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3 February 2011

Jeremy Paxman: lovable grump or cantankerous luddite?

The Newsnight host can’t hold his tongue – and we love him for it.

By Steven Baxter

One of the best – and worst – things about Jeremy Paxman is his inability to bite his tongue.

Jeremy Paxman finds it hard to keep shtum when he’s got an opinion. For many, it’s the quality that elevates him beyond the level of A N Other journalist to being a national treasure. For others, though, it’s what gives him a rather snotty and supercilious air that chips away at his credentials.

Sometimes I don’t know which way I go on Paxman. When he got stroppy about a pair of pants and wrote to M&S to voice his displeasure, I found it rather endearing. You can imagine the righteous anger of an aggrieved Y-fronts wearer seething out of his pores as he wrote the email, his tolerance stretched, like an inadequate gusset, to breaking point. On the other hand, when he grumbled about having to do a weather report on Newsnight it seemed to be verging on the juvenile (though I found it amusing). And then there was his withering rant about how white, middle-class men (The Real Victims, as you may recall from this column last week) were discriminated against in television.

So, into what category does his latest grumpy outpouring – this time writing in Newsnight‘s daily email about what a bad idea having a daily email is – fall? Is it lovable old Paxo, railing against his daft bosses, striking a blow as the only one who can see past the madness? Or is it Victor Meldrew Paxman, whingeing and whining about anything slightly innovative?

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I think it’s probably a bit of both. The rebel in me enjoys the way in which Paxman refuses to keep quiet about what he has always thought is a bad idea, despite being forced to push it by his superiors, and the blunt tone is rather refreshing. “The reason for killing it off is pretty straightforward,” Jeremy P wrote yesterday, sparks presumably flying off his keyboard: “it’s crap.” As well as that, you have to concede that an email which arrives after the programme it’s promoting has gone to air isn’t spectacularly successful.

On the other hand, I think Paxman’s a bit too quick to dismiss multi-platform promotion of his TV show. Things like emails, podcasts (as Paxman somewhat Luddishly calls them, “television without pictures”) and blogs (presumably “television without moving pictures, or sound”) can be a pretty handy way of engaging your audience, as opposed to the one-way “like it or lump it” approach of conventional broadcasting. And in an era when people don’t just watch your programme when it’s transmitted, but can catch up on iPlayer for a week afterwards, emails arriving a bit late might not be the end of the world.

Still, that rather truculent sign-off is the reason we should cherish Paxman, even if every now and then he occasionally makes us wince. How many of us in our daily jobs have had to put up with some kind of tinkering from the higher echelons which makes no sense at the coalface? How many times have we bitten our tongues and stayed silent, knowing that what we’re doing is madness?

Most of us just stay silent and keep our head down. Paxo gives us the chance vicariously to stick two fingers up at the boss – and hurrah for that. We may have to keep our head down, but he’s not afraid to say what he thinks – even if he gets it wrong sometimes.

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