Interruption time

For old time's sake I thought I'd count up the number of interruptions each interviewee suffered on this morning's The Andrew Marr Show. 

Here are my totals:

Chuka Umunna - 14

Shami Chakrabarti - 5 

Boris Johnson - 91

If you divide the number of interruptions by the length of the interview to get a better sense of the frequency of the interruptions (i.e. work out an interruption coefficient), this works out as follows:

Chuka Umunna - 1.9

Shami Chakrabarti - 0.4

Boris Johnson - 3.3

Which means, if you take it as a measure of the toughness of each interview, Boris got an eight times tougher interview than Shami...which feels about right. 

Just let me finish

It would be remiss of me not to mention this strange piece in the Sunday Times

Emily Maitlis and Mishal Husain interrupt interviews even more than John Humphrys

"The veteran presenter of the Today programme is outflanked on interjections by two BBC colleagues"

It took three authors, Rosamund Urwin, Shingi Mararike and Ellie McDonald to come up with this unexpected theory.

“Yet, perhaps surprisingly, Humphrys is already outflanked on interjections by two BBC colleagues — Mishal Husain and Emily Maitlis — both of whom have a reputation for being more measured.”

Reputation with whom? Misha Husain is measured? Who knew?

other presenters are available

The comments below the line are equally remarkable. Interruption coefficients? Where’s Craig?