It was sad to hear about Bob Holness's death last Friday. When the news first broke, the story didn't have any political potential at all. But thanks to Twitter, "Blackbusters" could go down as Ed Miliband's defining blunder.
I have my own reasons to remember Bob. I was on Blockbusters in 1986, and made a complete idiot of myself by answering 10 questions wrong in a row - including "What B were the King's suede shoes?" (Brown) and "What L is a disease of tropical Africa, especially Nigeria?" (Laryngitis). I never got anywhere near the Hot Spot.
BBC News invited me on last Friday evening, to share my memories of Bob - you can see my interview here. It's quite funny.
Bob also caused Ed Miliband to make a complete idiot of himself - not on Blockbusters itself (he would surely have won several Gold Runs, had he been on), but with that Twitter blunder ("Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters").
That tweet capped off a bad week for Miliband. After a deliberate media offensive over the holidays, designed to promote his credentials as potential future PM, Miliband's efforts were scuppered first by Maurice Glasman's snipe (that he has "no strategy, no narrative and little energy") and then by tweeting himself in the foot.
There's no doubt Miliband was trying to use the holiday period to bolster his own position, with this piece from Toby Helm in the Guardian and this one in the Daily Mail. Both gave credit to Miliband for his handling of the hacking scandal, and for the occasional bright spot at PMQs. But awkwardly, both compare him to failed Tory leaders William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, and both dwell on his geekiness, his oddness, his weirdness (in the words of people like Tim Montgomerie).
One saving grace, according to Toby Helm on 31st Dec, was that Miliband hadn't by then made a "defining blunder" - as Hague did in that baseball cap back in 1998.
Will "Blackbusters" be that defining blunder for Miliband? More substantively, can he reassert his position with his own party and with the public? Some of his own party are already calling on him to turn things around, otherwise they will start casting around for an alternative leader. Meanwhile, I fully expect Cameron to ask for "an 'O' please Bob" at Prime Minister's Questions this week.
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