±«Óătv

Newsnight wins out over nookie

• Stephen Smith
• 13 Nov 07, 07:11 PM

It would be easy to be wounded. The ±«Óătv's flagship late-night round-up has been slightingly compared to other things that red-blooded Brits might care to devote themselves to as the long evenings draw in.

Yes, as hard as it may be for regular viewers to credit, Newsnight has been cast as some kind of milk-and-water alternative to a bit of how's-your-father.

And we've been on the receiving end of this calumny not once but twice!

First, a lady columnist on The Independent reveals that her high-achieving partner is strangely resistant to her charms, and actually prefers to flop down in front of us, if you'll overlook the expression.

What Catherine Townsend wrote was,

Then our near-rival in television's bitter ratings war, , runs a storyline in which an errant chap called John tries to throw his suspicious girlfriend off the scent with a clear-the-air chat. Let's have a talk, suggests John to Fiz, “before Paxman comes on”.

The implication is unmistakeable: Newsnight is for the sexless and the shagged-out. Watch Sex and the City for your libido. But turn over to Newsnight if your libido libidoesn't.

This is a terrible slur on the staff and friends of this once great programme. Though it's true that we devote ourselves single - and high - mindedly to bringing our viewers detached reporting and impartial analysis, be in no doubt that corpuscles pulse within us and passions simmer beneath the starched shirt fronts. It's thought that at one time during the programme's run, a male correspondent winked at a comely colleague, though the then ±«Óătv Board of Governors agreed to put out a statement blaming “a mild case of conjunctivitis”.

And little can Gordon Brown have imagined, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, the wicked mirth that was had, not a million miles from this office, at the outrageous puns suggested by his important “endogenous growth theory”!

The more I think about it, the more I see that these jibes at Newsnight's supposed shortage of sex appeal are really backhanded compliments. After all, as Ms Townsend describes her beau (“Ross”) to readers of The Indie, he is a chap who is setting up his own business and, by her own admission, good in bed. He is, in short, the kind of alpha male that we expect to find in our audience and that any woman worth the name would similarly covet.

Not only that, but Corrie's John, though clearly a bit of a hound, has not one but two other women on the go, as well as the long-suffering Fiz. One could almost forgive an impressionable young man, observing John's success with the ladies, and noting that he tunes into Newsnight before hitting the rumpled sack, saying to himself, (pace the woman in the cafeteria in the classic scene from When Harry Met Sally,) “I'll watch what he's watching!”