It was the email that made my day. The email that made me squeal out loud in a quiet library.
It was an invitation to Q&A in Hobart.
Having always been a Q&A watcher, the invitation was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise not so fresh second semester of University. For me, one of the attractions of Q&A has always been that after watching each show I come away feeling a lot smarter than I am. I suspect that many people, like myself, use the show as a secret news source. Nearly everything I know about current affairs and politics usually comes from watching last week’s Q&A. The other is the twitter conversation. Reading Q&A tweets during the show is like a smarter version of the on-screen “worm” during televised election debates. Real-time audience reactions range from the downright insulting, sexist and racist, to the insightful, witty and apt.
Invitees to the Hobart show were allocated by either red or yellow tickets. Yellows got to ask questions, whereas reds – situated in the cheap seats – didn’t. A list of topics were sent to invitees in the email: the NBN, News of the World, Pulp Mill, Minority Government, Carbon Tax, Gambling, Asylum Seekers and the crisis in Norway. Questions had to be submitted by midday on Monday, so I spent the whole weekend feverishly laboring over a question to ask. In the end, I had written about 10 different questions and spent a sleepless night on Sunday deciding which one to submit, and happily settled on a question about the NBN in Tasmania. My friends and I all arrived at the casino, excitable and giddy. We couldn’t resist taking a few happy snaps and uploading them to Twitter and Facebook. We each compared questions and tested each other to make sure we knew them well enough just in case we were asked. We checked our names off and were all informed that none of our questions had been selected.
Bummer.
I tweeted, “So my question isn’t going to be asked… preparing the shoe #qanda” (for those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, the hash allows you to characterize your tweet with a topic, putting it into a list with other corresponding hash topics).
The room outside the plenary hall slowly started to fill up to the point where it was uncomfortably hot and crowded. It seemed that most of Tasmania had shown up for the night. We were left waiting for a good half hour before an announcement was made that they’d be letting us in shortly. Everyone in the hall flocked to the doors, even though they hadn’t been opened yet. As soon as they were, I didn’t so much walk into the hall, but rather pushed in by the zombie-like hordes. It was a big audience, the biggest Q&A have ever had, ironic seeing as we’re the smallest state.
We all got great seats, third row from the front in the middle. Eventually when everyone was in and seated (which took an age), the floor manager came to the front of the room and introduced herself. She went through the basic do’s and don’ts: turn off your mobiles, follow all instructions, etc. She was followed by another man dressed in a casual white suit, who had the energy and excitability of a game show host, who’s job it was to warm up the crowd. In a probably fruitless attempt to make Tasmania seem more cosmopolitan, he reminded us not to wave to other people we knew in the audience (which lets face it, is most people).
The producer came out to explain that questions weren’t asked at random, and that Tony Jones knew which questions would be asked, and who would be asking them. About eight or so out of the four hundred in attendance had been picked, and the seating positions were marked and noted by the production team.
After that, there was some more light-hearted banter between the producer and the audience, at which point an aide came to the producer’s side, and whispered something in his ear.
“Where’s Fabian Brimfield?” the producer asked the audience.
It took me about a second to remember my own name. I meekly raised my hand about halfway. The crowd let out a collective “ooooooohhhhh” as if to say “he’s in trouble” as the aide approached where I was sitting. My only thought was “oh great, they’ve picked my question at the last moment”.
The aide stood in front of me, not looking particularly impressed and said “we know what you’ve been tweeting”.
I wasn’t sure which of the many tweets she might have been referring to during the wait outside the hall. “Preparing the shoe? I hope that was a joke…” she said. I must have started to sweat all of a sudden, “yes, yes of course it was a joke…”. She walked away, and resumed chatting to some security guards. How embarrassing. How a playful remark such as “preparing the shoe” could have been seen as a threat, at the time seemed a little farfetched to me, especially since Q&A staff were wearing T-Shirts with a shoe on it saying “Q&A: now with tighter security”. It was not like I was the only one to have made a shoe-throwing joke that night either.
I tried my best to brush off the embarrassment, but I was more red than the gaudy Wrest Point carpets. But then she approached again. “You’re going to have to come with me”. I saw a vision of me being roughed up by casino security in a secret room like they do in the movies, but what instead happened was probably more embarrassing. She led me to seats down the front on the left side, just behind the camera crew and said “we’re going to need you to sit in here for us”. I muttered that I would never throw Hugo Boss shoes, but she may not have heard.
It was the same feeling one would feel if they were being led to the principles office in high school. I was sitting in the naughty chair, close enough to a security guard to keep an eye on me, but just out of shoe throwing proximity. I was sitting behind two large cameras and couldn’t see the stage. I caught the occasional glimpse of Tony Jones and the back of Lara Giddings head, but that’s about as good as it got.
Other observations I could make were that us Tasmanians like to clap nearly anytime anyone says anything (we’re probably just happy to be having a night out). And I suspect that viewers at home wouldn’t have picked up on the almost constant heckling that came from the audience any time Eric Abetz talked.
I’ve always scoffed at people who joke about bombs and terrorism at airports, but I guess I’m no better than they are.
So if you were expecting some deep political commentary, then I’m sorry, but you’ll need to read elsewhere. Because from 9.30 till 10.30 on Monday night, I got a really good view of an ABC cameraman’s rear end. Maybe I’ll catch it on iView.
