Channel Four’s vote special runs aground on Sandie Shaw and the final word on last week’s telly

THERE was a brief moment, last week, when Katie Price sounded like not just the sanest person in the room, but also the brightest.

So if I asked you to name the venue you’d probably reply: “Loose Women”.

But you’d be wrong.

I will, however, accept your second guess, “Seg unit at the special hospital,” because it was the next closest thing.

Channel 4’s Europe: The Final Debate, with Jeremy Paxman, a last referendum bun-fight which just so happened to be produced by Rachel Kinnock, daughter of Neil, who made such an obvious success of being the European Commissioner for Administrative Reform.

There was no sense this influenced the pattern of the argument, obviously, but sceptics would probably not have been convinced by Paxo’s arithmetic.

“We have a studio audience of 150 people, 500 of them plan to vote Remain, 50 will be voting Leave and 50 still have to make up their minds.”

A landslide before we’ve started, then. If you thought there was anything random, though, about the 150/600-strong audience it would have been erased by the front rows which, along with the usual gob-s****s, like Alastair Campbell, were filled with demented celebrities.

Gillian McKeith, Katy Brand, Towie’s Lydia Bright, Edwina Currie, Theo Paphitis, Michelle Gayle, Selina Scott, Delia Smith — resplendent in a “Let’s be havin’ EU” T-shirt — and Katie Price, who ticked my own box by admitting: “I came here confused and now I’m even more confused”.

Russell Crowe may also have been just out of camera shot because, at the point everyone agreed the debate had to be conducted with dignity, merry hell was unleashed.

In normal circumstances, you’d expect Edwina to be at the centre of this bedlam.

Here, though, she didn’t even make the top five nutters list, which comprised Eurovision winner Sandie Shaw, Selina, Delia, Michelle and Anna Soubry MP who, like all those people divorced from reality, made a point of telling us: “I live in the real world”.

Paddy McGuinness might just have been able to control them, Paxman stood no chance and had a particular problem dealing with an agitated Sandie who was bobbing up and down like a . . . (searches for an appropriate career reference) . . . like a marionette and frantic to make some point about “artists”, but lost her thread so completely she was drowned out by the Leavers.

No small achievement, looking like the maddest old walloper, in that company, yet Sandie’s meltdown was far from being the defining TV moment of the campaign.

For that you’d look first at Jeremy Corbyn dressed as a pimp on The Last Leg, which was fizzing with right-on outrage at the referendum result on Friday.

The C4 show’s far too pleased with itself, clearly, to consider the possibility its stunt could have contributed to the outcome, so there was no chance it might also think the voting public prefer political satirists like Spitting Image, who put laughter before their own predictable Metropolitan prejudices.

More proof for that theory was provided by the heckler who cut Eddie Izzard dead, mid-rant, with an exasperated cry of “Shut up!” on Question Time and probably provided the highlight of the campaign for about half the country.

It’s tinged with some irony for me, though, because I loathe Question Time, a show that hasn’t just set the poisonous tone of the referendum and C4’s Final Debate it’s also infected other chunks of the TV schedule, like Big Brother and EastEnders, which now think there’s nothing more entertaining than people shouting at each other.

The     pantomime wouldn’t matter so much, of course, if the massed ranks of political trainspotters and Westminster airtime hoggers, knew what the hell was happening. With honourable exceptions such as Andrew Neil, though, they clearly don’t.

In fact, I went to bed at 11:15pm on Thursday, assured by ITV’s Rachel Younger and a bookie that it was 55-45 to Remain. I woke at 6:30am on Friday, to find Piers Morgan staring into the mad, revolving eyes of John Redwood asking, only half in jest: “Do you think I could be Prime Minister?”

So, on that bombshell . . .

— HOW TV chat shows work (Part 37).

Conan O’Brien to Kate McKinnon, June 2014: “You do some impersonations I don’t see other people doing on Saturday Night Live.

“Your Justin Bieber is excellent.

“What is the key to inhabiting  Justin Bieber?

“How do you become Justin Bieber?”

Graham Norton to Kate McKinnon, June 2016: “You do some great characters on Saturday Night Live.

“Your Justin Bieber is spookily accurate.

“You’ve a special way of preparing the face, haven’t you?”

Sinitta's got raw talent

SINITTA swept through BBC1’s most famous kitchen like a listeria outbreak on a cruise liner last week.

One of five new Celebrity MasterChef contestants, along with Tommy Cannon, Donna Air, Alexis Conran and Marcus “I was like” Butler, who was “looking for a new experience”.

And he got one when narrator India Fisher actually recognised him.

“A celebrity vlogger”, apparently.

