How to save BBC Question Time

“Has Covid castrated Question Time?” asked broadcaster Iain Dale recently on Reaction. The passing reader might have assumed this was a response to b*****s spouted on a programme increasingly prone in recent years to descent into post-pub car park verbals.

In fact, Dale was lamenting the loss of the audience and the guests socially distanced like a Rat Pack Christmas special, each on a stool two yards apart and a special guest joining live by satellite link.

He’s right, of course. A bit like live sport, Question Time thrives on the roar of the grease paint and the smell of the crowd. Both have suffered in the same way from Covid-induced absence. Without the partisan swell at the home end, the stiffening of the sinews, the sheer emotion that the crowd brings, we are condemned to a sterile training ground exercise in which everyone runs through their pre-rehearsed moves, does a lot of stretching and trots off to the bio-bubble afterwards without even the courtesy of a post-match swiftie with the opposition.

For QT, the very point is the public. It was born from the notion that this is their moment. A chance to take a pop at their masters by asking them, live and direct, whatever they fancied and on their terms without the intervention of proxies like journalists “asking what the public want to know.”

In fact, what the public wants to know can occasionally be both surprising and magnificently reductionist. That possibility provides the frisson on which the whole schtick has always depended. Again like sport, the thrill is uncertainty of outcome and without the disruptive influence of the crowd, the result is boringly predictable.

Whether that is the biggest threat to Question Time’s virility as Dale claims is, however, where he and I might differ.

You see, this is by no means the first time the programme has struggled. Its fear of emasculation, literal and figurative, is historical and I should know because I was the programme’s press officer for a two-season spell during the Peter Sissons years.

Sissons, the former ITN correspondent and newscaster, joined the BBC in 1989 and took over chairing Question Time shortly afterwards. It was his lot to assume the seat after Sir Robin Day, a national institution working for a national institution on a programme aspiring to be a national institution. In every way a BBC situation and one with which Peter struggled.

Never a natural BBC man, he was, very proudly, a Liverpool grammar school boy in what he regarded both privately and later publicly as a “soft left” public school world, a situation in which he claimed an unlikely kinship with the then BBC Director General, John Birt.

Sissons’ fears were given form in various running battles which foreshadowed to an extent the controversies surrounding current host Fiona Bruce’s appointment, such as female representation and panel quotas.

Nor was performance anxiety confined to the men. Editor Alexandra Henderson’s worries about the loss of prestige occasioned by Day’s departure were manifest. A fretfulness in no way diminished by the programme being shunted down the schedules to a late night slot.

The pressure to produce “news lines” to pump out to a largely indifferent media world and replicate the Today programme’s position in the news cycle was immense. In this, Henderson’s efforts were largely doomed.

Sir Robin had benefitted greatly from the heyday of Thatcher-era politics. Tear-ups between the likes of Norman Tebbitt and David Blunkett were great theatre. The audience too, suited, booted or bloused, was still shaking off the age of deference and among them all, Sir Robin snuffled, wheezed and rooted with the delight of a bulldog that had slipped its lead. This did not stop short at growling occasionally if anyone over-stepped the mark. And quite right too.

Sissons had no such luck. Audiences were becoming more rambunctious and the politicians had got wise to the potential for a public ambush. Preparations in the green room were often akin to a desperate pre-exam cram with politicians surrounded by their entourage planning and plotting answers against current events. The actual questions were always unknown to them but with due regard to the news, the location and the fact that there was a clue in “current affairs”, the politicos could largely guess what was coming.

For the most part, the participants got on quietly over the warm wine and bad satay. There were exceptions. John Prescott lurked and paced like a boxer in the warm up. Practising his combos, working his tense shoulders until the glove man came in to bind his hands and send him out.

The only thing Michael Heseltine practised was aloof hauteur, utterly convinced that no mere member of the peasantry was ever going to lay a glove on this aristocrat of the ring. Not with his footwork. Charles Kennedy, by some distance the most natural with people, was most relaxed, happy in the view that merely disagreeing with someone wasn’t grounds to fall out.

Kennedy took his place in Question Time history with his disarming frankness. Recording obeyed a format which saw Sissons make an audience plea for conciseness using an old joke about a small ad in the Press and Journal (‘McTavish dead. Cortina for sale’). There would be a warm-up question and then the audience would listen to Big Ben tolling for somebody’s political career and then the Six O’Clock News on Radio 4 before the show was recorded as live – the lag before transmission preventing any risk of libel.

Asked in the warm-up what was the biggest lie they’d ever heard in politics, only Kennedy poked fun at his own party: “Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government?” he asked in faux innocence and admirable self-awareness.

