Question Time comes tonight from Huddersfield in the Colne Valley – where the surrounding hills provide a stunning view of the permanent yellow smog over the town. To the east lies the tourist attractions of the ICI complex, various shopping complexes and Leeds Road – the main escape route – which is lined by a selection of everything’s-a-pound shops, Netto, Lidl, and derelict buildings.
Who is actually on the panel this week? Let’s run it as a competition.
Okay: John Redwood. Okay, no prize for knowing him. Wikipedia reckons Norman Baker is either a Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Transport or the navigator on Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra, Ra II and Tigris reed boat expeditions. The explorer would be more interesting.
Rachel Reeves is apparently a Labour MP who is so unbelievably obscure that in her biography under “Personal” it only tells us that she moved house in 2006 and who her sister is. Yes, really.
Fern Britton is someone who was last spotted when ‘retiring’ from daytime television two years ago.
David Mitchell? No idea. A Tory MP who stepped down in 1983? A cricketer who played for Devon? Once? Or this murderer hung in Barbados in 2000? The studio might get a bit smelly if so.
No, really…I give up. Who is he?
The LiveBlog will also stay open for the bizarreness of This Week with Andrew Neil, and Michael Portillo. They are joined on the Sofa of Mediocrity by Postman Prat…Alan Johnson.
David Vance, TheEye and David Mosque will be moderating the abuse here from 10:30pm. See you later!
Dear ASE
You cheeky fuck. Huddersfield is not ‘in the Colne Valley’ but in the Colne Valley constituency – an arbitrary nomiative that means as much round here as Buckstones or Scapegoat Hill. 2nd – it’s Zeneca and not ICI and their workforce has dropped to about 1,500 from the 20,000 in heyday, 3rd -more listed buildings than anywhere else except Plymouth & London – pop that within one’s pipe and smoke it. 4th – Fair play, there are a lot of pound shops but that’s the local planning department having ideas (brown envelopes!). 5th – more millionaires in Farnley Tyas than Cheadle Hume. 6th – Glad Barry Shearman isn’t on – good grief; Kirklees has been stitched up and the Boundary Commission may take Shearman down but it will have very little effect on Kirklees owning Dewsbury & Batley when it’s only Hudds that’s nice.
Hmmm….fair play but have accidently lived here all my days and nowhere is more than 20 minutes from nowhere – scenery & buildings are alright, ta.
Hmm…
Just realised – in the Huddersfield constituency – McCartney took Colne Valley from Labour. Colne Valley is Last of the Summer Wine yocals.
And you’re wrong there. Hudds is the confluence of the Colne Valley and the Holme Valley. The Colne valley was where the mills really dominated, the Holme Valley was where they have/had been growing for hundreds of years. The Colne Valley is mills, Methodism, Luddism and Kier Hardie. The Holme Valley is CofE, Liberal (old-style) and wine bars (Holmfirth).
Lay off Huddersfield. This is a town with a damned fine history, both economic and political. Mind you, it desperately needs to be freed from the dead artificially power-grasping hand that is ‘Kirklees’.
Northerners. If they could afford the chip for the other shoulder at least they would be balanced. Almost as bad as the Scotch. Almost.
…and the Welsh
Dweudwch hynny unwaith eto byt! bydd rhaid i fi’ch sorto chi ma’s!
It’s knowing they’re not Yorkshire that makes ’em all so mad. 5 minutes up the road is the highest hill to the Urals and the Rockies latitude.
What has Scotch whisky got to do with Northerners?
There is nothing wrong with Northeners, Southerners, Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish, we all have one thing in common. We are all British. That is something you cannot aquire by just buying a passport.
O ! let us not, like snarling curs,
In wrangling be divided,
Till slap come in an unco loon
And wi’ a rung decide it.
Be Britain still to Britain true,
Amang ourselves united ;
But never but by British hands
Maun British wrangs be righted.
Robert Burns
i think david mitchell must be from the mitchell and webb look or show or something like that. sneering lefty tick, uses ‘comedy’ shows to show disgust of tories and cameron tick, writes snooty columns for the guardian tick. if it is him, he is albeeba incarnate. the perfect beeboid. watch him deliver his lines and sit back with a smug expression on his face.
Correct that’s him. With that horrid sneery little voice and that awful hair. Would love to give him a slap.
