DIMBLE BIAS

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I've had a long-standing allergy to watching the BBC's Question Time. The audiences always used to seem so patently stacked against anyone from the centre-right that I would find myself getting too annoyed. So I gave up watching. Over the last year or so I've watched it at one remove through reading the hilarious commentaries on it on the Biased BBC website, with only a couple of forays into watching the programme itself. (Can you guess which ones?) I've now given it a proper try, and it's no so gruesome after all - if you're watching out for bias. The bias of David Dimbleby is a thing to behold.
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Now, it's true that he gave Labour's Jacqui Smith a hard time on expenses (though when an audience member asked about the claim for pornographic films he tried to move on, saying "No, I think we've been around this"), and got in a sarcastic comment about Gordon Brown and the recovery-that-isn't ("You're saying Gordon Brown got the Americans out of the recession but can't get us out of recession"), but it was his treatment of the Conservative member of the panel - and the only one who wasn't from the political left-of-centre - that really got my goat. For most of the time he did not mock Jacqui Smith, but he certainly mocked Cheryl Gillan on several occasions.
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Watch the programme and see Dimbleby pull a face (at 6.38) - a mock double-take - at Cheryl Gillan's answer to his first interruption. The topic here was Blair and the EU presidency. He went on to interrupt her 3 more times on this single question, contradicting her ("He did say that!"), then, when she talked of an inaccurate quotation, saying "Back to last week!" - 'humorously' drawing a comparison between what she had just said and what Nick Griffin had said! He got a handful of sniggers from the audience and the camera showed him with a very smug expression, laughing at his own quip.
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Note that Lib Dem Lembit Opik was never interrupted, but Dimbleby twice quoted something he'd said - once at Jacqui Smith and once at Cheryl Gillan. To Ms Smith, he said "Lembit said this was Mrs Thatcher's idea to pay people and you didn't actually have to pay the money solely for your expenses. Was that why you named the wrong house as your home...?" . Then, later, to Cheryl came "what Lembit said was this was designed by a Tory government because they didn't dare put up MPs salaries...Is that true?" As has been widely reported, it was in the early 2000's that further changes to expenses opened a new sluice - and Mrs Thatcher wasn't in power then! Why only ask about what Mrs Thatcher did?
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Dimbleby had prefaced this bit of Thatch-bashing with another leering dig at Cheryl Gillan: "Let's bring Cheryl Gillan in and let's not forget £4.47 tins for dog food, charged to all of us "(with a hand gesture to the audience). Did he mention any of Lembit Opik's dodgy claims? Or Elfyn Llwyd's? No, of course he didn't. No, it was 'let's embarrass the Tory' (as it wouldn't do to let all the disfavour fall on poor Jacqui Smith, and let's not embarrass the Lib Dems).
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A final point. When John Sargeant launched another of his anti-Conservative attacks, and when this was followed by a sustained attack on Cheryl Gillan by Lembit Opik, you would have thought that common decency would have prevailed and that Dimbleby would have given her a right to reply. Not a bit of it. He went straight to the audience, then allowed Elfyn Llwyd to speak. Only when she insisted on having a say did he allow her to do so, though not before saying "Very briefly..."
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Question Time is not for the faint-hearted right-of-centre viewer. A stiff drink may be needed.
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