please do not feed the Hitchenses

Flicking between Keith Allen Will Burn In Hell on Channel 4 and Question Time on BBC1 - the first sounds superficially interesting, and Keith Allen is never less than entertaining, but there's a degree of nutterdom that is very difficult to counter, just because you need to be able to corral a set of beliefs into some sort of structure to be able to question and/or mock them, which is, of course, the sensible thing to be doing.

I plumped for Question Time in the end just because it offered the irresistible spectacle of Peter and Christopher Hitchens in the same room, not something that happens very often. And in fact, although they seem to find it difficult to look at each other, they both talk a lot of surprisingly convergent sense on a variety of topics. Which is what makes the whole brotherly feud thing so amusing - they actually don't really disagree much on most topics, they're just too pompous and disinclined to listen to anyone's voices but their own to admit it. They were still clearly the two most clear-thinking and intelligent people in the room, though.