In an ideal world, discussions of the vacancy at the helm of Question Time wouldn’t need to be prefaced: “They have to get a woman this time.” But in the world we’re in, where these choice current affairs spots are distributed like mini-papacies, it’s a driving necessity, otherwise it’ll be more yik-yakking patriarchy until 2050.
Yet it’s hard to get excited about generic womankind, and it wasn’t until the pointillist daubs of femaleness clarified into the face of Fiona Bruce that I was able to muster active enthusiasm. I can see her bringing the spirit of Antiques Roadshow to the format, welcoming the audience and their treasured opinions, in the family for generations, turning them over, inspecting them respectfully, inviting expert view, delivering the verdict: I’m sorry, this opinion is not a diamond. It’s paste, I’m afraid.
While it’s in the business of upsetting its own apple cart, Question Time, and indeed the BBC generally, could use a few more changes. Its preference for the voices of the fringe right (Julia Hartley-Brewer, Jordan Peterson) over those of the likable, commonsense left is well documented. Caroline Lucas, for instance, has had a fraction of the appearances Nigel Farage has.
These examples – a woman who commemorates acts of terrorism with childish and defamatory accusations that Corbyn applauded them, and a man who is the poster-philosopher for the “incel” movement, seeking to restore women to chastity with cod evolutionary biology and negging remarks about their hair – are just taken from the past three weeks. You don’t even need wifi any more for evidence of this nonsense.
However, I do not share the view that it speaks of a rightwing bias within Question Time or the wider corporation. There are a number of contributory factors: first, a lack of genuine diversity among its staff, true since its inception but intensified by the 21st-century wheeze known as “internships” to ensure that only the wealthy can enter the mainstream media. This gives the BBC a constant fear of its own homogeneity. “We have to have Nigel Farage on, because none of us can speak to those people.” Meanwhile it recoils from the radical left, like sheep from an electric fence: what if it doesn’t respect their version of progress? What if it gives them a shock?
Genuinely, the only answer to this is more diversity – of class and race, not just gender – across the piece, such as a responsible public service broadcaster would have already sought.
More importantly, though, they are driven to invite on contrarians by the constant fear that the format is boring; as the fear intensifies, the contrarians must be ever more extreme, and soon they’ll have Tommy Robinson on, while a bland BBC Twitter account insists that the vital work of situating child sexual exploitation in a totally bogus ethnic context must, of course, take precedence over any of those boring lefties with their mad cat-woman quest for actual things that are true.
And here they are indeed in a fix: a panel of the apolitical golden years – Andy Burnham, Ed Vaizey, Nick Clegg, all agreeing that children must be lifted out of poverty and their feckless parents ought to take responsibility for themselves – was not interesting. The highest audience figures in recent memory were indeed when Nick Griffin appeared.
You could argue that maintaining decency in the public sphere was more important than the audience figures for any format, tired or not. I, however, would be more emollient, and say there are better ways to liven these stiffs up a bit.
They could borrow the siren system from QI, and have a series of buzzers set off by key phrases: dog-whistle racism met with an actual high-pitched whistle; a foghorn for the phrase “If you’re asking me (insert question that nobody asked), then what I’d say is (prepared answer)”; a bazooka for any statement on Europe that would be impossible meaningfully to enact. They could bring more of a sense of consequence by getting live-feed reactions from the nation fed back to the panellists, to see who cracked first and offered to nationalise the royal family.
Let’s not give up on Question Time altogether: it may be like Doctor Who or James Bond, in need of nothing but a regeneration.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
