But regardless of all of that, I find it difficult to understand why the BBC’s Question Time has decided to include him on the panel tonight for the fourth time this year. MacKenzie was on the programme on January 14, March 11 and June 3. Add in tonight’s appearance and that will be four programmes out of 41 in 2010 – or as near as damn it 10% of all the Question Times so far this year. (This is in addition to his regular appearances on This Week, Newsnight, the Daily Politics and various other BBC news and politics programmes.)

What dirt does MacKenzie have on the makers of Question Time that causes them to keep inviting him back? It can’t be that the viewing figures shoot up whenever he’s on – in addition to pissing off everyone in Liverpool, everyone in Scotland thinks he’s a prick as well. Perhaps his erudition and debating skills make him indispensable. Yes. That must be it.

Of course there has to – and should – be a spread of political views on Question Time. That’s the point of it, and the fact is that Kelvin MacKenzie represents the views of lots of people who read the Sun newspaper. But four times? In a single year? Isn’t that a bit much?

Taylor was talking about Roy Keane, who grew a chinful of obscenely Santa-ish facial hair immediately before quitting as manager of Sunderland at the end of 2008. But it might be worth pondering his analysis in relation to poor Adrian Chiles (42), who looks more and more fed up by the day on BBC1′s The One Show. Nobody exactly knows what’s going on but he appears to have become moderately repulsed by co-host Christine Bleakley (30), who is said to be engaged in some kind of personal bedroom arrangement with pie-eating Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard (32). (The ages in brackets signify my pathetic nod towards celebrity journalism.)

As Marple Leaf summed up on Twitter last night:

That scruffy yam on #motd can’t mention Lampard. Just knicked his bird.

Meanwhile Robin Brown has meticulously compiled an entertaining list of descriptions of Chiles’ beard, including my own observation that it makes him look like

the violent alcoholic captain of a Victorian steamship.

I strongly advise you to go and look at it right now.

Enjoy.

Hat tip: Nigel Barlow on Twitter

• The last known “art gallery” closed in 1987
• The crime rate rose by 900% last year, driven by a shocking trade in aggravated pigeon theft
• Jack Duckworth reads the ITV regional news every night in a stupid northern voice, accompanied by a dancing ferret
• It rains 434 days of the year
• Going to the theatre essentially consists of a night at the bingo
• They eat KFC for breakfast. In a bowl. With milk and sugar on top
• Nobody watches the BBC

It begs the obvious question of what right anyone has to bleat about dodgy MPs’ expenses when they are paid almost £30,000 a year more for doing what is essentially a completely inconsequential job.

I (maybe) wouldn’t begrudge Paxman his pay packet – and I dare say he earns a lot more than this – thanks to his knack of holding the establishment to account with consistent brilliance. Ditto the top war reporters or in fact anyone who helps to illuminate otherwise darkened corners of public life.

But £92,000 for what is essentially a glorified daytime TV autocue reader? You must be having a laugh.

According to Fry, MPs doing things like claiming £2,000 of public money to have the moats of their manor houses cleaned (Douglas Hogg), or £35,000 for a “second home” in London that’s five minutes’ walk from the first, or £1,700 in a year on televisions and video recorders (Hazel Blears) is OK.

I’ve cheated expenses, you have.

he tells Michael Crick. Erm, actually Stephen, I haven’t. And most people I know haven’t either because in many cases they don’t have an expense account (let alone one running to thousands of pounds) and, unlike MPs, they know that if they get caught they’ll get fired.

He attacks journalists, claiming they are

a venal and disgusting crowd of people when it comes to expenses and allowances.

Well, perhaps twenty years ago that rather lame cliché might have rung true but in fact being a journalist these days often doesn’t entail many perks. (I recently had a claim for a £2.50 train ticket turned down because I forgot to staple the receipt to the form.) Even if we accept the argument that unscrupulous journalists are an evil bunch of expense account abusers, the crucial difference is that unless they work for the BBC, the money they are wasting doesn’t come from the public purse.

Stephen is a man with a wonderful vocabulary. But he also strikes me as someone who loves the sound of his own plummy voice. Thus he goes on:

Let’s not confuse what politicians get really wrong like wars, things where people die, with the rather tedious bourgeois obsession with whether or not they’ve charged for their wisteria. It’s not that important, it really isn’t… it’s a journalistic made-up frenzy.

He really does say this. Honestly, he does. So perhaps it’s worth reminding ourselves about the MPs who claimed for a £2,000 repair to his tennis court (Oliver Letwin) and £510 to stay in a hotel for one night (Michael Gove). Presumably Fry thinks none of this matters – and anyone who does is simply being “bourgeois”.

The argument that MPs’ expenses are irrelevant in the context of wars and other more serious stuff makes as much sense as saying we shouldn’t care if someone dumps an empty fridge and a dustbin full of raw sewage (or “poo and widdle”, in Fryspeak) on our front lawn because, hey, global warming is much more of a concern.

ITV’s timely attempt to tackle to hard-hitting subject, part of the Tonight strand, was on earlier and was called Is TV Too Rude? This hard-hitting and timely investigation exposed a brave “viewers’ jury” to a series of shocking TV and radio clips containing Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay and Jordan, each of whom vocalised a smorgasbord of popular expletives.

The jurors were made to hold up cheap cardboard signs with red crosses on them if they thought the programme in question shouldn’t have been broadcast. In some cases the clips were so rude that we – the viewers at home – weren’t actually allowed to watch them, while all were bleeped to the point of incomprehensibility. As you can probably imagine, it was deeply hard-hitting, not to mention spectacularly timely.

