LAST week's Question Time from Barrow was remarkable. Remarkably dreadful - and actually painful to watch; it was one of the worst editions I have ever seen of this once-excellent BBC current affairs discussion programme.

Mail readers have been complaining that the audience wasn't "balanced", the main lack of balance complained of, apparently, being that there weren't enough supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the audience. Given the small number of audience members who were able to make themselves heard over the horribly shrill Labour MP Lisa Nandy and the embarrassingly poorly-briefed and inarticulate Conservative MP Andrea Jenkyns, it's impossible to say how many Corbyn (or Theresa May, for that matter) supporters there were in the audience.

Yes, the cameras did seem to focus on a lot of middle-aged faces - but there were plenty of youngsters in that audience, too. Those yelling "lack of balance" need only consider my 23-year-old mixed race goddaughter Olivia, who was there, sitting next to her uncle - who has recently returned to Furness after decades of living in France. Michael - "the man in the pink shirt", as host David Dimbleby referred to him - made the point that the EU has a vested interest in punishing Britain for Brexit. Pretty hard to argue with that, no matter which side of the political fence you occupy.

I would say that, judging from the level of applause given to the various members of the panel, there were a fair few Corbyn supporters in that Question Time audience. Paul Mason, the former economics editor of BBC's Newsnight, is now one of Mr Corbyn's most ardent cheerleaders - and his far-left views on tax, borrowing and spending drew probably the loudest applause of the evening.

The Barrow Question Time was a poor example of this venerable old programme - and I was disappointed by David Dimbleby's chairmanship. Usually able effortless to control the panellists, he was defeated by the fishwife shrieking of Ms Nandy. My ears were almost bleeding by the end of the hour, while my toes took a good two days to uncurl from the cringingly awful performance of Andrea Jenkyns, who ousted Ed Balls from his Labour seat, and whose apparent ambitions to become the next leader of the Tory party are now surely as dead as the proverbial dodo.

It's fair to say that the Barrow audience acquitted itself far more impressively than the Question Time panel.