The BBC panel show now causes as much debate as it hosts, accused of bias by all sides. Presenter Fiona Bruce still has hope for the future

Question Time turns 40 at the end of this month. The BBC institution is not immune to that birthday’s particular mix of crisis and denial. While the programme’s 25th year was marked with affectionate celebration and nostalgic retrospectives, this time around there will be little fanfare. Mostly, you imagine, like many of us who have experienced that midlife milestone, the show would ideally like to take to its bed in a darkened room to fret about its blood pressure and its sell-by date, and to relive those golden years before any red-faced audience member ever yelled the words “no deal” or “confirmatory vote” or “the Irish backstop”.

For those who hold to the idea that politics and journalism should be more about listening than lecturing, more about informed doubt than angry certainty, Question Time has for a long while been an uncomfortable watch. Since the redoubtable charmer David Dimbleby finally threw in the towel after 25 years, aged 80, in December, the hottest seat in British broadcasting has belonged to Fiona Bruce, who maintains a measure of order with a mixture of good humour and exasperation and that judiciously raised eyebrow. Her early outings on the show were praised for their briskness and confidence. As this long year has worn on, however, she has, like the rest of us, looked a little more beleaguered. She was not 20 minutes into the first show after the summer break before she was calling a time-out to the partisan bickering: “We are better than this.” Most evidence in the current public square suggests that we are not.

I met her last Monday, at the same moment that her equivalent in the House of Commons, John Bercow, was announcing his departure. She had been instrumental, the week before, in bringing back Question Time earlier than scheduled “because we all felt it was important for people to be able to hold their elected representatives to account in the absence of parliament”. Was there a part of her that wished she had stuck to Fake Or Fortune?, The Antiques Roadshow and the news?

Timeline 40 years of Question Time: a timeline Show Hide

The first episode of Question Time is broadcast on BBC One on 25 September, hosted by Robin Day. The panel – “There they are and here we go” – consists of the Labour MP Michael Foot, Edna O’Brien, the Tory MP Teddy Taylor and the archbishop of Liverpool Derek Worlock. The format is based on Radio 4’s Any Questions? A special Question Time episode from Brussels with the former Tory PM Edward Heath, the Labour MP Robin Cook and the SDP co-founder Roy Jenkins. Robin Day announces his retirement. Peter Sissons takes over until 1993. The BBC begins filming the show in different locations. David Dimbleby succeeds Sissons. In the mid 90s, there is a change in format, whereby audience members vote at the end of the show using voting pads. Schools Question Time launches, the aim being to improve political literacy and communication skills. Question Time makes history during the general election by featuring a head to head between the three main party leaders – Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy. The show records its highest figures to date, peaking at 8.3 million viewers when the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, appears on the panel. David Dimbleby misses chairing an episode for the first time in 15 years, having been injured by a bullock on his farm. John Humphrys steps in. David Dimbleby announces his retirement after 25 years and 914 episodes. Fiona Bruce replaces him. Question Time is the BBC’s most tweeted-about show in 2018. To date, 1,413 episodes of Question Time have aired and the show has about 2 million viewers per episode.

She insists none at all. “At the moment, Question Time occupies so much mental energy [for me]. But I tell myself a) times will not always be this fraught, and b) I will get more used to it. So it won’t always be like this.”

I wish I shared her confidence. That first week back she gave in to the inevitable and the audience talked Brexit and prorogation for the whole hour. Why?

“When we get the questions in from the audience, we are trying to plot a way through the programme. But last week the plan was just to try to find a way forward [in the current political stalemate].”

She began that quest by asking the audience in advance to signal whether they were remainers or leavers, roundheads or cavaliers. The gesture looked like a pre-emptive strike to appease those critics who see bias in the BBC’s every utterance.

Of course, it achieved no such thing. Question Time has a bigger Twitter response in the UK than any programme other than Love Island. Each episode of the programme has long since become a real-time media studies lesson. Bruce and the panel and selected members of the audience are freeze-framed for evidence of Brexit collusion or Remoaner conspiracy. No one, it can seem on Twitter at least, is immune to these tribal knee-jerks. Iain Dale, the LBC presenter and Tory commentator, who was a guest on that first show, was thrilled to note the boost it had given to his online following. He immediately fed that crowd by tweeting a tally of the amount of time each panellist had been allowed to speak. Despite the fact that by far the most newsworthy moment of that programme involved Labour’s Emily Thornberry being exposed explaining the absurdist contradictions of her party’s current policy, Dale used the data to support his belief that there was an anti-Brexit conspiracy on the show.

