The “defining issue” of this election, according to Nick Robinson in his Today pulpit, is young against old, one generation against another. But Nick forgets to mention that, at 53, he’s one of the young bloods of political interviewing still awaiting their sumptuous media inheritance.
That divide was starkly evident last week, when Jeremy Paxman came under media fire for his May and Corbyn interviews. “Snorting and whinnying like a disdainful racehorse, he suddenly felt both tired and tiresome,” said the Telegraph. “If anything, his relentless interrupting actually appeared to get the studio audience on Mr Corbyn’s side.” And the Guardian wholly agreed about this “shouty interruptor”.
Was it Paxman himself who had gone out of fashion – or was it the Paxman style? Was Paxman, returning to the colours at 67, simply old hat?
And there’s a question to ask more broadly – especially during a campaign when the faltering alternatives to interviews, so-called debates, are like one of those West End shows where programme notes tell you half the cast are off sick: routine dramas where understudies bellow their lines.
There are five frontline interrogators in play this time. Andrew Neil (68); John Humphrys (73); Robert Peston (57); Andrew Marr (57); and David Dimbleby (78). That’s five white males with 333 years of experience between them and an average age approaching 67 (the controversially imposed retirement age for Oxford dons, as it happens).
Now, is it a coincidence that the most-reported interview of the week was Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour finding Jeremy Corbyn a little forgetful on childcare billions? Or that Barnett is 32? There’s no need to construct a great thesis on one encounter (especially one overblown by the BBC in obvious pursuit of the plaudits LBC’s Nick Ferrari accumulated at Diane Abbott’s expense). Nevertheless, there is a problem here that the corporation itself implicitly recognises as it hauls in Jonathan Blake from Radio 1’s Newsbeat to co-host a Newsnight evening on the generation gap with Kirsty Wark (62).
It isn’t just that the dominant voice of politics on the major terrestrial TV channels and Radio 4 is middle-aged and beyond. It’s the implicit assumption, too many times, that the political bastards are in the studio to lie and be taken down. There is always an excuse to interrupt – and never enough time for a halfway relaxed conversation.
Yet that is the great lack in modern election broadcasting. In two- or even 10-minute slots, you talk in headlines. U-turn, U-turn, wobble, wobble. It would be more useful to see two politicians from opposite parties sit down for an hour and discuss, say, social care between them (as would happen almost automatically in France or Spain). It would be instructive to see the personalities and challenges of change laid out calmly at length.
Would anybody watch? They do just over the Channel. And there’s no sense there of the old guard of top “talent” hanging on. It’s a dynamic blend of young and old. It is possible to move the presentation of politics, as well as politics itself, forward, into an age where a Macron transformation or a Podemos upheaval is possible, where young people are driving forces too: an age where struggles with debt and housing are shared by the interrogator, not visualised second-hand across affluent decades.
But meanwhile we have Nick Robinson and Tom Bradby (50) awaiting their turn. One day after that, perhaps, Emily Maitlis (46) and Mishal Husain (44) will have their chance. But not this week, as we dance a generation game around Mrs M’s magic money tree.
• Among the flood of memories of Roger Ailes, only begetter of Fox News (and prolific begetter of molestation suits by female employees), this vignette from Tobin Smith, a veteran Fox pundit, is one to cut out and keep.
His target viewer: “‘I created a TV network for people 55 to dead,” Ailes told Smith. And they looked like? “They look like me … White guys in mostly red-state counties who sit on their couch with the remote in their hand all day and night.” Great viewing expectations? “They want to see you tear those smug condescending know-it-all east coast liberals to pieces … limb by limb … until they jump up out of their La-Z-Boy and scream ‘Way to go Toby … you killed that libtard!’”
Stop press: For the first time since the millennium turned, MSNBC has beaten Fox and CNN in audience share among prime viewers under 54. Call it the Trump factor, if you will: or the revenge of the libtards.
