If you appear on TalkTV, you're a collaborator
No amount of appearance fees justifies it; doubly so if you're propping up Nadine Dorries.
Stanley was no fool and shot back at him, “Are you fucking joking?
One of our own has been murdered in a graveyard, had his dick hacked off and fed to a cat…”
Hide Her Name (2014) — Nadine Dorries
Nadine Dorries is to TV interviews what Nadine Dorries is to literature: a talent vacuum into which the helium of unjustified confidence has rushed. As part of the ongoing TalkTV jobs scheme for narcissists, ‘Nads’ — as her first interviewee Boris Johnson insisted on calling her — has been given a show. The hour on Friday nights is designed to ensure Jeremy Kyle, ‘Iron’ Mike Graham’s “plank of the week”, and Piers Morgan’s Unwatched are not the channel’s most mortifying output.
The Times — frequently an advertising pamphlet for Times Radio and TalkTV — had no review of this era’s Frost/Nixon, limiting itself to laughably straight-faced news stories with the comments closed. John Crace for The Guardian delivered one of his patented 100% joke-free ‘satirical’ rewrites.
Ed Power in a two-star review for The Daily Telegraph wrote of “the blinding light of Dorries’ obsequiousness” but still managed to conclude that the show “wasn’t an actively unpleasant place to pass the time.” Well, if Powers is used to Telegraph Christmas parties, I can see how he might come to that conclusion.
Inevitably, The Sun delivered undiluted promo-propaganda about the interview — advertorials without the polish — but it was actually two outwardly acidic reviews of the show that were most revealing about the rotten state of political reporting in the UK. Firstly, The New Statesman’s ‘media and gossip blog’ The Chatterer claimed:
… most of the journalists who joined TalkTV did not do so to become a propaganda outlet for Boris Johnson.
… and played dumb: “Was there news value to any of this?”
Secondly, Tom Peck of The Independent wrote:
TalkTV employs large numbers of excellent journalists, not one of whom whispered a word out of their social media accounts about a sit down prime-time interview with a former prime minister happening on their own fledgling channel, which obviously tells you everything you need to know about it. But even they probably didn’t realise how wise they’d been to keep quiet.
Who are these “excellent journalists” at TalkTV? If there is such a large number, Peck will, no doubt, have no trouble reeling off their names.
I’m sure there are people who work at TalkTV who have done credible work in the past but that credibility has been burned off by the white heat of their proximity to Tom “Olivia” Newton-Dunn (who relied on neo-Nazi sources for a now-deleted Sun front page); Jeremy Kyle (who has more blood on his hands than an overzealous Lady Macbeth); and Piers Morgan (who is Piers Morgan).
If it took the launch of Friday Night with Nadine for TalkTV staff to feel ashamed of their workplace, they have an almost superhuman tolerance for embarrassment or are perhaps equally as sociopathic as the Kyles and Morgans of this world.
Peck’s media class solidarity continues; he writes:
For those of us who are occasionally panel guests on these kinds of things, it is not uncommon for the host to interrupt you, to turn to be a different guest to ensure that balance is maintained.
Dorries had her own panel to ‘analyse’ her ‘interview’. Some of them gamely tried to insert a bit of balance themselves, to offer a bit of perspective, to rescue Dorries from herself. It didn’t work.
One of them dared suggest that Johnson’s character might have rendered him unfit for office. At this point, the actual host interjected to tell her, “Well I don’t agree with you there.”
Each of Johnson’s utterances were given the “BREAKING NEWS” treatment. The first, “PUTIN WILL NOT DROP A NUCLEAR BOMB” was somewhat undermined shortly after, when having been asked him what he likes to get up to in his spare time, and the same dramatic graphic was amended to read: “BORIS IS LEARNING HOW TO DRAW A COW.”
(It was this utterance that brought on the next segment, in which the three panellists, who I’m not naming because it just seems so unfair, were made to have a competition to see who could draw the best picture of a cow. One of them’s got to go back to work on Monday morning, actually running a think tank.)
The panel was Sebastian Payne (latterly of the FT but now heading up the Tory think-tank Onward); Charlotte Ivers (who’s on the News UK payroll as Times Radio’s political correspondent and a Sunday Times columnist); and former Labour Party advisor Scarlett MccGwire (who is a frequent guest on GB News and TalkTV). No member of that trio deserves Peck’s half-arsed witness protection arrangement.
Peck also live-tweeted the broadcast and wrote:
Seb Payne, Charlotte Ivers, doing their level best to insert some vague bit of balance and are being put back in their box by the *actual host* (who if left to her own devices would currently be selling off channel 4.
I’ve watched the programme too; here’s Payne’s first attempt “to insert some vague bit of balance”:
Dorries: So, Sebastian, he’s being very modest in the impact he’s had in persuading others to send more arms to Ukraine; do you think he’ll do more of that? Do you think people are listening to him?
