I pop GB News on maybe once a week for ten minutes while I’m waiting for something to boil.
I shouldn’t. I should just hit Netflix. I watch not for the opinions, but for the same reason I used to watch You’ve Been Framed. You’re never more than a moment away from someone getting hit in the metaphorical balls, and at £250 a clip, this station could bankrupt You’ve Been Framed in an hour.
But I don’t know where Andrew Neil is. He’s only managed eight out of the 52 Andrew Neil shows so far, perhaps proving Dominic Raab’s point when he co-authored that book saying Britain is a nation of idlers. Despite this, Neil has regularly insisted he is GB News’s flagship presenter. I have now written two pieces for this newspaper, so as its flagship columnist, let me say this: I don’t think he knows what flagship means.
Brexit led to GB News, but I never thought it would lead to an Andrew Neil shortage. Maybe if they’d said that, they’d have got more than 52 per cent. Or perhaps it’s down to the lorry driver crisis, and there was just no one left to pick him up from his EU home. Imagine the extra delivery charges. He’d spend most of the month in a depot.
And now we’re told he might not return at all. First the milkshakes, now this! Still, he’s largely been replaced by ex-Sky man Colin Brazier, a man I always imagine sitting in the same carvery every Sunday looking disappointed by almost any meal he’s served.
Former war reporter Colin’s done his best, shaking his head in disbelief at the “woke” brigade and shrugging at the couldn’t-make-it-up madness of probably fine but misrepresented health and safety guidelines, and from this week the channel will also funnel Isabel Oakeshott, a woman who is like a drawing of what you’d get if you had to describe a posh woman to an alien quite quickly.
It is generally impossible to know who is doing a show, who even has a show, or who is doing someone else’s show. And what fascinates me about GB News is how lumbering it still is, given changes could be made in, like, one meeting. They keep saying, “we’re a start-up!” – but this isn’t some Shoreditch lavender ketchup company launched by two crazy TikTok tomato/lavender fans still raising finance. The genuinely weird decisions this well-backed operation stand by are so interesting.
Take Mark Dolan, “in for Dan Wootton”, whose obvious audition for the channel was cutting up facemasks live on his radio show one year ago almost to the day, because masks were “scientifically empty” and “useless” and… wait, was Dolan saying he was a mask?
Anyway, Dolan – a born-again Brexit enthusiast who proudly voted Remain and whose pro-immigration and anti-Brexit jokes are still on YouTube – is to be fair probably only following orders when he welcomes his “all-star panel” to the studio. It is an all-star panel in the same way you might describe complete strangers at a bus stop as an all-star bus stop.
But here’s what I find so odd: he asks them a very powerful question (eg “Is something bad or isn’t it?”) and then simply refuses to look at them. Instead, he stares down the barrel of the camera and makes a deeply concerned and worried face. The kind of face you might make if you’d just realised you were in for Dan Wootton on GB News. His three guests are all expected to stare down the lens just like Mark, because it would be weird if they didn’t, and also implies they are very serious Fox News people in very different places, beamed in at high expense from remote locations, satellite vans or villas in the south of France waiting for their lorry to the studio.
But no. We all know they’re all in the same room. We probably saw them arrive. They’re all lit the same and have near-identical backgrounds. And now they sit, elbow-width apart, looking at us from their little pointless boxes, but never at each other.
Sometimes you can even see everyone together, sitting there in the reflection in the glass behind them, pretending, all staring in different directions like some weird parlour game called “Act Like You’ve Never Seen TV”.
But not Dolan. Dolan stares straight ahead importantly, nodding imperceptibly, staring into your soul, perhaps wondering what it is. Maybe angrily tearing apart a mask under his desk. Watching his own important and darkening face reflected back to him in the lens, just behind the important words on the important autocue, the ones that say “Up next, answering your questions – Bucks Fizz.”
And then before I know it, whatever I’ve been boiling has boiled. And I take the rest of the evening off, just like Andrew Neil.
