I’ll miss cringing at This Week
As the late-night politics show is axed, Claire Cohen explains why it was the perfect – if bizarre – nightcap
It’s 9am, and I am lying in a white marble bathtub, in an upmarket London hotel, wearing a second-hand wetsuit that belongs to a woman I have never met. It’s a bit short in the body. In my hand is a life-size plastic mallard, my eyes are covered with slices of cucumber, and on my chin is a “beard” that I have fashioned from bubbles to look like Jeremy Corbyn. Two cameras are pointed directly at me, filming my every move.
Welcome to BBC One’s This Week, television’s most idiosyncratic political programme, whose 16-year run will come to an end in July, after its 69-year-old presenter Andrew Neil announced on Thursday that he is to step down at the end of the current series. “We couldn’t imagine This Week without the inimitable Andrew Neil, one of Britain’s best political interviewers,” said Fran Unsworth, BBC director of news.
That may be, but many of us won’t be able to imagine Thursday nights without the programme that has made us cringe since 2003. It is part of the furniture: 15 minutes of Newsnight at 10.30pm, then turn over to BBC One for Question Time, and This Week at 11.45pm. Anti-social, yes, but that it occupies the broadcasting graveyard slot has never deterred the show’s loyal audience of around a million – and its post-pub position made it popular with younger viewers. The perfect political nightcap, if you will.
Although when you’re pretending to apply shampoo to the tune of I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair (that man being Jeremy Corbyn), mock-shaving your legs, wrestling with said wetsuit (which belongs to the producer’s sister-in-law) and wiggling your toes in bathwater (after which I received no small number of emails from foot fetishists), it can be hard to remember just why you like it so much…
But you don’t need to have been a guest to have fallen for the show’s bizarre charms. From the costumes, bad acting – mine included – and a reputation for some of the most laboured jokes on TV, This Week occupies a unique place on the schedule. After all, what other programme could have turned Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo into a legitimate double act?
It’s worth tuning in for the nicknames alone. Portillo is “Choo Choo”, so named for his love of trains; Alan Johnson (who replaced Abbott in 2010) is “Sad Man on the Left”, and Liz Kendall puts up with “Four Per Cent” – the proportion of the vote she won in the Labour leadership election. Ouch.
When Abbott makes a rare appearance these days, as shadow home secretary, Neil introduces her by saying: “And back by absolutely no public demand whatsoever...”
It is all cringeworthy stuff, of course, but that’s why we love it. There is something inexplicably compelling and delicious about watching Britain’s leading politicians trying to make a serious point, while Molly the dog – Neil’s golden retriever – snuggles up to them on the sofa.
But it would be a mistake to confuse irreverence for a lack of clout. Amid the references to Blue Nun and naff jokes lies serious journalism. Andrew Neil is an interviewer forged in the fires of Fleet Street. Few presenters can move so seamlessly between grilling a political heavyweight and speaking to The Cheeky Girls about Romanian immigration.
What better antidote to Question Time – that gladiatorial arena of shouting, interruption and bloodletting? Instead, This Week offers something rare: calm, considered, cross-party dialogue, with rival MPs sitting side-by-side, behaving like grown-ups. Surely, in these turbulent times, we need that more than ever?
The programme was one of a handful launched by the BBC in response to the voter apathy at the 2001 general election. This Week is sole survivor. With its demise, the Beeb will not only be closing the door on an era – it will also be saying goodnight to its last high-profile centre-Right presenter.
That it has been cancelled is no reflection on the quality of political journalists in the BBC stable; from Laura Kuenssberg to Emily Maitlis and Nick Robinson, Brexit has made many careers. Any number of budding broadcasters would be willing to delay their bedtime to take it on. But it is hard to deny that Andrew Neil is This Week. Who else could persuade Michael Portillo to wear a reindeer onesie? Get former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith dancing to Underworld’s Born Slippy? And have Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie explain why he thinks a hard Brexit would be bad for Britain?
Compared to all that, I got off pretty lightly with a bubble bath.