A media man's nightmare the irrelevant presenter

Media Matter Nick Thomas
The dreams have started. The last time I was facing the imminent opening of a show, I had them all: the empty theatre, the house full of people groaning and peering at their watches, the scene I hadn't written that had been inserted by the director behind my back, the desperate chase through endless, empty backstage corridors ....It's not so bad this time, though, as I write, there are still four nerve-frazzling days to curtain up. But so far I've only had the two. In the first, the director called me to say we hadn't got the theatre after all.
Then, on the night of Wednesday 23rd (the date is relevant for reasons that will become clear, m'lud) I got something much nastier. I was attempting to address the cast, and they were ignoring me, just chatting amongst themselves. No matter how much I shouted they stubbornly refused to shut up and listen, and eventually my voice cracked with the effort, while their's rose to crescendo.
Now, lest you think that this week's column is merely an extended plug for the play, (Dancing Rears, at the Union Theatre in Southwark until September 15th, by the way) let me explain. For, although one's preoccupations have a tendency to surface nocturnally in surprising ways, the central theme of this particular bit of horror had its roots not in theatre, but in something quite different. Last Wednesday, you see. I had just watched the Newsnight debate between Kenneth Clarke and lain Duncan-Smith. And it was still fresh in my memory as I drifted off. Not that I have ever, in dream or nightmare, fantasised about leading the Conservative Party; no, the man with whom my subconscious chose to identify that fretful night was the one nationally in the chair, Jeremy Vine.
For a start, they hadn't given him a chair from which to chair, so while the two contenders sat on either side of a table, Vine was forced to loiter and shuffle and drift around the set, often with his back to the studio audience. This did nothing for his authority. Paxman, who ought to have been given the job, would surely have insisted on an enormous Mastermind leather throne in which to swivel magisterially towards the various participants and cameras, his giant's legs nonchalantly crossed throughout. But Big Jeremy, as he's known, would also have been much better at imposing his will on the combatants and getting answers to his questions.
Little Jeremy, alas, lost control completely. Part of the problem was that the consistently good-humoured debate that Clarke and IDS generated between themselves was so much more interesting to them and everyone else than Vine's interjections; while they got down to the nitty-gritty, he was trying to interrupt with superficial, Today-style jabs. So they ignored him, and indeed altered their posture to sit face to face, evoking memofies of Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones, while Vine spluttered impotently in the wings. And all the while, of course, he will have had his producer shouting in his ear, telling him to get in there and stop the two politicians taking over. No wonder he looked so flustered at the end. He had had to shout to get a word in edgeways, he had been publicly outclassed and made to look a lightweight twit, and he knew it.
My heart bleeds. After all, which of us could keep Ken Clarke in order when he's going good? The man's a steamroller. Ultimately it was the structure of the show that was wrong, though the results, albeit unintentional, made excellent television. What we ended up with was deep, intelligent debate between two guys who know their stuff, and riveting it was. But it is depressing to think that this was not the original idea, and that poor old Vine is in the doghouse for letting it happen.