Saturday 2 January 2016

And the winner is....


By one of those strange quirks of fate - or, more likely, merely by the sheer obsessiveness of the long-distance blogger - I've now become the unofficial archivist for the BBC News Channel's/BBC World's flagship weekly news review, Dateline London.

In that capacity, here are the guest rankings for 2015 - ranked by number of appearances...


Regular readers of this blog will already be able to guess this year's winner (spoilers!).  

He's been the undisputed winner (i.e. the most-invited guest) every year since I properly began monitoring the programme back in 2009.

In fact it really is time that the programme officially made him their President-for-Life...

...and that he was given the keys to the balcony at Broadcasting House so he could step out, at will, wearing a George Galloway hat and sporting a loaded rifle, to greet the cheering crowds below and hail his latest glorious appearance on Dateline as 'the mother of all appearances on Dateline'. 

Yes, he'll be dancing with delight in Trafalgar Square tonight, folks! - almost as much as if Iranian missiles had just struck the people of Israel...

Step forward Abdel Bari Atwan, soon-to-be Life-President of Dateline London. 

We salute your indefatigability, sir!....


....and we salute the indefatigability of Dateline London too in resolutely ignoring masses of complaints over the years about Bari's record of extreme comments - some of which would make Tyson Fury sound like June Whitfield!  and their apparent fond indulgence of him.

Yes, they've stuck doggedly with their man through thick, book promotion, and thin. They just can't get enough of him (for some reason), Israel-hater though he is! 


Here then are the much-anticipated full rankings, by number of appearances in 2015. They are guaranteed to make your eyes bulge too!:

12
Abdel Bari Atwan 

10
Marc Roche 

9
Stephanie Baker 
Janet Daley 
Thomas Kielinger 

8
Michael Goldfarb 

7
Alex Deane 
Steve Richards 

6
John Fisher Burns
Jeffrey Kofman 
Maria Margaronis 
Mina al-Oraibi 
Agnes Poirier 
Polly Toynbee 

5
Yasmin Alibhai Brown 
Greg Katz 
Nesrine Malik 
Stryker McGuire 
Nabila Ramdani 

4
David Aaronovitch 
Ian Birrell 
Eunice Goes 
Owen Jones 
Jef McAllister 
Rachel Shabi
Ned Temko 

3
Stephanie Bolzen
Roger Cohen 

2
Bernard Burrell 
Henry Chu 
Lilit Gevorgyan 
Dmitry Linnik 
Adam Raphael 
Amir Taheri 
Safak Timur 
Guney Yildiz 

1
Sebastian Borger 
Mary Dejevsky 
Abdallah Homouda 
Mustapha Karkouti 
Rashmee Lal 
Vincent Magombe 
Kevin McKenna 
Alexander Nekrassov 
Brian O'Connell 
Annalisa Piras 
Ashis Ray 
Jonathan Sacerdoti 
Dmitri Shishkin 
Sharon Tabari 
Safak Timur 
Diane Wei Liang 
Xinran Xue 

1 comment:

  1. Nabila Ramdani seems to have taken a rest from the airwaves since the Paris Outrages. No doubt the pressure is building up inside her, volcano-like, so the next time we see her she will appear to be hardly able to restrain her seething, boiling rage...

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