MUCH has changed over the summer recess at Holyrood.
There’s a fancy new lighting rig in the chamber for one thing.
It’s so painfully bright it feels designed to drive people out of the building clutching their migraines.
But as we have MSPs for that, it must be for the cameras.
Holyrood is now being brought to you in brutally revealing high-definition, you see.
Gone are the fuzzy old toaster-style tellies that hung like conceptual art from the rafters, and in have come massive, swanky flat screens showing every bogey and dewlap in unbearable detail.
The blazing lights are evidently part of the HD viewing experience.
Games of Thrones, it ain’t however.
The topics may have changed - it’s tax instead of independence since the election - but the quality of the contributions at First Minister’s Questions remains drearily familiar.
Scottish Tory Ruth Davidson told us she didn’t like tax going up, and said Nicola Sturgeon was coming for your paycheck.
Ms Sturgeon said the Tories were coming for your benefits.
This week’s Scottish Labour leader, Alex Rowley, said the SNP were rubbish at the NHS.
"We need action, actions speaks louder than words," he solemnly informed us.
Mr Rowley is a nervous soul.
Up on the big screens, his face turned scarlet and every pore wobbled with sweat.
He looked like an egg just before it explodes in the microwave.
Luckily for viewers, Ms Sturgeon had come not to bury him but to patronise him, delivering an interminable lecture on health service funds and staffing.
She even slipped in a cheeky “as I said many times to Kezia Dugdale” to remind him of his essentially ephemeral nature.
But how it went on. “I ask people to be succinct,” tutted Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh.
It was to no avail. of course.
A small geological era later, he was moved to weigh in again.
“I am conscious that it has taken 33 minutes to get through the party leaders’ questions,” he said.
(It was reassuring that someone was conscious.)
“This is not a conversation; it is a question-and-answer session. Can we make progress?”
The naivete of that man!
By the end of the session he was left harrumphing that it had taken 48 minutes to hear questions from just 11 MSPs.
“A number of members and the responses have been too lengthy,” he said.
Lengthy members in HD are obviously unsuitable for broadcast.
“Please can we make the questions shorter next week?”
Or better still, he could bring back the test card.
The ratings would hit our designer roof.
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