Lounge lizard: Andrew Neil. Photograph: David Sillitoe
With News At Ten sliding into light entertainment and Paxman grudgingly forced into "viewer participation" on Newsnight, it fell to one man to defend old-fashioned journalism at the BBC this year: Andrew Neil.
The former editor of the Sunday Times, "Brillo" (as he's been known in Private Eye since time immemorial) puts in a steady, workmanlike performance on The Daily Politics. But it's on his post-watershed The Week (which has just broken up for summer) that he has really come into his own. Now aged 57, he presides over the show like a crazed dictator in the twilight of his rule, tossing his largesse around as befits a man who lists his interests in Who's Who as "Dining out in London and the Côte D'Azur". Saddam and Ceaucescu fitted their palaces with gold toilets and cleared villages away to build the largest palaces on earth; Neil turns his studio into a casino, claims to be pumping the guests with oxygen and free booze and re-enacts pop videos, apropos of nothing.
Neil's real edge over rival shows (Sunday AM, Question Time) is that his guests are rarely current politicians. His regular foil, Michael Portillo, has been a quiet revelation on the show. Unpleasantly strident and oleaginous as a politician, his post-Westminster career has been like one long sigh of relief. Free of the straitjacket identity of "Tory boy dogged by gay rumours" he comes across as a humane thinker who shows an effortless, firm-handed empathy with Britain's underclass that David Cameron would give his right knacker for.
Neil's only possible undoing in future could be the fact that he's clearly got sex on the brain. His declarations that, in politics, "the girls are on top - and that's just the way we like it," are unpleasantly pervy. However, Brillo's fiefdom is a much-needed place. The show is refreshingly free of adherence to party lines, and remains a corner of the station that is forever 1986 (tellingly, he recently picked a Pet Shop Boys record on Desert Island Discs). A time when well-fed middle-aged gentlemen could set the world to rights before heading off to a Kensington nightspot to dance terribly with women half their age. Indeed, "we're off to Boujis nightclub," was Brillo's sign off the other week. "It's quite civilised now that Harry's off to Iraq..." For being such an unexpected televisual legend, a good night out's the least he deserves.
