BBC debate: Punch-drunk lightweights Johnson and Corbyn failed to land any blows during the Mumble in Maidstone

Were the UK to abandon its remaining commitments to human rights, it could use a recording of this clash to torture prisoners, the way US subjected Guantanamo Bay detainees to endless repetitions of I Love You by Barney the Purple Dinosaur

No zingers, then.

Far from it. It was stale, stale, stale. The stalest thing on telly, I think, since the last re-run of Last of the Summer Wine. Or Michael McIntyre’s new series.

There they were, two jaded lightweights, ready to plod around the ring. Two knackered prize fighters, punch-drunk, slugging it out again, going through the motions, throwing the same old punches, and missing. Not really a rumble in the jungle, more a mumble in Maidstone. Boring.

The only moment which might count as a “moment”, i.e. a gaffe, was so unfortunate and so depressing that it can be safely discounted on the grounds of poor bad taste. When Jeremy Corbyn knocked out his routine condemnation of antisemitism in the Labour Party. No apologies, obviously, but he condemned antisemitism anywhere in what he always calls “our society”. He keeps using that phrase, like he was addressing a meeting of the community garden stakeholders. Anyway, he made a silly slip and referred to the history of persecution of the Jewish people in “19th-century Germany”. Of course he meant the Holocaust in the 20th century, though, to be accurate the persecution of the Jewish people in Germany and most other places has been going on for many centuries. That’s kind of the point.

Anyway, Corbyn made the slip, and Johnson chose not to capitalise on it, a rare moment of restraint and sound judgement, and host Nick Robinson let it be.

Apart from that, which can hardly be termed a highlight of the evening’s viewing, it was jumbled balls, jumbled balls, dismal all the way. Anyone playing general election bingo will have had some fun checking off the parroted out meaningless slogans and soundbites. Except of course that in real bingo the same numbers don’t get called again and again and again in the one game.

On and on the prime minister and the leader of the opposition went, over-rehearsed lines in place of fact and reason. They did so as if automatons, regardless of the questions posed by the audience, oblivious to Robinson’s half-hearted attempts to hold them to the point (you could tell he thought it a fruitless task).

Of the pair, it was Johnson who had the more cunningly cynical approach, and displayed an impressively deft ability to get from the evils of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party to the Brexit deal Corbyn would negotiate in Brussels in about eleven words.

It was, as Alan Partridge once said it about his Geordie friend Michael’s heavily accented conversation, “just a noise”. It went on and on and on: end austerity… get Brexit done… many not the few … get Brexit done… oven ready... Trump trade deal… our society… fully costed… get Brexit done... get Brexit done… end austerity… billionaires… many not the few… oven ready… cuts…Trump trade deal... end austerity… get Brexit done… many not the few… fully costed… get Brexit done.

Were the UK to abandon its remaining commitment to protect human rights, they could use a recording of the BBC Prime Ministerial Debate to torture prisoners, like how the Americans used to subject Iraqis held in Guantanamo Bay to endless repetitions of I Love You by Barney the Purple Dinosaur. In the torture trade, this is called “futility music”, designed to convince the prisoner of the futility of maintaining his position. In the confines of the BBC studio in Maidstone the audience must have felt the same despair.

It was spirit-crushingly, bum-numbingly, what’s-on-the-other-side-oh-good-its-Cruising-with-Jane-McDonald dull. Yet it was, in its way, a perfectly fitting prime ministerial “debate”, as it condensed into just one hour the entire circular, lie-infested twisted, bogus half-facts, demi-truths and made up stuff that has tangled our politics up ever since the early hours of 24 June 2016. And, I have to tell you, the torture will not end in the early hours of Friday, 13 December 2019 either. Whoever wins, the futility music isn’t going to stop.