Joan Smith is 'sick of interviews conducted in a style more appropriate to the Colosseum than a civilised country':
On Newsnight and Radio 4's Today programme, presenters swagger into interviews like lions about to devour cowering Christians. Paxman is the retiarius of interrogators, casting a net over his victims and giving them repeated jabs with his trident while they're tangled up in words.
I'm with Joan on this. It seems not to occur to the interviewers in question that, like everybody else, they're subject to norms of civility and good manners. The thing that puzzles me is why people subjected to their rudeness, which is what it is, never call them on it - as, for example, by declining to answer anything that isn't put in a straightforwardly polite way, objecting to interruption, and so forth. If the Paxman-Humphrys style has become embedded, it's at least in part because others put up with it.