Play Video 1:09 Fiona Bruce makes debut as Question Time host – video

Bruce rolls her eyes just a little. “Last week, it was six people on the panel [instead of the usual five] and that definitely made it harder,” she says. “But I think there is little point counting the minutes and seconds each person gets. Partly because you need to take the political representation over the series rather than one snapshot programme, and of course how much you talk doesn’t necessarily reflect how much impact you have.”

Question Time was born in a similar moment of political polarisation: 1979, the first year of the Thatcher government. As the first chair, Sir Robin Day, said, it was an experiment in putting politicians in front of “what’s described in TV circles as ‘real people’ to distinguish them from people who work in television”. It was the third episode before a cabinet minister, Michael Heseltine, appeared, and offered himself as a rather grandiose conductor of the audience’s discontent. Watching those early episodes now, you have a sense of a different kind of relationship between panel and questioners. There is a little more general politeness from the latter, and a degree of anxiety about being the target of Day’s gruff wit. In the years since then, many things have changed. But the most obvious one is that people now have more practice and opportunity in broadcasting opinions – and belief in their need to be heard.

In the early days of social media, Dimbleby used to read out the show’s Twitter hashtag in the style of a high court judge presented with the latest fashion in tattoos. Latterly, he acknowledged the highly vocal “audience at home” as a crucial part of the reach of the show. Our greater access to politicians, and to commenting on their every gesture, has led to two things: their calibre has apparently fallen, and the collective mistrust of them has grown. Does Bruce think the relationship is retrievable?

“The one thing that Question Time still does which other programmes cannot do is cut through the political messaging,” she says. “I always ask people to be polite; sometimes they are very direct. And as any politician knows, if you face the public directly, anything can happen. Look at Boris Johnson in West Yorkshire the other day – you just don’t know who is going to shake your hand and politely tell you to ‘leave their town’. That is where the jeopardy comes on Question Time and not all politicians want to come on it, for that reason.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sir Robin Day, Question Time’s first presenter. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Alamy

Those who do rarely seem to have the time or the inclination to utter anything other than practised party lines. Hasn’t it actually become yet another opportunity for the two tribes that now make up our nation to display their colours, and to let off some steam?

“It can be cathartic, people like to vent on Brexit, but I still think it works best when people want an answer to a specific question. For example, I remember Nigel Farage was on – he has actually only been on once since I started – and someone asked him: ‘What other country trades only on WTO rules?’ The man in the audience just kept trying to get him to name one, which he didn’t. The best thing, on Question Time, is when the reality confronts the rhetoric.”

In his own recollections of the programme, Day mentioned that he regretted not having a greater say in choosing panellists. Has Bruce managed to win that concession?

“I do get involved,” she says. “It would be wonderful if I could sit there and say: ‘let’s have Michael Gove this week’, or whatever. But sadly it is not like that. Mostly there is a member of the government and a member of the opposition put forward, and then the rest is worked out over a year to get fair representation.”

Farage, who has an amazing appearance record, seems to have been a particularly fortunate beneficiary of that system…

“Not as amazing as Ken Clarke, who has been on it 59 times, I think.”

But whereas Clarke has held many of the highest offices in the land over half a century, Farage has been on 33 times having never been elected an MP…

“I am not fully across why that was,” Bruce says. “It was before my time. He came on with me after the European elections, once, which seemed reasonable, as he led the largest party.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Question Time in London, 5 September 2019: (left to right) Layla Moran, Richard Tice, Emily Thornberry, Fiona Bruce, Kwasi Kwarteng, Ian Blackford, Iain Dale. Photograph: Universal News And Sport (Europe)

In some ways Bruce’s own appointment appeared an odd choice at the time. It was generally accepted that whoever would replace Dimbleby had to be a woman, but others among what Bruce sweetly calls “the BBC sisterhood” – Mishal Husain, Kirsty Wark, Emily Maitlis – had arguably a greater depth of political experience. Bruce, by all accounts, aced the audition process, which involved a practice live show. Her apparently impermeable good humour was no doubt a factor. Anyone who took the thing more to heart would probably go bonkers after a couple of weeks.

You don’t have to spend long in her company to understand that her Antiques Roadshow bonhomie is not just for the cameras. There is a cloak of cheery confidence about her. A 2009 appearance on Who Do You Think You Are? revealed some of the roots of that, when she traced her father’s family back to an impoverished fishing village in Scotland. Her old man had escaped that, a considerable autodidact, to make it from the post room to the boardroom at Unilever.

Would she say that he had imbued his youngest child with a sense that anything was possible?

