One of the traumas of 2001 was, for UK viewers jealously treasuring
the almost uniquely intelligent comment garnered by Mark Lawson
in the chair of the weekly half-hour long survivor of ‘The
Late Review’ (long lamented), the peripatetic replacement of
the genial but inquisitorial Lawson from time to time by the schoolmarmish
cheerleader Kirsty Wark. While her Edinburgh Festival patronisations
were perhaps acceptable on grounds of local representation, her
know-all mediation of the Lawson team was worse even than the tail
end of Craig Brown’s captaincy of Scotland. The high quality
contributions of Germaine Greer and Tom Paulin were noticeably missing
when Wark took the chair. Ready transferability of interview skills
from politics or current affairs to the booby-trapped field of the
art and literary criticism is virtually unknown. It is amazing that
an elephant trap has not yet been set up by the team.
