"What are you doing on this sunny evening, Mic?"
"Oh, you know, very normal, very summer activities..."
*drinks whiskey and watches BBC general election 1997 coverage*
Frank Skinner is interviewing a John Major lookalike and Tony Blair lookalike. The Blair lookalike is *shocking*
55 minutes in and Jeremy Paxman has just asked Portillo if he's "ready to drink hemlock yet". Portillo smugometer still hovering at about 9.3.
Every time it appears I am absolutely delighted by the high tech command centre behind Dimbleby...
1 hr 3 minutes in and we get the first appearance of a very young, very sharp-looking @krishgm interviewing an oleaginous Jeffrey Archer.
Now Martin Bashir is interviewing Edwina Curry. I'm pretty sure he didn't have to falsify bank statements to secure this particular chat.
Michael Crick, looking like a serial killer estate agent, has just described Enoch Powell's successor (and fellow unhinged racist) Nick Budgen as "one of parliament's great independent spirits" so...
And Jill Dando offers Portsmouth possibly more glamour than it might ordinarily deserve:
1 hour 41 in and Gordon Brown appears, unable to hide his delight with the result. Look at his delighted face there... [and this ends this instalment of my 1997 general election rewatch]
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The Met arrested members of the City of Westminster’s Night Safety team. They are volunteers. They were pulled last night at 2am and have been held for 14 hours. One of them came out of the station in tears. Police didn’t apologise.
They were arrested by the Territorial Support Group.
They were arrested for being in possession of… rape alarms. They hand them out to women.
Since @lstwrd didn’t think my debate on the monarchy with Ruth Dudley Edwards was podcast worthy, here’s a section of my opening statement.
The word missing from the end of that clip is “farcical”.
And here’s where it got personal and I was explicitly accused of being a “puritan” and implicitly accused of disloyalty to the nation. (Obviously you can listen to the whole thing on the Today FM website. It does get more heated)
I know I’m meant to be civil or whatever but I’m fucking tired of it. These people are so tedious.
All they want to hear is me say, “I will vote Labour whatever Daddy Starmer does. He’s great and I love him and I can’t wait for him to be Tony Blair without the charisma but all of the authoritarian instincts.”
Curiously this debate didn’t make it onto their podcast. I have never been paid to appear on The Last Word — I have by the BBC for instance — and somehow it was totally cool to let RDE go personal instantly. It was a cheap debate and set up to be a bun fight.
Nick Ferrari’s show used to try and jump me when I went on there and they still owe me £30 so I’ll never go on there again. Similarly, I might be off Today FM now that the producer gaslit me after her own colleague effectively apologised when he told me they’d booked RDE.
A respected Irish broadcaster DM’d me earlier to say he was surprised I stated so calm and to note that the radio stations are going *far more tabloid* than they were even 5 years ago. And it’s not like I can’t handle rough vibes — I used to go on George Hook’s show ffs.
Depends on who you think the audience are. They are writing for an angry minority — some of whom can be inspired to violence by stochastic terrorism — and broadcast producers who are so lazy and cheap that they lean on Sun and Mail lines.
… who will suddenly believe the Mail, Sun, Telegraph et al. when the subject of the abuse is someone they also dislike or when the campaign line is in their interests. Just as many people wouldn’t admit voting Labour after Iraq, many Tories have got a lot, lot *shyer.
There are a lot of people in the ‘middle’ who like to believe that they are above the Mail or Sun readers but bare their fangs when their interests are threatened just as quickly.