“He never said that in so many words. But yes, given where he came from and what he did, I think subconsciously I have always felt that.”

When Question Time came her way, she followed Dimbleby’s obvious advice and just tried to be herself.

“I am a simple soul,” she says, not quite believably. “And you don’t have time to dissemble on live TV even if you wanted to. Everything is happening around you and you just react. If you were also trying to be a character, I’m not sure how you would do that.”

Day in particular gave the show its knockabout gravitas by being a political insider. Would she count politicians among her friends?

“That is not the world I have inhabited. God, who knows how long I will do this and if that will change. But I think it is healthy for me to keep a distance.”

That sense of perspective, of an outsider’s eye, she suggests, is rooted in a childhood that began in Singapore where her father ran Unilever’s east Asian operation.

“I didn’t grow up in this British system,” she says. The family came back briefly to live on the Wirral when she was six. Then later, until she was 14, she was sent to an international school in Milan, “a Tower of Babel of different languages and nationalities”. Her best friend was Norwegian, and they remain close. She returned from Milan, where she mixed with the “kids of international business people”, to a comprehensive in New Cross, south London, another “big adjustment”. From there, she used the language skills she had to win a place at Oxford, where she was “interested in women’s politics and having a good time”. She was very briefly a protester at Greenham Common; she fronted a punky band and dyed her hair blue (but only for a week). She was not involved in student party politics, and never a member of any party “because no party has ever had sufficient pull for me. And that is just as well now.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Dimbleby with guest Tony Blair in 2000. Photograph: Chris Ison/PA

Her desire to go into journalism came quite late. She worked at the management consultancy Accenture for a year, with airy ideas of an MBA, but spent much of it crying in the loos. She escaped to a job in advertising for four years – “had a blast” – and met her husband of 25 years, Nigel Sharrocks, who was a director at the BMP agency. She eventually talked her way into a job as a researcher on Panorama after she met its editor at a wedding.

She became the first woman to have presented both News at Six and News at 10. Does she think of herself as a presenter or a journalist?

“I think of myself as a journalist first and foremost.”

Before Dimbleby took on the Question Time job, Jeremy Paxman auditioned. By some accounts he savaged both the panel and the audience. Does Bruce feel TV journalism has to be combative to get at the truth?

“Not always. I had done debate programmes before and quite often you go into them thinking: ‘I might need to build some energy in the room.’ On Question Time, the reverse is true. A lot of the time, I am just trying to not have it turn into a slanging match. You want some heat in the programme, but you need more light than heat. I think if I don’t do that, sometimes it is just going to run away and be incredibly ill tempered. Who wants to watch that?”

The answer to that question is perhaps: quite a lot of people. For a while, in more politically stable times, there seemed to be an effort to invite mostly career contrarians on the programme in case it became dull. Ten years ago, there was considerable furore around the appearance of BNP leader Nick Griffin. More than 8 million people – nearly three times the regular audience, and still easily a record – tuned in to see him undone by Jack Straw and Bonnie Greer. Could Bruce imagine having a figure like Tommy Robinson on?

The thing about Griffin was that he had become an MEP, Bruce says. “If Robinson hasn’t won representation through a national election, then the question wouldn’t arise.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fiona Bruce on Antiques Roadshow. Photograph: Anna Gordon/The Guardian

The audience appetite for something of a political ruck, however, appears to have sharpened, ingrained by the winner-takes-all mentality of first past the post, and a mistrust of coalition and compromise. Since about the time Question Time first appeared on our screens, it could be argued that we have increased the demand for politicians to entertain us, to be colourful rather than competent. We are, you might say, now reaping that particular whirlwind.

The present prime minister was a regular fixture on Dimbleby’s Question Time panels. He played a characteristic part in one of the most memorable exchanges on the programme, when the panel debated the award of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie in 2007. Dame Shirley Williams, surprisingly and to her discredit, suggested that the honour was ill judged since it risked insulting some Muslim groups and inflaming tensions. The late Christopher Hitchens made a robust defence of the novelist’s right to offend, with a righteous erudition rarely heard on British TV. When Johnson’s turn came, he inevitably ducked that nuanced and principled argument, and instead mumbled a crowd-pleasing wish that the knighthood had gone to an English novelist with “a grasp of plot and character”: Dick Francis was his suggestion.

One result of that ongoing desire for politicians that look for easy applause, rather than confronting hard choices, is a sense of debate as a zero-sum game, rather than an attempt to find consensus. The clips that trend on Twitter from Question Time are often prefaced by the language of cage fighting: “Watch X get owned by Y”; “Y tears Z a new one”. The clips are followed by dialogue in which people shout intemperately on Twitter about Question Time being unwatchable because it reflects a nation in which people shout intemperately.

