As the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas nears the end of its first day, a well-heeled middle-aged couple are browsing the pop-up bookshop selling works by the festival’s headliners. The woman taps her husband on the shoulder and holds up a copy of Andrew Bolt’s new book, Worth Fighting For.

“Darl, why don’t we get this for your dad?” she asks teasingly, a grin on her face.

Her husband, dressed impeccably in a tweed suit jacket and trilby hat, visibly recoils at the suggestion, looking her up and down as though a spell has suddenly fallen from his eyes and he’s discovered he’s been tricked into marrying a snake.

“Jesus, Janet, no! What are you thinking?”

Needless to say, the festival is not Bolt’s usual crowd. The yearly talkfest has a reputation for attracting well-moneyed progressives of the pre-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull variety, which made Bolt’s appearance as the guest of choice for the regular “How Many Dangerous Ideas Can One Person Have?” fixture something of an odd fit.

Bolt and the festival hardly have the most cordial of histories. In 2014, he railed against the programmed appearance of writer Uthman Badar, who was to speak on the ethics of “honour killings”, and contributed to the event’s swift cancellation. Two years later, the announcement that Bolt himself was being given a prime spot on the lineup likewise prompted outrage, with the Indigenous actor Nakkiah Lui leading a petition to have him dropped from the event on the grounds that giving him a platform amounted to “legitimising his hate speech and closing your doors to those he vilifies”.

The Opera House, which said little throughout the kerfuffle, defended the decision to invite Bolt: “The FODI session is a rare opportunity to interrogate the views and ideas that Mr Bolt will present”.

Such an opportunity doesn’t come often. While he hardly needs additional platforms from which to sell himself, Bolt exercises strict control over almost every iteration of his public profile. His columns go to print in newspapers that share his ideological leanings. The guests on his TV show, The Bolt Report, are usually either his fellow travellers or someone he wants to give a talking to.

So there was a genuine reason for someone not of Bolt’s political persuasion to go along: how would this very prolific, powerful influence on our political landscape do in an arena not of his choosing? Against a live, unpredictable and probably hostile audience willing to challenge him?

The answer, unfortunately, was not forthcoming; the long-awaited Great Clash of Ideas in the hopefully named Drama Theatre never materialised. What transpired instead was an hour-long fizzer: half puff-piece interview, half talking points regurgitation.

Besides his standard denunciations of the ABC, the Racial Discrimination Act, climate change “warmism” – “In what other field of human endeavour do you hear ‘the science is settled’? What kind of moron says that?” – Bolt happily used the furore around his appearance to play the martyr card when it suited. “The security you’ve had to arrange for this event, it’s not to save you!” he joked to the audience early on, putting forward an argument that his dangerous ideas place himself in more danger than anybody else.

FODI cofounder Simon Longstaff, who MCed the event and interviewed Bolt for close to an hour, was less of a foil than he was a wet napkin. Strange gaps in Bolt’s free speech-at-all-costs mantra went unchallenged – like when he wondered out loud why “people can protest wherever they like” and why protesters feel the need to “create a great nuisance to other people”. (Presumably Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, who headlined her own event two hours later, would have a thing or two to say about that.)

Nor did Bolt’s own campaign to remove Badar from the lineup in 2014 come up. At the end, Longstaff thanked the crowd for facilitating “a celebration of reason, rather than righteous indignation”, adding that he “can’t stand the yelling that goes on”.

The hour might have benefited from a bit of yelling, if only to liven things up a bit. The fifteen minutes for questions at the end didn’t bring the robust debate and interrogation the Opera House hoped would justify Bolt’s appearance, with proceedings quickly devolving into a weird, slightly unsettling love-in.

“Thank you so much, you’re brave, you’re courageous, we love you,” gushed one young questioner. Another, who began his question with the phrase “as a libertarian”, spent the next five minutes talking about what we can learn from the French Revolution. The single audience member who asked a mildly challenging question, inquiring if his position on human-induced climate change was softening given new evidence, was yelled at to “get out” by someone in the crowd and scoffed at by Bolt himself.

For a festival that prides itself on being “dangerous”, arguably the biggest sin FODI committed in pencilling Bolt in was that of being boring. People who agree with Bolt showed up to cheer him on, people who don’t went to watch race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane instead and security ensured no one too suspicious-looking did any event hijacking. After all that fuss, no one in the audience came away with anything different to what they carried in.