Georgie Porgie’s Pudding of Spies

I used to have a lot of time for George Galloway, the former Labour party stalwart who told Tony Blair and the American Senate exactly what he thought about their conduct in Iraq.

“Gorgeous George”, as he was known, is one of the last remaining parliamentarians with any kind of character, a true orator and a fierce debater, a rarity in these dark days as the real people running the country have the reins of power snatched away by the men in grey suits, the automaton lobby fodder who have as much to do with the real world as a bag of Martian spanners.

Sadly though, as the mainstream media becomes ever more hype-obsessed, George has started to believe his own propaganda, and thinking that just because he could beat the questions of interrogators and senators, his next obvious step was to show them how it was done, and get his own show.

So he turned to Iran’s Press TV, an Al Jazeera wannabe set up by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and which therefore shares his tenuous grasp on reality, and the meeting of these two particular minds has produced unbelieveable results:

Normally at this point I would launch into a detailed, nay forensic, dissection of everything that is wrong with this interview – however in this case bandwidth limits prevent me from doing so – yes, it is that bad.

The line of questioning, the bias, the demenor and the method are so toe-curlingly, cringe-inducing that the only reason I stuck it out to the end was to see whether the interviewee would make it that far as well.

Fair play to him, he did, and in the face of George’s pathetic whinging and unsubtle attempts at provocation, did so with good grace and honour – a lesser man would have walked away earlier, or punched the interviewer in the face.

This is an object lesson in bad television and bad journalism, it breaks pretty well every rule from conduct to objectivity, and for my part I will be using it in future to demonatrate to trainees exactly how not to conduct an interview.

[Edit/PS: I wonder whether Ofcom will be investigating this now]