Reality check

What Gordon needs now (whatever happened on Thursday night and Friday morning) is a bit of radio therapy. I don’t suppose he had time to listen to The Vote Now Show (Radio 4) in the rumbustious run-up to the election, but he’d have done well to tune in for a bit of a laugh and a health-inducing reality check. Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis’s nightly paean to the political shenanigans of the previous 24 hours took us back to the heyday of Week Ending, before the PC Brigade and/or Russell Brand made it so difficult to be funny, decent and pertinent all at the same time. I caught it most nights while subjecting myself to the rituals of flossing and found myself trapped in the bathroom, unwilling to miss a second of their sharp-talking comment on the surreal drama of an election without a plausible winner.

On the night after the Big Gaffe, or perhaps more accurately referred to as yet-another-ploy-to-make-us-forget-the-real-story (which is the economy, stupid), Punt and Dennis invited Kate Adie on to the show for her expert view on electioneering disasters. She reminded us how once upon a time such a blip would have been but a fleeting headline, rather than a major story, reminiscing how the esteemed Sir Roy Jenkins always used to mistake the camera crew who were following his campaign for the plebs he was supposed to be meeting, loftily calling out to them, ‘Good morning. My name is Roy Jenkins. I’d like to talk to you about SDP policies.’ Adie and her team would reply, ‘We’re not real people. We’re the BBC.’

Such self-deprecation would be unthinkable now among our current crop of self-important news-makers. As would the prospect of having to entertain half the population of these islands in an hour-long TV special — and at Christmas, too.