![]() Robert Peston criticises ‘vicious’ approach to interviewing politicians So his gentle oath may have been a celebration of greater editorial freedom, as perhaps was his appearance without a tie, his preference for a bare neck having also reputedly been a source of tension at the corporation. Over at the BBC, which Peston left in November in a big-money transfer, an expletive even as mild as “bleeding” would have brought phalanxes of middle managers running across the fields. This decision to break the second rule of live broadcasting – hide from the audience how terrifying it can be – was risky, but exposed a touching vulnerability that may have usefully undercut, for some viewers, the allegations of arrogance that have sometimes haunted the broadcaster. Robert Peston goes for the jugular with George Osborne in new Sunday showīut the reason for Robert Peston breaking the first rule of live broadcasting – know when the mic is live – was possibly explained by a line in his official intro: “Before you ask, yes, I’m bleeding nervous.” ”), Peston had to tell him, in effect, to shut up.The unintended first words heard from the host of ITV’s new Sunday morning talk show, Peston on Sunday, were “break a leg”, spoken to co-host Allegra Stratton as the opening titles ended. Halfway through his long disquisition on European history (“Philip II of Spain, blah, blah. He is the kindest man you could ever meet – truly, he is – but chirpy Sunday-morning television is not his forte. Last Sunday, the guests included Liz Kendall, the Blairite Labour MP, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the fuddy-duddy Tory who longs for Brexit. Screeny, it seems, is staying and Stratton continues to be marooned beside it until the programme’s final minutes, at which point she hotfoots it to a strange, teardrop-shaped table loaded with croissants and orange juice to join the guests. It goes to show just how wrong you can be. ![]() The show is obsessed with Twitter, even as the rest of the world falls out of love with it.) Surely by now it would have occurred to someone other than me that, in 2016, it’s a bit much to expect an intelligent and highly capable woman reporter to play, however gamely, Anthea Redfern to Peston’s Bruce Forsyth? Ditto its faux-loft set, which looks so much like it belongs to a comedy spoof of an early-Nineties breakfast show that you half-expect Victoria Wood to stroll in, talking loudly of ladies’ troubles and Battenberg cakes.īut I did assume that the programme’s host would at least have ceased referring to the big screen that is a central feature of the show as “Screeny”, a diminutive of – ho, ho – “Screeny McScreenface”, and, perhaps, that Allegra Stratton, the national editor of ITV News, would be allowed to do rather more than stand in front of this seemingly pointless bit of technology. There would be no getting rid of its theme tune, which is like the three-note jingle that Ruth Madoc used to play on a glockenspiel in Hi-de-Hi! as reworked on a Casio organ. I knew that none of the big things would have changed by its second outing. Not wanting to be mean, I waited a week to get stuck into Peston on Sunday (15 May, 10am, ITV).
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