Payne: I think so. And whatever happens to Boris Johnson next, I think Ukraine is such a big part of his political standing and will always be a part of his political legacy. And think he left Downing Street, he’s clearly gone all around the world to try and sell this message; he’s obviously been to Ukraine recently to see Vlodomyr Zelensky and I think even since you interview, Nadine, he’s been to the US and he’s been spotted on Capitol Hill with the speaker, with many other senior republicans, who are more sceptical about sending money to Ukraine. And I think Boris has actually been very outspoken in saying to these republicans, ‘This is a battle beyond just arms and one thing; it’s about liberal democracy, it’s about the values we stand for…’ and trying to appeal to them in a different way…
…you did highlight a very good point in that interview: At the very beginning when this happened, about this time last year, the Russian invasion, there was so much pushback from the kind of Whitehall groupthink and he pushed against that and I do think he deserves a lot of credit.
Payne was introduced by Dorries as “former Whitehall editor at the Finanical Times, Sebastian Payne, who wrote ‘The Fall of Boris Johnson’…” rather than the recently appointed director of a think-tank explicitly aligned with the Tory party. He wasn’t bundled into a van on Millbank and driven blindfolded to the TalkTV studio; he turned up of his own volition and no doubt took the appearance fee (which are large given the station’s struggle to get people to appear).
Near the end of this review, Peck writes:
Whose idea was it? Who thought it would be good, to have Dorries, palpably incapable of reading an autocue, conducting an interview, chairing a panel, or otherwise doing anything at all, sitting around telling Johnson how great he is, on an actual news channel where, for the rest of the week, actual credible journalists are going to have to carry on pretending that none of this is happening?
While he knows that Dorries is a free hit, Peck can’t take the risk of properly going for TalkTV; who knows when he might need a job at News UK? Or when he might looking for an appearance fee to offer his professional opinion from the TalkTV sofa?
At one point during the Dorries show, Payne said this:
When you’re doing political journalism, you’re trying to make your best guess at one story at any one time; you can’t always get everything right. Journalists know about half of what politicians know… we’re going down a dark corridor with open razor blades is how I think about it. When you’re doing that, you’re not going to get everything right; same with politicians.
Reporting isn’t a guessing game. Neither is analysis. And it’s probably a good thing that someone who thought of journalism as stumbling through the dark with razor blades is out of the game and now in the adult playpen of the think-tank world.
At no point during the show did any of the panels seriously challenge Dorries’ “Mr. Burns, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?” questions. They were validating the programme and the channel more generally by their presence: Ivers because she’s a News UK employee, Payne because he’s there to promote a Tory think-tank, and MccGwire because she’ll seemingly be a talking head whenever she’s asked.
Peck’s review furthers this legitimisation of TalkTV as an outlet; by pretending that the problem rests with Dorries — the individual clown — rather than the entire circus, he can be sure he’ll continue to be given admission to the big top. He also offers comfort to his readers, joking that at least ‘we’ aren’t like North Korea or Turkmenistan:
For anyone thinking this kind of thing, this brazen, shameless, and entirely corrupt embarrassment might make them angry, the full hour of the show was a blessed relief. Occasionally, one wonders what it must be like, actually to live in a fully corrupt state, which this country absolutely is not, but good lord, not for the want of trying of a hell of a lot of people.
Yes, we here in Britain don’t drink down the acrid piss-tasting vintage that can only be found in the Corruption region, we delight in Sparkling Croneyism instead.
The programme ended with the Vision On theme being played and the panel being asked to draw a cow — Johnson claimed bovine sketches are his current hobby — while Dorries fired questions at them and roasted their efforts…
… before she told them to try the wine they’d been served and declared that they were all “going to the pub”.
The producers, the panel, the reviewers of Dorries show are all collaborators. Dorries provides a convenient foil; a new bigger joke to distract from the parade of them that traipse through the TalkTV studio on a daily basis.
While writing this edition, I received a Twitter notification about an episode of The Trawl podcast that quoted one of my tweets. I listened to the show and at one point a host introduced an anecdote with the words: “I was on TalkTV this week…” This came after a long section rightly mocking the excesses of the right-wing press and decrying all things that are broken in Britain.
If you regularly appear on GB News or TalkTV, whatever your protestations of ‘reaching a different audience’ or ‘making the arguments’, you have a walk-on part in the pantomime. Those channels are the circus. If you appear on them, you cannot pretend you’re not also wearing the grease paint. No matter what The Independent’s sketch writer assures you.
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This story reminds me of On the Media's coverage of "the American" on Russia TV a year ago (https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-good-as-gold). (Though their portrait of someone "making the arguments" was fairly sympathetic.) I'm struck by how the Russians just employ a lot of shouting/interrupting and not the humiliation of sketching barnyard animals. That's certainly ... inventive.
But I like John Crace...