Viewers left fuming as Q&A divides and conquers its audience
Clem Bastow
June 3, 2011/the AGE
Comments 100
Tony Jones hosts the ABC's Q&A.
The TV show for the digital age appears to have passed its zenith.
THERE was a great statistic doing the rounds a few years ago - I read it in one of the more noted scientific journals, Cosmopolitan magazine - about how many people had become physically violent with their computers due to frustration (37 per cent was the magic number).
That statistic was at the forefront of my mind on Monday night, when I found myself standing in my living room, spittle flying, fingers jabbing the air, screaming at my television. How many do the same thing while watching ABC's Q&A? Perhaps those Cosmo statisticians should look into it.
It's true that - to borrow everyone's favourite diet ad disclaimer - individual results may vary while watching the show, but as Q&A has grown in stature, so too has its polarising effect on viewers. People either watch and scream bloody murder, or they don't watch at all: rare is the viewer who says: ''Oh yes, Q&A, I don't mind a bit of that of a Monday night.''
What is it, then, that the show is doing wrong? For a start, it's a one-way conversation. Q&A runs selected Twitter comments across the bottom of the screen like a CNN news ribbon, but any actual engagement is limited to the chosen (very) few. It's hard not to take host Tony Jones's regular trotting out of ''we'll take that as a comment'' as a cop-out.
In fact, the ''show'' that unfolds on Twitter as everyone plays the hashtag game is a separate show to the one the TV. It's become a Pavlovian response: if the panel members start yelling at each other while ignoring the issues at hand, retreat to Twitter.
Take last week, when Professor Gail Dines - on the panel for the Sydney Writers Festival edition - took to yelling down anyone who didn't agree with her with a terse ''Let me finish!'' (You know it's been a shouty episode when the ABC transcript reads ''Multiple speakers talk at once''.)
The problem is not specifically the shouting - after all, Parliament's question time is a very entertaining and enlightening shout-a-thon - but that too often the panel gets bogged down in the minutiae of policy and rhetoric rather than working through a broad range of issues.
It is not expressly a show about politics, yet Q&A is regularly stuck with politicking because the line-up is often weighed down by politicians.
On occasion, that has worked. The special editions, featuring Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and John Howard, have been fascinating.
Also, much like the Gruen Transfer's election special, Gruen Nation, Q&A shone during the election. Stripped of the urgency of an election campaign, however, politicians' grandstanding does little to deepen anyone's grasp of the issues.
This week, for example, did we learn anything from George Brandis and Kate Lundy's bickering - ''That is nonsense.'' ''It was Scott Morrison and you know it, George.'' ''That's a very unworthy thing to say, Kate.'' - other than that the Liberal Party and Labor like to goad each other when given the chance?
Engagement with the discussion also relies upon engagement with the topic at hand. As a ''working single'' unlikely to have children, this Monday's talk of working families (a phrase issued by politicians so often that it should come with a trademark symbol) and their cost of living left me cold. Climate change, on the other hand, is very pertinent given that I'll get to live out my twilight years in a global warming wasteland.
A young audience member on Monday's show was concerned about the same issue and asked what the parties were doing ''to slow down or eliminate climate change'', only to be answered by more bickering from Lundy and Brandis. (Though Brandis was quick to assure him that ''we'll make sure you have jobs'', which must be comforting in the face of certain weather-based Armageddon.)
Perhaps that's the problem. The show's engagement with the ''audience's'' questions is so limited - there's definitely more ''A'' than ''Q'' - that if a particular panel doesn't cover whatever your burning issue is, you're left wanting.
Or maybe it's the sly fox himself. Jones has been careful, after a few early missteps, to cultivate his Q&A persona as one of inscrutable tour guide, and for the most part he pulls it off.
Unless, that is, he can't resist getting a word in edgeways, as he did on Monday when, in response to Lundy's glowing shopping list of Labor public policy that ''helps'' resettle refugees, he remarked, ''except the ones that you plan to send to Malaysia to an uncertain fate''.
It's tough to know where to go from here: should Jones just think ''damn it all to hell'' and start weighing in as well? Should the panellists all have a laptop at the desk so they can individually respond to Twitter questions? Or should we look past the social media buzz and accept that Q&A is ultimately just a non-interactive TV panel show, and keep shouting into the online drain without hope of our questions being answered?
The show's own assessment of itself is that ''it's about democracy in action - on Q&A the audience gets to ask the questions''. But when the pollies are too busy one-upping each other, they forget to answer.
Feel free to take it as a comment, Tony.
Clem Bastow is a freelance writer. 
