QT has become ludicrous. A bore one week as contestants play musical chairs with the middle ground of market economy politics. Bear pit or freak show (Phillips / Starkey etc) the next.

There are a lot of people who get on that show who would be better suited to Have I Got News For You and a lot more people who would make interesting contributions who will never get on because they have no interest in the the kind of consensus politics that the Beeb thinks indicates "balance".

George Galloway was deliberately ambushed. As with Russell Brand the other week I think Galloway thought that his oratorical skills could carry the day - as they often do in audience-free tv debates - but it wasn't going to be allowed to happen on QT. Call me cynical but you don't get to make films about former prime ministers that argue they should be subject to a war crimes trial and walk away from that. Post Saville there are a lot of chips to be cashed in with the BBC by the political establishment. George should have seen it coming. The Greens will be lined up to get ambushed and a rubbishing next. Oh and Tristram Hunt is the poorest nice-but-dim excuse for a Labour spokesperson I have ever seen on that show. Then again, as Helen Lewis points out in this week's NS, if Labour are so shit how come the race is so close????

Moral Maze on R4 is in some ways a far more interesting take on the same concept. You certainly get more detail on the subjects, interlocutors are a range of expert witnesses rather than members of the public and the more rabid contributors have far more opportunity to hang themselves. The best weapons against Melanie Phillips' nonsensical arguments (for example that the poor were better served in Victorian times by charity than under the welfare state) come out of her own mouth.