TYPICAL. You wait ages for someone to come along and lead your media people out of the desert of fake news and social media dross and when he turns up it is Richard Madeley, the British broadcaster who makes Alan Partridge look like Walter Cronkite.

The husband of Judy Finnigan and former This Morning host is no stranger to “Quotes of the week” columns. When asking Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky, the Madester confided: “I was in a similar position to you. I was accused of shoplifting. But unlike you, I knew I was innocent.” Nor will the book club champion ever be accused of under-sharing, once breaking into an interview on health to declare: “Remember when you had thrush, Judy? You had a terrible time of it.”

But what do you know. Long past the hour when it was time to take a stand against evasive politicians, Madeley has been the man to do it. The occasion was ITV’s Good Morning Britain and the interviewee was Gavin Williamson. The Defence Secretary had rocked up to West Midland Safari Park to highlight a scheme in which British troops train park rangers in East Africa how to track poachers.

You can imagine the pitch by the MoD press office. “It’s good news for once, Minister. The optics will be marvellous, all those elephants strolling around. Who hates Dumbo? No, Minister, I don’t think we can get the elephants to link tails and stage a parade. They’re not Cabinet members, for goodness sake.”

So poor old Gav, whose youth and gaucheness have earned him the nickname Private Pike, turns up to talk turkey about lions and tigers. But Madeley wanted to know if the Minister regretted telling Russia to “go away and shut up” after the Kremlin protested at being accused of the Salisbury poisonings. “Do you think that was a bit too informal?”

Williamson started to praise the NHS staff who treated the poisoning victims, but Madeley cut him off. After four attempts, Madeley declared: “Right, you’re not going to answer, are you? OK. All right, interview terminated.” At that point he pulled a lever and Williamson was sucked into the Earth like so many potato peelings down a waste disposal. Actually, he wasn’t. After a shot of the Minister looking vaguely stunned it was back to the studio to carry on with the next item. Madeley now finds himself cast in the role of media hero, a modern day version of Peter Finch in Network, who tells exasperated viewers to go to the window and shout: “I’m as mad as hell. I’m not going to take this any more!” Or as Madeley said to himself mid-interview: “Enough of this crap.”

Writing in the Guardian the next day, Madeley said it was the first time in his 30-year career that he has pulled the plug, and he did so because the “evasion, obfuscation and manipulation” of politicians had reached new depths. Nor would it be the last time. From now on he is going to operate a “three strikes and you’re out” policy. “If all of us interviewers adopt that principle, the quality of political debate on television will immediately and dramatically improve. And viewers will love us for it.”

Will they? It will certainly make a nice change from the shout-fests that too often pass for broadcast interviews these days. But what is an interviewer to do when faced with a subject, and it is not just politicians, who have been told by a media trainer (usually a former journalist) to answer the question they want to answer, not the one that has been asked? Or the subject who “does a Boris”, bludgeoning the interviewer with bluster. We can’t all do a Mishal Husain, who told Boris to “please stop talking”, because the impact would lessen over time, and every interview would begin to sound like a chat between a teacher and a four-year-old. Hardly illuminating.

Emma Barnett did a grand job filling in for Andrew Marr the other week, largely by stripping the interview back to the basics. Be prepared, then prepare some more, ask direct, open questions, and keep coming back if answer comes there none. If that fails, draw attention to the non-answer and move on. Viewers will draw their own conclusions.

As for politicians, most of the time, a straight answer to a straight question is all it takes, particularly in a live interview when words cannot be recast. What is so difficult about that? It will take a long time to have an effect, but there has to be a middle way between “Do you have a message for the folks at home, Minister?” and Times’ journalist Louis Heren’s approach, an inspiration to Paxman and others, “Why is this lying b****** lying to me?”