When people come on media training courses they all want to know if you’re going to be like Paxman and beat them up. For some it’s a genuine fear. For others, they secretly relish the opportunity to find out if they could muster a great fight and put the ‘Paxo’ trainer back in his box.
You wonder what the Tory media trainers told Treasury minister Chloe Smith before her recent debut in front of BBC Newsnight’s master of the raised eyebrow and devastating retort.
‘Just go out there girl and tell him the abolishing of the fuel duty rise has been on the cards for some time, we’re helping households and businesses and we’re sticking to our plan.’
You can imagine how they all chortled sending out the little princess minister to fend off the big mighty dragon, while none of the big guns dared to face his fire on the day of yet another embarrassing political U-turn.
As the young, eager minister remembered those seemingly wise words she found herself like a rabbit in headlights while Paxo took apart her futile attempts to ‘stay in the loop’: that prepared statement approach to questions, beloved of politicians since Alastair Campbell’s days of spin-meistering.
"So when did you learn about the u-turn," he lazily teased.
"Ooh I can’t give you a running commentary, I can’t tell you the ins and outs," she hazarded.
The famous mock-hectoring tone increased as Paxman leant even further back in his chair, and raised his eyebrow to unscaled heights: "You’re coming here to tell me about a change of policy and you can’t even tell me when the change of policy actually was?"
This was Paxman as sarcastic headmaster at his bully best, a tone that would send a memory shudder down any former Eton schoolboy’s spine.
It was not lost on Ms Smith as she stumbled on, reaching for regular gulps of water to stop her drying mouth.
Audiences love tuning into this cruel sport that is trouble TV or trouble radio. Radio 4’s Today Programme equivalent is John Humphrys. The game is seeing the presenter ‘cat’ bat the 'mouse' around the studio floor.
We often take apart Paxman’s bully-boy tactics during training sessions to expose how journalists only really have two weapons, seen in extremis with Paxman and Humphrys: interruption and cynicism/sarcasm. And how they can be disarmed with charm and zen-like determination.
Successful survivors of these public maulings have usually asked their media opponents to let them finish the interrupted question or have pointed out the cynic game-playing in gentle pantomime asides to the audience to win their sympathy.
More importantly, it is not being caught in the cat-mouse, question-answer loop but bridge out to something that will capture the audience’s imagination, leaving the fire-breathing presenter with nowhere to go.
If Ms Smith had told us how this would have changed our lives, had spoken eloquently about what it would be like to save 3p a litre, if she’d done some creative maths and showed exactly how much that would have helped ‘households and businesses’, she might have seen off the mighty Paxo dragon and put him back in his lair, ready for another unsuspecting victim another day.