Delayed blogging of Question Time Extra

Okay, so this blog stutters carries on by popular(ish) demand. Many thanks for the appreciative comments left, and the handful of emails I've received. Really, I'm blushing.

For those who somehow contrived to miss my stellar appearance on BBC News 24's peak-time blockbuster hit, Question Time Extra, you can relive my 25 minutes of glory via the wonders of the web here. Rarely have I watched the whole of the main Question Time show with such dedicated concentration as last night, especially knowing that I was about to appear live on air to try and make sense of the Lib Dems' position this week on Europe. I gave it my best shot.

Actually the whole thing was made much easier by (i) Shirley Williams' barnstorming appearance to defend the Lib Dems' pro-European stance. When she wants to be she's an absolute star. And (ii) sharing the panel with ConservativeHome.com's Tim Montgomerie - I doubt there's a single issue we agree on, yet he's wonderfully polite and good company. (Tim - my mum thought you were excellent as well, by the way.)

Studio 60 - hot or not?

I’ve just caught up with the first four episodes of West Wing-creator Aaron Sorkin’s new NBC show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. And, no, it’s not as good as TWW, but that’s a pretty tough gig to follow. Sorkin can take heart from Joseph Heller:

"When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as Catch-22 I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'"

It’s a problem Sorkin acknowledges up front in this exchange between Bradley Whitford’s not-Josh-Lyman-no-sirree-no Studio 60 producer, Danny Tripp, and NBS president, Jordan McDeere, who has just bigged-up their new show to the press:

Josh Danny: You raised the bar a little high.
Jordan: Clear it.

Anyway, here’s my likes/dislikes of Studio 60 to date:

Great:

1. It’s. Aaron. Sorkin. Writing. For. Telly. Again. If you can’t rejoice at that, you are spiritually dead. Fact.

2. Matthew Perry is a triumph as Matt Albie, currently acting everybody else off the screen (including Bradley). Yeah, so he’s still pretty much the wise-cracking Chandler Bing - but he’s a lairy, haggard, Vicodinned-up Chandler, and I can dig that.

3. The chemistry between Josh and Chandler Danny and Matt sooo works. Even the homo-erotic stuff is ironically hat-tipped as they self-consciously slug it out in the sand.

4. Snappy, whiz-crack dialogue rants, like this: “there's always been a struggle between art and commerce, but now I'm telling you art is getting its ass kicked, and it's making us mean, and it's making us bitchy, and it's making us cheap punks, and that's not who we are.”

5. Or this: “You can blame the blogs, but I blame The New York Times. They quote the blogs like they've found a source. CNN quotes the blogs. 'Beverly, Editor-in-Chief of the BeverlyBlog, says the Fed should cut interest rates to counter the drop in consumer spending over the past fiscal-' who the hell is Beverly? I don't believe in free speech, I think it should require a license. What happened to credentials. What happened to being impeccably credentialed, and when did elite stop being a good word?”

Not Great:

1. No really likeable women: no CJ Cregg, no Abi Bartlett, no Donna Moss. I guess we’re meant to root for Jordan. But I can’t.

2. Sarah Poulson’s Harriet Hayes, one of Studio 60’s leads, and a good ole’ southern Baptist girl, principled but not uptight (giving Sorkin the kind of cover from the Christian right that TWW’s Ainsley Hayes gave him from the Republican right). She’s supposed to be Matt’s love interest, but there’s zero chemistry. She’s supposed to be hilarious, but forgot to bring the funny. As Mandy was to TWW’s first season, so is Harriet to Studio 60.

3. The show is lacking the wise patriarch figure of a President Bartlett, who could close an episode with his ‘Jerry Says’ spiel of liberal enlightenment. Steven Weber’s NBS chairman Jack Rudolph might become that guy, but Sorkin seems conflicted whether to make him into God or Satan.

4. Erm, not too sure quite how to put this without blaspheming against Sorkin, but… Studio 60 just isn’t funny enough. Not so much the programme as a whole, but the show-within-the-show Studio 60: gags are laboured and sketches drag. Not as badly as the lethargic Letterman (folk still watch him?), but, compared to the pin-sharpness of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, Studio 60 sadly trails.

5. It’s behind-the-scenes telly, not behind-the-scenes politics. I’m interested in both, but I care about the latter. It never mattered whether or not I understood why Leo was so pissed with the House majority leader’s attempts to tack on a reservation to the Appropriations Committee’s Social Security (No Pensioner Left Behind) Bill (or whatever) - I got the issues, I wanted Leo to win. Not sure I can get so fired up about whether Matt can nail his ‘cold open’ for Studio 60.

