Gurning Griffin makes an idiot of us all thanks to the BBC

I have to hold my hand up. I didn't make it all the way through Question Time.
You know, the one that was set up to prove that the BBC is objective and balanced in everything it does. That was meant to prove just how fair-minded and non-censorious we are as a society. That, above all, was intended to give Nicholas Griffin enough rope to hang himself in full view of the whole nation.
I didn't make it through because, much to my horror, I started to feel sorry for Griffin about twenty minutes into the broadcast. I couldn't believe it. He is, in every conceivable way, a dislikeable chap. He looks shifty. He gurns manically in the belief that this will endear him to the rest of us. He kept trying to put an arm around Bonnie Greer, as if to demonstrate that he could make contact with a brown skin without recoiling in horror. Not once did he answer a question directly and when he did answer, he did everything in his power to disavow the privileged education bestowed upon him at Cambridge.
In short, his was a performance calculated to prevent anyone with half a brain taking him seriously.
Yet, despite his many and continuous own-goals, I started to feel sorry for him.
Ranged against him, he had not just the panel and the carefully selected and beautifully multicultural studio audience but David Dimblebey as well.
Dimbleby, who normally performs his Chairman's functions as an ancient and sacred duty bequeathed by earlier generations of BBC Dimblebys. strayed egregiously this time. In place of the calm moderator, we were given the Prosecutor Fiscal or Examining Magistrate. He made no attempt to hide which side of the argument he was on; indeed, at the commencement of proceedings he invited the audience to fell free to boo and jeer. So much for balance, then.
As for the studio audience, they had clearly been selected first and foremost by race ( preferably mixed), then by gender or sexual orientation and, finally, by age. All clearly had an agenda and a pre-formed set of ideas that they wanted to get across. I probably don't need to explain that these did not include allowing anyone with contrary views a platform on which to air them.
There were very few actual questions in the segment of the show that I could be bothered to watch. Instead, we were treated to the likes of Jack Straw trotting out carefully-planned statements, designed only to demonstrate how right-on message they were when it came to questions of race and multiculturalism. The only avid self-promoting, one-trick pony missing from the Panel was Yasmin Alibi-Brown. I understand from her column in the Independent today that she had a prior appointment with relatives in Pennsylvania and, after a few days, has already worked out that the US is doing a better job of integrating the races than we are in divided GB. Wow. She has obviously not yet made it to Auburndale, Polk County, Florida.
Anyway, I digress. By the time, I had heard Jack Straw sounding off, in that infuriatingly smug way of his, and the rest of the panel - Griffin excepted - nodding wisely at every word, I realised that I was both bored and more than a little offended.
Griffin is patently an arsehole. It took about five minuted for that truth to be established. It wasn't necessary then for each member of the panel to be given the opportunity to kick him while, metaphorically, he was down on the floor, in a head-hold and with both arms pinned to the canvas. By any measure, this was bullying. The fact that the kicking was being administered by the self-appointed great and good didn't make it any more edifying in my book.
We have a long and honourable tradition of tolerance in this country. Much of that tolerance springs from an innate sense of fair play; an instinctive sympathy with the under-dog, whether in sport or in a fight.
By turning Question Time into a Griffin-bashing session, the BBC and David Dimbleby, managed to undermine their own cunning plans. Initially condemned out of his own mouth, Nick Griffin ended the night backed into a corner and, by the time I switched off, looking like the victim of a mugging.
Making an avowed Nazi look like a martyr is a difficult trick to pull off. Unfortunately, by cramming the Question Time studios with the massed bands of Political Correctness last Thursday, the BBC managed it