“Glee” referring not to joyous satisfaction with Channel 4’s 10 o’Clock Show (though it did hang together better this week, with less of last week’s nerves) but to one of the guests on there: Professor Glees, a soi-disant ‘terrorism expert’.

He was such a scary example of swivel-eyed paranoia that I suspected he might be an actor.  So I looked him up, and he appears to be for real, and the person all the papers go to for quotes about how universities are being taken over by terrorists.  In an article in the TES in 2005 he said:

If people wish to form associations on the basis of religion, they should not be permitted to do so on campuses. Nor should any form of exclusivity be tolerated.

Which seems to rule out university-based bible classes, and most other extra-curricular activities.   It wasn’t clear what exactly he does.  He was just described as “terrorism expert, Buckingham university”.  I don’t think universities employ people just to be an expert, so there is the worrying possibility that he is put in front of students to lecture them from time to time, which is ironic given that he is often quoted expressing concernt hat universities ‘foster extremism’.

You can’t get much more extreme than advocating that people be locked up for what amounts to thought crime if you want to put it in Orwellian terms.  I hadn’t really given much thought to control orders before, but Prof Glees has helped me understand why they are a bad thing, so thanks Prof!

Personally I still find the show a bit fragmented, as a necessary consequence of having four presenters who ostensibly share equal billing.  I feel it would have more coherence if it was one person’s show, with others having regular slots, but what do I know?   For what it is worth, it is the only TV programme I actually watched this week as it was being broadcast – everything else being on iPlayer or V+.

OK… I did turn over afterwards and saw a bit of Question Time but only managed 5 minutes before getting annoyed by it.   And I think I may have watched the new Charlie Brooker thing ‘live’ the other night now I think about it.

Talking of which, is it a drawback to have the 10 o’Clock Show scheduled to clash with Question Time?   You could argue that they are both appealing to people with an interest in politics.  On the other hand, you could argue that the 10 o’Clock Show is aimed at people who like comedy shows and don’t yet realise that politics can be relevent.

People interested in politics tend to mix with other people who are interested in politics and maybe do not realise that a large proportion of the population don’t actually have an opinion on control orders or Serco, and those people could well now have an opinion.   A lot of serious issues only really get a mention in the serious newspapers and a glance at sales figures show that the number of people who actually read the Times/Telegraph/Guardian is actually not that large compared to those who read the Mail/Sun/Express or nothing at all.

I’m just happy to be getting two doses of Charlie Brooker a week at the moment.