In a wonderfully apposite item in his Sunday Telegraph column yesterday, Oliver Pritchett wrote:
In my capacity as Visiting Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nether Wallop, I can announce the details of next year’s module on television and politics.
First, I will be dealing with the Theory and Practice of Shouting Questions at Politicians as They Walk to Their Cars. This will involve some on-the-spot practical experience and you are advised to spend time in the vacation familiarising yourselves with some notable pavements and trying out a few shouts, such as “Are you thoroughly ashamed of yourself, minister?” Or: “Have you been sacked?”
Students who perform satisfactorily in this part of the module will be allowed to move on to the second, more difficult discipline, involving a degree of technical expertise: How to Forget to Switch off the Interviewee’s Microphone.
There really is no point in shouting questions to politicians because they are inevitably ignored, a fact of life that the shouters accept. But it doesn’t stop them from doing it because it has become an embarrassing journalistic ritual, especially among TV news reporters.
I just watched two formal statements outside parliament by Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 committee, and Chris Grayling, leader of the house of commons. As each departed the shouters began.
There now appears to be a competition between journalists about (a) who can shout the loudest; (b) who can ask the silliest question; and (c) who can be the rudest.
They really should shut up. They are wasting their breath. The shouters may well argue that one day, just possibly, an MP will stop in his/her tracks, turn back and say something of enormous import. And pigs will fly.
NB: For the record, at City University London, where I lecture, we do not teach students the theory and practice of shouting to politicians. Nether Wallop university is clearly more in tune with the media zeitgeist!
