1. Jamie Oliver 37 per cent2. Shami Chakrabarti 21 per cent
3. George Galloway 16 per cent
4. Bob Geldof 10 per cent
5. David Cameron 9 per cent
6. Tony Blair 7 per cent
And to make matters worse, the Hansard Society's first Award for Opening Up Politics went to BBC1's late night political review This Week and the gruesome twosome Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo duly turned up collect their glass slab of an award. Hansard Society chief executive Clare Ettinghausen said: "We felt that This Week's combination of incisive political journalism delivered in a light-hearted manner, combined with an eclectic array of guests, made them worthy winners.'' What she ought to have said was "We're ashamed to give this award to two of the smarmiest people on TV who do little but take great delight in trashing the very political parties which brought them to prominence. We wouldn't dream of giving an award to a programme that brought an incoherent Shane McGowan onto its sofa to talk about, er, well we can't quite remember what cos we didn't understand a word of it."
The full awards programme is being broadcast on Saturday night. If those two awards are typical of what will be on offer I think I'll slip an old episode of Crossroads into the DVD player. Er, not that I've got one of course. No. No way...
I often wonder why This Week isn't broadcast on the net like the much-inferior Daily Politics.
ReplyDeleteThat's not dumbing down - that's sending common sense down the drain...
ReplyDeleteI'm sure George Galloway would be quite inspiring if you happened to be a cat.
ReplyDeleteI think that Dominic Grieves should get a honourable mention; he has been instrumental in both the 90-day detention defeat and the religious hatred defeat.
ReplyDeleteHe is also the nicest politician that I have met.
Bearing in mind that "inspiring" doesn't mean good, smart or useful & that there is so little in politics today that truly inspires this doesn't look worse than any list of the great & good one could come up with. But howcome Nick Griffin & Osama bin Laden, who really do inspire people, got left off?
ReplyDeleteI often wonder why This Week isn't broadcast on the net like the much-inferior Daily Politics.
ReplyDeleteBoring historical reasons, I'm afraid. I'm currently working on the This Week site and broadband stream - something I'm sure Iain will be delighted to hear. ;)