Skipper

There are times when I don't just feel 'Victor Meldrewish' but actually become him with all the teeth gnashing apoplexy it entails. Such an occasion was last night watching Jonathon Ross interview David Cameron. For some reason Ross thinks that his asking toe-curlingly embarrassing questions is what viewers tune in to hear. My toes curled, as far as their curliness potential allowed, when he began to edge into a line of questioning about Margaret Thatcher's sexual attractiveness to Cameron when he was a 13 year old boy. I prayed he was not going to, but in the end he did: 'Did you ever wank over Maggie Thatcher?'

Cameron, to be fair to him, handled it with the aplomb one might expect of someone who attended the school he was at during his early teens: he smiled a trifle uneasily; said he now understood why politicians had not appeared on the show before; and no, he had admired her as a Prime Minister but nothing more as at 13 such things did not loom large in his life. Later on Ross asked him another gratuitously silly question: had he ever peed in a telephone box? Answer, unsurprisingly, no. In an earlier interview with Martina Navratilova he had done something similar by asking her if she eschewed sexual activity in the period before playing a big match, the aim, presumably, being to sidle seedily up to the topic of her sexuality. The tennis player, clearly a little put out, was embarrassed. Was I alone in feeling ashamed that the puerile question had been put to a guest in the first place?

I know the answer to to my problem is just not to watch the show- my usual default state as it happens; last night was just an exception. Ross is a sparky personality with a very quick brain and an excellent wit, so why does he demean himself and his guests with such pathetic laddish ploys? But maybe the public generally enjoy the 'edge' he brings to his work and laps up his smutty schoolboy schtick. The BBC obviously thinks so otherwise it wouldn't pay him the £7 odd million quid a year, they do of our money to retain his services. But for this Victor Meldrew, his programme, from now on, is forever not switched on.