Paxman is back in the chair but he’s not a happy man

THE BIG NEWS OF THE WEEK is that the country is just two cashpoint withdrawals from the Grapes of Wrath. However the Today programme has been concerned with the possibility that Nick Clegg might be having a Clause 4 moment. "Do you think that we saw a Clause 4 moment yesterday?" asked Ed Stourton in Bournemouth. "I think we did," replied Olly Grender, former Director of Communications for the Lib Dems. "I think this is it. But there's a danger it won't be. Can I put my tactical hat on?" "Oh, please do!" "I think that a leader needs to push the party forward. They always need to lead from the front. It's bad for a party if you have a leader who is not pushing the party forward."

Star of the previous day's programme had been Agatha Christie, whose grandson recently found a cardboard box full of cassette tapes of the author talking rather irritatedly to herself, as one might an unwelcome tradesman at the door. "I can't remember how I wrote Murder in the Vicarage, or when," complained Christie. "Or even why." "The Japanese love her," said the grandson to John Humphreys. "How bizarre is that?" Hmph said back.

"We're going to be in the smelly stuff for quite some time," - Robert Peston

On BBC2 things were equally precise. "We're going to be in the smelly stuff for quite some time," warned business editor Robert Peston, whilst Jeremy Paxman did a good impression of someone taking it on the chin. I noticed how pale Paxman is looking. Or rather, his face is currently a colour approaching normal. There was a time, before he took his summer holiday, when switching on Newsnight was like opening the curtains to a fire raging over Naples.

Turning to Robert Reich, head of public policy at Berkeley University, who was sitting in an American studio, he yelled, "Does this look to you like the beginning of the credit crunch or the end of the credit crunch or the beginning of the end of the credit crunch or what?" Reich was gorgeous. His casually tousled white hair called to mind someone playing saxophone well in a hammock, and his mushroom cashmere jumper was pure Californ.I.A. "Nobody knows where the bottom is," he said, happily, before turning, one felt sure, to fondle Ali McGraw's.

Back in the studio Paxman went through the grim headlines in the following day's papers, all his loathing transferred momentarily to his fingers as he wound down the show. A couple of weeks ago it looked as though they were trying to end each programme with a Trevor McDonaldish 'shot of the day' - an idea of which Paxman was clearly about as fond as he'd been of delivering the ill-fated three-second Newsnight weather forecast. But as the shot of a complicatedly coiffed seahorse staring seductively through fronds off the coast of Dorset - evoking Melanie Griffith propping up a bar - engulfed the screen, one heard the sound of another non-Paxman-approved initiative hit the dust.

The camera then panned back, leaving Paxman sitting stock still in the lonely studio - guests having fled in terror - like Al Pacino in his leafstrewn park at the end of Godfather Part II. A character ruined and brooding, sucking all the light out of the frame. I fear we shall see actual blood before this season is out, friends.