Have I got news for you, girls — TV’s most merciless quiz is just as terrifying for us boys!

As the show is engulfed by a sexism storm, bruised panellist QUENTIN LETTS says ...

THE late Emmeline Pankhurst, in her few spare moments, might not have considered it the most heinous of injustices against women.

On the great scale of things, it’s some way short of the struggle for universal female suffrage or rights in marriage, or campaigns against such horrors as suttee, rape and female genital mutilation. But gender-equality activists are on the warpath. They are kicking up a kerfuffle about women being allegedly under-represented on the BBC1 comedy quiz show Have I Got News For You.

Normally tough Tory MP Nadine Dorries has complained that the show does not ‘lend itself to women feeling comfortable’. Biting her lip like some Charlotte Bronte heroine confronted by a naked piano leg, she said she’d been on the show, but would never again accept an invitation to appear. ‘I find it too vicious, too abrasive.’

Ankle-biter Nadine finds something too abrasive? Gracious. Others accused the veteran and actually rather liberal team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton of chauvinistic ‘mansplaining’ when they suggested that women often simply chose not to appear on the show.

Stand-up comic Tiff Stevenson said when she appeared on TV quiz shows as the sole woman she felt the burden of ‘an entire gender’ on her shoulders. At this point, the late Michael Winner (no feminist, he) might have said ‘calm down, dear, it’s only a light-entertainment telly show’.

Are these critics justified when they claim that HIGNFY, as it is called, is a stubborn redoubt of latent sexism and ‘schoolboy humour’? Or is this row another example of our political class seeking to take offence where none was intended — and, indeed, very little has been taken by the people who matter, who are the great mass of TV licence payers?

Maybe you don’t have to be a Michael Winner to say: ‘Come off it, sisters — there are serious battles to be fought on gender equality, but this isn’t one of them.’ The rumpus began in, of all places, Radio Times magazine, which was promoting the long-running series.

The show began in 1990 when it was chaired by Angus Deayton alongside comedian Merton and Private Eye editor Hislop. Each captain had one team-mate and the idea was to chew over the week’s news in a breezily satirical manner.

Along the way, the panellists josh one another and try to provoke reactions from a studio audience of about 300. Badinage, you could call it. Unless I am getting my words mixed up and Badinage is a brand of bath salts.

DEAYTON left in 2002 after a sex and drugs scandal. When satirists are caught with their trousers down, they rightly deserve little mercy. But Hislop and Merton have stayed in place, testament to their enduring popularity. For any TV show to last as long as HIGNFY is rare, and happens only if it wins a big audience.

Since Deayton’s defenestration, the show has been chaired by guest presenters. Although 12 politicians have chaired it, only one ( that fragrant daisy Ann Widdecombe) has been female. Merton and Hislop told Radio Times it had always proved difficult to find women hosts. ‘The producers always ask more women than men, but more women say “no”,’ said Merton. Hislop, noting it was not compulsory for anyone to accept the offer, suggested women might be ‘slightly more reticent and think, maybe modestly, “I can’t do that.”’ Men did not seem to have the same problem with self-doubt, he laughed.

When I read those remarks, I thought them entirely reasonable — even gentlemanly. But in this era of ‘Me Too’ feminist militancy, I should have known better. The professional grievance gang is now trying to hoist Hislop and Merton on the public gibbet.

In her exegesis, Nadine Dorries said women were deterred from taking part in HIGNFY by the ‘banter’. She meant the repartee and verbal jousting that happens. Women did not like to expose themselves to such danger, she claimed. ‘Women don’t banter in that way, or very rarely. They don’t have that aggression.’

In order to savour the full flavour of this controversy, bear in mind that Ms Dorries is one of the more peppery members of the House of Commons, a formidable character sure of her bombastic beliefs.

Having appeared on HIGNFY a few times as a panellist, I have to tell Nadine that we blokes are just as daunted at the thought of going on the show. On set at the start of shooting sessions, my guts have turned liquid when the familiar theme tune is played. And afterwards, in the green room, I have sunk the first three glasses of wine like John Mills with his lager at the end of Ice Cold In Alex, such has been the sense of relief.

Merton and Hislop are now so practised that they know exactly how and when to make their witty interventions. They are extremely good. That can make the other panellists look a bit pedestrian.

Unfair? Yes. But you have been given the privilege of appearing on prime-time telly. You are there to make people laugh — or (and this is why I have been asked back a few times) to be laughed at for being a ripe old fogey. C’est la vie.

In my HIGNFY sallies I have been firmly put in my place by the host. Twice it was the funny, salty Jo Brand and on one other occasion it was Miranda Hart.

Last time was a few months ago, when we were discussing the resignation of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon after he put his hand on the knee of journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer.

Now there is no point spouting saintly platitudes on HIGNFY. They don’t want that — certainly not from a Right-wing sketchwriter like me. So, knowing and liking Julia of old, I observed that Fallon must be a bold man to chance his luck with her, because she was ‘a big strong girl’.

As anticipated, this archaic term (intended as an echo of boxer Henry Cooper, who used to talk about heavyweight rivals as ‘big strong boys’), caused a certain frisson in the audience and drew a barb from Jo. She ticked me off with matronly severity and rebuked all of us male panellists for seeming not to take sexism in the Commons seriously enough. And everyone loved her for it.

I was happy. She was happy. The producers were happy. Social media had a flurry of excitement. That, in turn, made the BBC bosses happy. A win-win-win-winwin situation!

My point is that the ‘banter’ — to use Nadine Dorries’ word — came from a female. Anyone who writes off Merton’s humour as ‘schoolboy’ needs a new dictionary. ‘Surreal, crazy and inspired’ are all better descriptions of his remarkable flights of fancy.

And Hislop is that rare thing: someone able to express, without profanities, something of the real rage he feels about our corrupt, decadent politics. I bet the show’s female viewers admire that just as much as the men.

LIKEWISE, it is plain wrong to suggest that HIGNFY is exclusively male. In addition to Jo Brand, Victoria Coren Mitchell, kirsty Young and kathy Burke have all been brilliant in the show’s chair and been booked frequently. Other women to have shone as guest host include Jennifer Saunders, both Mel and Sue, katherine Ryan, Tracey Ullman and Clare Balding.

Successful female team members have ranged from Scots Tory leader Ruth Davidson to Labour MP Jess Phillips and the Greens’ Caroline Lucas. Playwright Lucy Prebble did well, as did newscaster Steph McGovern, comedians Roisin Conaty and Sara Pascoe, journalist kirsty Wark and that great honking sealion Janet Street-Porter. Feminist Germaine Greer has also done several turns on HIGNFY. A show that invites her can hardly be described as a hotbed of chauvinism.

There is little equality of outcome in mirth. Someone invariably comes a cropper, and the comedy gods have always ensured some are more quick-witted than the rest of us. But to pretend for narrow political purposes that HIGNFY is some tool of sexist suppression deserves a great, prolonged bark of derisive laughter.