If your fifteen year old son listened to two people talking on the radio, commented ‘I really want to punch that guy in the face‘, and you knew that one of the two people was UKIP’s Nigel Farage, what odds would you give that it was the other guy he wanted to punch ?
Congratulations to Steven Nolan for his impressive achievement on R5 tonight. Following on from the Question Time attacks, Nolan waded straight into the attack with the same theme (‘rude Nigel’) and interrupted Farage continually (‘No, you didn’t … that’s a lie ..”) to the point where it was hard for him to ever finish a sentence.
I was amused by the bit where Nolan kept repeating ‘what was Van Rumpuy doing between 1993 and 1997 ?’ – as if Nolan would have had a clue before the researchers gave him the notes.
If Nolan had wanted to attack rudeness, he could have tackled his compatriot Colin Murray, who a few minutes before had used a four-letter word to describe a Welsh rugby coach’s (imagined) half-time talk.
And on the subject of Question Time, I see BBC favourite Janet Street Porter attacked Farage for racism. Strangely, for such an anti-racist, Ms Street Porter left her native London and now chooses to live in a white and monocultural part of the UK. As, strangely, does BBC favourite Billy Bragg. Not to mention Woman Sour’s ‘Jeni’ Murray. Most odd.
(With apologies to David Vance, twenty-five years coverage of the Troubles gave me a bit of an allergy to highly opinionated Ulstermen who love the sound of their own voices – the Seventies in particular providing a surfeit of such. Radio 5 already has a perfectly good one in Alan (‘I don’t want to criticise the referee, but his performance tonight was abysmal‘) Green. Do we really need two more, or couldn’t we swap Murray and Nolan for Vance?)