Tag Archives: great ormond street hospital

On Christmas Day at 1pm, LBC broadcast a 2 hour Call Clegg Christmas Special which had been recorded at Great Ormond Street Hospital. He spent time visiting patients and then took questions from staff and patients in the hospital’s education centre.

I had it on in the background while I was cooking, so my coverage was a little bit patchy. I love Twitter, but even I can’t manage to tweet while basting the turkey and getting the roast potatoes sorted.

It had absolutely the right tone for a Christmas Day episode. Nick was his usual, relaxed, normal self. There were lots of fun moments. My favourite was when he referred to Nick Ferrari as Old Nick, one of Satan’s alter egos. When asked about which languages he spoke, he told a story of how he and his siblings were in a lift slagging off one of their fellow passengers in Dutch – only to have him turn round and tell them, in Dutch, that he understood every word.

The bit that was trailed in the media was his passion for kickboxing and how he’d asked Miriam to get him boxing gloves for Christmas. He said that he sometimes imagined people while kickboxing, but that they would remain nameless.

He was asked some policy questions too and took a pretty consensual approach. He said that it was up to all parties to work out a solution to housing because we needed more houses to be built.

He was asked how he persuaded people round to his point of view. After a bit of self-deprecating “do I?” jokey stuff, he gave an answer that was very much in keeping with the spirit of Mark Valladares’ article from yesterday. He said that he tried to use humour to illustrate his point and to stick to the facts rather than attack the person. He did admit, though that he sometimes made an exception for Ed Balls.

I found the part  where he was talking to the Intensive Care nurses particularly moving. I have had to spend time visiting in an ICU in my life and I was so impressed with the nurses. Their nursing skills had to be top notch to understand all the complexities of any given situation, but they were also so compassionate and understanding towards the visitors who were going through all manner of hell. He asked how they coped with their job and they said that they tended to get the emotions out on some everyday event at home, like losing hair straighteners.

Sadly, LBC don’t seem to have put this episode up on their website, so all I can offer you is my very brief collection of tweets. Feel free to pile in with some more snippets from the show if you listened to it.