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Sir Nicholas Winterton's highly ill-judged comments also came under the purview of Jim Naughtie, who had a lot of fun with them at the beginning of his discussion with Matthew Parris. The Times columnist then recalled a very similar gaffe made many years ago by another Conservative MP. Naughtie leapt in to name him as Roger Freeman. (Fancy him remembering that!) Matthew joined him in the joshing, but then - for the sake of fairness - added "He's actually a very nice man Nick Winterton. He's worked very, very hard in his constituen..." but was straight away interrupted by an excitable Naughtie, who clearly wasn't having anything nice said about a nasty Tory: "Well, the other thing of course", he said, talking over Matthew Parris, "the bizarre thing, as so ever in these little fandangos that come up, is that he's wrong anyway." He then went on an inordinate length to explain just why Winterton was wrong. Later, when Matthew Parris began joking about the irony of Old Nick complaining about noise, given his own loud voice and propensity to speak everywhere as if he's addressing an auditorium, Naughtie joined in the joke but, being a Tory-hater, turned it sour: "He could empty a first-class carriage on his own, couldn't he?"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8523000/8523417.stm
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Even if I could afford first class I wouldn't use it as it would probably be full of Beeboids.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Matthew Parris is about as left-wing as a Tory can get and should really be a Lib Dem.
Very surprising that Naughtie would remember Roger Freeman. I wonder if Parris jogged his memory before the interview ? Surely not !
But it brings up the question of to what extent "interviews" are rehearsed before being broadcast.