Curious? Watch the first 10 minutes of Episode 1, Pilot, here.

Everybody needs good soaps

In today’s thegrauniad, Mark Lawson reflects on 20 years of that most iconic of soap operas, Neighbours.

"The huge UK success of the show can be attributed to the strong presence of the young but also to another element rarely seen in Crossroads and Coronation Street: the sun."

True, though in its earliest incarnation (way back when it was broadcast on Australia’s Seven Network), Neighbours’ storylines were much darker - for example, focusing on the cruel dashing of Shane Ramsay’s Olympic diving hopes following a spinal injury, and the tough-love bullying of his dad, Max, who was trying to live his own thwarted dreams through his son.

Perhaps this dark-underbelly psycho-probing helps explain why Neighbours was initially such a failure, rescued by its transfer to Network Ten, and the introduction of teen heart-throbs, like Kylie and Jason.

Though (as you may be able to tell) I was a child-fan of Neighbours - even if it did help globally export that most irritating of verbal constructs, AQI - it is not my all-time favourite soap.

The top two places would have to belong - as is my liberal wont - to more, erm, minority tastes, both made by Granada.

Revelations was broadcast in 1994 in only three ITV regions. Created and written by Russell T Davies, and featuring lesbian vicars and conniving bishops, the words most commonly associated with it are ‘ironic’ and ‘camp’ (what a surprise). But as it filled the Prisoner in Cell Block H hole in ITV’s schedule, this seemed entirely apt.

Night and Day lasted slightly longer, with 80 hours broadcast on ITV between 2001 and 2003. Had it been on Channel 4, it would have been a critical and commercial success: outrageous plotting, witty writing, and a stellar array of acting talent. (Including the really rather lovely Stephanie Leonidas.)

Night and Day’s self-consciously arty direction - ironic intercutting, musical montages, flashback fever and comic campery - lives on, however, in Holloyoaks, which owes much to the trail blazed by its short-term rival. Here's a taster.

The perils of live telly

So I wasn’t going to blog about this…

Last Monday was my first time on live telly, on BBC News 24, where I was asked to give my reflections on the opening day of the Lib Dem conference, alongside a political correspondent for the Financial Times.

The interviewer, James Landale, asked her a question; then he asked me a question (a different question to the one he’d said he would ask, but what the heck). And then he reverted to my fellow interviewee - who looked queasy, staggered slightly, and then fainted. Live on air.

It’s fair to say I was caught off-guard (as you can see from this still). Together with Mr Landale, we (sort of) caught her mid-fall, and then there was a split second when we both thought the same thing - do we carry on?

Quite rightly, the channel’s editors intervened, and cut straight back to the News 24 studio in some confusion.

As I say, I wasn’t going to mention any of this here (it just didn’t seem fair). But two things prompt me to do so.

First, I see the BBC has seen fit to broadcast the moment on its Storyfix download, which you can watch here (it’s about a third of the way in).

To my embarrassment and shame, I emerge from the incident looking utterly heartless, rather than serenely gallant (as I had hoped, and mis-remembered) - like the kind of cheap politician who would step over his own grandmother’s corpse if she lay between him and a photo-op. My only defence is that it happened very quickly, and that I was acutely conscious this was being broadcast in real-time.

The second reason I'm now telling all is that the journalist who fainted wrote a lovely e-mail to me last week, which I’d like to share:

I don't know if you remember me, but I was the falling body that interrupted your moment of glory on BBC News 24 on Monday evening in the Metropole Bar.

This is just a short note to say sorry that my unexpectedly crashing blood pressure came between you and Mr Landale's penetrating questions - I told James later that he should have just stepped over me and carried on asking you what you thought about things. Sky would have done, I reckon!

And several of Ming's aides said I'd introduced a great way of avoiding the difficult questions on policy.

Anyway, I've heard you on just about every broadcast outlet since then, so well done, and I clearly haven't killed off a burgeoning career.

Regards, and please feel free to use the video clip and this letter on your site if you feel like it - I'm absolutely fine and won't be offended at all. It was apparently a television first, and James said (I can't remember any of it) that you did at least get to answer one question before I did the drama queen bit.

'Nuff respect.

PS: Rob Fenwick has oh-so-kindly uploaded my moment of un-glory to YouTube here.