For the most part I can’t watch Question Time anymore. To the pointless either/or debates we now have the added dis-incentive of knowing that the audience selection strategy is no longer fit for purpose, and that half the people asking the questions are some kind of an axe-to-grind plant. Last night, noticing that cyclist (cyclist??) Chris Boardman was on the panel, I thought I’d check out what was happening.

There was a question about the NHS. There’s an election coming, so this wasn’t such a great surprise. Neither, then, was the inevitable left-versus-right claptrap argument. This time around it seemed to devolve into a race to see who could make the most ridiculous claim about how much more money they were planning to throw into the Service after they were elected. ‘The Tories have given us 10 years of austerity, have stripped the morale out of all the staff and their new policy is just about putting back what they took away’. ‘Labour’s plans are un-affordable utopian nonsense’. You say tomayto, I say tomarto. Same old blather.

Then it was Chris Boardman’s turn to talk. He decided to take the discussion down a different direction. There are 20 million inactive people in the UK, he said, and if we change the way they move, everyone wins. People get fitter, we reduce pollution, we spend less money, everybody wins.

This was what I call a third-way solution to the problem. Not a total solution to the problem, but rather one that jumps out of the either/or psychological inertia debate and points us in a direction in which we end up with a better overall solution: an NHS that costs us less money, one that has less patients to treat, and one that delivers better outcomes because when people do become ill, they get better, faster. A step in the right direction. A step that tells us, hey, look, we can do this, let’s now go and look for other win-win solutions.

Unfortunately, that’s not quite the way the audience heard the answer. Most seemed to hear it from their ingrained either/or-think perspective, ‘why isn’t he answering the question?’ The others went down the cynical vested-interests track. One snarky, Tweeting either/or prat of a politician wrote, ‘man who sells bikes thinks everyone should use bikes. Quelle surprise.’ This is how far we’ve now sunk.

It was time to turn the TV off again.