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12 November 2009updated 27 Sep 2015 2:28am

Dimbleby knocked out by a bullock

Presenter to miss Question Time for first time in 15 years after bullock incident

By George Eaton

The most startling headline this year? He may have been able to handle Nick Griffin, but David Dimbleby has fallen foul of a bullock. For the first time since he began presenting Question Time in 1994, the avuncular Dimbleby will miss tonight’s show after being knocked out by a bull on his farm in Sussex. The rather curmudgeonly John Humphrys will replace him in the chair.

A BBC spokesman said: “David was loading a bullock on to a trailer when the bullock reared, resulting in David being briefly knocked out. He also received a cut to the head that required stitches.”

Dimbleby is recovering at Eastbourne District General Hospital, where he was kept in for observation. Speaking from his hospital bed, he said: “I haven’t missed a Question Time in over 15 years. Trust my wife’s bullock to take me out.

“I’ll be giving bullocks a wide berth in the future.”

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The broadcaster isn’t the first public figure to fall foul of pugnacious cattle this year. In June, David Blunkett suffered a broken rib when he was hit by a stampeding cow in Derbyshire.

The words of William Boot from Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel Scoop come to mind:

There was something un-English and not quite right about “the country”, with its solitude and self-sufficiency, its bloody recreations, its darkness and silence and sudden, inexplicable noises; the kind of place where you never know from one minute to the next that you may not be tossed by a bull or pitchforked by a yokel or rolled over and broken up by a pack of hounds.

 

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