Pork Scratchings and the Death of the Awkward Question

There is a video doing the rounds of Andy Burnham eating pork scratchings in a pub, and another of him having a genial chat with Gary Lineker. Neither of these are news but together they tell you rather more about the state of British democracy than a fortnight of Prime Minister's Questions.

The shared campfire has gone out

Ofcom's Media Nations research found that 16 to 24-year-olds now watch around seventeen minutes of live television a day, and fewer than half of them tune into broadcast TV in a given week — down from more than three-quarters in 2018. Meanwhile the over-65s carry on watching the BBC and ITV almost exactly as they always have.

This isn't a story about telly. It's a story about the collapse of what sociologists used to call the public sphere — the shared space where a nation argues with itself using the same set of facts. Britain used to have one, and it was largely accidental: three or four channels, a nine o'clock news, a newspaper you could reasonably expect your neighbour to have also read. Benedict Anderson's "imagined community" was, in practice, a bunch of people watching the same broadcast at the same time.

That's gone. Not degraded — gone. The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report found that social media and video networks have overtaken both television and news websites as the world's most-used source of news, with more than half of 18 to 24-year-olds naming platforms or AI chatbots as their main route to it. Two generations now live in genuinely separate informational countries, and neither has much idea what the other is being told.

The advertising ban that isn't

Britain has one of the better bits of democratic regulation in the Western world: you cannot buy political advertising on television or radio. It is a large part of why our elections don't look like America's four-billion-dollar attack-ad festival.

But that ban only works if television and radio are where politics happens. A politician who builds a following of two million on TikTok is advertising to voters continuously, for free, with no regulator anywhere near it. The rule is still on the books. It is simply policing an empty room.

Scrutiny used to be the price of the ticket

The old bargain was crude but effective. If you wanted to reach the nation, you had to go through someone whose job it was to interrupt you. A Paxman, a phone-in caller, a Today programme producer with a folder of things you said in 2019. Access to the audience came with an obligation to be embarrassed in front of it.

Direct-to-camera abolishes that tax entirely. You get the reach without the interrogation — and the same door is open to Nigel Farage as it is to Burnham. Nobody is being sneaky here. It is just that the incentive now points one way, and it points away from accountability.

Final thoughts

The pork scratchings are not the issue here. The problem is that nobody gets to ask an awkward question afterwards....