Sorry, but I had just heard the Wilson Pickett version on the radio as I was about to write this.
Joey Barton on Question Time? Is that their idea of a working-class voice?
This week's edition featured the ultra-posh presenter of some programme about ultra-posh property purchases. She was one of two card-carrying members of the Conservative Party.
A third panellist was a former Conservative MP and Minister, while a fourth panellist did a more than passable impersonation of a present or future Conservative MP and Minister.
But what of Jack Monroe? Confusing matters by going about with a bloke's name calls to mind Princess Michael of Kent. Her recipes are fair enough, but her accent is prolier-than-thou rather than prole, and she can never keep it up.
At the time of my birth, my late father was entitled to be styled "The Venerable". Yet I have never sounded remotely as plummy as she did. She has been on Any Questions twice in about three months, and now she has also been on Question Time.
Next week, the pleb's seat is to be filled, not by a well-born celebrity chef, but by a man with quite recent convictions, including prison terms served, for several crimes of physical violence, and who even without those would be notable only as a footballer.
At the time of my birth, my late father was entitled to be styled "The Venerable". Yet I have never sounded remotely as plummy as she did. She has been on Any Questions twice in about three months, and now she has also been on Question Time.
Next week, the pleb's seat is to be filled, not by a well-born celebrity chef, but by a man with quite recent convictions, including prison terms served, for several crimes of physical violence, and who even without those would be notable only as a footballer.
From one extreme to the other.
And more to the point, none of the many working-class Members of Parliament who do in fact still exist, but who are among those 19 out of 20 MPs who are never on television.
Take Steve Rotheram, a bricklayer and a Hillsborough witness who went on to become Lord Mayor of Liverpool and then, in 2010, one of that city's parliamentary representatives. His fellow Labour MPs have already put him on their party's National Executive Committee. Yet he never receives airtime even when the subject is Hillsborough.
2010 also brought in Ian Lavery. That's right. An ex-miner who was first elected in 2010. You might have thought that that would attract some attention. But dream on. Even a thuggish footballer is preferred.
As he is over people who have been in Parliament for many, many years: Dennis Skinner (a parliamentarian since as long ago as 1970 and a very longstanding NEC member, but whom the media uniformly think is a joke), Ronnie Campbell, Jim Dobbin, Jim Hood, Mike Wood, George Mudie, Roger Godsiff, Joe Benton, David Hamilton, Dai Havard, George Howarth, and others besides.
Agree or disagree with the analysis being presented in the last couple of days by Graham Stringer, John Mann, Simon Danczuk or Austin Mitchell, but at least any of them has been allowed on. That never normally happens. Time and space must instead be found for Joey Barton.
A secret ballot of Labour MPs put Graham Stringer, a scientifically trained climate change sceptic, onto the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee. But not onto the Question Time panel. With the next edition coming from Heathrow Airport, we await with baited breath Joey Barton's illumination of that or any other subject.
But even that is not quite the point. He has been elected to absolutely nothing. The above have been elected to the very House of Commons.
A secret ballot of Labour MPs put Graham Stringer, a scientifically trained climate change sceptic, onto the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee. But not onto the Question Time panel. With the next edition coming from Heathrow Airport, we await with baited breath Joey Barton's illumination of that or any other subject.
But even that is not quite the point. He has been elected to absolutely nothing. The above have been elected to the very House of Commons.
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