Predictably, the tie-wearing middle-aged bloke in the grey suit and neatly-combed hair thought virtually all television should be banned and that people who swear have got under-developed language skills (y’know, like monkeys). Whereas the slurry-voiced student with the lop-sided fringe and half-opened brown cardigan was more inclined towards the view that Fern and Phil should be permitted to clog ITV’s morning airwaves with loudly articulated swear-talk, so long as “freedom of speech” is maintained. (I exaggerate, natch.)

They also had some celebrity talking heads on, in order to tackle the hard-hitting issue. Jon “Gaunty” Gaunt (Sun columnist and former TalkSport presenter who was fired in November for calling a local councillor a “Nazi” and an “ignorant pig” live on air) represented the side of the right wing reactionary gobshite fat-heads, while Janet “Street” Porter mouthed off in favour of the greasy-faced sandal-wearing Hampstead-dwelling media village liberal elite who wouldn’t understand the normal, hard-working, family values-loving “British Public” if it phoned them up and boasted about fucking their grand-daughter.

And so half an hour of my life was wasted, reducing my use of the adjectives “timely” and “hard-hitting” to the level of pure sarcasm. Unluckily, Panorama’s no doubt timely and hard-hitting investigation into the issue, fronted by Frank Skinner and subtitled Have I Got Bad Language For You?, screens on Monday night. I’ve got my cheap cardboard sign with a red cross on it at the ready. The c**ts.

Twitter, in particular, has been held up as an innovator, thanks to its Election 2008 page. At about 12.45am it was being updated at a rate of more than a tweet a second. Unfortunately, the majority of tweets came from Americans who were simply watching the TV news and typing out what they saw. I was watching the TV at the same time as surfing the web, so it was kind of pointless.

The most entertaining thing about Twitter was the level of ignorance it revealed about the US electoral system. Bearing in mind only a couple of states had been called at this point, there were loads of tweets from people despairing that McCain was up by 21 college votes to 3 over Obama – like it was a basketball game or something.

In the end I gave up on the web and gave my full attention to the telly, where the BBC’s captioning department seemed to be under the misapprehension that the big place in the middle of Midtown Manhattan is called Time Square (they later corrected it). At just after 1am, Pennsylvania went to Obama, at which point it was becoming rapidly obvious he was going to win. The advantage of TV over the web then became clear: as a passive medium, I was able to listen to it while dozing off.

I inexplicably woke up at 4.20am and saw John McCain conceding defeat. This felt slightly surreal, as most events do at that time of day. I thought McCain’s speech was incredibly generous (David Dimbleby possibly called it “handsome”, although I could have dreamt that). Shame the Republican thickos started booing when McCain said he had congratulated Obama on his victory and then booed again when he mentioned his “old friend” Joe Biden.

While Obama’s election as president is exciting, the pessimist in me can’t help but wonder when it’s all going to go wrong. I remember a similar feeling of optimism when Tony Blair got elected in 1997, which dissipated quickly as soon as everyone realised he was just Maggie Thatcher in a purple tie. Just as long as Obama doesn’t start driving round in a golf buggy (see below), addressing the British Prime Minister with the phrase “Yo Brown” or squeezing Angela Merkel, the world should be safe.

The resignation of Brand and Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas, and the suspension of Ross on zero pay until January, shows the debate has moved beyond the issue about who said what to whom and how offensive it might have been. It’s morphed into a Daily Mail-led hate explosion in which the Alan Titchmarsh-loving moral majority lament the bloke-ish, foul-mouthed comedy of a few highly-paid BBC “faces” who represent the antithesis of everything they hold dear. (And yet the Mail’s decision to publish numerous photos of Andrew Sachs’ granddaughter Georgina Baillie in various states of undress entirely thwarts the paper’s position as a moral guardian.)

Whatever the problems with the unfunny, puerile, bullying phone “prank” might have been – and how it came to be aired – the Beeb’s capitulation to this mass of 30,000 brainwashed idiots – none of whom, let’s remember, actually heard the original broadcast – is depressing in the extreme.

The dead hand of Max Clifford in the affairs of Baillie (aka Voluptua from the Satanic Sluts – link almost certainly NSFW) adds another sordid angle. I notice she was complaining in a Sun interview yesterday about how Brand

embarrassed me by making a private relationship very public in the cruellest way imaginable.

And yet today, the same fuckwit’s comic publishes a kiss-and-tell in which Baillie reveals Brand is

a disappointment in the bedroom considering he has had so much practice.

Thanks for clearing that up, Voluptua. I hope your appearance on next year’s Celebrity Big Brother goes well.

Photo: BBC

It goes without saying that it’s unacceptable to leave offensive and humiliating answer machine messages on an elderly person’s mobile. But here’s another thing that’s troubling me. Despite the fact that up to two million people listened to it when it was originally broadcast on 18 October (source: Daily Telegraph), only two complaints were made before the Mail on Sunday splashed with it at the weekend. Since then, 10,400 complaints have been received by the BBC. More than 5,000 complaints were received today, some ten day’s after the programme went out… but just as the height of the media outrage was kicking in.

This suggests that people are either complaining based on what they have read about the incident, or are complaining having specifically sought it out first on Youtube – neither of which makes any sense. (And why has Ofcom only announced an investigation today? If the episode was so manifestly abhorrent, why has it taken well over a week for the watchdog to notice it even happened?)

Something else that doesn’t make sense is why there’s an advert for a service called WackyPrankCalls.com (“Responds to what your victim says. If they swear it will shout back!”) underneath many of the Guardian’s multitude of hit-generating stories about it.