Or, as he may also may be known, professional egomaniac.

No such problems, obviously, with Tommy and Donna, even if her accent has gone from Byker Grove to Ladbroke Grove as she’s clambered her way up the social ladder via partners Damian Aspinall and James Middleton.

She got barely a look in episode one, though, in the company of health hazard Sinitta, above, and her lethal serving of raw mince in a hollowed-out aubergine, which looked more like a suicide bomber’s sandals in the Raqqa branch of Abra Kebabra just after the “bad stuff” had gone down.

It was not an isolated incident, either.

Sinitta cannot cook.

In fact, she barely functions as an adult and you wondered how she’s built any sort of career.

Then Gregg Wallace jogged my memory with a spoonful of her cod soup.

“Sinitta, your first reaction when you get a mouthful is it’s very, very insipid.”

Sinitta returns on The X Factor later this summer, I’d imagine.

— REFERENDUM update of the night

ITV, 10.12pm, Tom Bradby: “Julie Etchingham, with the Remain campaign, do you have any sense of what’s happening?”
“No.”

— COMMENTARY box clarification required

BBC1’s Guy Mowbray to Robbie Savage and Gerry Armstrong: “You were both straining next to me, putting your nuts on that.”

Putting your nuts on that what?

— TV Gold: Channel 4’s unforgettable Messages Home documentary.

BBC3’s consistently funny Murder In Successville.

ITV4’s Hand Of God documentary (but maybe shut up about it now).

The One Show’s home nations’ baby race proving far more entertaining than most of the Euro 2016 matches.

And Love Island’s commentary grasping the moment, last week, with the announcement:

“It’s been an historic day for Britain. You voted for something that’ll shape all our futures. And dumped Malin.”

Note: The petition to re-run Malin’s phone vote, until spoilt right-on t**ts get their own way, does.

GREAT Sporting Insights

Jermaine Jenas: “Northern Ireland have already achieved the unachievable.”

Clinton Morrison: “It’s never easier against Italy but it will be a bit easier now.”

Glenn Hoddle: “If the ball goes inside the post it goes in.”

And Rio Ferdinand: “Kroos coming off has disabilised them.”

— RANDOM TV irritations: The BBC forever over-estimating how much of a toss we all give about Glastonbury.

ITV cancelling Friday’s This Morning for another two-and-a-half hours of clueless political speculation.

The crushing inevitability of Celebrity MasterChef’s Gregg Wallace telling one half of Cannon & Ball to: “Rock on Tommy”.

Big Brother monsters, like Natalie Rowe, claiming their vile behaviour is merely evidence “that I’m not a hypocrite”.

And brooding Love Island colossus Tom managing only “Koala and Tasmanian Devil” in response to the quiz question “Can you name four animals with three vaginas?” When any fool could surely have added “Kangaroo and Atomic Kitten”.

GREAT TV lies and delusions of the week.

Big Brother, Laura: “Honestly, genuinely, you’re such a lovely person, Natalie.”
Big Brother, vile Natalie: “I am not here to be humiliated on television.”

And Celebrity MasterChef, India Fisher: “Actor Donna Air has made a trio of dishes, a lamb mint filo parcel . . .” ’Cos she lost me at “actor”.

Find time for our heroes

IT was probably a scheduling accident, but I’d like to think Channel 4 was making a point by filling the Sunday hour before Love Island/Big Brother with Messages Home: Lost Films of The British Army.

These were the men of the 14th Army who’d received a morale-boosting visit from the Calling Blighty film crew in Burma before they counter-attacked the Japanese in 1944.

Many never made it home to Lancashire.

Others did but kept their war secrets locked away or, like Frank Miller, went to the grave with his family believing he’d been in the catering corps rather than the brutal truth, which was fighting hand-to-hand as part of the Chindits special forces unit.

Only one survivor of the regiment, Ken Chadwick, now 92, was available to deliver a first-hand account of the filming.

Thanks to a miracle discovery in the bowels of Manchester Town Hall, though, here was footage of all his mates, looking young and handsome and optimistic, talking in accents that have gone out of fashion along with the shy self-restraint and total lack of self-pity this generation seemed to take with them as well.

It was almost too overwhelming to see a woman like Ann Alsop watch the briefest clip of the father she never knew, Corporal John Hartley, who was killed weeks after the Calling Blighty messages were recorded.

However, if you did miss Messages Home first time round, you owe it to them and yourself to watch a repeat of this beautiful television programme at 8pm, Thursday, on the 4Seven channel.

I’d switch off your TV as soon as it’s finished, mind you.

— IT’S Not Me, It’s You.

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