Sissons, meanwhile, did sterling work holding up the Question Time audience figures to a greater or lesser extent over four years. Eventually departing the BBC in 2009 having been increasingly marginalised, he suggested, by “ageism”. Sissons’ Parthian shot was to point out that the BBC had been “twitchy” about letting him interview Labour’s Harriet Harman on the basis he might prove critical.

More prophetically still, his autobiography that the BBC was left-leaning “in its DNA”, overly taken with the opinions of The Guardian, biased towards women and enamoured of the European Union. All of which concatenate nicely in the conversations which surround QT now just as they have always done.

The BBC, meanwhile, had done what it always has when it feels its symbols of virility like Question Time are struggling to muster much more than a semi with the public. It pops the little pill marked ‘Dimbleby’ to stiffen resolve, morale and self-regard. In fairness, he kept it up for 25 years.

His stint came with greater sure-footedness – here was a star playing at home – but many of the same problems. The politicians still said little to disturb the headline writers and, a little like a 1980s football match, there was more going on in the crowd than on the field.

The programme began to play decreasingly to political insight and cogent debate and more to social media excerpts which highlighted audience reaction (Boo! Hooray! Like! Dislike!) and panellist discomfiture – tricoteuses jeering their rulers to the guillotine.

To that binary bonfire of social media politics where nuance is burned on a pyre of misplaced certainty, querulousness and lack of respect for an honest view, honourably held, Brexit came running with a gallon of unleaded.

Sissons’ prophecies had proven right. As the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) empirical analysis has shown and the BBC’s incoming chairman Richard Sharp has effectively conceded, the BBC couldn’t be trusted near Brexit, and QT was loading the panels to favour Remain.

What’s more the BBC had done the best and worst possible thing in running to the comfort blanket of an institutional broadcasting figure. Oh, he gave them longevity, but the Dimbleby who started was not the Dimbleby who finished and his interventions became less paternal and more irascible like a grandfather who can’t bear the shrieking and the loud music.

Moreover, the best referees go unnoticed. They know they’re not the point. Theirs is a natural authority based on consistency, a reciprocated respect for the players and a feeling for the ebb and flow. Competent anonymity is the key and the BBC’s continued belief that a great broadcaster is the same as a good chairman is very much part of the problem.

The increasing rowdiness of the panellists and audience is, indeed, a reflection of our polarised times and, to a degree, egged on by the addition to the panels of entertainers who disguise their professional skill at audience manipulation as visceral and unconsidered reaction to the artifice of politicians. They are rarely honest brokers and their views often tiresomely predictable.

Managing this is a skill and while Fiona Bruce plainly does draw on her experience of a life beyond the newsroom via Antiques Roadshow – the greatest tensions there coming in the respectable avarice of discovering whether Granny’s chamber pot is, in fact, Ming Dynasty – but she isn’t beyond what might be termed “crowd control”.

Her touchiness is more in defence of her employer which, with journalistic conceit, is happier calling others to account than being held accountable. Meanwhile, audience figures fall.

So if QT is being castrated, it is the product of the most ghastly self-mutilation. Some sort of surgery might yet save the programme’s potency. Here’s my advice for the show’s producers:

Understand what the chair’s there for – and it isn’t to draw applause. It’s about the players. On stage and in the audience. They’re there to help a group achieve a result. In this case a debate in which illuminating answers are given to questions posed and strength of argument tested.

Fair enough – this must be balanced against a need to entertain. It’s TV after all so let it flow when it fits the brief of informing, educating and entertaining. Otherwise, shut ‘em up and move it on.

Entertainment does not extend to dangerous gang tackles. Pile-ons are not edifying – stop them. They inform nobody and lack respect for the people who you invited on set.

Again, this is TV. So forget how it might look on social media. Nobody pays a licence fee for Twitter and click-bait is a currency with no value. You’re better than that!

Assorted actors, jongleurs, rock stars, comedians and related trades have their place. The antic jester saying what nobody else dares is valuable. But with most, chances are we know already what they’ll say and probably already have. They’re not short of a stage and a little is enough. Johnny Rotten’s views on drug legislation might be mildly amusing but neither he nor we take them seriously. If you don’t stand, you can’t deliver.

Frame the terms of engagement for panellists. When asked a question, they will always cover what they agree with, what they don’t agree with and they will propose a solution.

Get the panel in the studio early – “Disco style”, as they say on Newsnight. Each invited to get off the wall and do their turn in the middle. In the metaphorical sense, contact counts.

Do balance the programme. Selecting the audience on the basis of party allegiance means that between the SNP, Labour, LibDems, Greens, Plaid Cymru and all points Left, the poor bloody Tory is bound to be outnumbered unless Farage is drawing fire with his amusing Mr Toad impression. Toot! Toot!