The BBC programme Question Time is coming to Crawley this month. I put my application in early this week but I don’t expect to get a place in the audience. Apparently they usually get about 1000 applications for approximately 150 places, and it would probably not be fair if I did get a place while somebody who actually watches the programme misses out.
The truth is that I haven’t bothered watching it for years now. In fact when I heard about this on Monday I had to rack my brain to remember who presents it and my first thoughts were Paxman or John Humphries…
I have sometimes caught bits of it when turning on the TV after getting home from a meeting but it quickly annoys me too much. At the risk of sounding like a quote generated by the Daily Mail-o-matic, it is just so dumbed-down now. Maybe its the influence of so many reality TV talent shows and all the audience participation that entails and encourages, but QT is now all about playing to the studio audience. It always was, of course, but it is just so blatant now.
I may be remembering the past through a rose-tinted filter, always a risk at my age, but in the good old days with Robin Day in charge, it seemed that the audience reserved a round of applause for when somebody actually said something substantial and said it in style – when somebody said something worthy of inclusion in a dictionary of quotations. This might only happen once or twice a week. Now the audience clap at anything, like a bunch of fish-starved seals. It devalues the currency.
In turn, the panel play to this and half the time they actually leave pauses for applause which actually encourage the reaction. In fact, the most enjoyable part of the show now is seeing a talking head say something they feel dead proud of, sit back with a smug, expectant grim, bracing themselves for the wave of ecstatic public appreciation and are met with a stony silence. At this point the show could really do with those tumbleweeds from Shooting Stars to roll across the front.
You never know though, I might get lucky, and on the 22nd the nation could be hearing Dimbleby say “the gentleman at the back with the bald head – yes you the one with the big nose”.
I had stop watching during the Thatcher/Major years as I thought I was going to kick the tv screen in at times. The best Robin Day one I ever saw though had A.J.P. Taylor, the historian on. I don’t recall the question but it was of the format ‘does the panel agree that x is bad thing because of y, q and my cat Tiddles’ – A.J.P. Taylor was first up, I think, considered the question for a moment and then said ‘yes’. Always admired that.