The Question is, can you be more brutal, Fiona? QUENTIN LETTS sees the new David Dimbleby’s debut 

Fiona Bruce made her BBC1 Question Time debut last night and what a chirpy soul she is. Ping ping, went her smile, and her dazzling gnashers caught the lights and nearly blinded us with their glint.

Quite the chipper-in of bons mots she proved, adding ironic little observations here and there. And she undoubtedly has a stronger jawline than jowly old David Dimbleby, whom she succeeded. But she lacked Dimbleby’s interventional sharpness. She let some of the contributors drone on for far too long.

And she could do with mumbling less. One of her bons mots, which made the audience laugh, was so half-swallowed that I missed it, even though I had the telly turned up to nearly full blast. So says this deaf old geezer, anyway.

‘Lovely to be here,’ she purred with pleasing insouciance at the start of the late-night debate show. The episode came from Islington, North London, the very heartlands of Planet BBC.

Fiona Bruce looked comfortable in the hot seat although she said she was nervous beforehand

One of the panellists was an Islington MP, Labour’s Emily Thornberry. Not at her perkiest, was Emily. Shades of Leonid Brezhnev after a night on the marching juice. In the opening shot Bruce was standing next to the audience. We were spared further walkabouts, thank goodness. One of the good things about this new series is that they have not gone mad with innovations. The format is pretty much unchanged.

Having a woman in the chair helped the gender balance. Last night’s show had four women – host Bruce, Thornberry, Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson and newspaper columnist Melanie Phillips – and two men. Some things are harder to change (or perhaps they don’t want to try). Only two members of the panel were Brexiteers. The old Establishment-Remain bias is deep-set.

One hour and just two topics: things became a bit bogged down. We had Brexit, Brexit, Brexit – much of it focusing on Thornberry – and then a quarter of an hour on knife crime. That choice was presumably down to the editors and producers but Madam Chairman Bruce should be encouraged to become a lot more brutal when it comes to telling people to shut up. That applies to members of the audience, too. A man with a hat became a frightful bore and could have been zapped at the end of his first round of applause.

Dimbleby used to let panellists have their opening say pretty much uninterrupted but Bruce jumped in quickly to question Tory MP James Cleverly while he was giving the programme’s first answer (to the question ‘has the Government lost control of the Brexit process?’). Time and again she chased Cleverly and Thornberry, pinning them down when they were being slippery.

Such pursuit of the truth is fine up to a point but you have to let panel members actually make their initial points. As a result of the verbosity and the interruptions it was something like 17 minutes before one of them – a stand-up comedian called Nish Kumar – actually said a word.

The hose clashed with Emily Thornberry over whether Labour should be backing a people’s vote

Mind you, when he did start spouting forth, one rather felt he might have been better advised to remain completely schtum for the duration. A simplistic, shouty sort. He tried attacking Phillips for criticising the Macpherson report on the police.

Bruce’s best decision of the night was to let Phillips have a counterblast and it produced a scintillating moment when Phillips comprehensively flattened Kumar, asking him if he had read the report. Er, he hadn’t. Oops.

During one of Thornberry’s orations, Bruce pointed out that the audience was laughing at her evasions. During one of Cleverly’s flannelings, she intervened to say she was ‘still waiting’ to hear what his Brexit Plan B was.

These added to the saltiness of the programme but they arguably went a little beyond what a proper BBC debate chairman should do. And her sarcasm when she commented on an audience member’s remark about Brexit’s ‘sunlit uplands’ left a faint tang, too.

But on the whole this was a pretty decent first bash. She controlled the nerves she must surely have been feeling and she proved a lot more objective and charming at chairing a debate than that bloke Bercow.