The only decent thing Mitchell has done is Peep Show – the writing is wonderful and everyone thinks he wrote it but he didn’t. You can tell because the Mitchell and Wenn show which he does write is rubbish.
Do you realise that Fern Britton was a Beeboid long before she hit that sofa that you say she vacated a couple of years ago?
Yes, indeedy, a Beeboid reporter, newsreader, presenter etc.
Congrats to everyone who actually managed to watch this show I don’t know how you do it. I caught a little under 5 minutes near the start of the show and heard that Labour woman MP prattle on about both the UK and Greece needing strategies for growth and how spending cuts weren’t the answer. At this point the studio audience were moist with excitment and burst into applause. At that point I could take no more and turned off in disgust at the utter stupidity that is modern British politics. I’m starting to think I need to buy a shotgun and stock up on canned goods. because we are going to be in for a rough ride in the next few years.
I toughed it out. Mitchell was way out of his depth having to work off script. On the public sector pensions he almost caught himself out by starting with the statement that unfortunately there’s no money but then went into a wandering monologue about the word unfair, using it about thirty times.
I think his primary concern was to try and stay away from contentious answers so he doesn’t lose audience share and hit his Chrstmas DVD sales by alienating people.
Then we had the fireman bemoaning the lack of negotiation in pensions reform and complaining about the idea that the coalition were just rogering their decision through. This too was an outrage until he we got his conclusion that the private sector should provide more money and that it should just be taken off them.
On Greece, the most sense came from not from the panel or the oh so up themselves audience members but the lady in the front row who identified the stupidity of having such divergent economy types being forcibly reconciled. She also question what the point was of loaning money to a nation that already will never be able to pay the money already loaned to it.
Then we had the Afghan withdrawal question. The question was would a withdrawal mean the loss of over 300 british lives was in vain. Cue the outrage from some audience members of the thousands of innocents slaughtered by British troops by those who more identify with their counterparts in faith than in Britain when it suits them.
Absolutely no point to this programme whatsoever!
It`s as if the BBC will only let their caricatures on if they fit through the cut out holes-lefty, clever clogs,tory,liberal and labour.
The audience have got to be suspect-would YOU giver up an evening to hear the well rehearsed platitudes of the elite so you can clap the buggers in person?
We know pretty much all that the BBC will be saying for the next few weeks-and all positions we`ll be expected to adopt for them too.
So we needn`t bother or get our ulcers going-nice summer evenings and let the whole thing implode. They couldn`t manage us in the good times and they sure as hell won`t manage us through the bad times either!
First, I’ve no idea where Huddersfield is. Second, I’m entirely happy not knowing. MaybeitsbecauseI’maLundoner. Now to the question.
Would Question Time would be better WITHOUT an audience? You know, just debate the question? What does the audience contributes to the debate, when it is routinely skewed. It’s an unfair trial, with a nobbled jury. First the BBC skews the panel, then it skews the audience.
I would only watch if the audience places were allocated to paid up members of the main political parties, so they can howl each other down. All we want is a bare-knuckle fight between Left and Right, with a 50% chance the right arguments win the day. Political Smack Down.
What we get instead is a show trial, with token balance, leading to the predetermined verdict. Never forget this was the programme who’s vile anti-american leftwing audience shouted down the former US ambassador in the wake of 9/11.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1544897.stm
Greg Dyke may have apologised but nothing has changed.
If there was a competition as to who’s smug face would you most like to slap (Rule of Law temporarily suspended) Dimbleby would be somewhere near the top of my list.
Well I’ve had it with the BBC. TV licence was cancelled last week and the TV goes to the skip before the end of the month! I can’t bear to watch QT anymore, even on iPlayer – it’s full of leftish rubbish.
Well done. I ended my subscription BBC subscription recently.
No need to put your TV in the skip though.
There are other channels to watch.
Yes, congratulations! I gave up my TV licence several months ago and removed the tuner out of my TV for good measure. I’ve never looked back since.
There are some good parts to the BBC – e.g. Natural History Unit in Bristol, but on the whole its a dreadfully run organisation (full of leftists with massive chips on their shoulder) and the soon it is discarded to the dustbin of history the better.
Norman Baker thinks Blair killed Dr David Kelley. Standard QT kinda guy.