records in stoking my hate levels (Pickles for frequently being on the wrong side of the folksy/condescending line and spectacularly buggering up my life since he’s been in government, Self for saying a great many things that I completely agree with but saying them in a way that makes me feel nauseous and wretched). Add into that a generic Mail columnist in the form of Janice Atkinson (or is it Janice Atkinson-Small? The internet stands in defiance to Dimber’s assertion of the former) and we’re on for a right old session of heartburn and high blood pressure, right? Wrong!

In the case of Pickles I thought I was onto a winner as he spent the first question looking pissed off and constipated whilst saying approximately nothing at very great length. However, that trend was not to last and by the second question he found himself largely on the right side of the folksy/condescending line, even if it was at times through gritted teeth. Add into this some rather disarming outbursts of humour tinged with barely submerged contempt for his peers (I did really like it when he started scrawling out Atkinson’s notes) plus a remarkably reasonable stance on gay marriage then it becomes clear that this wasn’t going to be the day that I could absolutely let rip on him. It is still however the day that I can post a photoshop I made of Eric Pickles as a pickle (see Fig. 1). No one rides for free around here.

eric pickles dill gherkin

Fig. 1

As for Self, well he really wasn’t as obnoxious as he usually is and I have to say that the points he made on both Afghanistan and the railways were very, very good. Ok, his pulling of the ‘Ooooooooooh!’ face in response to something Atkinson said did grind my gears a little but in the general scheme of things he did well. So that just leaves Atkinson on my Hate Bench and given her day job, I was pretty sure that she would whip me up into a frothy lather of spittle and bile. As it turns out, she couldn’t and I put this down to the fact that I never really had a clue what she was talking about. It wasn’t so much the content as the jarring and completely arbitrary pauses that seemingly came out of nowhere, not to mention her halting ramblings about a “leaky pipeline” and female MPs. In short, she just left me bewildered.

Hmmmm… So not a lot of hate to be had here and given that our next two panelists are none other than Caroline Flint and Will Young, it swiftly became clear that my Thursday night was going to end up becalmed and adrift in serenity. Now, I know that some of you are going to wonder why I’m making Caroline Flint out to be some sort of beacon of tranquillity as she can be both combative and irksome so allow me to explain: Ever since Questionable Time has been going, Flint has been on more than any other panelist and thus I have had several years in which to watch her go from an overly aggressive diamond-in-the-rough into actually quite an accomplished performer who could well see her status upgraded to Steady Pair of Hands. Ok, so much like Reeves last week she suffered from Labours belated recognition that they now need to be really hammering slogans home (Ol’ Snagletooth never actually said ‘the squeezed middle’ but she might as well have done given how many platitudes along the same line she came out with) but on the whole, her performance was solid. And for me that’s nice because such prolonged exposure to Flint has left me feeling quite fraternal towards her and it’s pleasant to see her continue on the trajectory of incremental improvement. I realise that this hardly makes for an objective account of her performance but that, I’m afraid, is just the way it is.

All the above leaves us with Young and let’s face it, there’s no way he’s walking out of here without some really good marks. As to why he deserves such plaudits, well part of it is to do with the way he gets points across (he’s thoughtful and reasoned while assertive when he needs to be) and partly because the role of 5th panelist fits him like a glove. Usually when a figure from the realm of celebrity is shoehorned on to the show they come with a health warning: ‘This person will probably have an opinion on one specific and personally dear issue but will be useless for the rest of the show’. Not so with Will Young because he actually had well thought out opinions on everything (including the habitually toxic question of Afghanistan) and delivered these opinions in such a soothing-yet-confident manner that I just couldn’t help but get right behind him. Oh, and the stuff he came out with on gay marriage? Top flight Question Timing.

So, where does all this leave me, hankering as I was for a right old evening of venom? Well part of me is a little a disappointed as it was just one of those nights where I really fancied getting hot under the collar but I must confess that it was a generally high quality episode made even higher by the presence of an audience member in a bow tie and dinner jacketish sort of affair. I’m still a sucker for innately posh gentlemen in a dapper get-up and as always, Surrey didn’t fail me. It must be down to all those £2 million homes that are full of grannies.

Tl;dr

Pickles: 5/10

Weigh(s a lot)

Flint: 6/10

(Has a certain) Cachet

Self: 6/10

(Is looking quite) Grey

Young: 8/10

(Is quite clearly) Gay

Atkinson: 3/10

(Is) Away (please leave a message and she’ll get………………. Right back to you)

The Crowd: 6/10

Way-hey!

Oaky-doaky, there we go(ky). I’m off to do the washing up and try to quell this feeling of apprehension that I’m about to see Eric Pickles barreling down my street. Have you people got nothing better to do than harass bloggers of minor significance? Have you not got homes to go to? Do I have to involve the authorities? Question Time panelists: There’s just no trusting them.

Next week Lemmings, next week…

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