Homage from Catalonia (to Jeremy Paxman)

One of the great things from having spent time in the UK is to know who Jeremy Paxman is. He is probably the best TV presenter anywhere in the world. I always tried to do whatever I could to receive BBC2 at home anywhere so that I could watch Newsnight. It is hard to think how other countries could have a more independent TV journalist in a public television. Paxman presented his last program in the BBC last week, and in this piece you can watch a selection of his 10 best interviews. Some people believe that he is so aggressive that he represents both the best and the worst in TV journalism. But he was aggressive not in the shouting style that we are familiar with in Spanish talk shows, but in an ironic way that systematically made only the most intelligent people survive his interviews. The BBC will still have many good journalists and very few public broadcasting organizations will match their degree of independence. But Jeremy Paxman will be very hard to replace. Other public TV stations (like the Spanish or the Catalan) will only dream of having the institutional and political contexts where a Paxman can make interviews without interference for 20 years.