Five months into the role of Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons, and Damian Collins MP has consolidated a reputation as a well-informed politician with a decent grasp of key issues, ranging from fake news to the complexities of press regulation, post-Leveson.
His recent appearance at the Oxford Media Convention enhanced that reputation, with a speech stressing the seriousness of the fake news phenomenon.
With the arrival last May of Peston on Sunday on ITV to add to The Andrew Marr Show and Andrew Neil’s The Sunday Politics on the BBC, the Sunday morning TV political audience seemed to be very well catered for.
Yet, Sky’s head of news, John Ryley, thought there might be room for another competitor and a different approach. With this in mind, he talked it over with his young political correspondent, Sophy Ridge.
The disruptive, combative political landscape created by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump is, on the face of it, a gift for UK television satirists and their venerable tradition of biting and often brutal parody.
While Theresa May’s blandness may do little to whet a satirist’s appetite, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage bring larger-than-life personas to Brexit. And Trump is, well, Trump.
“I remember on the day of the [Trump] election thinking there is not a news organisation, or periodical that won’t be covering this on the front page.”
The RTS Network Presenter of the Year nominee has spent the year hot-footing it across America in pursuit of the new president.
“I didn’t call it for Trump,” she confesses. “I started in Texas following Ted Cruz. I went down to Florida, I followed Marco Rubio. I knew each of the candidates before we got to Trump.”
The first big story of the year was the Zika virus. It yielded moving pictures of troubled mothers and their babies, with malformed brains. It prompted near pandemonium, however, when speculation spread that it might disrupt the Olympic Games.
There was also the continuing Ebola virus outbreak which had, in 2014, seen British servicemen and women come to the aid of folk in faraway places. That included the building of hospitals, which were staffed by brave medics, many taking time out from the NHS.
The comedy, titled Unspun With Matt Forde, is to feature interviews with leading political figures and will be recorded the day before airing to keep up with unfolding events in UK politics.
Forde, who currently runs a weekly podcast called The Politicial Party with Matt Forde welcoming guests such as Nigel Farage and Alistair Campbell, will be joined by other stand-up comedians in reporting on stories of the week.
Did the broadcasters’ coverage of the last general election actually determine its outcome? This was one of the key questions asked during what session chair Martha Kearney called an “inquest” into how television handled the run-up to polling day on 7 May.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg certainly thought so. He argued that there was too much of a focus on the possibility of a Labour/SNP tie-up and this “had two very big consequences. One, it had a determining factor on the outcome.
Getting information out of politicians on TV is proving difficult this election. Day after day of interviews on a range of programmes are testing parliamentary hopefuls on every policy they have, and straight answers are rare.
Television becomes the perfect climate for politicians to avoid tough questioning and instead get their planned party message across.
It is impossible to summarise the political change that swept through Scotland in the period between the independence referendum and the general election. Yes, it was unprecedented. Yes, it was seismic. And yes, it has delivered the biggest number of pro-independence MPs to Westminster since the romantic heydays of Irish nationalism.
