For as long as I have been a journalist, I have been a regular follower of Newsnight, the BBC’s nightly flagship current-affairs show. God knows how many thousands of hours I have watched, slumped on the sofa, not infrequently with a glass of wine to see me through.
Although, like many of Auntie’s works, sometimes guilty of left-wing bias, the programme was for a long time authoritative and informative. The rot set in when Jeremy Paxman left in 2014 after 25 with a sense of importance. Grown-up politicians flocked to its studio to be eviscerated.