Friday, February 23, 2007

Question Time - Have You Seen This Man?

Question Time was enjoyable last night if you are a Nat. Poor George Foulkes was awful, making a fool of himself at one point by accusing the SNP of 'xenophobia' ( S&I passim), just seconds before he slated Alex Salmond for being 'London based'. Oops...

Nicol Stephen started promisingly enough, but he never seems to know when to shut up. In the end, vile self took over to turn in a waffly and forgettable performance. Annabel Goldie started quietly but came into it later, scoring points off of George Foulkes over crime (but did she really mean to say that Independence was 'not a priority'? - wow). Meanwhile, Alex Salmond was effective, winning the audience over early on and, maybe surprisingly in view of the red rag tendencies of wee George, kept the interruptions to a minimum.

But the star for me was Hardeep Singh Kohli. Not for him the usual celeb panellist cop out of regurgitating for each answer some variation on the theme of 'why can't we all be nice to eachother and have the politicians work together?'. He managed to be truculent, impassioned, thoughtful, honest, respectful and funny, often at times in the same sentance. He even got away with responding to the Edinburgh congestion charge debate by declaring 'I'm from Glasgow - I don't care', and lived to tell the tale! A fine performance - well done, sir.

And nice to see someone in the audience point out that McConnell had once more bailed out of a debate with Alex Salmond, leaving an unelected peer in his place. Wee George was left to splutter away about planted questions... rule number one, George - even if it is a planted question, you still answer it gracefully, even if you don't particularly see why on earth you should!


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Utterly insulting for Labour to put up an unelected peer, but good for the SNP. Keep him coming! Glad to see Alex wasn't too smug, but why on earth put George up - his reference to a 'white paper' in the Scottish Parliament betrays his utter ignorance of the institution. Understand wee Jack might be feart, but why didn't they put up someone like Margaret Curran?

Richard Thomson said...

Margaret Curran can be quite good one-to-one, but I think her manner with other participants in a panel debate often leaves a bit to be desired.

If she learned to sit quietly through other contributions instead of trying to needle people by chirruping away inanely, she'd probably be one of Labour's most effective performers.

Ewan Watt said...

Yes, Foulkes was truly dreadful. Thought Goldie and Salmond were pretty good, all round an interesting show.

Anonymous said...

The real question is what was he watching?

Iain said...

What a guy...still its nice to seem him on his own two feet and putting his criminal record for drunken assualt on women behind him as he leads Labour's march to victory (ahem!).

Good blog - I'll add a link over on http://smallnation.org/drupal

Richard Thomson said...

Cheers, Ian. I'll reciprocate in due course!