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His face was a melange of horror and pain...
Difficult times: BBC director-general Mark Thompson had to justify the BBC's licence fee.
First Commons sighting yesterday of the new BBC chairman, Sir Michael Lyons. Goodness, what a dullard. This was good news for the Beeb on two fronts.
Bespectacled, earnest, gusty Sir Michael also made the BBC's director-general, Mark Thompson, look rather good by comparison.
It is one of those fuzzy growths of barely more than an inch - about the length our lettuces have been reaching this summer after being nibbled by the rabbits. Perhaps the rabbits have been at the Thompson beard.
Surely he cannot actually choose to wear his stubble that length. It makes him look so scruffy and unwashed.
The MPs started with a tilt against BBC3, saying that the Beeb has spent nearly half a billion pounds on this channel but it is still watched by roughly two-and-a-half people.
Mr Thompson insisted BBC3's 'reach' was improving. He argued that not every BBC outlet can be judged solely on the basis of audience numbers. 'BBC Parliament doesn't appeal to everyone, after all,' he said.
A low blow! MPs love BBC Parliament because it runs their speeches uncut. But here was the ill-shaved Thompson reminding them that hardly anyone watched the thing. The cur!
That very evening BBC3's schedule had included Dog Borstal, a show about the most annoying pop songs of all time, and a hospital drama called Bizarre ER which featured 'a circus dwarf who had superglued his penis to a Hoover'.
Did Mr Thompson truly believe such programmes were worth £125million a year of licence fee money?
Behind the BBC grandees sat an array of flunkeys who froze to the spot, frowns petrified on their brows.
In earlier years Mr Thompson would have been clean bowled by such a question.
Philip Davies (Con, Shipley) had a few half-hearted jabs at the BBC for going so overboard about quotas that 10.9 per cent of its workforce is now from an ethnic minority while 4.7 per cent are disabled - well ahead of the population rate.
'At what point will the BBC say, 'We've got a sufficient percentage of minorities'?' asked Mr Davies, a one-man protest group against political correctitude. He didn't get a real answer.
Mr Davies also asked if all BBC hirings were made 'on merit, irrespective of background'.
Mr Thompson: 'Yes.' He might believe this but I personally know it not to be true. Oh well.
Meanwhile, in the House of Commons it was Transport Questions. And for a moment we were almost back to that dwarf.
The improbably coiffed Michael Fabricant (Con, Lichfield) was talking to the Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly.
Miss Kelly just about managed to say that she agreed with Mr Fabricant that such an experience would, indeed, 'not be much fun'.
More fun than listening to Sir Michael Lyons, though, I bet.
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