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The lost city of Yes Dundee

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What is the point of BBC Question Time being held in a different city each week if the audience isn’t representative of that city? The programme would be as well basing itself in London every week. It wouldn’t be any less representative than it is now, and besides it would make it easier for its favourite guest Nigel Farage to get home after filming.

This week the programme obstensibly came from Dundee, although you’d have been hard pressed to notice. On Thursday the National had a front cover showing the lost city of Cadzow, dug up by archaeologists working on the M74 improvements. We desperately need some political archaelogists to dig up the lost city of Yes Dundee, because BBC Question Time dismally failed to find it. What they found instead was some mythical settlement where yes voting working class Dundonians are as rare as unicorns.

It would appear, according to whoever it is that decides the audience for BBC Question Time, that Dundee is disproportionately inhabited by weel spoken middle class types of a decidedly Tory persuasion, and failed Labour party candidates. It was however marginally better than David Cameron’s visit to the Tory party conference the previous week in that no one felt the need to put on a Scottish accent. Watching the programme I was struck by just how much the Dundee accent had changed since my last visit to the city. Although to be fair, it was a terribly long time ago and linguistic change can happen at a surprisingly fast rate. I just hadn’t expected it to change that much since January this year.

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