APPARENTLY the average patient receives 19 prescriptions a year from his GP compared to just four when the NHS was first set up. I know this, I think, because it was offered up as “clarification” by a man in the audience asking a totally unrelated question of Jeremy Paxman at Hay Festival on Saturday.
However, the figures might not actually be that at all. Paxman had earlier suggested a modern GP prescribes medical remedies only 19 times IN TOTAL in one year (in a whole year? Oh come on, Jeremy!).
This is important because the debate that ensued about whether the questioner’s figure was right took up a significant proportion of Jeremy Paxman’s hour discussing his new book, A Life in Questions, with the self-titled “satirist” Marcus Brigstoke.
Unfortunately the lucky questioner is probably the only person in the Hay audience who is ever likely to get closer to finding out the true figures in this debate as Paxman promised he would send the source of his figures to him if he gave him his email address.
Of course, the irony in all this is that if a politician in a Paxman interview had been similarly muddled in their thinking and appeared to have such a woolly grasp of figures (how much a given policy cited in the Labour party’s manifesto might cost, for example) then they would have been flayed alive. Although her name did not come up in the discussion, Diane Abbott’s name springs to mind here.
Paxman had used the dodgy GP prescription figures to underline a point in answer to an earlier question about the BBC – how it is funded and whether the grand inquisitor thought it would survive.
Paxman was hazy in his answer to this too. Just as he’d been hazy in his answers to other questions in a way that he would never have got away with had his interrogator been a certain Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.
But then this wasn’t Newsnight. This was a cosy discussion in front of a packed audience in the Tata tent – the biggest venue at this year’s 30th Hay. And the audience loved it. The split of those who had come to see him was clearly one between those who knew Paxman from all those late-night grillings of shifty politicians and those who knew him from his role presenting University Challenge. But whatever the reason everyone seemed to love the fact that Paxman seemed to be uneasy in his role as the person being questioned rather than the man asking the questions, although he was still prone to scathing outbursts when his interviewer, Brigstoke, slipped up.
Maybe the detail of how many prescriptions an NHS doctor writes out in a year is something that fascinates Paxman now that he is semi-retired, having given up his Newsnight role in 2014.
Not that Paxo really is semi-retired. He has his role presenting University Challenge and appearances at events like Hay to keep him busy for a start. And as the questioner who asked “so will you be watching the general election coverage on June 8 on BBC like everyone else?” discovered he will soon have a role “eating bananas” to keep himself awake as one of the presenters of Channel Four’s election night coverage.
This kind of meandering discussion took up a big part of the grand inquisitor’s hour on Saturday; an hour which included discussions about whether Marcus Brigstoke was wearing any socks and whether Marks & Spencer underpants should have a sell-by date on them.
The questioner to whom Paxman offered to write an email got off lightly. One questioner was rudely told: “Christ its Rolf Harris!” before he could even open his mouth and was then berated for not actually asking a question. This might seem like an abrupt way to treat a member of the audience – until you realise that this questioner was wearing a name tag and was probably a member of the Press.
Paxo doesn’t like the Press you see. Despite having earned his living as a TV journalist in the “most wonderful job in the world” (“what job would you have done if you hadn’t been a grand inquistor?” was another question he failed to answer properly) he thinks its “rubbish” to say journalists have a role in shaping the world and newspapers shouldn’t be taken seriouosly. For one thing if you are intelligent enough to change your mind on an issue then “silly journalists will accuse you of a U-turn”, but then in an ideal word we would have far more journalists getting out and about talking to people to find stories (although this, he conceded, is “expensive”).
It was the kind of answer Newsnight Paxo would have torn to shreds in seconds. But then having conflicting views on the same issue doesn’t really matter so long as you say it with enough conviction, it seems.
This brings us neatly round to the best question of the night: if you were allowed one last interview and it could be anyone in the world who would it be? Not Donald Trump – although he’s done better in his first months as president “than I’d have expected”. Most likely the Pope. What a fascinating discussion that would be – Paxo could ask him about contraception, abortion, Papal authority, population control, migration... And he’s sure he would get interesting answers to all of them.
Paxman actually came across as thoughtful, humorous, a little self doubting – not so certain of the world as his interviewer alter ego – and self deprecating. Although his body language remained defensive – or “hostile” as Brigstoke put it – throughout, with his arms folded across his chest for the full hour, Paxman showed he was capable of letting his guard down.
He didn’t know, for instance, how he was going to vote in the EU Referendum – for Remain as it happens – until he got into the voting booth. He doesn’t “even understand” some of the questions he asks on University Challenge (although he thinks he could answer 50-60 per cent of them) and he thinks Nick Clegg deserved his fate for “perpetrating the greatest lie in modern politics” over student tuition fees.
So in one hour we got a reflective Paxo, a rather muddled Paxo and the scornful Paxo we know and love. As Marcus Brigstoke said at the end, “thank you for being brilliantly rude!”