It is hard to see that temper cooling. Does Bruce imagine that she might soon have to start programmes by asking everyone to play nicely?

“I don’t want to be the schoolmarm. You just have to sense the feeling in the room. We had one guy who became so irate he stood up and started haranguing one of the panellists. I had to tell him to sit down, which sounded a little odd.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crowds outside the BBC’s former headquarters in White City, London, protest against then BNP leader Nick Griffin’s 2009 Question Time appearance. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

The other armchair Question Time sport is the opportunity is provides for the current national pastime of bias-hunting. It is good fodder for those who would rather put our current political impasse down to a misjudged sneer from John Humphrys on the Today programme, or an answer cut short by Fiona Bruce, than to three decades of rising inequality and underinvestment in infrastructure and skills. The BBC has been found wanting in various ways in reporting our political meltdown, but those who, like the Labour peer Andrew Adonis, call it “the Brexit Broadcasting Corporation”, or conversely, along with Nigel Farage, characterise it as “the enemy” should be careful what they wish for.

“The BBC value I aspire to represent on Question Time is simply impartiality,” Bruce says. “From what I can tell on social media people think the programme is too rightwing. And when you look at the audience research we get people thinking it is too leftwing. I can only hope we fall between those two and plot a course down the middle.”

The problem is that the middle ground no longer appears to exist, even as a widely held aspiration. Bruce can look like an easy target for those political forces that want to suggest the BBC is the voice of a supposed metropolitan elite. She has homes in Hampstead and Oxfordshire, and has been known to write about nice holidays for the Telegraph. I wonder if she thinks the scrutiny of the corporation in general and Question Time in particular has been helped or hindered by publishing presenters’ and journalists’ salaries? (Bruce’s was reportedly between £350,000 and £400,000 before she accepted the Question Time job.)

“I think it’s a good thing,” she says. “I think it has been helpful for women. And I think: why not?”

Does she not think average earners might look at those numbers and think: why on earth are taxpayers paying TV presenters four times as much as the prime minister?

“I can understand that. And I feel incredibly lucky to be doing the jobs I do and be remunerated as I am.”

Does she see any danger of becoming too far removed from the people she is giving voice to, the audience and the viewers?

“I don’t think that. But I also think that is partly why I cannot see myself becoming the person who goes to Westminster parties and so on. I see my role on the programme as helping the audience get their answers.”

Play Video 0:51 David Dimbleby throws out Question Time audience member - video

You believe Bruce when she says she has the will to escape from work, though it can be all-encompassing. “I go and walk the dog or go horse-riding or whatever it is in the great outdoors and that, for me, is a switch-off,” she says. “My daughter does not like to talk about politics, though my son does, but that means we talk about it at home less than we might. I try not to look at my phone. There was a period where I had Trump’s tweets coming up and that got in my head, so I stopped. But these last couple of weeks it has been impossible, obviously. We had people round for dinner at the weekend, and it was all dominated by Amber Rudd’s resigning.”

We talk a little about the history of Question Time. The time David Steel and David Owen proposed their political pact on air; and the time there was a marriage proposal in the audience and an awful delay before a “yes”.

“It is clear the tenor of it has changed so much,” she says. “When Jilly Cooper was on she used to bring champagne and smoked salmon for everyone. Then again, someone once threw a bread roll at Tony Blair at the end of the show and we haven’t had that yet.” If the show holds a mirror up to Britain, what does it currently look like from where she is sitting?

“We are just so angry,” she says. “And people feel so let down and not listened to and unrepresented, on both sides. It is not a happy country at all at the moment.”

Does she not fear, whatever madness happens in the coming months, that if she sits there for another five years, or 10 years, every show is going to be about Brexit and its consequences?

She winces at the thought. “That can’t happen can it? Surely years of negotiating the minutiae of trade deals behind closed doors will not be the same?”

It only won’t be the same, I suggest, if we belatedly rediscover the arts of consensus, listening, taking on board expert knowledge, and learning how to disagree better. Bruce fervently believes that Question Time has a role to play in that, and also in helping the nation to plot a course through the current mess.

I admire her confidence. Of all the mail and reaction she has had over these last nine months, I ask, has she received a single letter or tweet or email from someone saying: ‘Thank you to Question Time for helping me to see things in a different light and for changing my view on this subject?’”

She laughs at the idea. “What do you think?” she says.