Tuesday, February 12, 2008

London talks climate change

I was an expert in the audience for London Talking, a political chatshow on ITV London, this evening. Their line up is worth sharing:

The presenter: Konnie Huq

Every week: Vanessa Feltz and Nick Ferrari

This week: Andrew Gilligan and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Plus a smattering (maybe half a dozen) of experts in the audience and an audience of about forty. We were discussing environmental policy in the section I took part in. Later on they would discuss abortion. It was pretty novel to have a panel show that was so focussed aroun discussion by non-specialists. It had Radio 5's populist appeal. An interesting addition to the TV line-up.

What was even more interesting was that again the audience were distinctly hostile to the greens. I got to make two points setting out why motorists don't deserved to be taxed more and plastic bags shouldn't be banned. Cheers for the greens were a lot quieter and less enthusiastic than those for the blockers like Ferrari and myself. The same divide was clear in the Channel 4 programme I did on the issue a while back. It is possible that both programmes were unrepresentative but it seems equally likely that that support for green policies is still very weak among the general public.

2 comments:

Gracchi said...

Interesting- though from my experience in TV in the past I do know audiences for those programs are carefully selected to get people who will ask questions say at the right point- so you might be seeing some kind of bias. But its still interesting.

Anonymous said...

What was Konnie like in person? My daughter says that she recently had a boob job - was this at all apparent? I am asking for a friend who is interested in such things- obviously....