The Life-President of Dateline London

At the risk of appearing nerdy about Dateline London...

I was intrigued to read Dateline regular Alexander Nekrassov (a guest on today's show and as entertaining as ever) tweeting that "they have a rotating system so that no one appears on the show more than others". (He also said that "they pay very quickly, unlike most other shows".)

Although it's certainly true that Dateline rotates its guests, my statistics have shown that some guests are more equal than others. 

One guest in particular has been on significantly more than any other - namely the Palestinian extremist Abdel Bari Atwan.

(He's the sort of extremist who says things like "I want North Korea to retaliate to stop US warmongering" - as he said on today's programme). 

Our Bari has maintained his dominance every year since I started monitoring the programme way back in 2009....

Or at least that was how I left at my last full count at the end of 2015. Was it also true in 2016? (What with Brexit, Trump, etc, I haven't kept up, so I too was intrigued to know the answer.)

And the answer is: Yes. Abdel Bari Atwan still reigns. He scored 12 appearances, beating everyone else - and doing so for the last eight years in a row (at least)...

...but he was only one appearance ahead of Thomas Kielinger (11 appearances) in 2016, and others are catching up: Mina al-Oraibi and Agnes Poirier (10 appearances), and Nesrine Malik, Marc Roche and Alex Deane (9 appearances), for example. 

So the man I once described as the Life-President of Dateline London still holds onto his presidential sash. But for how much longer?

Exciting, eh?