In the beginning, Q and A was unmissable TV. The panel format wasn’t new, but with the gravitas provided by the ABC and Tony Jones, the quality of guests was unprecedented. Then, when the Twitter feed turned it into one of the most interactive hours of Australian television, Q and A was hovering on the edge of something truly ground breaking.

Over the last few months of 2010 though, Q and A has fell into a narcissistic pool of its own publicity and became a parody of itself. Where it used to foster discussion, it now manufactures outrage and judges its success on the number, not the content or quality, of tweets and comments it generates.

Its eponymous raison d’être has been stifled since it devolved into a barely-civilised Jerry Springer for people with degrees (credits to @lhjh70) where the most inflammatory and ill-informed panellists dominate what passes for discussion and no one can learn anything or hear a cogent opinion.

It finally jumped the shark in the first episode of 2011, when Catherine Deveny was seated next to Gerard Henderson and they drowned out the rest of the panel with their straw-man arguments and self-aggrandizing gibberish. There was no analysis or discussion; it was cage fighting in preppy clothes.

Things were looking up a little in Q and A’s second outing for the year. The overthrow of Mubarak took centre stage and Lydia Khalil imparted more knowledge and analysis in 20 minutes than we’d had in a week of nightly news. Greg Sheridan managed to keep his Israeli and Indonesian flag-waving to a bearable level and the only stupidity ensued when he and John Pilger (helpfully seated beside him) traded insults and stentorian bluster.

We hoped, as did many others, that the appreciation of Lydia Khalil and the outraged disgust at Q and A’s troll-baiting splattered all over twitter was getting through; maybe the ABC would have a cup of tea, a nice lie down and the wake up wondering what the hell had happened to it when it decided to turn Q and A into cockfighting for yuppies. But no, in week 3, like an abused teenager self-harming in the classroom, it put Ian Nelson, the Queensland State Director of One Nation on the panel and then poked him with pointy questions from rednecks and understandably furious Muslim immigrants.

Giving airtime to an ill-informed minority view point from either of the wingnut ends of the spectrum is not balanced reporting, it’s troll baiting and the only purpose it serves is to legitimise the nutbags, polarise opinions and stifle debate.

Last night’s formulaic show covered all the bases: Malcolm Turnbull showed us (again) how much he is not Tony Abbott, Piers Ackerman was disgusted by anyone who isn’t drunk on his kool-aid, Samah Hadid proved (again) that Muslim women can be intelligent and successful, Bill Shorten was rendered tongue-tied and frustrated by trying to dance while keeping all his toes on the Labor party line and Gretel Killeen seemed faintly embarrassed by her inclusion on the panel.

When Q and A has a single panellist or is devoted to a single topic, when it provides information not otherwise available to the public and is a forum for informed debate by knowledgeable people, it is excellent viewing. Q and A has been, can be and should be much better than it is. If it keeps behaving like it’s competing for ratings with ACA it’s going to do a Ben-Elton-style crash and burn. And we will all lose something when that happens.

Get it together Q and A, or if you can’t, sell the format to Channel 9 where it belongs.

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